Mark Esper was fired as defense secretary on Monday, becoming one of the first casualties of President Donald Trump’s post-election purge of officials seen as insufficiently loyal to him. Esper’s ouster had been rumored for months, following his public opposition to Trump’s efforts to involve the military in quelling protests over police brutality and racism. At an unusual press conference in June, Esper suggested that Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act, a law allowing the military to serve in a domestic law enforcement role, was not warranted.
…Chris will do a GREAT job! Mark Esper has been terminated. I would like to thank him for his service.
Esper’s move stunned Trump, who reportedly confronted him about it during an Oval Office conversation. Reports of his likely resignation or removal trailed the secretary for months, culminating in an NBC story last week that said Esper had prepared a letter of resignation. Esper’s spokesperson denied the report, but just four days later, Esper was fired and replaced by Christopher Miller, Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Federal law dictates that the Pentagon’s No. 2 official, Deputy Defense Secretary David Norquist, take over when the position of defense secretary is vacant, but Trump’s appointment of an official from outside the department ignores that statute. As University of Texas School of Law professor Stephen Vladeck noted on Monday, the Pentagon’s mandated rules of succession seem to conflict with the Federal Vacancies Reform Act, which would permit Miller’s appointment, so it’s not clear which law takes precedence.
Esper had been criticized extensively for his initial response to the nationwide unrest following George Floyd’s death. On a June 1 conference call with governors, he urged them to “dominate the battlespace,” drawing criticism from several former Defense secretaries, including James Mattis. Later that day, he joined Trump outside the White House as peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square were forcibly removed to make way for a bizarre photo op outside a church across the street, where Trump held up a Bible. Esper gave a series of shifting explanations for his presence there, at first claiming he needed to inspect a vandalized bathroom, and later suggesting he wanted to oversee National Guard members and had no knowledge of Trump’s plans to clear the park. The violent spectacle culminated in two Guard helicopters flying low over a Washington, DC, neighborhood in an apparent “show of force” against protesters, sparking widespread condemnation among retired military leaders. A National Guard internal investigation eventually concluded that the helicopters were not authorized to be there.
Esper, who took over as Defense secretary in July 2019, was no outsider to the role. He had been Trump’s Army secretary and was nominated to replace Mattis, who resigned in December 2018 amid conflicts with Trump, after acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan withdrew from consideration. Esper’s nomination received bipartisan support, but some lawmakers, such Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) were uncomfortable with his stint as a lobbyist for Raytheon and criticized him for not adopting a strict ethics pledge to separate himself from matters involving his old employer. Raytheon is one of the biggest defense firms that competes for Pentagon contracts and, since Trump took office, has aggressively lobbied for arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf allies, which Congress has opposed given the recent track record of these weapons being used to commit atrocities in Yemen.
Esper declined to adopt Warren’s pledge and proceeded to carve out an influential, if understated, role as one of Trump’s main advisers. He developed an especially close relationship with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who had been his classmate at West Point. For a time, he even showed more transparency with the Pentagon press corps, which Mattis had longignored.
He also honed a talent—at least for a time—for appeasing Trump, drawing concerns from senior leaders that he was too conciliatory toward the president. Some of them even nicknamed him “Yesper” behind his back.
His firing brings to a close an especially chaotic time for the Pentagon, which has grown used to frequent vacancies and quick staff turnover under Trump. Given Trump’s failed reelection campaign, Miller, the new defense secretary, will only have the reins at the Pentagon for a few months—unless the lame-duck president chooses to make another surprise switch.
The TV networks have declared Joe Biden the next president of the United States. World leaders have congratulated him. Biden’s transition team is moving ahead. Courts have repeatedly tossed allegations of fraud or misconduct alleged by the Trump campaign to try to block the result. The race is over. But most Republicans in office refuse to admit that.
On Fox News, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called the election “contested” and said Trump was right not to concede.
“This is a contested election,” Lindsey Graham says on Fox. “President Trump should not concede.”
On the same network, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) agreed that the race isn’t over until all of the Trump campaign’s legal challenges are heard—though there’s no evidence to back up those challenges.
House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, who hasn’t commented on Biden’s victory, says to Bartiromo that “every legal challenge should be heard” in the presidential race. “Why would you call the presidential race first?” pointing to how some House races haven’t been called yet
On ABC’s This Week, George Stephanopoulos grilled Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.). “Joe Biden has won this election. Why can’t you acknowledge it?” Blunt, in turn, called on Trump’s team to lay its cards on the table. “It’s time for the president’s lawyers to present the facts and then it’s time for those facts to speak for themselves,” he responded. But he acknowledged that it is unlikely that any litigation or further ballot-counting will lead to a Trump victory.
Thus far, it appears only GOP Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah have acknowledged Biden’s victory. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has not had any contact with the Biden team, and neither has the White House. Meanwhile, on Sunday morning, President Trump continued to baselessly claim the election had been stolen with voter fraud.
“You have the president sitting in the White House not acknowledging” the outcome, Trump ally and former Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said on ABC. “And I think there are lots of Republicans who are trying to feel their way around that.”
The GOP is still Trump’s party, and even when it comes to our democracy, Republicans are still beholden to his rantings. The question is, for how much longer?
The ragtag legal team that President Donald Trump has dispatched in a long-shot bid to disrupt vote-counting across the country includes several lobbyists who represent domestic and foreign interests. While there’s no reason to think their lobbying efforts are directly related to their work for Trump’s legal team, it’s worth considering the swampy day jobs of the well-heeled lawyers scrambling to disenfranchise their fellow Americans.
Former GOP Rep. John Sweeney, who is assisting the Trump team’s efforts, is registered to lobby for multiple Russian entities. Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is involved in the Trump team’s effort to challenge the vote-counting process in Pennsylvania, works for a leading Trump-connected lobbying shop and is a registered foreign agent for Qatar. Corey Lewandowski, the one-time 2016 Trump campaign boss, works for a firm whose lobbyists represent foreign and domestic clients with interests in Washington. Lewandowski has said her personally does not do lobbying work.
And then there’s Rudy Giuliani, the co-head of Trump’s legal assault. Giuliani reportedly faces a federal investigation into whether he violated lobbying laws by failing to register as foreign agent in connection with his activities in Ukraine last year. Giuliani, who is not a registered lobbyist, denies wrongdoing and has suggested that billionaire philanthropist George Soros is behind the probe.
Speaking at a news conference in Philadelphia on Wednesday, Giuliani said that Sweeney, who was on hand for the event, is working with Trump’s lawyers, “going around the country collecting” information on alleged abnormalities in vote counting. It’s not clear exactly what that entails. Giuliani didn’t elaborate, and Sweeney immediately hung up when Mother Jones called him.
But it’s worth noting that Sweeney is registered with the Justice Department as an agent for Vnesheconombank, a Kremlin-controlled investment bank that the United States sanctioned in 2014 as part of the US response to Russia’s invasion of Crimea. (The bank, known as VEB, played a part in the Trump-Russia scandal due to a December 13, 2016, meeting between the bank’s former chairman and Jared Kushner. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report noted that Kushner and the bank chairman made contradictory claims about the meeting’s purpose.) Sweeney’s DOJ registration states that he was hired to help the bank avoid new sanctions. Sweeney’s contract with the bank pays him about $750,000 per year.
Sweeney is also a registered lobbyist for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a project by Russia’s state-run gas giant, Gazprom, to move natural gas from Russia to Germany. Congress has passed legislation aimed at blocking the effort. In addition, Sweeney has represented Igor Kolomoisky, a politically powerful Ukrainian tycoon who previously controlled a Ukrainian bank seized by that country’s government in 2016 due to a lack of capital and financial improprieties. The US Justice Department in August announced that it is seeking to seize US property that Kolomoisky allegedly bought in the United States with money stolen from the bank. Kolomoisky’s lawyers deny the allegations.
Bondi, who has appeared at press conferences in Philadelphia this week to fault local ballot-counting procedures, works for a Ballard Partners, which has become one of Washington’s top lobbying shops by touting its ties to Trump. The firm’s founder, Brian Ballard, is a longtime Florida Republican operative who once worked as a lobbyist for Trump’s business interests in that state. Bondi is registered with the Justice Department as an agent for Qatar’s government. She is also among a slew of Washington operatives who have lobbied for KGL Investment Co., a Kuwaiti company whose CEO—Marsha Lazareva, a Russian citizen—was arrested in 2017 by Kuwaiti officials for allegedly embezzling public funds. Lazera, who is imprisoned, continues to dispute the charges. Bondi also appears to have had a chummyrelationship with Lev Parnas, a Giuliani associate and a key figure in Trump’s Ukraine scandal, who is under indictment for fraud and campaign finance violations, and who helped steer foreign lobbying business to Ballard in 2017. Ballard Partners and Bondi did not respond to inquiries Thursday.
Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee last year accused Lewandowski of selling access to Trump and the White House by offering his services to foreign and domestic clients as a consultant. Lewandowski since 2017 has maintained ties to lobbying firms, while saying that he himself is not a lobbyist. He previously worked for a firm, Avenue Associates, that lobbies for Qatar. Last year, Lewandowski joined a firm, Turnberry Solutions, that is named for a golf course Trump owns in Scotland. Lobbyists for the firm, through a legally separate corporation, have represented a pro-Russian Serbian separatist party in Bosnia.
Giuliani himself has spent nearly two decades doing work for foreign parties. At times he acts as a lawyer, helping clients with legal issues in the United States. At other times, he acts as a consultant, offering security advice to cities and states around the world. Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, an office Giuliani once ran, are reportedly looking into whether he violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The probe has reportedly focused on Giuliani negotiating to be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to represent Ukraine’s top prosecutor while helping that prosecutor pursue an agenda in Washington that included the firing of the former US ambassador to Ukraine. Giuliani has said he was never actually paid by the prosecutor.
Senate Democrats have also asked the Justice Department to look into whether Giuliani is violating foreign lobbying laws by doing work for foreign interests without registering with the DOJ. This includes Giuliani’s prior paid work for a Ukrainian-Russian oligarch investigated by Mueller; Giuliani’s acceptance of a payment to write a letter attacking an anti-corruption effort in Romania; and his receipt of payments from Mujahedin-e-Khalq, a radical Iranian opposition group, while promoting its calls for the US to adopt a policy aimed at overthrowing Iran’s rulers. Giuliani has claimed he has no obligation to register under FARA because he does not do work that involves promoting foreign interests within the United States. He has also never registered as a lobbyist.
These connections by Trump’s legal advisers presumably have no direct bearing on their bid to help invalidate the president’s likely electoral defeat. But the kind of team Trump has assembled says something about the task they are engaged in.
The New York Times series based on Donald Trump’s tax returns has revealed a lot about the president’s finances, but so far it has yet to illuminate one of the biggest mysteries of Trump’s business empire: his Scottish golf courses.
The clubs—one at Turnberry, located outside Glasgow, and one in Aberdeenshire, situated on a remote stretch of coastline along the North Sea—have been a main focus of the Trump Organization over the past decade. Trump has poured more money into these properties than any other part of his business. Yet neither club has ever turned a profit. In fact, together they have lost as much as $6.2 million annually over the past 14 years. Trump has other failed investments, but he rarely sticks with a losing venture for so long.
That’s not the only strange thing. Instead of putting money into the business, in exchange for equity, the way an investment usually works, Trump has been lending himself the cash needed to develop the properties and keep them afloat. And he has dramatically overvalued the courses—and not just in his typical braggadocios way, but in detailed corporate filings made annually in the UK.
To be sure, Trump is known for employing aggressive tax avoidance strategies. In October 2018, the New York Timesreported that he and his siblings had engaged in tax fraud in connection with their father’s estate. But tax and financial experts Mother Jones consulted about his Scottish ventures were puzzled by his business methods, which they said did not have obvious tax or financial advantages. Perhaps, they said, Trump is just bad at doing business.
However, some critics have speculated about a more nefarious explanation for Trump’s anomalous business dealings related to the Scottish golf courses: money laundering. To that end, members of Scottish parliament have been pushing to probe Trump’s golf clubs using a statute typically aimed at kleptocrats.
From the beginning, Trump’s Scottish ventures were a departure from his usual M.O. He has traditionally financed his development projects with borrowed money—that’s why he has often referred to himself as “the king of debt.” But starting in 2006, when he began developing his Aberdeenshire property, he deviated from that practice. He financed his Scottish courses out of his own pocket, pouring, by his own estimate, more than $200 million into the clubs. These expenditures came during a nine-year cash spending spree during which Trump dropped some $400 million on various properties in the United States, Scotland, and Ireland.
Moreover, the way he has funneled money into the Scottish courses is downright bizarre. Every dime that he has put into the properties has been lent to the Scottish companies he owns that control the golf courses, by Trump himself or one of his New York-based LLCs.
Tax experts say it’s not unusual for different parts of a business based in different countries to lend to each other. Doing so can create tax advantages since the borrower may be able to write off the interest payments. Yet Trump’s loans (from himself and his LLCs to his Scottish companies) carry no interest and have no due dates, negating the most common tax benefit.
“I don’t see the tax angle to doing that,” says Daniel Shaviro, a professor of tax law at New York University’s law school. “There is a stupidity angle, perhaps, which would fit what we know about him as a businessman more generally.”
Shaviro and several other tax experts speculated that Trump may be attempting to take advantage of a variety of other, more obscure tax-avoidance tactics, but they pointed out that these strategies were, for the most part, not legally advisable, if not outright illegal.
The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.
The experts Mother Jones spoke to were also puzzled by the values Trump has assigned to his Scottish properties. For instance, according to Trump’s most recent corporate filings, he values his Aberdeenshire course at $40.5 million. That’s nearly four times what comparable Scottish clubs are worth. Carnoustie Golf Links, a historic and top-ranked course that hosted the British open as recently as 2018, is valued at $10.4 million. Kings Barns Golf Links, which like Trump’s Aberdeenshire property runs along the North Sea and is owned by an American businessman, is valued at $10.3 million.
Trump has a habit of over- or undervaluing his assets to suit his objective at the moment—inflating his net worth to obtain financing or deflating property values when seeking lower tax assessments—his former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen told Congress in 2019. Allegations that Trump misrepresented his worth when seeking loans are currently at the center of an investigation into Trump and his company by New York’s attorney general, Letitia James. Documents Cohen provided to Congress show that Trump excluded his Scottish resorts from the forms he submitted to banks asking for loans. That in itself could be interesting to investigators. In court filings, James raised questions about a similar Trump action: He omitted financial data regarding his Chicago projects from financial statements he gave to banks. And she wanted to know why.
The weirdness of the numbers—and the method by which Trump has invested—has raised eyebrows in Scotland. Earlier this year, members of the Scottish parliament began urging their government to pry open Trump’s books and use what’s known as an Unexplained Wealth Order (UWO). As the name suggests, it’s a UK statute that can be used to compel a politically prominent person to explain how he or she pulled off a financial transaction that appears out of line with what’s publicly known about his or her finances. In 2018, this law was used to examine how the wife of a jailed ex–Azerbaijani government official had managed to afford a £16 million shopping spree at Harrods.
Patrick Harvie, a Scottish Member of Parliament and co-leader of the Scottish Green Party, is leading the effort to use a UWO to investigateTrump. “This is not someone who inspires confidence in sound finances and sound business,” he told Mother Jones this summer. “The fact that there are many allegations floating around that the US authorities have investigated, whether it’s in relation to Russia or his political dealings domestically—you don’t have to sniff the air very long to see there’s something that smells.”
Adam Davidson, who covers business for the New Yorker and who has investigated Trump’s finances, has extensively detailed Trump’s odd financial maneuvers in Scotland and why he believes they may be evidence of shady activity.
He cannot have spent all that money on the properties. We have the planning docs. We know how much he spent–it’s far less than what he claims.
The money truly disappears. It goes from one pocket to another pocket and then the pocket is opened to reveal nothing is there.
Fueling the suspicions of his critics is the fact that Trump has a history of partnering with people with alleged ties to money laundering. One example is the Agalarovs, the Azeri-Russian family who Trump teamed up with to produce the Miss World pageant in Moscow and with whom he explored developing a Moscow tower. The Senate Intelligence Committee reported this summer that the Agalarovs “have significant ties to Russian organized crime and have been closely affiliated with individuals involved in murder, prostitution, weapons trafficking, kidnapping, extortion, narcotics trafficking, money laundering and other significant criminal enterprises.” The committee also noted that Trump’s partners in the Trump Soho hotel project had connections to money laundering.
Real estate is a common vehicle for money laundering—anyone can purchase real estate, sellers welcome cash, and it’s relatively easy to obscure a property’s true owner.
In Scotland, Trump has proposed lavish housing developments at both of his clubs. Though his proposed development has thus far been blocked at Turnberry, Trump has received approval to move forward with his plans in Aberdeenshire. Martyn McLaughlin, a reporter with Glasgow’s Scotsman newspaper who has doggedly covered Trump’s Scottish adventures, says he and many locals wonder who would put down six or seven-figures to buy a home on this stretch of the Scottish coast, known for its booming offshore oil industry.
“Quite how they’ll have a viable business scheme out of that, I’m not sure,” he told Mother Jones this summer. “Who pays hundreds of thousands of pounds for a family villa in the northeast of Scotland that’s got the corrosive brand of Trump attached to it?”
McLaughlin said that at an early open house event for prospective buyers—before the COVID-19 pandemic limited travel—the interested parties seemed mostly foreign. “Which raises the question: Who is investing? Who is giving money to the president’s company? It’s the most explicit opportunity to put money into the Trump Organization in return for property.”
The development the Trump Organization has proposed in Aberdeenshire is expected to cost another $200 million, and it’s unclear where Trump will come up with the cash for this. The pandemic has slammed his hospitality empire, especially his Scottish courses, which have been largely destinations for American travelers. Trump’s company also faces loans totaling more than $400 million that it will either have repay or refinance over the next few years.
Whether Trump can pull off this next stage of development for his Scottish resorts or the courses sink further into unprofitability, Trump’s financial future (if he stays in office or not) seems increasingly tied to these properties. Consequently, it remains notable that so much about his Scottish dealings continue to be unexplained and puzzling.
Donald Trump’s entire career has been built on disinformation.
The celebrity real estate developer bullshitted his way into his early breakthrough deals in Manhattan. After his casino empire collapsed, he revived his fortunes with a reality-TV show that like all reality TV-shows manufactured and sold a fake reality. He became a conservative movement favorite—and created a foundation for his presidential bid—by championing the racist birther conspiracy theory about Barack Obama. For decades, he ran a non-stop PR campaign to gild his image and push the tale that he was wealthier than he probably was. And he won the 2016 election partly because of a secret Russian attack that weaponized a hack and that covertly flooded various social media platforms with disinformation designed to create discord, hurt Hillary Clinton, and boost Trump. (He and his campaign aided and abetted the Kremlin operation by falsely denying it was happening.) Disinformation is Trump’s lifeblood. And in this election, Trump is not relying on Vladimir Putin or anyone else for the disinformation he needs to possibly win. He and his crew have taken on this task. The disinformation in the 2020 campaign is coming from inside the house.
Though Trump will never acknowledge it publicly, Moscow’s clandestine assault on the 2016 race was a key component of his victory. Its cyber-theft and subsequent leaking of Clinton-related emails and documents shaped the last four weeks of the campaign and perfectly teed-up the last-minute announcement of a revived FBI investigation of Clinton’s use as secretary of state of a private email server. And the Kremlin’s undercover social media campaign spread messages that aimed at suppressing the Black vote and reducing enthusiasm for Clinton. There is no evidence that Trump and his minions directly conspired in this sabotage. But he and his aides engaged in a parallel disinformation campaign by repeatedly insisting in public there was no Russian attack underway—even though the Trump campaign had been informed the Kremlin had a secret plan to assist Trump and Trump, as the GOP nominee, was briefed by US intelligence that Putin was trying to subvert the election. In short, Putin did the dirty work, Trump covered for him, and, as a recently released Republican-endorsed Senate Intelligence Committee report noted, he and his campaign sought to benefit from the Kremlin plot.
In 2020, Trump’s disinformation scheme is out in the open, and he is at the center of it. In a way, his entire presidency has been one long disinformation crusade. As of the end of August, according to the Washington Post‘s “Fact Checker” database, Trump had made 22,247 false or misleading claims since entering the White House. And in the final stretch of the campaign, he has been averaging over 50 lies or falsehoods a day. Many of these are pillars of the false narrative he has been peddling for a while: the US economy on his watch was the best economy in the history of the nation, no president since perhaps Abraham Lincoln has done more for Black Americans, he has a health plan that will provide better and cheaper coverage to Americans who rely on Obamacare, his trade war with China was a rousing success, he has protected Americans from the violence of immigrants, Antifa, and others…and so on.
But it is within his presidential campaign that Trump has attempted to take control of and pump up the disinformation blitz—and he has done so unabashedly. In May 2019, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, publicly said he was heading to Ukraine to search for dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who had been a board member for a Ukrainian energy company. He didn’t bother to hide this. He would spend over a year on this mission, hooking up with various right-wingers (remember Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing?), conservative journalists, and shady overseas officials, as he looked for mud to throw at Biden. For his part, Trump, during a July 25, 2019, phone call that would lead to his impeachment, pressed the Ukrainian president to initiate investigations that would taint Biden and produce the derogatory information he and Giuliani yearned for. When news of this call emerged in September 2019, Trump hailed it as “beautiful” and “perfect.” The disinformation campaign was hiding in plain sight. No Russians needed.
Still, Russia was involved. In his pursuit of anti-Biden material, Giuliani collaborated with a Ukrainian parliamentarian who was pushing falsified evidence of Biden corruption in Ukraine and whom the US government would openly describe as an “active Russian agent” cooking up disinformation to influence the US election. (And Moscow was undoubtedly targeting the 2020 election in other ways.) Yet even after this Russia connection was exposed in September—and the former New York City mayor was cast as a useful idiot for Putin—Giuliani continued to hype wild accusations about Biden and Hunter and alleged (but unconfirmed) wrongdoing in Ukraine and also China. And so did former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon and the entire Trump media machine (Fox News, Breitbart, the New York Post, OAN, and others). A laptop that supposedly belonged to Hunter Biden mysteriously emerged (with emails!). A former business partner of his came forward with allegations about a Chinese deal (which never materialized) that could not be substantiated. There was no clear evidence of any Joe Biden wrongdoing.
But as it had done throughout the campaign, this vast collection of Trumpers chugged along, generating headlines designed to raise suspicions and hoping to gin up a scandal that would destroy Biden’s candidacy. At the presidential debates, Trump, in less-than-effective fashion, echoed the crazy-quilt assortment of accusations. To the uninitiated, it all probably came across as incomprehensible. Trump’s major disinformation operation appeared to be failing. Huntergate did not become an October Surprise.
The Hunter stuff was only a piece of Trump’s disinformation effort. He and his crew endeavored to create and spread other phony story lines about Biden. They repeatedly claimed the former vice president was ailing and losing his cognitive abilities. They asserted that he had to rely on a teleprompter during interviews with reporters. (False.) They said he had referred to Black men as “super-predators” during the debate in the 1990s over a crime bill. (False.) In tweets and campaign speeches, Trump asserted Biden was part of the Obama administration effort to spy on him during the 2016 campaign. (False.) The entire so-called “Spygate” controversy—a disinformation effort developed to distract from Trump’s complicity in the Russia scandal—fizzled. The Trump campaign even courted a massive source of bizarre disinformation: the nutty QAnon conspiracy movement, which claims Trump is battling a global cabal of deep-state pedophiles and Satan-worshipers.
Trump, too, has repeatedly spread much disinformation about voting and about the horrific coronavirus pandemic. In fact, one study found Trump was the biggest driver of COVID-19 misinformation online. He has pushed false information about the danger of the virus, the value of mask-wearing, the efficacy of questionable treatments, the importance of testing, the availability of a vaccine, and much more. This past week he claimed COVID-19 deaths were “WAY DOWN” and that doctors pocket more money if they report COVID deaths—two outrageous lies. His voting and COVID untruths, of course, are designed to serve his own political interests: to undermine an election that might cast him out of office and to spare him accountability for a pandemic response that has resulted in the deaths of over 230,000 Americans.
In 2016, Trump needed the secret Russian disinformation campaign to help him reach the White House. He now seems to require a multi-level disinformation campaign to retain power. After all, without this flood of falsehoods, what narrative is Trump left with? An incumbent president who presided over widespread death and economic calamity in a national emergency he mishandled is up against a moderate, well-known, and competent long-time government official. He has had to wage a rampant disinformation effort to undermine this basic context of the race. The public won’t know if any of Trump’s propaganda ops have worked until the final results are in, but his systematic assaults on the truth have not produced an obvious game-changer.
In the 2020 presidential contest, Trump’s reliance on deception has been in full public view—and has even been called out on occasion by media outlets and social media platforms. After decades of Trump depending on disinformation for many of his successes, this election will determine if he has lost the power to exploit fabrications and has finally encountered a moment of truth.
Last month, after fundraising filings showed that his campaign was facing a possible cash crunch in the final weeks of the campaign, Donald Trump pledged to personally bankroll his reelection effort if money was needed.
….Like I did in the 2016 Primaries, if more money is needed, which I doubt it will be, I will put it up!
Well, it’s needed. And a check from Trump has yet to materialize.
Yesterday, his campaign filed its September fundraising report, and it was dismal. Trump entered October with just $63 million in cash on hand. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden reported having $177 million, nearly three times as much.
Despite raising around $1 billion with his partners in the Republican Party since 2017, Trump is struggling to attract donations in the homestretch. In September, when his fundraising should have been reaching a crescendo, he pulled in just $81 million. Adjusted for inflation, that’s less than what Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential campaign raised in the same month. And it’s way less than the $281.6 million Biden brought in.
So, Trump is in a hole. What’s he going to do about it? Unlike in 2016, when he gave around $55 million to fund his primary campaign, he hasn’t provided a dime of his own money to the campaign yet this election cycle. Despite the promise he made in September and reports that he planned to fund his campaign to the tune of $100 million, he’s not likely to contribute much at this point, if for no other reason than he probably can’t afford to.
Many of Trump’s hotel and golf businesses were posting declining revenues before the pandemic wreaked havoc on the hospitality sector. Meanwhile, his company is facing looming deadlines to refinance or repay more than $400 million in debt. Trump’s most recent financial disclosure showed that at the end of 2019 he had somewhere between $46.7 million and $156.6 million in checking or money-market accounts. In other words, without raising more cash by offloading assets, it’s not even clear that he has $100 million to loan his campaign to begin with. Even a loan of $50 million might be a heavy lift. Trump does have a stock portfolio, but according to the New York Times bombshell reporting based on his tax returns, he already liquidated a big chunk of that in 2016 to fund his primary campaign. That well is probably dry.
The Trump Organization is allegedly exploring the sale of at least one big property in Westchester County, outside of New York City, but as far as this campaign goes, it’s probably too little, too late.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment about whether Trump planned to throw a financial lifeline to his campaign.
On Saturday morning, Donald Trump launched a Twitter attack on Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) after the Senator’s telephone town hall comments criticizing the president were reported in the media. Sasse excoriated Trump over his handling of the coronavirus, his foreign policy, and his sexist remarks. “I’m now looking at the possibility of a Republican blood bath in the Senate, and that’s why I’ve never been on the Trump train,” he said. In response on Twitter, the president called Sasse the “least effective” Republican senator painting him as a “stupid and obnoxious” RINO.
…Nomination to run for a second term. Then he went back to his rather stupid and obnoxious ways. Must feel he can’t lose to a Dem. Little Ben is a liability to the Republican Party, and an embarrassment to the Great State of Nebraska. Other than that, he’s just a wonderful guy!
The president is known to get riled up about even the smallest of criticisms, so his comments lashing out at Sasse are to be expected. And Sasse’s attempt to cast himself as a moderate, anti-Trump Republican is part of a broader rebranding effort ahead of what many in the GOP assume will be a bloodbath in the general election. But will they be able to distance themselves from Trumpism after spending four years watching as Trump damaged democratic institutions and eroded the public’s faith in government?
It’s hard to see Sasse’s comments as anything but a political tactic, as opposed to genuine concern for the hell the Trump presidency has unleashed. In 2016, Sasse emerged as a vocal Trump critic—he once compared the president to David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. But when he was facing a primary challenger, he toned down the anti-Trump talk and earned himself an endorsement from the president last year.
Senator Ben Sasse has done a wonderful job representing the people of Nebraska. He is great with our Vets, the Military, and your very important Second Amendment. Strong on Crime and the Border, Ben has my Complete and Total Endorsement!
Sasse isn’t alone. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sought to distance himself from the president, couching his criticism is pandemic safety. Earlier this month at an event he mentioned that hadn’t been to the White House since August 6 because their public health protocols were too lax. “My impression was their approach to how to handle this is different from mine and what I insisted that we do in the Senate, ” McConnell said, “which is to wear a mask and practice social distancing.” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who is rumored to be considering a run for president in 2024, has always been a vocal critic of Trump. On Friday, he took it a step further by writing in Ronald Reagan for president on his ballot.
Republican politicians’ sudden desire to distance themselves from the president comes as Trump’s poll numbers continue to trail far behind former Vice President Joe Biden. With the election just weeks away, the president still hasn’t been able to articulate any policy goals for a second term. Instead, he has chosen to repeatedly lie about the course of the pandemic, attack his political opponents, and engage in racism on the campaign trail. The result is that more and more Republicans are planning for a post-Trump future.
It’s obvious that Republicans and conservatives are preparing to insist that they were on the right side of history. It’s what they always do. We already saw a glimpse of this time-honored tactic with the passing of Jown Lewis, Georgia congressman and longtime civil rights icon. McConnell and other Republicans who fought hard against Lewis’ life project of ensuring voting rights for all were suddenly praising Lewis’ work in their statements after his death, as I wrote in July:
I realized I was watching the time-honored practice of whitewashing of history. Over and over again, people who are attacked while fighting for the rights of the marginalized are embraced by the group that did the attacking. The duplicity was inevitable, but also useful: We witnessed the rewriting of history that has taken place with other great Civil Rights leaders by those who have done everything they can to oppose what they fought for in real time, unlike what happened with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., which took place over years.
Their effort to distance themselves from Trump is not unlike what happened in the post civil rights era. Though Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement was largely unpopular during the 1960s, today many politicians claim to have supported the movement in its heyday and frequently cite MLK when talking about racial justice. If Republicans are successful in rewriting history once again, in 20 years, don’t be surprised if they claim to be the ones who actually stood up to Trump.
In any other time, it would have been front-page news and ignited days or weeks of controversy. But last week, when a former top government official accused the president, for whom he once worked, of treasonous conduct, the story lasted nanoseconds and was blown away by the never-ending firehose of craziness and disinformation generated by the commander-in-chief and his crew. The tragedy here is not merely that Donald Trump escaped yet another scandal. It is that a fundamental and dire threat to the security of the United States did not receive sufficient attention and that American democracy remains in immediate danger.
I am referring to an interview retired General H.R. McMaster, who served as Trump’s national security adviser after Michael Flynn was bounced, gave to MSNBC, in which he said that Trump was acting like a traitor. This sounds hyperbolic. But how else to frankly characterize McMaster’s remarks? He stated that Trump “is aiding and abetting Putin’s efforts” to intervene in the 2020 presidential contest. This is a helluva accusation being leveled by a man who once was Trump’s most senior national security aide: the president is currently assisting a foreign adversary’s covert attack on the United States.
Why did McMaster’s accusation not produce a thunderclap that caused the world to stand still for a moment? There were articles in the New York Times and elsewhere about his charge. But the Times relegated the story to page 14. That’s hardly highlighting the issue. If you blinked, you easily could have missed this damning comment from McMaster, who noted that Vladimir Putin was currently mounting a “sustained campaign of political subversion against us” and that this operation was being “aided by a leader”—that is, Trump—“who doesn’t acknowledge” Moscow’s assault.
For months, news reports and Democratic members of Congress have noted that Putin, following up on his successful 2016 attack, is once again trying to sabotage an American presidential election to sow discord and help Trump win. Trump, though, has refused to address this. In fact, Trump and his minions have been blocking, suppressing, or discounting intelligence showing the Kremlin is attempting to subvert the 2020 election.
After intelligence officials in February told House lawmakers during a classified briefing that Russia was interfering to boost Trump, an irate Trump ousted Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire and replaced him with a loyalist (who was subsequently replaced by another loyalist). Last month, the former intelligence head at the Department of Homeland Security filed a whistleblower complaint claiming that members of the Trump administration pressured him to withhold intelligence assessments detailing Russian efforts to spread disinformation aimed at influencing the 2020 election “because it made the president look bad.” The current director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, has tried to restrict the sharing of intelligence on Russia’s clandestine endeavor with Congress, and the Trump administration has downplayed Russia’s actions, attempting to deflect attention to Iran and China, whose efforts to influence the 2020 election are far less developed and are more indirect. (Ratcliffe also has been declassifying information to assist the latest Fox disinformation campaign, which claims Hillary Clinton and Obama administration conspired in 2016 to tie Trump to Russia. This is nonsense. There was no secret scheme. When Moscow targeted the Democrats with a hack-and-leak operation, Clinton’s aides publicly raised legitimate questions about Trump’s and his adviser’s connections to Russia.)
On Tuesday, DHS finally released its delayed annual assessments on threats to the United States—which the whistleblower had claimed had been withheld to protect Trump—and the report stated that “Russia is the likely primary covert influence actor and purveyor of disinformation and misinformation within the homeland.” But in an interview, Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf insisted that China posed the greater overall threat to the United States
Last week, in another little-noticed development, several Democratic senators demanded that Wolf release a document that shows Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting are “consistent with a foreign influence campaign.” They contended that this unclassified report produced by DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis “demonstrates that a foreign actor is attempting to undermine faith in the US electoral system, particularly vote-by-mail systems, in a manner that is consistent with the rhetoric being used by President Trump, Attorney General Barr, and others.” They did not say that Russia was the culprit, but that’s a good guess.
Democrats in Congress have been trying to sound the alarm about Putin’s schemes. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) recently subpoenaed DHS for information related to the whistleblower complaint that alleged intelligence on Russia had been smothered. He also asked the intelligence community to monitor Russian disinformation efforts—particularly those that boost Trump’s criticism of mail-in voting. “Sure enough, it wasn’t long before the intelligence community started seeing exactly that,” Schiff said. “It was too enticing and predictable an option for the Russians. They have been amplifying Trump’s false attacks on absentee voting.”
On the Senate side, though, there has been little action. In August, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee released a massive report that detailed Russia’s wide-ranging efforts to secretly help Trump in 2020. (The report showed that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort colluded with a Russian intelligence officer, that Donald Trump Jr. tried to collude with a secret Kremlin plot to help Trump, that Trump and his aides sought to exploit the Russia attack while denying it was happening, and that Trump likely lied to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.) The committee acknowledged Putin was up to it again in 2020. But it has taken no public steps to address the Russian threat. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, tells Mother Jones, “U.S. intelligence agencies have made clear Russia is intent on interfering in the 2020 election, and yet Republican senators and Donald Trump continue to obstruct any legislation or oversight to respond to the Russian threat. Republicans have refused to even hold a single oversight hearing in the Intelligence Committee this year on how to respond to Russia’s attack on our democracy.” Not one hearing.
On October 1, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) tried to cast the spotlight on this brazen negligence. He posted a Twitter thread detailing what he called a “massive coverup campaign underway to disguise the octopus-like Russian election interference operation being run on Trump’s behalf.”
Murphy pointed out that in early 2020 intelligence reports started “coming into Congress about a giant, multi-layer Russian effort to help Trump in 2020. Bigger than what they did in 2016. Looks like Russians are trying to get U.S. persons – especially those close to Trump – to help.” In July, he said in this thread, “Dem leadership [wrote] a letter to FBI Director Wray, asking for an all-Congress briefing, especially because the reports we’re reading suggest Russian agents are trying to find Members of Congress to assist their interference operation.” But no such briefing came. Instead, the Trump administration released “vague” statements about possible Russian, Chinese, and Iranian intervention—which, Murphy calls, “very puzzling” because “Congress has never been briefed on any meaningful Chinese/Iranian interference plans.”
Murphy also noted that when the Treasury Department in September sanctioned Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian politician and Russian intelligence officer promoting conspiracy theories about Joe Biden, there was “no press conference from Intel or the FBI or DHS that they’ve caught a Russian agent who has been in regular contact with the President’s inner circle.” Derkach had been in touch with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, who has been trying to collect and spread anti-Biden disinformation. The Trump administration made no fuss about this move. “What’s happening is clear,” Murphy tweeted. “American intel agencies, that are supposed to be totally apolitical, have been folded into Trump’s campaign. They are keeping info about Russian interference hidden, and overhyping info about China and Iran helping Biden.” And Murphy finished with this: “It’s why Trump’s former National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, said something today that is as shocking as it unsurprising. He said Trump is ‘aiding and abetting’ Putin’s interference campaign. Wow. But of course he is. And now you know the details.”
Which brings us back to the general and his demand that Trump call out the Russians for attacking the election. McMaster is currently peddling a book, which focuses on his big thoughts about foreign policy. It is not a tell-all about his tenure in Trumpland. But the insight he shared on MSNBC is worth the same sort of attention that was granted to Bob Woodward’s revelations about Trump purposefully downplaying COVID-19. Here is a former high-ranking Trump official stating that Trump is assisting an attack on the United States because he believes that serves his own political interests. McMaster ought to be asked more about this. And he ought to say more. (He did not respond to an email from me in which I posed several questions, including whether he had made any efforts as national security adviser to persuade Trump to take direct actions to protect the United States from Russian information warfare and how much Trump’s “aiding and abetting” assists the ongoing Russian operation.)
McMaster’s remarks and the GOP-endorsed Senate Intelligence Committee report are a firm rebuttal to the Trumpers’ long-running shouts of “no collusion” and their cries of “hoax!” Whether or not Trump directly conspired with Russian operatives—Donald Trump Jr. attempted to do so and Manafort indeed collaborated with a Russian intelligence officer—it is now (and has long been) clear that Trump’s great sin in 2016 was providing cover to the Russian operation and taking advantage of it. McMaster’s judgment about Trump’s current actions echo what Michael Isikoff and I concluded in our 2018 book, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump: Trump “had aided and abetted Moscow’s attack on American democracy.”
The Russia story can seem like old news, and Trump and his amen chorus have done all they could in the last four years to discredit and marginalize this historic scandal. But Putin has again targeted the United States, and Trump is again assisting Putin. A reunion of treachery is under way. Meanwhile, Trump’s GOP handmaids are doing nothing, as the US political system is endangered by an overseas foe. McMaster spoke up in one interview. Yet with Election Day only weeks away, he, other Trump alums, and members of Congress need to do so repeatedly and forcefully for Trump and the GOP’s grand act of betrayal to register during a time of chaos and information overload.
Trump is in league with an enemy plotting to infect and undermine a crucial election. And just as he has not protected the nation from the coronavirus, he has not safeguarded the American nation from Russia’s insidious attacks. As McMaster tells it, there is a turncoat in the White House. Other than the pandemic, what could be a greater threat to the United States and more deserving of continuous coverage and dread?
In advance of the first presidential debate, disinformation about Joe Biden is going massively viral on social media, just one day after the former vice president sent Facebook a letter laying out his campaign’s concerns about political disinformation being spread on its platform.
“Report: Joe Biden Has Been Given Tonight’s Debate Questions In Advance” reads a headline on arch-paranoiac Alex Jones’ site, Infowars, a notorious peddler of right-wing disinformation. The “report” Infowars cited was from former Fox host Todd Starnes, who was just citing Jerome Corsi, a right-wing conspiracy theorist with a history of spreading outright lies. Corsi offered no proof that Biden had been given the questions, but Starnes’ story on the baseless allegation reached over 1 million followers on Facebook and another million on Twitter, according to CrowdTangle, a social media analytics tool owned by Facebook.
Lots of disinfo ahead of tonight’s debate. One case: InfoWars says Biden got questions in advance, citing former Fox host Todd Starnes. Starnes himself just heard it on local radio. And the radio station got it from conspiracy theory king and ex InfoWars employee Jerome Corsi. pic.twitter.com/O9g8OgZde6
Infowars published its story around noon. By later that afternoon, more Biden disinformation was hurtling out of control on Facebook. A New York Post story with a single anonymous source from the Trump campaign claimed Biden had agreed to be inspected for an earpiece before the debate, which the Biden campaign denied. Regardless the story spread across Facebook, amplified by right-wing sites and posters.
NBC’s Ben Collins noticed that the claim predated the New YorkPost story; it had been floating around online for weeks before the online poster at the center of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a user claiming to be Q, posted the theory on 8kun, the successor website to the 8chan forum.
The Biden earpiece conspiracy theory (which originated in a tweet from a single anonymous source to a NYPost reporter, and was instantly denied by the campaign) is everywhere on Facebook. Absolutely everywhere. pic.twitter.com/AIdXoy4ZIi
Breitbart‘s story on the claim reached 5 million accounts on Facebook and 3 million on Twitter.
The massive spread of disinformation about Biden came just hours after Facebook essentially blew off Biden’s concerns about disinformation being spread about him.
On Monday, the Biden campaign sent a letter to Facebook calling it “the nation’s foremost propagator of disinformation about the voting process,” and saying that “Rather than seeing progress, we have seen regression,” according to a copy of the letter published by Axios.
Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone responded vaguely, saying that the company has received criticism from both Republicans and Democrats and added that “we have rules in place to protect the integrity of the election and free expression, and we will continue to apply them impartially.”
Here’s what Facebook is saying back, “While many Republicans think we should take one course, many Democrats think we should do the exact opposite.”
Today Barton Gellman tells me something that I didn’t know: “the consent decree is gone.” Here’s what that means:
The 2020 presidential election will be the first in 40 years to take place without a federal judge requiring the Republican National Committee to seek approval in advance for any “ballot security” operations at the polls. In 2018, a federal judge allowed the consent decree to expire, ruling that the plaintiffs had no proof of recent violations by Republicans. The consent decree, by this logic, was not needed, because it worked.
The order had its origins in the New Jersey gubernatorial election of 1981. According to the district court’s opinion in Democratic National Committee v. Republican National Committee, the RNC allegedly tried to intimidate voters by hiring off-duty law-enforcement officers as members of a “National Ballot Security Task Force,” some of them armed and carrying two-way radios. According to the plaintiffs, they stopped and questioned voters in minority neighborhoods, blocked voters from entering the polls, forcibly restrained poll workers, challenged people’s eligibility to vote, warned of criminal charges for casting an illegal ballot, and generally did their best to frighten voters away from the polls. The power of these methods relied on well-founded fears among people of color about contact with police.
So what does this mean? Let’s turn the mic over to President Trump’s wastrel son:
It sounds like a drive to raise a militia. “We need every able-bodied man, woman to join an army for Trump’s election security” https://t.co/n0IJ7fjIP2
It’s 1981 all over again. Trump Jr. is recruiting “an army” to provide “election security,” and I think everyone with more than a room temperature IQ knows what that means. It means descending in force on polling places in Black neighborhoods and trying to scare people into staying away. This is what Republicans routinely did until a judge stopped them, and it’s what they’re going to do again now that a judge has removed the leash. Apparently 40 years wasn’t enough.
