Wisconsin’s spring primary in Whitewater saw three candidates vie for two spots on the April ballot for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Statewide in preliminary numbers, conservative Michael Screnock had a plurality, followed by liberals Rebecca Dallet and Tim Burns. (It’s Screnock v. Dallet in April.)
Look, however, at how different the statewide, Jefferson County & Walworth County, and City of Whitewater results are:
Statewide:
Michael Screnock 46%
Rebecca Dallet 36%
Tim Burns 18%
For Walworth County overall, Screnock took 58.1% of the vote, and for Jefferson County overall, he took 54.9% of the vote.
Now look at the City of Whitewater, all wards:
Dallet 47.9%
Screnock 30.9%
Burns 20.3%
In the City of Whitewater, even in a low-key race, the two liberal candidates easily took about 58% of the vote, while in the full rural counties of which Whitewater is a part, Screnock took a similar majority.
There’s your City of Whitewater political story: Whitewater votes farther left than either the counties of which she is a part or the state. Conservatives in the city proper are a political minority (and have been for a while); conservatives in the school district towns nearby, however, are a political majority (and are likely to say as such for a long while).
Politically and culturally, the city is likely to look less and less like nearby towns, and is less and less likely to share the same politics as smaller towns immediately beyond the city limits. It’s a slow process, but one that will prove inexorable nonetheless.
Liberals in the city might hope these changes will be faster, but they will move at their own pace; conservatives in the city might wish to forestall these changes, but they come nonetheless.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of thirty. Sunrise is 6:41 AM and sunset 5:35 PM, for 10h 53m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent, with 30.42% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred sixty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1885, the Washington Monument is dedicated: “some 800 people attended a dedication ceremony for the Washington Monument, an obelisk situated roughly due west of the U.S. Capitol and due south of the White House. After construction had been suspended in 1876 due to lack of funds, Congress passed a concurrent resolution, appropriating $2 million to complete the monument to the American Revolutionary War leader and the nation’s first president. Sen. John Sherman (R-Ohio), chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee for the Monument, noted that the edifice was “simple in form, admirable in proportions, composed of enduring marble and granite, resting upon foundations broad and deep.”
On this day in 1918, the Wisconsin Assembly rejects a denunciation of La Follette: “a move to denounce Sen. Robert La Follette and the nine Wisconsin congressmen who refused to support World War I failed in the State Assembly, by a vote of 76-15. Calling LaFollette “disloyal,” the amendment’s originator, Democrat John F. Donnelly, insisted that La Follette’s position did not reflect “the sentiment of the people of Wisconsin. We should not lack the courage to condemn his actions.” Reflecting the majority opinion, Assemblyman Charles F. Hart retorted that “The Wisconsin State Legislature went on record by passing a resolution telling the President that the people of this state did not want war. Now we are condemning them for doing that which we asked them to do.”
In early 2016, after a legal affairs website uncovered old court cases in which a female former Trump business partner had accused him of sexual misconduct, Mr. Cohen released a statement suggesting that the woman, Jill Harth, “would acknowledge” that the story was false. Ms. Harth said the statement was made without her permission, and that she stands by her claims. It was not the last time Mr. Cohen would present a denial on behalf of a woman who had alleged a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump.
In August of that year, Mr. Cohen learned details of a deal that American Media had struck with a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, that prevented her from going public about an alleged affair with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen was not representing anyone in the confidential agreement, but he was apprised of it by Ms. McDougal’s lawyer, and earlier had been made aware of her attempt to tell her story by the media company, according to interviews and an email reviewed by The New York Times.
Two months later, Mr. Cohen played a direct role in a similar deal involving an adult film star, Stormy Daniels, who once said she had had an affair with Mr. Trump. Last week, Mr. Cohen said he used his own money for the $130,000 payment to her, which has prompted a complaint alleging that Mr. Cohen violated campaign finance regulations. Legal experts also have noted that the payment on behalf of his client may have violated New York’s ethics rules.
Mr. Cohen, who is still described as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer although he is no longer on the Trump Organization payroll, has denied any wrongdoing and insists the arrangement was legal. In an interview, he disputed details of some of his other activities that were described to The Times. But he has never shied away from his role as Mr. Trump’s loyal defender. “It is not like I just work for Mr. Trump,” Mr. Cohen said in an interview in 2016. “I am his friend, and I would do just about anything for him and also his family.”
Critics of Mueller’s investigation have been quick to suggest the indictment proves that no collusion took place between the Trump campaign and Russia. President Donald Trump reiterated as much in a string of tweets on Saturday and Sunday, in which he argued yet again “that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems” and that the Russians “are laughing their asses off in Moscow!”
And although this indictment does not make the allegation of Trump campaign collusion explicitly, it may be too early to jump to any definitive conclusions. As a lawyer and former FBI agent who conducted counterintelligence investigations, I believe Mueller achieved five things with this indictment, all of which suggest this is not the end of the story.
1. Neutralizing Russia
The most extraordinary aspect of Mueller’s indictment is that it lays out, in great detail, one aspect of a large-scale Russian intelligence operation against the United States. It’s not surprising that the FBI uncovered the operation: As part of its counterintelligence mandate, the FBI’s job is to identify and disrupt the activities of foreign spies in the United States.
MOSCOW — Trolling political opponents has become so routine in Russia, such a part of the everyday landscape, that operations are typically performed without much effort to cover any tracks.
So when Russian trolling techniques were exported to the United States as part of the effort to influence the 2016 presidential election, it seems to have been done with the same lack of discipline that characterizes the practice in Russia.
That devil-may-care attitude helped make possible the identification and indictment of 13 Russians and three Russian companies, with the United States accusing them of trying to subvert the election, including efforts to bolster the candidacy of Donald J. Trump and undercut the campaign of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Just because the operation was thinly veiled, however, does not mean that the Russian trolling — creating provocative online posts about immigration, religion and race to try to sway voters — lacked high-level support.
Indeed, ever since the first reports surfaced in 2014 about the existence of a troll farm called the Internet Research Agency, there have been questions about its Kremlin ties.
Whitewater’s looking for a new police chief, and our small city has two candidates from which to choose. There’s a time to consider all this in greater detail; for today, two simple observations are enough.
1. Competency, Not Ideology, Has Always Been Key. Whitewater’s policing challenges have not been between left and right, or between those who back the badge and supposed others. It’s a false choice – residents of all kinds have wanted and hoped for competency.
Indeed, a reflexive support from a few for any chief has only delivered mediocre chiefs. Other nearby towns have moved to police chiefs of stronger credentials years ago, while Whitewater has persisted with a lesser standard. Those other nearby towns aren’t radical places, honest to goodness – they just expected more for themselves than a few insider Facebook friends and buddies delivered for thousands in Whitewater.
2. Whitewater’s a College Town – She Needs a Chief Who Can Function Well Here. Fish swim in water, and camels walk in the desert heat. They’re suited to their environments. No one asks a fish if it likes the water, or a camel if it likes the desert – they’re naturally adapted to those environments.
A community survey only works well if one correctly understands the demographics of one’s community. (Yesterday’s post on this topic, The Limits of Community Surveys, was a planned prelude to this post.)
Strong credentials (overdue in Whitewater) are a necessary but only partial condition for success. The holders of those credentials – like fish in water or camels in the desert – need to be suited to the real conditions in which they will live.
Whitewater has always deserved a chief who is competent and truly suited to our environment.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of forty-three. Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 5:33 PM, for 10h 50m 44s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent, with 22% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred sixty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1962, John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the Earth.
On this day in 1950, “in a six-hour speech delivered before the U.S. Senate, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed he had the names of 81 U.S. government officials actively engaged in Communist activities, including ‘one of our foreign ministers.’ “
“For everyone, it was a distraction or a reprieve,” said the White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal conversations. “A lot of people here felt like it was a reprieve from seven or eight days of just getting pummeled.”
The official likened the brief political calm to the aftermath of the October shooting in Las Vegas that left 58 dead and hundreds more injured. That tragedy united White House aides and the country in their shared mourning for the victims and their families.
“But as we all know, sadly, when the coverage dies down a little bit, we’ll be back through the chaos,” the official said.
(There is the perversity of Trump and his ilk: for them, the Parkland shootings are an opportunity to be seized as a distraction from Administration misdeeds. Not merely and wholly a tragedy, but for them an opportunity.)
Aside from the blizzard of lies, one is struck by how frantic Trump sounds. The number and looniness of the tweets arguably exceed anything he has previously done. His conduct reaffirms the basic outline of an obstruction charge: Desperate to disable a Russia probe that would be personally embarrassing to him, he has tried in many ways to interfere with and end the investigation. In doing so, he, at the very least, has abused his office. In turning on his inquisitors rather than to the job of protecting America from Russian influence, he confirms his peculiar fidelity to Vladimir Putin and reminds us he continues to violate his oath of office. There is no doubt he has, based on what we already known, committed actions constituting an abuse of his office. What, if anything special counsel Robert S. Mueller III intends to do about it remains to be seen. Trump’s meltdown over two days is likely to re-raise questions about his mental stability and temperamental fitness to govern.
In a short string of tweets, in other words, Facebook’s vice president for advertising [Rob Goldman] twisted and obfuscated the issues almost beyond recognition. For one, the indictment states clearly that the Russians were not merely buying ads: It alleges that they used fake American identities, fraudulently obtained PayPal accounts and fraudulent Social Security numbers to set up Facebook pages for groups such as “Blacktivist,” “Secured Borders” and “Army of Jesus.” They did indeed use those pages to spread fear and hatred, reaching tens and possibly hundreds of millions of people.
They [the Russians] began this project in 2014, well before the election. And when the election began, they were under clear instructions, according to the indictment, to “use any opportunity to criticize Hillary [Clinton] and the rest (except [Bernie] Sanders and Trump—we support them).” By the time the election began in earnest, the attempt to “divide America” was an attempt to elect Trump. They pushed anti-Clinton messages on websites aimed at the far-right fringe and tried to suppress voter turnout on websites aimed at minorities. I’m not sure where Goldman’s idea that “swaying the election was not the main goal” comes from, but it is diametrically opposed to the content of Mueller’s indictment. No wonder Trump tweeted this on Saturday: “The Fake News Media never fails. Hard to ignore the fact from the Vice President of Facebook Ads, Rob Goldman!”
But Goldman is right to be afraid. The social media companies, including Facebook as well as Twitter, YouTube and Reddit, really do bear a part of the responsibility for the growing polarization and bitter partisanship in American life that the Russians, and not only the Russians, sought to exploit. They have not become conduits for Russian propaganda, and not only Russian propaganda, by accident. The Facebook algorithm, by its very nature, is pushing Americans, and everybody else, into ever more partisan echo chambers — and people who read highly partisan material are much more likely to believe false stories.
During the presidential transition, Kushner was a lead contact for foreign governments, speaking to “over fifty contacts with people from over fifteen countries,” according to a statement he gave to congressional investigators. Before joining the administration, Kushner was also working to divest his interests in Kushner Companies, the family company founded by his father. In early 2017, Kushner also divested from the 666 Fifth Avenue property that his family’s company purchased in 2007 for $1.8 billion. The interests were sold to a family trust that Kushner does not benefit from, a spokesperson said at the time.
One line of questioning from Mueller’s team involves discussions Kushner had with Chinese investors during the transition, according to the sources familiar with the inquiry.
A week after Trump’s election, Kushner met with the chairman and other executives of Anbang Insurance, the Chinese conglomerate that also owns the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, according to The New York Times.
At the time, Kushner and Anbang’s chairman, Wu Xiaohui, were close to finishing a deal for the Chinese insurer to invest in the flagship Kushner Companies property, 666 Fifth Avenue. Talks between the two companies collapsed in March, according to the Times.
It’s expensive to survey opinion, scientifically, using standard statistical principles. Whitewater, like many small places, understandably relies on community surveys (for the city proper, for her school district). Surveys of this kind are an approximation of overall sentiment. One wouldn’t expect an end to these surveys, but they have obvious, significant limitations. (This is true of online surveys either through Google Docs, SurveyMonkey.com, or POLCO.)
A few remarks:
Whitewater’s survey samples are often small.
These responses are from self-selected respondents.
Some of these small numbers are residents of neither the city nor the school district.
In Whitewater, the majority of the city’s residents (57.5%) are aged 15-24, while most of the ‘community’ responses to surveys come from the much smaller percentage of respondents (only 16.1% of the city) who are 35-59. Indeed, all residents over 35 amount to only about 27% of the city.
Just about every press release, news story, and announcement speaks in the language of ‘the community,’ but a majority of this community’s residents are only a minority of those survey respondents.
Even among all residents 25 and older, Whitewater has a same-ten-people problem.
This leaves Whitewater’s public institutions mostly populated with a demographic minority of a minority.
It’s possible to govern this way, of course, as Whitewater has been. It’s evidently hard, however, for those representing a smaller, revanchist view as though it were all the community’s opinion to accept that they’ve actually a minority position.
More work should be done surveying in places that the city’s majority frequents.
Monday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of forty-five. Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 5:32 PM, for 10h 47m 56s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent, with 13.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred sixty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
As a young boy, he taught himself photography. His family eventually moved to the Puget Sound area of Washington state. He settled in Seattle and opened a photography studio in 1897. A chance meeting on Mount Rainier resulted in Curtis being appointed official photographer on railroad magnate E.H. Harriman’s expedition to Alaska. Curtis also accompanied George Bird Grinnell, editor of Field and Stream magazine, to Montana in 1900 to observe the Blackfoot Sun Dance.
After this, Curtis strove to comprehensively document American Indians through photography, a project that continued for over 30 years. Working primarily with 6 x 8-inch reflex camera, he created over 40,000 sepia-toned images. His work attracted national attention, most notably from Theodore Roosevelt and J. Pierpont Morgan, whose family contributed generously to his project. His monumental work, The North American Indian, was eventually printed in 20 volumes with associated portfolios. Curtis’ work included portraits, scenes of daily life, ceremonies, architecture and artifacts, and landscapes.
The Factory, at that time [three years ago], was operating from a building in the suburbs of Saint Petersburg at 55 Savushkina Ave., but earlier this month it moved into a seven-story business center with multiple exits. So now it is harder for the observers to count and identify the Factory’s employees.
“The bot farm is working today. Thousands of people are involved in the propaganda machine attacking U.S. and European Union democracy. I believe there is more than just one building,” Savchuk told The Daily Beast. “There must be trolls in the United States, too, but in Russia we have cheap labor, people happy to work as slaves for a miserable fee.”
In 2015, there was a security camera over Savchuk’s desk, she said, watching as she wrote “casual posts about Ukraine and other international affairs.” The special project she was assigned to work on was the LiveJournal blog of a fortune teller that is still up on the web.
Savchuk said that every employee at the Factory reported to “a tall, bald guy named Oleg Vasilyev,” she was surprised not to find Vasilyev on the Mueller’s list. The former mole said she had known a few of the Troll Factory Thirteen, including Gleb Vasilchenko, Mikhail Bystrov, and Mikhail Burchik. And when she checked Facebook friends of people from the indictment list she found Sergei Karlov and Robert Bovda, who also were “men I saw at the Factory.”
John Sipher, an expert on Russia’s intelligence services, who retired in 2014 after twenty-eight years in the C.I.A., told me that the details in the indictment lay bare how audacious the Russian effort to get Trump elected President was in its brazen, repeated contact with American citizens. “You see a willingness to take risk that you hadn’t had before, because Putin was so hateful toward Hillary Clinton. They had a unity of effort, because they had one enemy: the United States. We’re focussed on China, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan. I don’t think it was brilliantly thought out, but they put an army out there to do what they can.”
Ordinarily, U.S. prosecutors are wary of releasing highly specific accounts involving foreign-intelligence targets, in order to protect the “sources and methods” that allow the government to pierce electronic communications and hidden dealings. But, Sipher said, this thirty-seven-page indictment suggests that Mueller’s team made a strategic decision to include a level of detail that will help it elicit relevant documents from businesses and banks. The indictments open the way for “discovery that otherwise may not be allowed or would be hard to do without a charging document,” he said.
In its particulars, the indictment, which charged thirteen Russian nationals and three organizations with multiple conspiracies and frauds, fills in the details of an “active measures” campaign that had been described in general terms by analysts and journalists over the past year. It offers a playbook for manipulating American democracy using a mix of classic espionage, private-sector social-media tools, and partisan ideology. The operation, centered on the now infamous troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency, extended to scores of undercover staff and associates in multiple countries, including the United States, and deployed a range of political gambits.
The tentacles of the “Translator Project” reached deeply into American political life as at least 80 employees of the Internet Research Agency worked with unwitting Trump supporters to organize rallies, stoke concerns about Clinton’s honesty and health and suppress the turnout of key voting blocs, including African Americans, according to the indictment by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
The campaign unfolded in a way that largely evaded public notice at the time, as Russians used American social media platforms, American payment systems and stolen American identities, birth dates and Social Security numbers to infiltrate American debate at its most unpredictable and intense.
The Russians involved in the campaign executed it with almost perfect pitch — learning to mimic the way Americans talk online about politics so well that real Americans with whom they interacted found them in no way suspicious.
Such deception did not happen by accident. Russian trolls worked hard to sound like Americans and camouflage their political messages in other content.
Imagine if, after 9/11, the president had said that the World Trade Center and Pentagon could have been attacked by “China” or “lots of other people.” Imagine if he had dismissed claims of al-Qaeda’s responsibility as a “hoax” and said that he “really” believed Osama bin Laden’s denials. Imagine if he saw the attack primarily as a political embarrassment to be minimized rather than as a national security threat to be combated. Imagine if he threatened to fire the investigators trying to find out what happened.
Imagine, moreover, if the president refused to appoint a commission to study how to safeguard America. Imagine if, as a result, we did not harden cockpit doors. If we did not create a Transportation Security Administration and a Department of Homeland Security. If we did not lower barriers between law enforcement and intelligence. If we did not pass a USA Patriot Act to enhance surveillance. And if we did not take myriad other steps to prevent another 9/11.
That’s roughly where we stand after the second-worst foreign attack on America in the past two decades. The Russian subversion of the 2016 election did not, to be sure, kill nearly 3,000 people. But its longer-term impact may be even more corrosive by undermining faith in our democracy.
The evidence of Russian meddling became “incontrovertible,” in the word of national security adviser H.R. McMaster, after special counsel Robert S. Mueller III indicted 13 Russians and three Russian organizations on Friday for taking part in this operation. “Defendants’ operations included supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J. Trump (‘Trump Campaign’) and disparaging Hillary Clinton,” the indictment charges.
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of forty. Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 5:31 PM, for 10h 45m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent, with 7.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred sixty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1930, a Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto: “Tombaugh’s task [at the Lowell Observatory] was to systematically image the night sky in pairs of photographs, then examine each pair and determine whether any objects had shifted position. Using a blink comparator, he rapidly shifted back and forth between views of each of the plates to create the illusion of movement of any objects that had changed position or appearance between photographs. On February 18, 1930, after nearly a year of searching, Tombaugh discovered a possible moving object on photographic plates taken on January 23 and 29. A lesser-quality photograph taken on January 21 helped confirm the movement.[19] After the observatory obtained further confirmatory photographs, news of the discovery was telegraphed to the Harvard College Observatory on March 13, 1930.[15]”
We’re only at the beginning of having an answer to this question because we’ve only just begun to ask some of the right questions. But Mueller’s indictment shows that Russian accounts and agents accomplished more than just stoking divisions and tensions with sloppy propaganda memes. The messaging was more sophisticated, and some Americans took action. For example, the indictment recounts a number of instances where events and demonstrations were organized by Russians posing as Americans on social media. These accounts aimed to get people to do specific things. And it turns out—some people did.
Changing or activating behavior in this way is difficult; it’s easier to create awareness of a narrative. Consistent exposure over a period of time has a complex impact on a person’s cognitive environment. If groups were activated, then certainly the narrative being pushed by the IRA penetrated people’s minds. And sure enough, The themes identified in the indictment were topics frequently raised during the election, and they were frequently echoed and promoted across social media and by conservative outlets. A key goal of these campaigns was “mainstreaming” an idea—moving it from the fringe to the mainstream and thus making it appear to be a more widely held than it actually is.
This points to another impact that can be extracted from the indictment: It is now much more difficult to separate what is “Russian” or “American” information architecture in the US information environment. This will make it far harder to assess where stories and narratives are coming from, whether they are real or propaganda, whether they represent the views of our neighbors or not.
This corrosive effect is real and significant. Which part of the fear of “sharia law in America” came from Russian accounts versus readers of InfoWars? How much did the Russian campaigns targeting black voters impact the low turnout, versus the character attacks run against Clinton by the Trump campaign itself? For now, all we can know is that there is shared narrative, and shared responsibility. But if, as the indictment says, Russian information warriors were instructed to support “Sanders and Trump,” and those two campaigns appeared to have the most aggressive and effective online outreach, what piece of that is us, and what is them.
The Russians overseeing the operation, which they named the Translator Project, had a goal to “spread distrust toward the candidates and the political system in general.” They used a cluster of companies linked to one called the Internet Research Agency, and called their campaign “information warfare.”
The field research to guide the attack appears to have begun in earnest in June 2014. Two Russian women, Aleksandra Y. Krylova and Anna V. Bogacheva, obtained visas for what turned out to be a three-week reconnaissance tour of the United States, including to key electoral states like Colorado, Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico. The visa application of a third Russian, Robert S. Bovda, was rejected.
The two women bought cameras, SIM cards and disposable cellphones for the trip and devised “evacuation scenarios” in case their real purpose was detected. In all, they visited nine states — California, Illinois, Louisiana, New York and Texas, in addition to the others — “to gather intelligence” on American politics, the indictment says. Ms. Krylova sent a report about their findings to one of her bosses in St. Petersburg.
Another Russian operative visited Atlanta in November 2014 on a similar mission, the indictment says. It does not name that operative, a possible indication that he or she is cooperating with the investigation, legal experts said.
The operation also included the creation of hundreds of email, PayPal and bank accounts and even fraudulent drivers’ licenses issued to fictitious Americans. The Russians also used the identities of real Americans from stolen Social Security numbers.
43-year-old Marat Mindiyarov, a teacher by training, spoke by phone with The Washington Post on Saturday from the village outside St. Petersburg where he lives. Mindiyarov worked in a department for Russian domestic consumption. When he took a test in December 2014 to move to the factory’s “Facebook department” targeting the U.S. market, Mindiyarov recalled, he was asked to write an essay about Hillary Clinton. Here are lightly edited excerpts of the conversation.
What was your first reaction when you heard about the Mueller indictment?
I congratulate America that they achieved something — that they put forward an indictment rather than just writing about this. I congratulate Robert Mueller.
…
What was the working environment like — was it really like a factory?
There were two shifts of 12 hours, day and night. You had to arrive exactly on time, that is, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. There were production norms, for example, 135 comments of 200 characters each. … You come in and spend all day in a room with the blinds closed and 20 computers. There were multiple such rooms spread over four floors. It was like a production line, everyone was busy, everyone was writing something. You had the feeling that you had arrived in a factory rather than a creative place.
How did the trolling work?
You got a list of topics to write about. Every piece of news was taken care of by three trolls each, and the three of us would make up an act. We had to make it look like we were not trolls but real people. One of the three trolls would write something negative about the news, the other two would respond, “You are wrong,” and post links and such. And the negative one would eventually act convinced. Those are the kinds of plays we had to act out.
…
Did you know that the factory was also targeting the United States?
We didn’t visit other departments, but I knew there was a “Facebook department.” … It wasn’t a secret. We all had essentially the same topics, they were focused on American readers and we were focused on Russians.
While the indictment does not accuse Facebook of any wrongdoing, it provided the first comprehensive account from the authorities of how critical the company’s platforms had been to the Russian campaign to disrupt the 2016 election. Facebook and Instagram were mentioned 41 times, while other technology that the Russians used was featured far less. Twitter was referred to nine times, YouTube once and the electronic payments company PayPal 11 times.
It is unprecedented for an American technology company to be so central to what the authorities say was a foreign scheme to commit election fraud in the United States. The indictment further batters Facebook’s image after it has spent months grappling with questions about how it was misused and why it did not act earlier to prevent that activity.
Jonathan Albright, research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, said the indictment laid bare how effectively Facebook could be turned against the country.
“Facebook built incredibly effective tools which let Russia profile citizens here in the U.S. and figure out how to manipulate us,” Mr. Albright said. “Facebook, essentially, gave them everything they needed.” He added that many of the tools that the Russians used, including those that allow ads to be targeted and that show how widespread an ad becomes, still pervade Facebook.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with an afternoon snow shower and a high of thirty-four. Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 5:29 PM, for 10h 42m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent, with 2.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred sixty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 2002, a Wisconsin skater takes gold: “West Allis native Chris Witty won a gold medal in speed skating’s 1000 meter at the Salt Lake City Olympic Winter Games. She broke the world record with a time of 1:13.82, even though she was recovering from mononucleosis. Before Witty competed in ice skating, she was a professional bicyclist.”
None of the defendants indicted Friday for their alleged influence operation against the U.S. political system is likely to ever see the inside of an American courtroom. None is in custody. None is likely to surrender to U.S. authorities. And Vladimir Putin will probably not race to extradite them.
Nevertheless, the grand jury’s charges against the 13 Russians and three organizations mark a significant moment in the investigation of L’Affaire Russe. President Trump has spent the year since his victory casting doubt on the very premise that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Yet here is the Justice Department on the record declaring that the Russia investigation isn’t, in fact, a witch hunt. It isn’t a hoax. It isn’t just a “phony Democrat excuse for losing the election,” as the president has tweeted. There really was, the Justice Department is saying, a Russian influence operation to interfere in the U.S. political system during the 2016 presidential election, and it really was at the expense of Hillary Clinton and in favor of Donald Trump.
The U.S. intelligence community, of course, already knew this. It has already shouted it from the rooftops about as loudly as the intelligence community announces its conclusions. The intelligence community, after all, assessed in January 2017 that it had “high confidence” that “President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016” targeting the U.S. presidential election. Before that, it had warned in October 2016 that the Russian government was behind the hacking and distribution of emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. None of these public conclusions stopped Trump from publicly casting doubt on Russian interference.
But the indictments on Friday reflect a different level of certainty, confidence and evidence. Here the special counsel is stating not merely that he has “high confidence” that the interference happened. He is stating that he can prove the existence of the Russian operation in court beyond a reasonable doubt, using only admissible evidence, and that the operation violated U.S. federal criminal law. And he is laying out an astonishingly specific set of forensic conclusions that reflect an impressive intelligence operation against the very operation on which the indictment reports. Even if the special counsel never gets the chance to prove his allegations in court by bringing any of the indictees before a federal judge, the formal statement that he is prepared and able to do so represents a remarkable rebuke of the president’s claims.
Russian nationals tried to suppress minority turnout in the 2016 election and spread false claims about voter fraud in an effort to harm Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and help Donald Trump, according to an indictment announced today by the Justice Department.
The indictment says that a St. Petersburg-based company called Internet Research Agency LLC began in the second half of 2016 to “encourage U.S. minority groups not to vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or to vote for a third-party U.S. presidential candidate.”
From the indictment:
a. On or about October 16, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used the Instagram account “Woke Blacks” to post the following message: “[A] particular hype and hatred for Trump is misleading the people and forcing Blacks to vote Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we’d surely be better off without voting AT ALL.”
b. On or about November 3, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators purchased an advertisement to promote a post on the Instagram account “Blacktivist” that read in part: “Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it’s not a wasted vote.”
c. By in or around early November 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used the “United Muslims of America” social media accounts to post anti-vote messages such as: “American Muslims [are] boycotting elections today, most of the American Muslim voters refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton because she wants to continue the war on Muslims in the middle east and voted yes for invading Iraq.”
The Russians also pushed debunked claims about voter fraud, including that Clinton stole the Iowa caucus and received thousands of ineligible votes in Florida. From the indictment:
Starting in or around the summer of 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators also began to promote allegations of voter fraud by the Democratic Party through their fictitious U.S. personas and groups on social media. Defendants and their co-conspirators purchased advertisements on Facebook to further promote the allegations.
a. On or about August 4, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators began purchasing advertisements that promoted a post on the Facebook account “Stop A.I.” The post alleged that “Hillary Clinton has already committed voter fraud during the Democrat Iowa Caucus.”
b. On or about August 11, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators posted that allegations of voter fraud were being investigated in North Carolina on the Twitter account @TEN_GOP.
c. On or about November 2, 2016, Defendants and their co-conspirators used the same account to post allegations of “#VoterFraud by counting tens of thousands of ineligible mail in Hillary votes being reported in Broward County, Florida.”
The third Saturday of August 2016 seemed like a big day for Donald Trump in Florida.
A group called “Being Patriotic” had organized more than a dozen “Florida Goes Trump” rallies throughout the state — from Clearwater to Jacksonville to Miami. They bought Facebook advertisements for the occasion and hyped a “patriotic flash mob” for him. They even paid someone to build a large cage on a flatbed truck that could hold a costumed Hillary Clinton impersonator in prison garb.
“Go Donald!” concluded a Facebook post, outlining the day’s festivities.
But the effort was not part of the official Trump campaign.
Instead, the pro-Trump rallies were just a small piece of an expansive shadow campaign engineered thousands of miles away by Russians who gained what prosecutors said Friday was a keen understanding of the fault lines of U.S. politics. From staging events on the ground in political battlegrounds to spreading misinformation across social media, the operation functioned in effect as a third party injecting itself into the hotly contested 2016 presidential race — exploiting the vulnerabilities of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and stoking ethnic tensions to help Trump become president.
The hackers, he suggested, may have been Chinese. Or some 400-pound guy sitting on his bed. Again and again, he insisted, Russian interference was a hoax — a fiction created by Democrats as an excuse for losing an election they should have won.
When Donald Trump finally acknowledged publicly that Russians had hacked Democratic emails and interfered in the 2016 presidential election, the then-president-elect immediately regretted it. He confided to advisers that he did not believe the intelligence. The last thing Trump wanted to do was to endorse the notion that his victory may have been caused by any force other than his own strategy, message and charisma.
“Russia talk is FAKE NEWS put out by the Dems, and played up by the media, in order to mask the big election defeat and the illegal leaks!” Trump tweeted last Feb. 26.
Another tweet, this one from May 2017: “The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?”
But Trump’s own Justice Department has concluded otherwise. A 37-page federal indictment released Friday afternoon spells out in exhaustive detail a three-year Russian plot to disrupt America’s democracy and boost Trump’s campaign, dealing a fatal blow to one of the president’s favorite talking points.
Contact(s): Scott Walter, DNR Large Carnivore Specialist, 608-267-7865 or Dianne Robinson, Wildlife Biologist, 262-424-9827
MADISON- Video footage of a large cat submitted by landowners in Washington County has been verified by Department of Natural Resources biologists as a cougar.
The animal was recorded on a security camera during the early morning hours of Feb. 7 as it crossed a walkway in front of the residence. While there is no evidence of a breeding population in Wisconsin, individual cougars do move through Wisconsin periodically.
“A cougar’s ability to cover ground is very impressive,” said Scott Walter, DNR large carnivore specialist. “As an example of their range, DNR staff collected genetic samples from a cougar in Oconto County in 2010, and this cat was subsequently killed by a vehicle in Connecticut, roughly 70 miles from New York City, after travelling over 1,100 miles.”
A cougar was confirmed Jan. 8 on a trail camera photo in Fond du Lac County, while four photos taken in Lincoln and Langlade counties in mid-December 2017 were also confirmed to feature a cougar. Without genetic samples, it is impossible to determine if this is the same animal confirmed in Washington County. Dispersing cougars are known to travel significant distances and it is possible these confirmed photos recorded a single cougar.
It is likely that the cougar recently confirmed in Washington County is passing through the area, and is now out of the area.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of twenty-six. Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 5:28 PM, for 10h 39m 38s of daytime. The moon is new, with .4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred sixty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1968, America has her first 911 emergency telephone system: “the nation’s first 911 emergency telephone system was inaugurated in Haleyville, Alabama, as the speaker of the Alabama House, Rankin Fite, placed a call from the mayor’s office in City Hall to a red telephone at the police station (also located in City Hall) that was answered by U.S. Rep. Tom Bevill.” On this day in 1943, the Nazis execute Milwaukee native Mildred Harnack: “Harnack was born in Milwaukee and studied and lectured at the University of Wisconsin. She and her husband, Arvid Harnack, were key members of a German resistance group which assisted German Jews and political dissidents, circulated illegal literature, met secretly with prisoners of war, and worked to document Nazi atrocities in Europe. Known by the Nazis as the “Red Orchestra,” Harnack’s companions were arrested, tortured, and tried for their activities. Mildred Harnack was guillotined in Berlin on the personal orders of Adolf Hitler.”
The former commander of the Milwaukee County Jail and two other jail staffers were charged Monday in connection with the April 2016 dehydration death of Terrill Thomas, with the complaint saying guards “abandoned” him to die.
Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Maj. Nancy Evans, 48, is charged with felony misconduct in office and obstructing an officer. Jail Lt. Kashka Meadors, 40, and correctional officer James Ramsey-Guy, 38, are each charged with neglecting an inmate, a felony offense.
Meadors gave the order to shut off the water, Ramsey-Guy physically cut all water to Thomas’ cell, and Evans lied about the subsequent investigation, the complaint says.
…
The practice of cutting off water to an inmate is against the jail’s written regulations, the complaint says, but Ramsey-Guy said it was common practice. Within three weeks of Thomas’ death, water was cut to two other inmates’ cells, according to the complaint.
“The incidents demonstrate an institutional practice of punitively shutting off water to unruly inmates,” it said.
President Trump has been receiving classified information about the Russia investigation from the House Intelligence Committee as he reviews and declassifies evidence being used in a probe that could implicate him and his campaign team, raising concerns about a potential conflict of interest.
In their attempts to either chide or defend the Justice Department’s handling of the investigation, the House panel’s majority and minority members have written two separate memos describing a highly classified application submitted by the FBI to obtain a surveillance warrant targeting early Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The Republicans’ memo claims the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when applying for a warrant in October 2016 to surveil Page. The Democrats’ memo insists the bureau acted properly.
The memos were sent to the White House to declassify, in effect putting Trump, who is a subject of the ongoing investigation, in charge of evidence that could potentially be used against him—further blurring a line between the White House and the Justice Department that previous administrations have been wary of crossing.
“The situation is, as far as I know, unprecedented,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former Department of Homeland Security official who founded Red Branch Consulting and serves as a senior fellow at the conservative R Street Institute. “Never before has a president been tied to a FISA warrant application. In fact, as far as I know, no president has ever been tied to any warrant application—not FISA, not a search warrant and not a Title III wiretap. So this is unique.”
Veterans Affairs Secretary David J. Shulkin’s chief of staff doctored an email and made false statements to create a pretext for taxpayers to cover expenses for the secretary’s wife on a 10-day trip to Europe last summer, the agency’s inspector general has found.
Vivieca Wright Simpson, VA’s third-most-senior official, altered language in an email from an aide coordinating the trip to make it appear that Shulkin was receiving an award from the Danish government, then used the award to justify paying for his wife’s travel, Inspector General Michael J. Missal said in a report released Wednesday. VA paid more than $4,300 for her airfare.
The account of how the government paid travel expenses for the secretary’s wife is one finding in an unsparing investigation that concluded that Shulkin and his staff misled agency ethics officials and the public about key details of the trip. Shulkin also improperly accepted a gift of sought-after tickets to a Wimbledon tennis match, the investigation found, and directed an aide to act as what the report called a “personal travel concierge” to him and his wife.
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s inaugural committee paid nearly $26 million to an event planning firm started by an adviser to the first lady, Melania Trump, while donating $5 million — less than expected — to charity, according to tax filings released on Thursday.
The nonprofit group that oversaw Mr. Trump’s inauguration and surrounding events in January 2017, the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee, had been under pressure from liberal government watchdog groups to reveal how it spent the record $107 million it had raised largely from wealthy donors and corporations.
Its chairman, Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a longtime friend of Mr. Trump’s, had pledged that the committee would be thrifty with its spending, and would donate leftover funds to charity. In a statement released by the committee, he praised it for carrying out the inauguration and more than 20 related events with “elegance and seamless excellence without incident or interruption, befitting the legacy and tradition that has preceded us.”
But the mandatory tax return it filed with the Internal Revenue Service revealed heavy spending on administrative and logistical expenses associated with planning and executing several days’ worth of events for donors and supporters around Mr. Trump’s inaugural ceremonies.
By contrast, the return showed that the group’s charitable donations included only a previously publicized $3 million for hurricane relief, as well as a total of $1.75 million to groups involved in decorating and maintaining the White House and the vice president’s residence, and $250,000 for the Smithsonian Institution.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 5:27 PM, for 10h 36m 54s of daytime. The moon is new. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred sixty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1564, Galileo Galilei is born in Pisa. On this day in 1865, the 12th Wisconsin Light Artillery participates in the Union victory at Congaree Creek outside of Columbia, South Carolina.
The phalanx of intelligence chiefs who testified on Capitol Hill delivered a chilling message: Not only did Russia interfere in the 2016 election, it is already meddling in the 2018 election by using a digital strategy to exacerbate the country’s political and social divisions.
No one knows more about the threats to the United States than these six officials, so when they all agree, it would be derelict to ignore their concerns. Yet President Trump continues to refuse to even acknowledge the malevolent Russian role.
It’s particularly striking that four of the men who gave this warning to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday — the C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo; the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats; the F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray; and the Defense Intelligence Agency director, Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley — were all appointed by Mr. Trump.
They testified that the president has never asked them to take measures to combat Russian interference and protect democratic processes.
First, the administration should issue a declaration: “The United States views any foreign attempt to influence our election processes through covert or clandestine means as an attack on the fundamental underpinnings of our system of government. We will not tolerate such activity and reserve the right to respond to such activities.”
We need to establish a clear line that delineates unacceptable behavior and puts others on notice that we will act as needed to defend ourselves. The Trump administration might emulate the actions of our allies France and Germany. In 2017, Jean-Marc Ayrault, France’s foreign minister at the time, announced prior to its elections that France would not tolerate any Russian or other foreign interference, a stance adopted by now-President Emmanuel Macron. French government agencies also quickly alerted political parties to the threat of Russian hacking during the campaign. In Germany, the government took a strong stance against interference, and companies helped raise awareness of Russian meddling by publicly debunking a Russian disinformation campaign that sought to inflame anti-migrant sentiments.
Second, Congress should pass legislation, such as the bipartisan Secure Elections Act, to provide sufficient resources for evaluating the cybersecurity of our states’ disparate electoral infrastructure and addressing shortfalls. The Department of Homeland Security’s pledge to complete assessments of states’ electoral vulnerabilities by April was a good step. But legislation, particularly with resources attached, can improve upon bureaucratic inefficiencies. Congress should also consider codifying the Obama administration’s designation of election systems as critical infrastructure.
Third, the U.S. government should establish an interagency task force to combat foreign attempts to influence our democratic institutions and processes. This task force would be entirely removed from the ongoing investigations into the 2016 elections; instead, it would focus on preventing future attempts to infiltrate and influence our democracy.
Such a task force should combine U.S. policymaking and intelligence communities, including the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Commerce, Defense, State and Treasury, as well as relevant intelligence agencies. It should also coordinate with nonpartisan private-sector entities — such as privacy and civil liberty organizations and social media and technology companies — to bring specialized expertise and unique insights. Private companies provide voting machines, aggregate voter data and operate much of the nation’s critical infrastructure. Better coordination among these companies and federal and state governments can only improve security.
Finally, the Trump administration should ensure that the U.S. government has the authorities needed to deter foreign actors engaged in malign influence campaigns and cybe roperations against U.S. elections. Countermeasures would include diplomacy, economic tools such as sanctions, covert action and military action. Many of these authorities already exist, but some need further strengthening or clarification to be used in the context of election security.
(Of their backgrounds, “Mike Rogers, a Republican from Michigan, served in the House from 2001 to 2015 and was chairman of the Intelligence Committee from 2011 to 2015. Rick Ledgett was deputy director of the National Security Agency from 2014 to 2017. Both are members of the Advisory Council of the Alliance for Securing Democracy.”)
Director of National Intelligence Coats on threats to U.S. elections:
"We need to inform the American public that this is real… We are not going to allow some Russian to tell us how to vote, how we ought to run our country. I think there needs to be a national cry for that." pic.twitter.com/NbqhKSVBKa
NBC News is publishing its database of more than 200,000 tweets that Twitter has tied to “malicious activity” from Russia-linked accounts during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
These accounts, working in concert as part of large networks, pushed hundreds of thousands of inflammatory tweets, from fictitious tales of Democrats practicing witchcraft to hardline posts from users masquerading as Black Lives Matter activists. Investigators have traced the accounts to a Kremlin-linked propaganda outfit founded in 2013 known as the Internet Research Association (IRA). The organization has been assessed by the U.S. Intelligence Community to be part of a Russian state-run effort to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential race. And they’re not done.
“There should be no doubt that Russia perceives its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 US midterm elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told the Senate Intelligence Committee Tuesday.
“The Russians utilize this tool because it’s relatively cheap, it’s low risk, it offers what they perceive as plausible deniability and it’s proven to be effective at sowing division,” he told the annual hearing on worldwide threats. “We expect Russia to continue using propaganda, social media, false flag personas, sympathetic spokesmen, and other means of influence to try to build on its wide range of operations and exacerbate social and political fissures in the United States.”
“Frankly, the United States is under attack,” he said.
(GET THE DATA:
Download tweets.csv and users.csv [recommended that you right click on filenames and select “save link as” or similar]
View data for ten influential accounts in Google Sheets
Jennifer Rubin considers the views of Colbie Holderness, a domestic abuse survivor during her marriage to Rob Porter, an accused serial abuser:
Her hope that women would be better than that may be well-founded in the aggregate. Trump is hemorrhaging support from women, both college- and non-college-educated ones.
Yet Rubin reflects on human nature, and acknowledges a dark truth:
However, in the particular case of those women — Conway, Sanders, Concerned Women for America, Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel, the Fox News female hosts — who work for, rationalize and sacrifice integrity to defend the indefensible, we should expect them to be just as clueless, disingenuous and morally vacant as the men who have chosen to tie themselves to Trump’s mast.
…
The same is true of Trump’s Jewish advisers. We realize in retrospect that we should not have expected Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and senior adviser Gary Cohn to behave any more admirably in the context of Trump’s responses to Charlottesville neo-Nazis than Trump’s non-Jewish advisers. Sure, as a group American Jews are overwhelmingly Democratic and anti-Trump, but if you’ve gone to work for a man who called Mexican immigrants murderers, bragged about sexually assaulting women, sought to demonize an entire religion and ridiculed Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for being a POW during the Vietnam War, you probably don’t place social justice and Torah-based values at the top of your concerns. You have rejected or been oblivious to a slew of principles in order to go work for him in the first place.
…
It’s human nature to think that those from the same groups whom Trump insults and abuses would identify with the victims, or that members of any minority group with a history of persecution would feel the sting of bigotry and spot the dangers of destroying democratic norms. And in general, that is true. But lest we think all women, Jews and minorities are angels, one need only look at the cringe-worthy, daily performances of press secretary Sanders, the toadyism of Mnuchin and the presence of Ben Carson in Trump’s Cabinet. What we should expect is that anyone who has sacrificed principle, integrity and humanity to defend this president will keep on defending him, no matter how horrendous his rhetoric and his actions.
Among all groups there are those who will betray others, including – and sometimes especially – their own. If there should be a group with not a single quisling, then one has never heard of it.
Most people are not like this, of course, but no group is free of those who support the victimization of people like themselves. That support is sometimes implicit and soft, but at other times explicit and hard.
Washington, Whitewater, and countless other places are, sadly, no different in this regard: a nearness to an unprincipled authority sometimes wrongly requires the mistreatment of one’s own kind situated farther from that authority.
Cooperation is humiliation, collaboration is degradation.
Ash Wednesday & Valentine’s Day in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 6:51 AM and sunset 5:26 PM, for 10h 34m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 1.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred sixty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1819, the typewriter inventor is born: “On this date the inventor of the modern typewriter, C. Latham Sholes, was born. Sholes moved to Wisconsin as a child and lived in Green Bay, Kenosha, and Milwaukee. In 1867, in Milwaukee, he presented his first model for the modern typewriter and patents for the device were taken out in 1868. Sholes took the advice of many mechanical experts, including Thomas Edison, and so claims that he was the sole inventor of the typewriter have often been disputed. [Source: Badger Saints and Sinners by Fred L. Homes, pg 316-328]”
This is hardly the first time that Kelly, in his mere six and half months as chief of staff, has done and said bad things. In the fall, Kelly slandered congresswoman Frederica Wilson with an accusation of publicly grandstanding at an event opening a federal office building in Miami in 2015. When confronted with evidence that his claims against Wilson were untrue, Kelly said he would never apologize for his comments. He referred to a traitorous Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, as an “honorable” man, and, echoing his boss’s language about neo-Nazis who marched this summer in Charlottesville, Va., said, about a civil war fought over slavery, “men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”Just this week, he attacked so-called Dreamers who had failed to register for the DACA program as being “too lazy to get off their asses.”
From a policy standpoint, Kelly, as secretary of Homeland Security, was the point man for both the Trump administration’s so-called Muslim ban and its increasingly cruel and sadistic efforts to deport law-abiding undocumented immigrants. Under his short tenure at DHS, there was a 40 percent increase in deportation arrests.
In his public speeches, Kelly eagerly adopted the public line, pushed by Trump, that immigrants represent an existential threat to American security, suggesting in April that the nation is “under attack from criminals who think their greed justifies raping young girls at knifepoint, dealing poison to our youth, or killing just for fun.” Last month, he appears to have played a crucial role in torpedoing a possible deal on DACA because of his own hard-line and racist views toward nonwhite immigrants.
A week after former White House staff secretary Rob Porter resigned amid domestic abuse allegations, the White House is still struggling to provide clear answers on who knew what and when. The scandal has rare longevity for the Trump administration, which is used to bouncing from one controversy to the next.
Last week, the Daily Mail reported that Porter’s two ex-wives said he was physically and emotionally abusive to them. His first wife, Colbie Holderness, alleged to the Daily Mail that he had punched her during a trip to Florence, Italy, in the early 2000s, and his second wife, Jennifer Willoughby, said she had obtained a temporary protective order against Porter after he allegedly violated their separation agreement.
Porter — whose job required him to handle sensitive and confidential information read by the president — denied the allegations and resigned before he was ever granted permanent security clearance from the FBI or White House. The White House has suggested it learned all about the allegations in the past week — but the FBI said it related issues in Porter’s background investigation to White House officials at least three times, twice in 2017 and once in January.
What has emerged is a timeline in which White House officials offer contradictory information, leading to a confusing narrative and dribs and drabs of information from the news media. Here’s what the public learned about the scandal, in order [detailed chronology follows]…
More than a dozen women have publicly accused Trump of sexual harassment or assault over a period of many years. He says they are all lying and has dismissed a 2005 audio recording from the TV show “Access Hollywood” that captured him boasting in vulgar terms about such behavior as “locker room” talk.
The Porter controversy has brought intense scrutiny of Kelly’s role in protecting him, but Conway said on ABC’s “This Week” that Trump “is not actively searching for replacements” for the retired Marine four-star general, who has sought to impose discipline on a chaotic West Wing.
Conway said Trump also has full confidence in Hope Hicks, a former campaign aide who became White House communications director. News reports have said Hicks was romantically involved with Porter and helped craft an initial forceful White House statement defending him.
A person close to the White House, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the president had not authorized him to characterize their private conversations, said he expects Trump to keep Kelly rather than choose a third chief of staff. Kelly replaced Reince Priebus, who served in the White House for only six months.
(Kelly is unfit, so a suitable fate would be – indeed would already have been – dismissal.)
What we can say with some clarity at this point is that people who would stand in Trump’s way do have a tendency to step aside. Trump’s most vocal critics in the Senate just happen to have been the first two GOP senators to announce their retirements, Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). Political pressure applied by Trump may also have contributed to Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s decision to step down months earlier than he had been planning. Trump has made Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s life so miserable over his recusal in the Russia probe that Sessions offered to quit.
(Better to leave than be a party to wrongdoing: cooperation is humiliation, collaboration is degradation.)
Wisconsin’s spring primary in Whitewater saw three candidates vie for two spots on the April ballot for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
