By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 20, 2020

SILVER SPRING—This piece is going to be less about research and facts and more just personal reflection, but quite analytical still.  So let us dive in.

Harris the Senator and Candidate: Not Her Best Self

As I noted before in one recent piece, I thought Kamala Harris had an impressive resume but that Susan Rice’s resume was far more impressive vice presidentially and that it was not even close.

I stand by that analysis.

After I wrote that piece, I began writing another looking at personality and other intangible aspects to rate both Rice and Harris as candidates.  I had gotten through half of what I had originally planned, finishing the part on first impressions, when it was announced that Harris was the pick.  I was slightly surprised, and then began thinking more and more about(now-) Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden picking her, and what that meant.  I had laid out earlier serious concerns about who Harris was as a person and how she chose to present and conduct herself in key moments in her career public career as a senator.  Biden’s picking her did not mean that my concerns were invalid, but it did mean that he has thought of them, spoken with and vetted her, and left confident that her positives outweighed, by far, those concerns.

So, as I wrote my conclusion to that last piece, I decided to look at her in a new light.  And I had realized, in that white-and-male dominated rat-race of politics, Kamala understandably felt a tremendous amount of pressure as a woman of color.  New to a gridlocked Senate and not able to pass any of her legislation, she focused, instead, on trying to create viral moments much like Warren’s “Nevertheless, she persisted” moment, as I detailed in my last piece and for which SNL satirized her.

Since I mentioned the NBA basketball documentary The Last Dance in my previous pieces, I will compare some of these moves to Reggie Miller initiating contact, expertly, and getting an offensive foul called on a defender: a cheap but very effective ploy.  I admit, without such moments, it would have been hard for her to get attention and distinguish herself in a gridlocked senate.  But as someone who was an athlete in high school and a huge Kicks fan, I hate Reggie Miller and cheap, fake play like that.  I just do not like those kinds of cheap, media-driven moves, but hey, my purist style is probably not opportunistic enough for a freshman junior senator trying to run for president; I understand the politics behind such plays and can appreciate it as an effective tactic (just look at Reggie), but I do not have to like it, as I mentioned in my last piece.

Well, Harris and her campaign doubled down on this kind of conduct in 2019 in the presidential campaign and debates, most notably in cheap shots against Biden and Warren (the latter really backfiring but both probably souring her with Democrats who do not like seeing their beloved figures suffer from friendly fire that is unfair; it did not work for Sec. Julían Castro, either, for the record) and even Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who ripped her apart on her criminal justice record.  Now, I cannot stand fringe-y, wacky Tulsi Gabbard (though I respect her military service), but the way in which Harris did not really defend her record but, instead, punched down at Gabbard in response—as if Gabbard was simply beneath her—was also not impressive to me and rubbed me very much the wrong way.

But I am a policy wonk who likes fair, accurate, collegial (when within the Party, at least) campaigning and avoiding the cheap shots, taking the high road.  And, in the end, my guy with that style won and got the nomination.  Still, at the time, Biden saw what I did not: a tough, aggressive rival whose fire could be turned effectively against the GOP in a general election, who could competently deflect away from things she did not want to answer, and would be a good complement for a guy who is too open and says too much about his vulnerabilities, is too candid.  In other words, she could be different and was in ways that would enhance the ticket as a number two far beyond just being younger, a woman, and a person of color.

I also knew she had a friendship with Beau Biden, the heroic, accomplished son of Joe’s who succumbed to cancer in 2015.  What I did not know was how close Kamala was with Beau, and that this closeness helped create an authentic relationship between Joe and Kamala.  But that relationship between Joe and Kamala just did not come out on the campaign trail in 2019, not on TV and certainly not at the debates.  Harris was going to put her friendship with Biden aside and play aggressively to win by going after Joe and letting Joe defend himself rather than take chances to defend him, too, even with the Hunter Biden, Ukraine,  and Burisma smears.  This was at a time when it was very possible (especially if Harris had run a very different campaign) for Harris to put herself in a position to overtake Biden in ways that were never realistic other candidates.  Again, I do not have to like it, but, at the same time, Harris had a real shot, she felt that would work, and negative cheap-shot campaigning is far from the most insane tactic from a rationalist perspective; sometimes, politics really is House of Cards.  I can respect that as a candidate choice even if I do not like it.  It just did not work, thanks to Democratic primary voters and in spite of biased mainstream media coverage and because.  And, thankfully for me as a Biden supporter, this was in part because Harris ran an overall terrible campaign.  The opportunity to build enough support passed for Harris, she saw the writing on the wall, and, like Joe Biden in his 1988 election cycle presidential campaign dropping out in late 1987, dropped out even before 2020 began.

Biden Picks Harris for the Real Kamala

But Biden was clearly impressed with Harris’s grit, and, from the personal relationship few knew they had, he knew things most Americans did not know about her: her warm, thoughtful, unrehearsed, tender, compassionate, funny, fun, likable (dare I say humble?) side.  While a large portion of Harris’s major public displays since becoming a senator were calculated, shallow, and not highlighting in deep, substantive ways her impressive, substantive record, Joe knew the real Kamala when she was not trying too hard, not so desperate to distinguish herself in an ineffective Senate and a crowded debate stage.

So it was that I began to think that he must know her in ways I did not, and gave Biden the benefit of the doubt in picking her and, thus, gave her the benefit of the doubt.  If Biden could be big in putting aside Harris’s cheap attacks, trusting that what he saw in her was greater than my less-familiar impressions, even if they were consistent, I could put those attacks aside too (“All’s fair in love and war and politics too??” [meh]).  I began to get excited about the speech she would give the next day as I was writing my conclusion to my second Harris piece, and the moment that was put out on social media, when she was delighted, surprised, and humbled when Biden offered her the VP slot, was a different side of her, what I felt must be the real Kamala, what it seems she had in some ways been hiding from me and many others who did not know her better.  The person she thought would work politically may not have, but I could not wait to see her the next day give her first speech as Joe’s VP selection.

But even before then, I began to realize where I had been wrong in other ways.  Rice easily had the best resume, and I care little for flash, for theatrical performance, for how “cool” or smooth someone was when weighed against policy chops, expertise, and experience.  But guess what: there are very few voters like me, and most voters will pick the “cool” telegenic candidate over Albert Einstein himself.  And I realized, that, politically, sacrificing some substance and experience for a person who has exceptional poise, stage presence, and charisma (even when Harris is falling flat, you see glimpses of that, and I had seen a few far better moments here and there) but who still has a relatively impressive resume is the best fit politically, especially for such a crisis moment that amounts either the survival or death of our democracy, as former President President Barack Obama himself made terrifyingly clear last night.

Basically, I put too much stock on experience and expertise (Rice) and not enough on optics and performance.  If we had three grades for each candidate—substance, style, and baggage—Harris would be score higher than rice; even if her substance score was not nearly as high as Rice’s, her style score—when Harris is at her best—was incredibly high and she has far less baggage that can hurt.  And it is not that Rice is not also a great personality, it is simply that Harris is one of those rare top-tier-with-very-few peers-level-of-charisma people.  I think Rice could have won Americans over, but she also has the whole Benghazi and unmasking “baggage,” which, though totally nonsense and made-up smears obviously concocted by Republicans, still would have admittedly stuck and dogged a Biden-Rice campaign throughout the election (just ask Hillary Clinton how damaging false smears can be!).  So Rice, though more substantive, had more risks whereas Harris was relatively lower-risk, higher political reward, still strong substantively, and did not have any of that Benghazi-Clinton-Obama Administration baggage; Rice was an old Washington Hand (which I loved) but Harris was fresh, new, and exiting (which pretty much everyone else loved).  I did not consider politics enough (though a VP is mainly needed as a governing partner) and, especially for campaigning in the coronavirus era, did not consider enough the ability to produce energetic, viral clips nearly enough.  As a policy wonk, I needed to remember that wonks are a political constituency that amounts to the negligible and recognize the importance of mass appeal to a public that generally will not care as much about someone being an Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs or a peacekeeping specialist on the National Security Council as they will about sheer star power.

In short, I was wrong to favor Rice over Harris if you take politics, not just resumes, into account.

Kamala’s Real Self Is Her Best self

And yet, that was Harris’s fault, because of the way she campaigned and presented herself since becoming a senator in key moments when she had the most exposure.

So when Harris was formally introduced to speak as Joe’s VP pick by Joe himself, when I saw the real Kamala Harris, a.k.a. Mamala, when I saw the emotion and tenderness with which she spoke about her relationship with Beau and how Beau was the one who really made her understand what made Joe Biden so special, when I saw how deeply she respected Joe and appreciated Joe, when I saw her warmth and grace in a setting where she did not have to fight to be remembered on a stage with about ten other people, when I saw the grace, dignity, and humility with which she accepted this honor, and when I saw the measured but more natural version of the fierce prosecutor, indicting Trump not in a soundbite but in but methodical, righteous detail, with measured yet genuine anger and scorn that felt organic and not staged, I was fully on board with Team Kamala.

Biden’s pick of her brough me over to her in my head, but Kamala herself won over my heart when I got to see the real her in this first real speech by her as Joe’s running mate.  Joe had picked the most magnetic and charismatic person available from the entire pool of presidential candidates and other VP hopefuls, and, apart from Rice, the person with the best resume among all of the mentioned VP contenders: in other words, the best VP candidate possible for this moment, especially at a time of great reckoning and awakening and tragedy, when someone not a woman of color would have affected enthusiasm among some key voting blocks, especially younger voters of all colors, whose level of cynicism and disaffection may be what determines the outcome of this election (if it is voting that will determine it and not voter suppression or Russian interference).

Harris and Biden: A New Hope Bringing Out the Best in Each Other

To be clear, I am (cautiously) optimistic Biden can and will win by a lot (though I am also filled with dread, but more on that another time), and I think no matter his VP selection, this would be the case as long as it was not someone too far-left for most Americans, like Sens. Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren (sorry Bernie and Liz fans, that’s political reality, but thanks to both senators for such solid support for Biden!), so I do not buy what some of the punditry—especially, understandably, those so strongly identifying with and seeing themselves in Harris—are saying along the lines of Biden “needing” Harris,” or that the man perhaps most steeped in policy of any major-party nominee in American history “needed” her on any particular issue or with any particular demographic.

But I strongly believe Harris is a major win-win even allowing for stupid racists and misogynists, that Harris adds a lot to Biden’s team, that her different perspective as the last second-opinion in the room will be good and valuable to Biden much like one way Obama found Biden so valuable, and am thrilled—even ecstatic—that she will be by his side during the campaign and, we should all hope, in the White House.

To be clear, I though her speech when Biden introduced her was perfect.  Literally perfect.  As was her speech accepting the Vice-Presidential nomination, and with that first speech, I was an enthusiastically on board with Team Kamala.  Harris, freed of the inane pressure of having just a few minutes to shine, showed her real self, the one Joe loves and Beau Biden loved, the one I had only seen glimpses of, in its full glory.  This side of Harris reminded me, too, why I love Biden, for he chose so wisely and so well: Harris is no black-Indian Palin, so, she is a singularity in this election cycle when freed to be herself by herself and the format.  She will demolish Vice President Mike Pence one-on-one and electrify the campaign trail like Palin did for (the now late) Sen. John McCain, though not with crass appeal to racists and xenophobes, but with grace and substance, hope and accountability.

I had serious issues with Harris.  I was offended by how she conducted herself, and though I respected her talent and accomplishments, I just was not feeling her.  I also had issues with her record.  But Joe’s faith in Harris as demonstrated by his picking her and Kamala’s own since her selection—her conduct in rising decidedly to the occasion—made me realize who the real Kamala Harris was I was sold.  Even on policy, as Peter Beinart persuasively argues in The Atlantic, as a trailblazing black-Indian-American woman trying to win statewide office California, she more or less did what she had to do.

So now?  Call me a Kamala Convert.

Kamala—Senator Harris—thank you for showing me and so many others your real-self.  Joe is so smart to have picked you and so lucky to have you by his side.  The Democratic Party may very well have found its next Obama, and America may have found the perfect teammate for Biden to both beat Trump and Pence like a drum out of the White house and save America, democracy, and the world from Donald Trump’s insanity, tribalism, and a rising fascism, as a Democratic Party Batman and Robin: Joe as Batman and Kamala as a much cooler-than-normal, way-more-stylish Robin.  They are the superhero duo we need now, and let me be an example of how one of Harris’s superpowers is winning over serious doubters to become fervent supporters.

See related previous articles: Substance vs. Style as Biden Picks Harris over Rice and Based on Experience, Susan Rice Is Easily—by Far—the Best Choice for VP for Biden (Sorry Harris Fans, that Includes Kamala)

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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With the race starting to pull away from Trump, he needed last night’s debate to be a change-changer or at least a game-alterer; it wasn’t, and it’s now over for The Donald unless something super-crazy breaks in the next few weeks.

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 20, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 20th, 2016

AMMAN — It’s over for The Donald.

Ladies and gentleman, the long national nightmare is almost over; not the other nightmares that existed before this election season that are alive and well, but, still, the current elephant in the room is being shooed out, and, barring a disaster or something incredible or crazy, Hillary Clinton will defeat Donald Trump and take office as President on January 20th, 2017.

I know many people were saying this as of several weeks ago, as of the “#TrumpTakes” sex-groping scandal, even before that. I maintain that such pronunciamentos were premature and reflected wishful thinking—hardly entirely baseless, but wishful thinking nonetheless—that made the mistake of saying the door was shut, the window closed for Trump. But after this final debate, we can now safely say Clinton will be president unless something crazy—a major terrorist attack, an economic crash, incredibly high and consistent polling errors, some shocking WikiLeaks revelation (none have been shocking so far), etc.—happens in the next few weeks.

Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and a (at least slightly surprisingly) fair-minded Chris Wallace each did their part at the debate last night to ensure that Trump’s path to victory—again, barring something shocking even by the standards of this election—is now blocked beyond any ability of Trump’s to break through.

Why do I say this? Given the current state of the race, in order to stay competitive in the final weeks, Trump needed one or more of the following to happen last night: he needed to really seriously damage Hillary, she needed to inflict serious damage upon herself, the moderator had to significantly damage Clinton, or he had to have done something himself to grow his shrinking tent of support.

None of this happened.

Let’s look at each and how the outcome Trump needed did not happen regarding of these hypotheticals.

Trump Did Not Hurt Clinton: Trump failed to land any big blows on Clinton. He got some great blows in during the second debate, but his attacks this time were so unfocused and rapid that his flurries either failed to really have an impact or missed entirely. And it’s not like he did not have ample opportunity to provide focused attacks on Clinton: he could have gone into detail on any number of issues, including some new ones that have just surfaced in recent reporting. He could have given a shout out to Pat Smith, the mother of a victim of the Benghazi attacks who blames Clinton for her son’s death, but he didn’t; it would have been smart for him to say to Clinton “Pat Smith is here, and her son, who died bravely in Benghazi, is dead because of you. What do you have to say to her, and to the victims of those attacks, who are dead because you failed them?” He actually didn’t even mention Benghazi at all during the debate. He mentioned Clinton’s e-mails only three times, twice just in passing, and didn’t really sustain his attack the other time. In fact, he spent more time talking about himself and defending himself that attacking Clinton, responding to every little needle and bait she laid out, diverting precious time away from being on offense and keeping the focus on himself rather than focusing on what would have been either tactically or strategically beneficial to his candidacy. He actually had ample chances to go into detail uninterrupted with deep, specific attacks, but his lack of preparation was so painfully obvious as he kept repeating himself with lists that were more often mere mentions than any built-up, organized, coherent attacks.

Clinton Did Not Hurt Herself: Clinton herself also performed extremely well. Was it an amazing performance, or full of things that would increase her support dramatically? Was she as bold as she could have been in her attacks? No, and that was not necessary. But her performance was a masterclass in demeanor, in self-control, in maintaining composure, in maintaining focus, in staying on offense, in how to pivot from explanation to attack, in how to deliver succinct yet substantive explanation, in how to get under an opponent’s skin and baiting him into behaving on her terms. She didn’t stumble once, she didn’t lose her cool once, she didn’t appear weak once, and she took every swing from him gracefully and came back with a solid response each time, as well. Clinton in no way can be said by any reasonable person to have damaged herself, then, with this performance.

Moderator Chris Wallace Did Not Hurt Clinton: When it comes to Chris Wallace, after having some time to process the debate more I have to say he was the best moderator of all moderators at the debates. He was fair, tried to keep both candidates in line, was quick to tell the audience to stay quiet, allowed both candidates to speak while also keeping them mostly on topic. He stayed away from the muck and the tawdry and from spending too much time on the scandals, and kept the debate focused on issues. He asked Clinton questions that could have damaged her but she was prepared for them and no damage was done. I’ve had my issues with Chris Wallace in the past, and he’s still one of the least fat kids at the Fox News fat camp, but last night he did an exemplary job. Rather than attacking either candidate, he let the candidates attack each other and performed his moderation role well. So, no way did Wallace do any damage to Clinton. It is very possible that Wallace could have been much harder on her, and been much more aggressive in asking her about her e-mail problems. But he wasn’t, just as he wasn’t terribly aggressive with Trump either. Fair and balanced, in the end, and I am not being sarcastic.

Trump Did Nothing or Next to Nothing to Increase His Support: OK, so, no we know that the debate did not do anything to bring Clinton down from her current, rising levels of support. So Trump’s final option to make himself competitive again was to increase his support. While Trump by far had his best tone and kept his composure the most throughout this debate relative to his other two performances, it is hard to imagine this alone leading to anything but perhaps the slightest of gains, if any. What he did do was just repeat the same policy quips he used in the other debates, nothing new that would grow his tent, especially not with his poor handling of the questions about his “lewd” talk and the swamp of sexual assault allegations in which he has found himself. He even failed to bring up his new policy ideas of congressional terms limits or a bold new student-debt plan, some of his best ways to possibly bring in undecideds. For the most part, Trump did not cover any new ground during this debate and it is extremely hard to envision people not in his camp moving into it as a result of said debate.

So, with Trump currently substantially behind Clinton both nationally and in most battleground states, he needed the debate—the last time substantially large numbers of Americans will see the two of them together or talking in any detail about their plans—to fundamentally change the race or at least its trajectory. That did not happen. And, yes, I noted how bad the second debate was, but if you think this last debate redeems out democracy, think again: that only 1 of the 3 presidential debates was serious, and that it has come this close, and that so much damage has been done, so many bad precedents set and normalized, so many dark doors opened for future demagogues, should worry us all. 

But at least Trump won’t be entering the White House, barring a political miracle. The real battles now are over control of Congress and, after that, the fight over governance once Clinton takes office. But for now, the worst has been avoided.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse September 23, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) September 23rd, 2016 (UPDATED September 24th with further details on server security; see separate post-October-Surprise-Comeygate article here)

Richard Drew/AP

AMMAN — Well, a lot has happened since my last update on this story in January.

Or has it?

More Much Ado About Nothing: Summer of Sadness

The conventional wisdom is that yes, it has. But as is so often with this story, what often seems to be a big deal or raises questions actually is more of the same or has answers that are more boring and mundane than anything else (Occam’s razor, anyone?). 

After an FBI investigation, the Republican and well-regarded FBI Director, James Comey—known for his “independence” and “aggressive” upholding of the law—recommended to the Justice Department in early July that Hillary Clinton not face any prosecution for both her use of a private e-mail server and the fact that some classified material passed through this server, and publicly explained his decision to not recommend prosecution. The recommendation was followed on by the Justice Department and no prosecution of Clinton has been pursued.

Republicans, outraged that they did not get the result that they wanted, had Comey testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform soon after his announcement. Repeatedly throughout the hearing, Republican lawmakers seemed far more concerned about their feeling that Hillary Clinton should be prosecuted than with any proper understanding of the evidence or how that evidence would or would not merit prosecution under a proper understanding of the relevant statutes and their broader history of application.

Espionage Act: 18 USC 793(f) and Its History

AP

A brief explanation should make Director Comey’s decision and why it was the right one clear for our readers…

The law under which Clinton could have been prosecuted was a statute dating back to WWI, the (problematic) Espionage Act of 1917, an anti-espionage law enacted during the height of war with Imperial Germany, and in nearly 100 years of its existence, no one has ever been convicted in civilian court of violating the statute without demonstrating clear intent to do material harm to the United States. Intent has been one of the major required components in determining in civilian court culpability within a formal understanding of the law that has existed ever since a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in a case dating back to 1941. This can be confusing based on the wording of the 18 USC’s relevant section 793(f) alone, but a key element of the overall law of which that section is a part is that the whole law was supposed to be based on prosecuting those intending harm to the United States in the form of espionage, sedition, or worse. In fact, only once has anyone ever been charged by the Justice Department purely on gross negligence without intent—an FBI agent who was arrested in 2003 for having an affair with a Chinese mistress and who unknowingly gave her access to classified information by not locking or paying attention to his briefcase when spending time with her—and, in the end, this charge was dropped in 2004 when he settled and was thus not convicted of that charge but another, lesser crime. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that officials, aware of the law and its application history, may have regarded conviction of that charge as unlikely or even impossible, but may have included it in an array of charges thrown at the defendant in order to help intimidate him into accepting a plea bargain, which he did. 

Military courts-martial did twice charge and obtain two convictions without using the intent standard under section (f) of the statute—one stemming from an incident in 1979 and one from another incident in 1989, the only two court convictions unearthed thus far under this statute without the intent factor over a nearly 100-year history of this law’s existence (neither person found guilty served more even a full year of time)—but it is important to note a few things: 1.) military personnel are generally held to, and military courts generally use, a stricter interpretation of the law and enforce stricter penalties than their civilian counterparts, 2.) the cases were dramatically different than Clinton’s and each included clear, indisputable obstruction, which tends to make prosecutors go for harsher penalties, 3.) at least one of the cases including overruling earlier precedent, an overruling on which the conviction likely depended, and 4.) the cases were not subject to civilian court appeal rulings, and, given the Supreme Court’s ruling and precedent established in 1941 and other civilian court rulings, it is quite possible these convictions under 18 USC 793 (f) could have been overturned should civilian courts have dealt with them.

The point is that as a civilian official operating in the civilian legal system, Director Comey was completely right when he stated that “No reasonable prosecutor would bring the second case in 100 years based on gross negligence” because the case history is clear and the only cases where charges were brought under such pretenses, including military cases, bear no resemblance to the circumstances of Clinton’s case; when myopically accused of by Republican congressmen of a double standard in not prosecuting Clinton, he noted that the “double standard” would be “If she were prosecuted for gross negligence,” and that such an act would amount to “celebrity hunting.”

Of course, none of this matters to the bulk of Republicans, who have been predetermined to find criminal wrongdoing with the Clintons for decades (again, only perjury relating to Monica Lewinsky has ever been proved). With Hillary, when the GOP was unable to prove any specific wrongdoing after nine Benghazi investigation, they were only too happy to discover this e-mail server and the classified contents that passed through it in the course of their ninth Benghazi investigation, which was such a sham that by the end it tended to focus more on Clinton’s e-mails than anything else, since everything else they threw at her on Benghazi either stood on incredibly flimsy ground or was demonstrably false, as I noted before. Basically, the whole e-mail situation looked bad and raised some questions, but now those questions have been vigorously pursued by professional investigators, and what may have looked bad turned out, upon closer inspection, to not contain anything criminally prosecutable, and no matter how much Republicans want it, the aura of something bad or questionable is not enough to warrant prosecution, certainly not in our American justice system.

About Those Classified E-mails…

How Many?

The FBI’s “July” report (released in early September by a clearly-exasperated-with-the-brouhaha-and-political-criticism-Comey) and information provided by the State Department on July 6th detail how many e-mails had contained classified information at the time they were sent to or received by Clinton’s server: we know that there was information that was classified at the time of sending or receiving in just about 200 e-mails in 82 e-mail chains* that passed through Clinton’s server. All but 13 of these chains were turned over by Clinton as part of the some 30,000 emails Clinton’s team had determined were work-related (most can be read here), and none of those other 13 e-mail chains—which were found among some additional 17,000 unique work and personal e-mails recovered by the FBI—were the highest level of the three levels of classification, TOP SECRET. Overall, of the 82 e-mail chains: 69 are still classified (16 of which has been downgraded in their classification level), and 13 have been declassified (suggesting that at least those 16 and 13 are not involving anything particularly serious or particularly sensitive, even at the time); 8 chains were classified as TOP SECRET (7 of those, consisting of 22 e-mails total, were regarding Special Access Programs [SAP, more on this below]), 37 were classified as SECRET (the middle level of classification), and 37 were classified as CONFIDENTIAL (the lowest classification level). The report only mentions others sending Clinton material that was classified to begin these exchanges, not the other way around, suggesting that she may not have started any of the e-mail chains with classified material, essentially meaning that people were sending this information to her, and none of the e-mails contained classified material warnings in the headers, as is standard practice (more on that in a bit), so it would have been reasonable for Clinton to assume that the people sending her this material knew what they were doing; in fact, it would be a terrible use of a Secretary of State’s time to parse through every e-mail and ask if material that was not labeled as classified was actually classified: that would be a recipe for endless inquiries and not getting anything else done. Out of the 82 chains, Clinton herself weighed in and responded in 4 chains that were CONFIDENTIAL, 3 that were SECRET, and 4 that were TOP SECRET (all 4 of these were SAP related, see below), and 67 times she passed on information from chains classified CONFIDENTIAL or SECRET (frustrating that the report inexplicably did not detail how many of each!).

So, out of over 47,000 e-mails under consideration, let’s remember that about 200, or about 0.425%, were deemed to have contained classified information at the time of sending and receiving and at least half or more were either the lowest level of classification or concerned publicly available information, and some of them were not considered not to be classified by Clinton’s own State Department. 

*(Side note on above numbers: for the above numbers, I presumed the “July” report—almost inexplicably no specific date is given as to the completion of the report, just the month of July—was more recent/complete than Comey’s press conference on July 5th and testimony on July 7th, in which that information given at those times, combined with the information from State, provided a lower figure of 113 or 114 emails in about 53 or 54 e-mail chains that had classified information in them at the time they were sent/received; the FBI report also states that the number of e-mails and chains is subject to change as the FBI was still waiting on responses regarding some of the content in question from several relevant agencies; the lack of clarity,lack of a clear specific presentation, the inability of the whole of the government to just be able to produce a single, clear figure on this is somewhat remarkable; since the report had larger figures than the one Comey gave in the first week of July, it is reasonable assume to the number was higher because other agencies had provided subsequent updates, thus the assumption that the “July” report came some time after the 7th, when Comey gave lower numbers during his testimony to the House committee; if, somehow, the updates would have involved the less likely scenario of reductions in the number of e-mails and chains identified as classified, Comey’s lower numbers would be more current)

How Serious?

To delve into the topic of classification itself, contrary to almost all the reporting I’ve seen, there are the only three actual levels of classification; I myself erroneously reported that SAP (Special Access Program) was a separate level of classification, and many other major mainstream sources have reported that and that SAP is a level of classification above TOP SECRET, when actually it is just a special type of TOP SECRET or SECRET information, designed to give people who “need to know” that information access to it but not indicating a higher level of sensitivity than the classification level; these days SAP often has to do with the U.S. drone program, and the available reporting on the subject suggests that nearly all of the most sensitive TOP SECRET information (7 of 8 TOP SECRET chains) in the classified content that passed through Clinton’s server had to do with SAP-related, publicly available information on the drone program or other publicly available information about North Korea; in both cases, anything from an eyewitness account published by an NGO to a newspaper report about drones would be considered classified, pushing us to the issue of rampant & unnecessary overclassification in the government, often more about interagency turf wars than national security, to the extent that prolific national security officials of both major political parties have publicly testified that “between 50% and 90% of all classified material could even be disclosed without any detrimental effect on national security,” as I have discussed before; objectively, then, much and perhaps all of the information with the highest classification labels in Clinton’s e-mails were objectively not really sensitive or secret in nature. And it should also be noted that CONFIDENTIAL generally describes information that is so mundane and harmless that America’s intelligence chief, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, is considering a move to do away with the CONFIDENTIAL classification level entirely, noting that this is something the UK did recently in 2014 “without [adverse] impact.”

How Would Clinton Know They Were Classified? (It’s All About the Labels!)

Another important thing to note is that something would still be considered classified even if the State Department did not feel it needed to be but another agency did, as happened with information in some of Clinton’s e-mails; to expect the head of one agency to be aware of other agencies’ classifications of information that that head’s agency did not feel the need to classify is, indeed, quite unreasonable.

But this next point is a crucial one: zero of these e-mails were properly marked as classified. See, all e-mails that are supposed to be classified are supposed to have clear, obvious headings and subject lines indicating that they contain classified information, but not one of the roughly 200 e-mails had anything indicating it contained classified information in any header or subject line. In fact, only one classified e-mail chain contained any classified markings whatsoever; this involved one or a few simple “portion mark” “(C)”s that preceded material that was specifically classified and appeared in the body of the emails within the chain (two other e-mail chains had the same markings but the information in question in those chains was improperly classified and should not have been marked in the body with “(C)”s at all). Some important things to note here:

1.) As Director Comey said as much during his testimony, the absence of the classification markings in all e-mail headers meant that it would be “a reasonable inference” to “immediately [conclude] that those three documents were not classified” even for an “expert at what’s classified and what’s not classified.” In fact, it seems it would be reasonable to assume, as Clinton did, that, in the absence of any other markings, such “(C)”s could at a glance seem to be a selection from an alphabetical list.

2.) Nobody ever reads every part of every work e-mail. Many people probably don’t fully read even a majority of their work e-mails, as so much content is sent and received and often people have to ignore much of the content and many e-mails entirely for the sake of time; still others will be ignored out of simple prioritizing or would even been seen as a nuisance. The idea that Clinton was careless and irresponsible because she 1.) did not know that about 200 e-mails out of tens of thousands were classified but had no classified markings, 2.) that she did not know that classified material was in 1 e-mail chain (2 including the mislabeled ones) that had 1 or more little “(C)”s buried in e-mail bodies that any person skimming could easily miss is preposterous; in fact, it is possible she did not even read some of these e-mails or only read them in part, so considering this, holding her responsible for being aware of every detail of every e-mail sent to her has an added layer of ridiculousness.

3.) Taking into account that neither Clinton nor her people sent anything properly marked as classified on this e-mail system, this would actually mean that they were quite careful not to send anything that was and that they knew was classified, contrary to the popular narrative and the conclusion of Director Comey. After all, he told Congress that there was no evidence to suggest that Clinton or her people were aware that any of the material passed through that server was classified.

About That Server…

Clinton Did Not Make the Decision to Have Private Server

The FBI report also helps shed light on some other details: while Clinton directed her people to set up a specialized personal e-mail account, the decision to set up a private server in her Chappaqua, NY, basement was not something she directed her staff to do, though she later did become aware that there was such a server after it was established; rather, it was a decision staff made agreed to with technical experts. One thing that is clear is that Clinton and her staff were scarred by such a tumultuous political past of being subjected to so many politically-motivated witch hunts, acting in a very secretive way that actually helped to foster some of the issues about which we have now heard altogether too much. One of the most crucial examples of this is that Brian Pagliano, the IT expert from the Clinton 2008 campaign tasked with setting up the personal server, at first was not apparently not aware that then-soon-to-be-Secretary of State Clinton would even be using this server to host her e-mails, though the FBI was unable to specifically verify exactly what he knew at this time; still, this is an indication he very well may have had no idea Clinton would be conducting any official business using this server, let along using it, at the time. It is ironic that Team Clinton’s penchant for privacy in this case may have possibly prevented Pagliano from having knowledge that may have made him set up the e-mail server differently for a sitting Secretary of State than for a retired president’s staff in ways might have shielded Clinton from some of the criticism levied against her since the e-mail server’s discovery and may have even led to some coordination with the State Department.

The Server Was Not Insecure When Clinton Used It (9/24 UPDATE)

One thing the report makes clear is that the email server was not up and running, or even physically installed, until March 2009, when Pagliano also set up the SSL security encryption. This invalidates a major line of criticism thrown at Clinton, that from when she took office in January and until March, when the SSL encryption was installed on the server, her e-mails were somehow totally unprotected, but we know that the server was not installed or in use before then, and that Clinton’s e-mail domain was being used on the previous Apple Server, installed by Apple; though very little is known know about that server, it is inconceivable that Apple would not have included security protocols, such as SSL, in the process of installing a server for such high-profile clients (Occam’s razor, again, for all you conspiracy theorists that believe Apple would install a server without no security features to prevent hacking; and, frankly, Pagliano would not have gotten as far in his field of IT administration if he is someone who would have had set up a server with no safeguards). This means, contrary to previous suspicions, her server was not insecure for months as headline after headline has trumpeted and countless other articles assumed.

The FBI report notes that the Server was “operational” starting March 19th, and that SSL security was installed by Pagliano on either the 29th or 30th, and Pagliano stated that he was not the one who set up an e-mail account on the new server for Clinton; it seems that another IT specialist working for the Clintons, Justin Cooper, did that, though Cooper could not recall the details but assumed he was the one who performed that task. An e-mail from Cooper to Clinton indicated that in April he was readying to move her Blackberry (and thus, her e-mail communication) over to the new system, meaning Clinton was not conducting work through the new server before April and before the SSL was set up and that the server was not insecure at all when she used it as Secretary of State.

Conversely, the State Department’s state.gov system has been hacked on a regular basis. Perhaps her private system was relatively more secure since nefarious actors would have been extremely unlikely to have known of its existence and, therefore, would have been unlikely to deliberately hack it knowing what and who they were hacking.

No Evidence She Deliberately Hid Anything Work-Related

Another point which has been shamefully and myopically not had appropriate emphasis given on the part of the media is that nearly all of the e-mails would have been backed up by State Department servers: only thirteen people were regularly in touch with Clinton through her private e-mail, and most of those were people using state.gov e-mails, thus, anything sent to her e-mail from a state.gov e-mail or from Clinton to a state.gov e-mail would have been automatically captured and preserved by State’s record-keeping system. So the idea that Clinton was trying to hide her work-related e-mails is ludicrous because it would be incredibly easy to expose her for doing that using State Department records, and, in any case, there is no evidence-based reason to think that she did, considering that the work-related e-mails that have been recovered after being deleted from her server contained absolutely nothing worth hiding or incriminating and many were already captured and publicly released by State.

Which brings us to this Judicial Watch nonsense, what would mercifully seem to be the near-final chapter, at least for some time, in this faux saga. Judicial Watch has long been a right-wing advocacy “investigative” group looking to smear Democrats with a long, partisan history of targetinganything and everything Clinton. The group’s efforts have led to court-ordered releases of more Clinton e-mails, and, so far, they have shown pretty normal operations in terms of deals and influence and arranging meetings despite attempts to scandalize their content. More e-mails will be coming out between now and the election, but, like the other tens of thousands which had no incriminating content, these will almost certainly be more of the same.

There was 1 new e-mail about Benghazi, though: a congratulations from the U.S. Ambassador to Brazil on Clinton’s solid congressional testimony on Benghazi, while 29 other Benghazi e-mails that were part of the recent release were already part of State’s records. The right’s desperation to open any Clinton closet it can find in the desperate hope that something will reflect badly on the Clintons or that the very process of opening the closets will cast doubt on Bill or Hillary and damage their reputations, regardless of reality, is all too apparent (as usual).

Why, oh WHY?

It is also important to remember why there is so much scrutiny about these e-mails to begin with: when eight previous investigations had failed to unearth any wrongdoing on the part of Hillary Clinton or her close personal aides in regards to the Benghazi tragedy, the crusading, witch-hunting Republicans who drove the formation and/or ran the ninth Benghazi investigation and came across the existence of this server were ostensibly convinced that the e-mails contained on the server would confirm their wild conspiracy theories that they had had all along, that Clinton deliberately lied and covered up information about Benghazi and that she ordered rescuers who were ready to save the four fatal victims of the Benghazi attacks to stand down (the e-mails held no such information, in part because none of this ever happened, as I and many others have demonstrated in detail before). I have no doubt that many fanatics within the GOP were convinced at the time they would find such non-existent evidence, but the then-#2 Republican in the House, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, foolishly publicly confirmed what everyone already knew: that this ninth Benghazi investigation’s main raison d’être was to damage Clinton politically to lower her chances of becoming president (this screw-up was largely thought to have cost McCarthy his chance at succeeding Boehner for the #1 GOP House spot as Speaker of the House); in this, it was undoubtedly a success, even as it failed to unearth any new dirt on her conduct regarding Benghazi. The Committee’s quest to find quest to find wrongdoing by Clinton vis–à–vis Benghazi had about the same odds of success as Frodo and Sam running around alone in Mordor without Aragorn marching on the Black Gate, and it is telling that the Republicans who ran the hearings were at least subconsciously (and at least some must have been consciously) aware that the the “Benghazi” hearings ended up spending just as much—maybe even more—time on Clinton’s e-mails, her use of a private e-mail and private server, that classified information had passed through the server, and that the server was a possible security risk as they did on anything related to their committee namesake of Benghazi. So much for justice for the victims of Benghazi…

Conclusion: This Is Ridiculous: 15 Takeaways

So, below, we can outline my findings/conclusions which, at the risk of sounding egotistical, are far fairer and sounder that what we’re getting from large swaths of the media and certainly many politicians.

1.)   As Comey made clear, neither Clinton nor her staff or associates gave any indication they knew any material was classified when they were passing it around through the private server or ever had any intention of using this much maligned private e-mail system to disseminate classified information, and the FBI has no evidence to point towards a coverup or Clinton or her people lying to FBI investigators. 

2.)   Only 3 e-mail chains had any indications whatsoever that they contained classified material (only one actually did), and the markings were themselves not clear, were not accompanied by required classified markings in headers and subject-lines, and only referred to the lowest level of classification.

3.)   None of the people involved were expert specialists on classification, and they and Secretary Clinton relied, as most non-classification-specialists would rely, on proper and clear headings to warn that classified information was at hand and that people sending them knew they were following proper procedure.

4.)   The only indications we have in terms of the content of the most sensitive material of higher classification levels is that it was publicly available information.

5.)   Over 99.5% of all e-mails in question had no issues as far as classification was concerned; no official in the history of the modern United States has ever has so much of her communications material examined (or released so much to the public) so thoroughly and so soon after her time in office, and she used e-mail more than any of her predecessors because of the increasingly technological times we live in; if most other senior government officials had an audit like Clinton’s it is safe to say that she would hardly stand alone in having less than 0.5% of her content containing some sort of classified information; some would very likely have more, given the problems with overclassification.

6.)   No evidence exists that any sensitive information was given to the wrong people or enemies of America or that America’s national security was compromised in any way by Clinton’s use of a private server or the fact that some classified material passed through it (remember, the server was not insecure early in her tenure at State while she was using it as had been previously speculated/assumed in many a report).

7.)   Even if Clinton had used state.gov servers for her e-mail and never set up a private server, the information would still have been sent improperly through non-classified channels (her successor, John Kerry, was the first Secretary of State to ever use a state.gov account; why so little interest in Rice or Powell? Oh, yeah, they’re both Republicans and they aren’t running for president).

8.)   Yes, there were issues with having a private server (not initially her decision, which was just to have a private e-mail address) and it was not the best judgment call, but was hardly among the worst decisions made by a cabinet-level-or-higher official in modern history or even recent memory (the Benghazi investigation lasted longer than the Watergate investigation), yet Clinton has been investigated more thoroughly than any other official in the modern era for something that is at best a moderate mistake, not one that caused grave damage to anything other than her reputation and her poll numbers and not one that seemed to put any serious state secrets at risk, because, for all the talk of her “lack of judgement” in this case, we have no information yet that any of the information in question was of major consequence, the release of which could have had serious ramifications for the U.S. In other words, her staff and she were careful not to use the system for anything clearly sensitive, overclassification notwithstanding, at least based on what we know up to this point.

9.)   Basically, Clinton dove into a gray area with the personal e-mail/server that walked a line when it came following the exact letter and spirit of preferred policy, but from my earlier research, it was clear there was no outright prohibition on what she did. In an era of extreme partisanship, she should have known, just like Bill Clinton when he engaged in sexual relations with an intern, that such behavior would open her to serious attacks from her political enemies. It was an error in judgement, but hardly one that would be a tipping point in evaluating her performance as Secretary of State or her record as a public servant overall. 

10.) We can easily see that Clinton’s understandable main motivations were in seeking a convenient way to communicate both professionally and personally using the same device and to shield her private affairs from the public and her political enemies after years of witch hunts conducted by her rivals and the media. Nothing in the Constitution or the law states that senior government officials have no right to private communication for personal business.

11.) So Clinton is not perfect, but if this is the worst thing or one of the worst things we can come up with about her and her judgement and career, well, that’s a historically strong candidate, folks, no matter how you slice or dice it, at least if you slice or dice it in a reasonable way. Which Republicans and the media are not. But more on the media another time…

12.) In fact, I expected the investigation by the FBI would explain in considerable detail whose job it was to have labeled the material as classified and at what stage and when this should have occurred, because by the time any of that info reaches senior official that process should already have been completed; this to me seems a bigger issue than Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail server, because if people had properly labeled this information it would not have passed through Clinton’s server to begin with. There is no attempt to blame any specific officials for not labeling classified information as classified, and the illogical burden of blame has been put on Clinton and her people for receiving information they accepted in good faith mostly from within their own State Department (certainly the blame cannot be on them for that!). Strange that the focus for blame has been on the use of a server and not that the e-mails were improperly marked, which, again, is the only reason they ended up on said server. Also frustrating, if understandable, that major parts of the FBI report dealing with these issues were redacted. Still, contrary to what many have said, including Comey, it does not appear that Clinton herself or her senior staff were careless in the handling of classified information, as, again, they were careful not to use the private server for anything properly labeled as classified. Such conduct does not seem to fit Comey’s words of “extreme carelessness.” 

13.) The information we do have from the investigation shows that much of the material that was classified and passed on through unclassified e-mail channels was information that senior leaders needed to have to address pressing, time sensitive issues, where using standard secure terminals was impractical, impossible, or both, and that this was common practice.

14.) The last point in particular makes it clear that official procedures for the dissemination of classified information to senior officials when that information is needed in a timely manner are grossly inadequate and impractical to the extent that they are not followed so that important business may be done when it needs to be done. Comey would have to basically call the entire State Department extremely careless, for the classified content being improperly sent and improperly labeled was the product of unofficial but standard practice, and though he did note that the State Department was “generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government;” that seems to be decidedly less harsh language than Comey used to describe Clinton’s similar (the same?) behavior, even though State overall was just as big a factor in creating the situation as Clinton, if not more so.

15.) The above may be the most important controversy of all, but the fact that this all arose from investigations borne out of efforts to politically damage Hillary Clinton always meant that she, not these other important issues, would be the focus. It would have been useful to task the FBI investigators with recommendations for reform, but this was not done. If anything, Clinton herself has been a distraction from the real problem at hand: reform of a system that few seem to have confidence in or respect for under certain important conditions, a system that is outdated and not taking into account more rapid forms of information dissemination that are common in the twenty-first century. But that has been lost in the conversation. And that itself is a true scandal.

*****

I’m almost 35, and this is easily the most overblown, blown-out-of-proportion thing I’ve ever seen in politics, and may also be the most poorly-reported-on “scandal” I’ve ever encountered, as well, but more on that another time…

© 2016 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Related articles: Comey Damages Clinton With Horribly Timed Weiner Speculation in Historic FBI Injection Into Election

THE DEFINITIVE Clinton E-mail Scandal Analysis: The Real Scandals are the Benghazi Committee GOP Witch Hunt & Media Hype

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 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse September 15, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) September 15th, 2016

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

AMMAN — I’ve written repeatedly about 9/11 before: what it meant for me, what it should mean for Americans, how we have failed to properly honor the memory of the victims, how our nation has become worse, not better, since that fateful day, about all the missed opportunities. I think today it’s pretty clear that we as a nation still have not honored the memory of the victims through proper action, but what I could write about that now would be nothing new that I and others have not written before.

I’m not sure if it would make me feel better or worse to be able to write an article saying “9/11 helped to ruin us by starting a new style of politics that is ruining us.” In any case, I can’t, for while in many ways 9/11 must still clearly be regarded as a watershed, cataclysmic event in world history, let alone American politics and history, that sad truth is that the disgusting political gamesmanship of sucking in foreign policy and national security issues into the partisan maelstrom in the same manner as any other issue is not something that began (or ended) with 9/11, with the politics of 9/11 marking more continuity than change, just a larger example of growing partisanship amidst a rising tide of partisanship in post-Cold War America.

The big move towards consistent politicization in any significant way started almost exclusively with the Republican Party just a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, beginning with its withering partisan criticism of Bill Clinton’s efforts in Somalia in 1993, criticism that was wildly inconsistent and undermined U.S. policy.  When Republicans began using 9/11 as a partisan wedge issue in the run-up to the Iraq invasion of 2003 and in the 2004 presidential election, this was merely a continuation of the post-Cold War modus operandi of the Republican Party, which is only more extreme today. It is worth going through some of this history to better understand this dynamic besetting America today.

Bipartisanship During the Cold War, But Not For Bill Clinton

Somalia

In 1991, Somalia’s longstanding dictator, short of international support when he was no longer “needed” after the Cold War had drawn to a close, was overthrown, and the country fell into anarchy and warlordism. The political and security situation combined with a famine into one of the first great humanitarian disasters of the post-Cold War era. With the UN Security Council supporting a relief mission, and the Democratic-led U.S. Congress, including Republicans, urging support for such a mission, Republican President George H. W. Bush, though he had just lost re-election nearly two months earlier, announced on Dec. 4th, 1992, that he would send 28,000 U.S. troops as part of a peacekeeping force intended to ensure the distribution of food to hundreds of thousands of Somalis on the verge of starvation, a move supported by President-Elect Clinton. 

Not long after Clinton became president, though, Republicans especially began voicing strong criticism of Clinton’s efforts to sustain the mission, contradicting their earlier support for the mission under George H. W. Bush; while criticism was by no means coming from Republicans alone, they were generally particularly vocal and harsh in their criticism, exaggerating and distorting what was going on and using hyperbolic language to criticize a mission they were perfectly happy to support when commanded by a Republican president only a few months earlier. The mixed support of WWII veteran (and soon-to-be-Republican presidential nominee in 1996) Bob Dole was more the exception, rather than the rule, as Republicans were generally unified in opposing Clinton and succeeded in undermining public support and confidence in the mission, calling for an end to the mission and constantly threatening to cut off funding for the mission even while U.S. troops in the field were carrying it out, a mission that was far from a disaster and hardly a failure. Even when President Clinton announced a withdrawal date after the unfortunate October 1993 “black hawk down” incident, in which U.S. forces tangled with warlord forces and incurred relatively substantial casualties, many Republicans, rather than accept the withdrawal announcement as a sufficient political victory, pushed for a faster withdrawal than the one Clinton had called for; whatever Clinton did, these Republicans were sure to meet it with scorn and criticism. 

In the end, hundreds of thousands of Somali lives were saved by the mission, for all its faults. But Republicans seemed to be in lock-step with Osama bin Laden as viewing the mission as an American failure (even before the “black hawk down” incident), and sure helped to move public opinion in that direction despite the significant achievements of the mission. Perhaps even more hauntingly, the experience was a major influence on Clinton’s decision not to intervene during the Rwandan genocide that occurred only months later, in the spring of 1994.

Bosnia

Clinton was already clashing with Congress over the war in the disintegrating Yugoslavia in 1993, as well, as more and more reports of Serbs committing atrocities against Bosnian Muslims dominated the headlines. It was an odd mixture of Republicans and Democrats who said the Clinton Administration was doing too little, and Republicans and Democrats who argued the Administration was doing too much. Such wide-ranging bi-partisan criticism reflected how complex and difficult the situation was in the Balkans as Europe’s first real test of the post-Cold War era unfolded; against a backdrop of confused and divided U.S. lawmakers, European governments were nervous that any aggressive U.S. action would endanger their peacekeeping forces, already on the ground in the Balkans. In other words, there were no easy solutions and no single plan had widespread, bipartisan support or even strong agreement within one party. As president, Bill Clinton was in an unwelcome and lonely position in trying to craft a position on the conflict. This situation more or less continued through 1994, though after the November midterm elections, at least the leadership of the victorious Republicans signaled a desire for more forceful action.

But somewhat conflictingly, even as Republicans seemed to want to end the arms embargo to help arm the Bosnians (unwise for multiple reasons, e.g., that escalation could have prompted Russia to arm their Serbian friends, could have weakened the NATO alliance and prompted the UK and France to withdraw their forces from the region and force America’s hand in filling the void, measures that nonetheless also had some significant support from some Democrats; still, Clinton correctly noted that “…unilaterally lifting the arms embargo will have the opposite effects of what its supporters intend. It would intensify the fighting, jeopardize diplomacy and make the outcome of the war in Bosnia an American responsibility” and increased air strikes against the Serbs. But Republicans mostly balked when Clinton publicly weighed the idea of U.S. ground forces either assisting beleaguered UN peacekeepers or helping to enforce an eventual peace; thus, Republicans slammed him for not doing enough even while slamming him for raising the possibility of what would likely help the most. They also later balked at Clinton’s efforts to help support a new UN plan to create a rapid-reaction force of European troops to help the thinly-spread peacekeeping forces already on the ground.

When a cease-fire was finally negotiated in October 1995, and the U.S. held talks in November, a more partisan nature to opposing the president came into being, just when it was most crucial to achieve peace in the Balkans for Congress to support a long-term peace plan. Nearly every Republicans in the Senate but only one Democrat sent a letter to Clinton asking him to ask Congress for approval before committing any U.S. troops to a peacekeeping force; this was done just days before formal peace talks were to begin in the U.S., undercutting the president’s team’s negotiating authority at a crucial moment. Next, nearly the entire House Republican caucus voted on a successfully-passed (non-binding) resolution that spurned and disavowed Clinton’s promise to provide 20,000 troops as part of an eventual peacekeeping force, undermining the prospects of an agreement and an end to the war, but a majority of Democrats opposed this resolution even as a substantial minority voted with the Republicans. 

With negotiations between the warring parties underway on U.S. soil, House Republicans voted to prevent the deployment of U.S. troops without Congress specifically authorizing money to do so in what was largely a partisan vote, and even after the peace treaty was signed, House Republicans only narrowly failed in a bid to cut off funding for the mission (210-218) and Senate Republicans barely failed to pass a vote condemning the mission but “supporting” the troops (47-52). Another partisan vote passed just before the peace treaty was signed condemned Clinton’s decision to deploy troops, and another vote that would have offered language supporting the troops but not criticizing Clinton’s plan failed to pass pretty much along party lines the very day the treaty was signed. And in 1996, many Republicans rather myopically criticized both Clinton’s decision to provide substantial reconstruction aid for Bosnia and an extension of the peacekeeping mission. Despite Republican opposition, U.S. forces in Bosnia undoubtedly played a key and decisive role in forging and maintaining peace and stability in Bosnia and, in a larger sense, the Balkans and southeastern Europe.

Kosovo

Just a few years later, Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic was again threatening massive numbers of civilians, this time the mainly Muslim Kosovar Albanians in Serbia’s province of Kosovo. In response to a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing, NATO launched airstrikes against Serb forces threatening Kosovar Albanians. House Republicans, in particular, engaged in behavior that could reasonably (certainly) be said to have undermined the Clinton Administration’s efforts during the crisis. Not long before NATO began its airstrikes, a substantially large majority of Republicans in the Republican-dominated House voted to bar the use of American ground troops: “American soldiers have been trained to be warriors, not baby sitters,” was how House Majority Whip and Republican Tom DeLay put it. The measure was defeated by nearly every Democrat and a minority of Republicans teaming up to vote down the amendment. Even after the airstrikes began, a tie vote in the House failed to give public backing to the airstrikes. While Republican leaders tended to prevent direct challenges to the president in these cases, especially in the Senate, it was clear that many rank-and-file congressional Republicans, including a clear majority in the House, felt differently. Thus, when George W. Bush ran for president in 2000 and campaigned on pulling out of the peacekeeping efforts in the Balkans—making it clear how much value he placed on the missions in Bosnia and Kosovo—that position was not terribly surprising.

Of course, after 9/11, the Balkans receded greatly in importance in America…

9/11: More Continuity Than Change

Most people would have missed the fact that The 9/11 Commission Report, while produced ostensibly at a time when the nation was trying to heal and explicitly avoiding leveling particular blame with one administration or political party, nevertheless does make it clear how lax, unmotivated, and ill-prepared George W. Bush and his Administration were to deal with the crisis, and a careful reading (one which the general public did not even attempt or would even have been capable of attempting) showed that, while the Clinton Administration had not done everything it possibly could have done to go after bin Laden (after years of partisan Republican criticism whenever it had tried to act forcefully elsewhere!), it had increasingly focused on bin Laden as a threat over time and stridently recommended to Bush’s team during the 2000-2001 presidential transition to make bin Laden a top priority, advice which Bush’s people just as stridently refused to accept. Here is just one glaring example that exemplified both the Commission’s unwillingness to point fingers but willingness to still lay the clear picture there for those intelligent enough to follow the evidence:

“In May, President Bush announced that Vice President Cheney would himself lead an effort looking at preparations for managing a possible attack by weapons of mass destruction and at more general problems of national preparedness. The next few months were mainly spent organizing the effort and bringing an admiral from the Sixth Fleet back to Washington to manage it. The Vice President’s task force was just getting under way when the 9/11 attack occurred.” (6.5 The New Administration’s Approach)

Specifically, President Bush’s announcement that Cheney’s task force would be coming came May 8th, but presumably some thought and groundwork had occurred prior to this date. Then from May 8th until September 11th—more than four full months after Bush’s announcement—Cheney’s group had, famously, not met once; “The Vice President’s task force was just getting under way when the 9/11 attack occurred” is about as polite and diplomatic a way as possible to say that next-to-nothing had been done in those four months. One finds such an understated approach throughout the report, and an ability to look past it makes it clear a partisan gap, not in favor of senior Republican officials, in regards to the attention paid to bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Much like after the terrorist attacks in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983, that killed 258 Americans (among others), after 9/11 Democrats supported the Republican president—tending to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt, including then-Sen. Hillary Clinton—and conspicuously avoided playing a partisan political blame-game in the wake of a major attack against Americans even though the way both Presidents Reagan and his administration and Bush and his administration handled the events leading up to and surrounding the respective attacks in 1983 and 2001 were objectively ripe for criticism.

Of course, none of this mattered to Republicans in general, who were quick to blame 9/11 on Bill Clinton, continued to do so for years and still do so today, and who were also quick to politically weaponize foreign policy and national security as a partisan club with which to beat down Democrats into submission and defeat.  Especially as debate on potential and then actual war in Iraq intensified, those who raised questions, doubts, or criticism about the decision to go to war or even how the war was being prosecuted were loudly shouted down as “unpatriotic” and/or “not supporting the troops” (I had a reputation as one of the few liberals on my small conservative college campus back in the day, and late one night at a party in 2003 one drunken Republican angrily asked me “Why do you hate the troops?”). This happened in spite of the fact that the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and the prosecution of the Iraq war were far more deficient and problematic than the H. W. Bush/Clinton Somalia intervention and Clinton’s two Balkan interventions. Democrats also did not really intensify their opposition until it was quite clear that Iraq was going from bad to worse and the promised WMDs that were the main ostensible pretext for the invasion never materialized.

The rancor of the debate in 2002 and 2003 was just a warmup for the 2004 general election campaign between Democratic Senator John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam war veteran who was wounded twice in action, and incumbent President George W. Bush, whose stateside service in the Texas Air National Guard was largely understood as a way to keep him out of having to serve in Vietnam. A group calling itself “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” attacked Kerry on his very Vietnam record, disputing his heroism, his accounts of what happened during his service, and his worthiness of receiving any of the medals he did receive with a bevy of shamefully false and misleading accusations, most notably displayed on prominent television ads and myopic media coverage that damaged Kerry’s candidacy greatly with various segments of the public and maybe was the greatest single factor contributing to his defeat at the hands of Bush that November. Lies, not truth, prevailed in 2004. Some of the impetus behind those attacks on Kerry had to do with the fact that Kerry, then as a recently decorated combat veteran, famously and prominently came out against the Vietnam War just after he had served in it and while that war was still very much ongoing. Even years after the election, Kerry found that he was still having to defend his reputation against those 2004 lies about his service in Vietnam. The attacks were so damaging that the term “swift boat” came to be a phrase commonly used to describe extreme and false political attacks.

This was just another chapter in the right’s attempts to both “own” national security as an issue to the exclusion of Democrats and serving up caricatures of liberals as haters-of-the-military and extremist hippies, caricatures that served as straw-man phantoms and that bore little resemblance to reality. Other recent chapters had been 1992’s and 1996’s attempts by the Republicans to portray Bill Clinton as a raging antiwar pot-smoking draft-dodging hippie unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.

Recently, It’s Just Getting Worse

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

While the rise of Obama occurring hand-in-hand with an increasing, newly dominant anti-war feeling in America meant such fault-lines, concerns, and lines of attack would recede as they became increasingly ineffective (especially after the Obama Administration successfully took out Osama bin Laden; Mitt Romney barely mentioned, or challenged Obama on, foreign policy during the campaign homestretch in 2012), when the Arab Spring really turned for the dramatically worse and ISIS burst into view, Republicans, once again, found effective returns from investing in familiar tactics.

Yes, back were the days of Republicans using national security and foreign policy in hyperpartisan politicized attacks during Obama’s second term. The baseless, repeatedly-proven-to-be-false accusations trying to pin the blame on Hillary Clinton for the Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya—including our then-Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens—is perhaps the best example of this shameful disgrace of abuse of the concepts of oversight and political discourse (especially when contrasted with how Democrats responded to the 1983 Beirut and 2001 9/11 attacks, as discussed above). Other great recent examples of Republican weaponization of foreign policy and national security politics include trying to blame Obama for both the rise and success of ISIS, both accusations being quite factually incorrect, as well as pretty much the entire Republican/Trumpian critique on immigration and the despicable demonization of Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s refugee policies (and refugees, for that matter; the previous five links are to my own detailed rebuttals of each criticism). The irony is lost on Republicans, too, as they criticize Obama both for being feckless on Syria but for doing too much on Libya, when criticism of one of those policies begs the very response of the one they are criticizing in the other, take your pick; the same can be said when they try to blame Obama for Ukraine’s crisis, even though Russia’s Putin also invaded and annexed parts of Georgia under W. Bush’s watch. The irony in their criticism is also lost on Republicans because they themselves either have terrible alternative “policies,” if they have any at all, a reality simply augmented terribly by their terrible candidate for the presidency but a reality that is very much the status quo in today’s Republican Party even without Trump.

Conclusion

Linda Davidson/The Washington Post

One thing that is certain is that the trend of Republicans hyperpartisanizing and politicizing national security issues as a party began under Clinton in the 1990s with Somalia, not with 9/11. To a very large extent, national security and foreign policy were bipartisan issues during the Cold War, but that did practice not survive after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ancient republican (small “R!”) Roman historian Sallust hits the nail right on the head with the hammer describing this dynamic some 2,000 years ago in his Roman Republic:

“…the pattern of routine partisanship and factionalism, and, as a result, of all other vicious practices had arisen in Rome… It was the result of peace and an abundance of those things that mortals consider most important. I say this, because, before the destruction of Carthage, mutual consideration and restraint between the people and the Roman Senate characterized the government. Among the citizens, there was no struggle for glory or domination. Fear of a foreign enemy preserved good political practices. But when that fear was no longer on their minds, self-indulgence and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity loves, took over. As a result the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity…In this way all political life was torn apart between two parties, and the Republic, which had been our common ground, was mutilated.” ( The Jurgurthine War 41.1-5)

With the U.S., we can simply replace Rome with ourselves and Carthage with the Soviet Union, and that’s pretty much where we are today. While we faced the more-or-less existential threat of the Soviet Union, bipartisanship governed much (though hardly all) of our politics when it came to foreign policy and national security, and American victory in the Cold War was largely the result of decades of bipartisan policy and internal Soviet dynamics, hardly just because of the efforts of one man named Reagan, as many conservatives would have you believe.   Since then, largely because of the Republican Party (at least until the rise of the Bernie Sanders crowd), good practices are very much on the decline, not least of all in terms of how politics and issues of both foreign policy and national security have become toxically mixed, and we can’t blame this on 9/11, for it was a disease already growing in our body politic years before.

Today, there is hardly anybody left in a Republican leadership position who is someone like Bob Dole, who, though often opposing Clinton, put American interests and productive outcomes in foreign affairs ahead of partisanship and political gain, often acting to reign in his unruly Party members. There does not seem to be any new blood among Republicans who are capable of leading and cooperating like Dole, which means this untenable status quo of today is something with which we will be stuck for some time to come.

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Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse May 26, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 26th, 2016

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

EILAT and TEL AVIV — In what has become a constant occurrence throughout the 2016 Republican nomination contest, Trump’s own behavior has so lowered the bar as to what is considered “acceptable” that when he behaves in a way that is only mildly offensive as opposed to egregiously offensive, that when he speaks using prepared notes in a normal tone as opposed to yelling and rambling incoherently, people that are held to be respectable mainstream analysts are able to claim Trump is “presidential” and “serious” and is “improving” as a candidate.

Apart from Trump’s AIPAC speech, perhaps no better example of this has happened thus far during his campaign than his recent foreign policy speech.

Trump’s Elementary Mentality

For starters, Trump used the word “great” eighteen times in his address.  While it would be inane to expect the American people to elect someone of the linguistic abilities of Shakespeare, I myself remember how by middle-school, my instructors took great pains to teach us that using the same word over and over again was not to be desired, and that variety was an essential aspect of what is to be considered “good” communication.  Then again, as it has been pointed out, Trump tends to communicate at best at a middle-school level, and often at an elementary-school level; this is not some expression, but the result of sophisticated linguistic analyses.

Pretty early in his speech, Trump made clear that the cornerstone of his foreign policy would be to “put…‘America First.’”  I think it would be hard to accuse even the worst of our presidents of not acting in what they felt were the best interests of the United States, or to find one that acted on behalf of other nations primarily, and not on behalf of America; thus, while this is certainly a crowd-pleaser among some segments of the population, on a substantive level this “cornerstone” can only fairly be regarded as pointless, for while the segments of the population that appreciate such language feel that President Obama and others who don’t think like them are traitors who actively try to sabotage the United States in the interest of helping the Muslim Brotherhood or other apparently nefarious actors, such talk is simply inane and not even worth addressing… unless you are a mainstream Republican candidate for the presidency.

Another thing worth noting is how many times Trump repeats himself throughout.  That means even though Trump spoke at some length, the “content” of the speech was stretched pretty thinly throughout.

Dr. Trump Diagnoses U.S. Foreign Policy Problems

Trump then went on to assert that there are five main weaknesses in today’s American foreign policy, only one of which was accurate, and even that one is not exactly something that can be controlled on America’s end directly.

1.) “First,” he began, “our resources are totally over extended,” and maintained that Obama’s actions that have weakened the economy have thus weakened the military and America’s power in the world. 

What’s ironic about this criticism is that Obama, more than any president since the end of the Cold War, has retrenched, reducing and pulling back American commitments overseas, most notably in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, and cutting what was a historically and unnecessarily high defense budget in ways not seen since the end of the Cold War and more steeply than any time since the end of the Korean War.  If anything, Obama has clearly helped the U.S. to be less overextended. 

POGO.org

As for the economy, since the peak lows during the Great Recession—the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression—Obama has overseen 74 consecutive months of net job creation (a record for any president), the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 stock indexes have more than doubled in value, the export-import trade deficit has fallen by 24%, America has risen to become the world’s number-one producer of both oil and natural gas, and the unemployment rate has been cut in half.  So Obama has clearly “outperform[ed] Reagan on jobs, growth, and investing.”  Now, this does not tell the full story, and there are aspects of the economy which are certainly still troubling, but by any measure these numbers are impressive, even when allowing for very real problems, and one can hardly claim that Obama is “weakening our economy” overall, as Trump claims. 

Trump’s first major point can be dismissed, then.

2.) “Secondly, our allies are not paying their fair share,” and he expects them, especially fellow NATO members, to pay up, and pay up far more than they have been. 

Trump actually has a point here, besides the U.S. only four other NATO members are meeting their NATO defense-spending obligations.  But these decisions are not up to the Obama Administration, and while Obama could try to undiplomatically strong-arm close allies to do even more than the Obama Administration is already urging them to do, at a time when China and Russia are rising, when combating global terrorism requires better, not worse relationships, it is hardly a given that bullying our allies into paying more would be the best method.  And yet, Trump still has a point—EU nations and others that enjoy a high standard of living (including better education and healthcare than America) while America puts more effort into defending these same countries from potential foes like Russia, China, and North Korea than these countries expend themselves is definitely an imbalance that should be adjusted—but this has been the case long before Obama and Obama is not the one to blame for it.

3.) Then, “Thirdly, our friends are beginning to think they can’t depend on us. We’ve had a president who dislikes our friends and bows to our enemies, something that we’ve never seen before in the history of our country.”

Like his first claim, this statement of Trump’s is also very problematic.  As noted above, the Obama Administration does more than its fair share to contribute to European security, and Obama has led a regime of economic sanctions against Russia that have quite likely restrained the scope and intensity of its aggressiveness.  Europe, India, Russia, and China also very much wanted progress in improving the West’s relationship with Iran, and Obama led the way in achieving a historic nuclear agreement between the world’s most powerful nations and Iran’s government on their nuclear program.  But Trump’s criticism focuses on this Iran deal, which he and many Republicans (and Netanyahu and many Israelis) myopically and erroneously label a “disastrous deal.” 

Part of the argument that is made against this Iran deal is the claim that this deal makes Israel less safe, an absurd argument that is related to an absurd general criticism that many Republicans and many Israelis make in which, in Trump’s words, “President Obama has not been a friend to Israel.”  In fact, under Obama, Israel has seen a notable increase American in military aid and has been given more American military aid overall and on average per year than under any previous American president.  This aid includes the highly effective Iron Dome missile/rocket defense system, so effective in neutralizing Hamas’ and other militant groups’ rocket attacks against Israel. Besides this, Obama has not been shy in using the diplomatic might of America to defend Israel, the U.S. both being the sole Security Council veto of a resolution critical of Israeli settlement building in early 2011 and using pressure behind to scenes to push against Palestinian diplomatic efforts.  As is obvious to many, doing right by Israel does not mean supporting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party’s agenda.  That Obama challenged Israel under Netanyahu to do what’s in its own interests is not “throwing Israel under the bus,” it’s being a true, honest friend.  So while Obama does not hand over to Israel (increasing) billions every year in military aid without letting Israel know that its occupation and expansion of settlements is inflammatory and self-destructive, this does not make him an enemy of Israel. 

As for our other allies, Obama has been increasing America’s military presence in Eastern Europe to reassure allies wary of Russian aggression as well as increasing it in East Asia to reassure our Asian allies wary of aggressive Chinese moves.  So it is hard to find substantive examples of where we have let our allies down, though we may not always agree 100% with each other, as is the case with every American president.

And the whole fuss that people made over Obama “bowing” to foreign leaders was selective outrage at best and misleading at worst.  Another silly non-issue.

Thus, Trump’s narrative here is also false.

4.) After that, we have “Fourth, our rivals no longer respect us.”

“No longer” in this case implies that America’s image in the past was better.  As objectively measured in reliable global public opinion surveys, this can be dismissed at least in comparing America under Obama to America under George W. Bush, where a clear general trend of global opinion has been an improvement in America’s standing under Obama.  The largest downward trend in recent decades was a sharp decline in global opinion from the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency to when George W. Bush was president.  In short, any recent major decline in the respect people have had for America has a strong association with the Republican presidency of George W. Bush, not Democrats Barack Obama or Bill Clinton.  So Trump’s characterization of placing a supposed decline in the respect the world has for America as being associated mainly with Obama simply flies in the face of the facts. 

While it is true that, in contrast to many other nations, China’s opinion of America has dipped slightly and Russia’s has tanked, this is due to the increasing divergence of interests in the South China Sea on one hand, and in Eastern Europe and Syria on the other.  In addition, Putin has based much of his power on using state-owned and social media to whip up propaganda, including anti-American sentiment.  In addition, Russia was happy to invade U.S. ally Georgia even when George W. Bush was president, and China’s recent assertiveness is a reflection of its recent growth in power more than anything else, fueled by its impressive economic growth in recent years.  And in both Russia and China, it could be argued that its people like America less because Obama is standing up to their governments’ aggression.

To be fair, the Obama administration’s single biggest blunder to its credibility—backing away in 2013 from the “red line” it set for Syria’s Assad—did not help with the respect America’s rivals have for America; but to define Obama’s presidency on this single incident, and to blame him for the chaos erupting around the world, from the Arab Spring to the refugee crises in Europe and the Middle East, is myopic and extremely American-centered.  If anything, anti-Americanism is fueled by decades-long American policies, including aggressive military action, support for Israel, and support for oppressive regimes during the Cold War, not specifically because of President Obama.

Under Obama, even after historic cuts, America’s military spending (#1 in the world) still dwarfs China’s (#2) and Russia’s (#4) combined spending, and that is a reality of power that both Russia and China respect whether they admit it or not.  In the end, tying our rivals’ assertiveness to Obama’s policies and personality at the expense of other factors is speculative at best, then.

Thus, we have another dubious assertion on the part of Trump.

5.) And “Finally, America no longer has a clear understanding of our foreign policy goals. Since the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, we’ve lacked a coherent foreign policy.”  

Perhaps that is because the world is much more complicated now as far as international relations.  Trump early in his speech vowed to create a “new foreign policy direction, one that replaces randomness with purpose.”  For Trump, “after the Cold War…our foreign policy began to make less and less sense.”  This involves the typical assumption that conservatives makes all too often about the American foreign policy and the current world in which that policy needs to be crafted to fit.  For American conservatives, the Cold War is remembered somewhat fondly: the Soviet Union was unquestionable our biggest problem, threat, and adversary, with no other nation even coming close; our foreign policy subordinated all else to the competition between our two nations and their competing ideologies of free-market democracy vs. state-run economic communism/socialism.  Our aims and objectives throughout the Cold War remained consistent and obvious: counter the Soviet Union by any means necessary, preferably but not limiting ourselves to the spread of free-market capitalism and democracy, at least in theory.  Conservatives fail to remember with much clarity that this often meant, in practice, promoting undemocratic and abusively oppressive regimes that opened their markets to us but opened as well as prisons and torture rooms for dissidents within their own borders.  It is in these very trade-offs of convenience that roots of both the 9/11 attacks and many of the problems in the world today lie.

So for Trump and Republicans, they are right on one thing: foreign policy was far more simply conceived and strategized in the Cold War, and was executed without the same amount of hand-wringing and (social) media attention that is the norm in our present world.  If people living in Vietnam could live-tweet and post camera-phone pictures and videos of American carpet-bombing raids and killings like those at My Lai, the Vietnam War would have been a very different experience with potentially very different outcomes.  In other words, simplicity did not necessarily lead to the best long-term results.  Of course, Trump presents a hubristic vision of the Cold War in which the U.S. “won big,” with Reagan the Great getting much of the credit (of course, in this view, the Berlin Wall coming down and the the Soviet system was a consequence of Reagan’s rhetoric, and internal Soviet dynamics and policies, decisions on the part of Gorbachev to reform the USSR and essentially stand his forces down and to respect the will of the people—a hallmark of much of his later period of leadership—are myopically not considered or mentioned as major factors).

The solution to today’s foreign policy problems?  To return to the consistency and simplicity of our foreign policy approach of Reagan and the Cold War.  He engaged in a critique of what he called the “Obama-Clinton” approach to the world, notably repeating a number of repeatedly debunked assertions about Clinton’s response to the Benghazi attacks.

The problem is, the world is a much more complex place than the bipolar world of the Cold War; the current unipolar system, perhaps transitioning to a multipolar one, begs for a different approach, one not rooted in simplicity but in complexity.  A one-size-fits all “consistent” approach would very clearly be a poor fit for today’s more complex world.  This means that consistency is not to necessarily be pursued, as a nuanced and complex world requires different approaches for each new crisis.  Another problem is that while policy during the Cold War was relatively consistent compared with today’s foreign policy, it, too, was subject to nuance and departures and is hardly as simple as some make it out to be.

Trump also made clear that “We’re getting out of the nation-building business and instead focusing on creating stability in the world.”  This statement itself is a slap in the face of logic, as it is weakening, failing, and failed states that are among the greatest contributors to global and regional instability, including the fueling of terrorist movements like ISIS. It’s also a slap in the face to the most successful U.S. foreign policy ever: nation building in Europe with the Marshall Plan and with the American occupation of Japan after WWII are the main reasons why peace has reigned in Europe and East Asia ever since; without nation building, it is very likely that war, extremism, and chaos would have reigned instead.

Still, Trump seemed to articulate that the solutions to today’s crises are rooted in the strategy America had in the Cold War, a conflict that was quite different from the challenges faced by the world today and an ill-fit for as a toolbox for crafting an approach for today’s very different world.

Thus, Trump is wrong to call for a simple, unified approach to foreign policy; if anything, today’s more complex world requires inconsistency as each crisis and region requires solutions that defy them being lumped into a single box.

Dr. Trump’s Prescription to Make America’s Foreign Policy Great Again

Trump then laid out the pillars of his own “foreign policy”:

1.) “First,” he said, “we need a long-term plan to halt the spread and reach of radical Islam. Trump doesn’t really have a plan, as the lack of specifics in this speech demonstrate.  However, Obama has an approach that is set up quite well for longer-terms success, as I have pointed out before.  As part of this, he says “we must as a nation be more unpredictable.”  While there is merit in keeping our enemies guessing, too much unpredictability will unnerve our allies as well.  Either way, Trump has far from demonstrated that he has any competent, detailed ideas for dealing with ISIS, while Obama’s strategy, which Trump criticizes profusely without even understanding it, is very sound.

2.) Then, “Secondly, we have to rebuild our military and our economy.” This has been covered, already, and this statement is simply nonsense.  See above.

A.) After that, either as an aside or as a separate point, Trump says “We must even treat…[our veterans] really, really well and that will happen under the Trump administration.” There’s no denying the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA) had and still has serious problems, and there’s no denying that the Obama Administration should have addressed these problems with far more energy than it did.  But the simple fact of the matter is that the lion’s share of the VA’s problems go back many years, and Obama inherited a situation that was a ticking time bomb, most notably from the fact that the Bush Administration fought two significant wars over nearly a decade and did not prepare the VA for what was going to obviously be a serious increase in the number of veterans needing treatment; as soon as the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions began, expansion of funding, staffing, and support for VA services should have been among the first steps undertaken and should have been further expanded as the wars grew longer and more costly.

3.) “Finally,” Trump continues, “we must develop a foreign policy based on American interests.” Again, going back to our earlier commentary, this almost doesn’t even need to be addressed, so silly is this statement. 

Still: Trump engaged in a disorganized and meandering explanation of what this means.  He cites the Clinton years of the 1990s as a time of policy in which we were not acting in our interests based on a few isolated but not insignificant attacks Trump cited as somehow indicative of American policy being totally off -course, even though under Clinton we enjoyed an unprecedented jobs boom and employment growth, helped to bring stability to Europe several times by ending two wars there, and had a better relationship with Russia than any during any other American president’s administration, with the arguable exception of FDR.  Trump then made points he already made about the Middle East.  He then proceeded to spout a series of vague generalities on improving relationships with Russia and China and about the use of military force.  

For Trump, success relies on having a “disciplined, deliberate and consistent foreign policy.”  This coming from a candidate whose entire behavior on the campaign trail has been anything but.  Even within the speech, he seems unaware of the apparent contradictions (e.g., calling for stability while casting aside the role of nation building, calling for closer alliances while also threatening to weaken them).  He then repeated yet again some of his earlier points about the Middle East and the U.S. economy, and took additional jabs at NAFTA, tying all this into putting “America First” again, and vowed to bring in new and different voices into the foreign policy machine in order to do so.  Additionally, he also had this very contradictory statement to make:

“Finally, I will work with our allies to reinvigorate Western values and institutions. Instead of trying to spread universal values that not everybody shares or wants, we should understand that strengthening and promoting Western civilization and its accomplishments will do more to inspire positive reforms around the world than military interventions.” 

In a broad sense, basic Western values—democracy, human rights, equality, transparency—have been spreading, and even where they are not present are generally sought by people in the face of their intransigent governments.  Battles over religion and gender are particularly difficult, but do not negate the fact that many “Western” values since WWII and especially after the Cold War are approaching a universal quality, especially as embodied by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Trump correctly maintains that these values should not be spread at gunpoint, but then calls for “promoting Western civilization” even as he criticizes the idea that we should “spread universal values that not everybody shares or wants.”  So in the same paragraph, Trump is confusing as to whether or not he thinks the West should promote its values, even as he is clear about not using force to do so, while at the same time asserting he would be firmer than Obama about use-of-force red lines, or “a line in the sand,” as Trump put it.  In fact, this paragraph sums up his speech nicely: full of different ideas and talking points that sound good alone, but that Trump failed to connect coherently in this address and articulated in ways that were often either confusing at best or contradictory at worst.

Trump’s Speech: A Perfect Representation of GOP “Foreign Policy”

Several Republican foreign policy bigwigs, falling pretty easily for Trump’s plummeting expectations game, including the Republican Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Corker and George W. Bush’s Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, praised the speech.  Former Republican Speaker of the House (and possible Trump vice presidential running mate) Newt Gingrich also praised Trump’s speech, calling it “very serious” and “presidential.”

Seth Wenig/AP

But this Republican Party is a party that has been devoid for some time of substantive and serious ideas about foreign policy, which is a reality that was on display beyond any reasonable doubt (and not for the first time) as numerous Republican presidential candidates showed how out of their depth they were back in a December debate focused on foreign policy and security.  A few months before that, we had the Benghazi hearing featuring Clinton, and well before that, another case in point is George W. Bush’s presidency.  Trump’s foreign policy speech—and candidacy—is only the latest sign that the Republican Party and most of its voters are not serious or substantive.

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A deep look at the Clinton vs. Sanders fight: the history, the present, and a path forward. Sanders never had more than the slimmest of chances. Besides never winning over even close to a majority of the Democratic constituency on a state-by-state basis, Sanders also failed to understand even the basics of politics, which is more than just haranguing special interests and saying what you think with no filter. Clinton knows this, and it is a big part of how and why she has accomplished more in her career than Sanders. Ultimately, if you don’t share the same beliefs as the political party you want to lead and don’t know how to play the game of politics, you won’t be successful, no matter how much you and your supporters would love to ignore the game. But the game is part of reality, part of politics, and part of winning. And, like in sports, in politics, winning is not only everything, it’s the only thing. It doesn’t mean you need to sell your soul, but it does mean that the model Sanders has laid out is both naive and ineffective, even more so in a general election. Still, we come here not only to criticize, but to both praise and bury the Sanders campaign.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse April 29, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) April 29th, 2016 

CNN/NBC News

AMMAN — Now is a critical time for the Democratic Party. There are two candidates vying for the presidential nomination of the Party. One is Hillary Clinton, very active in Democratic politics for almost half a century since her rejection of Republican ideology in 1968, coming after her days as a “Goldwater Girl” and being raised by a very conservative father, a political transformation she underwent during her days as an undergraduate at Wellesley College.

The other is Bernie Sanders.

*****

How We Came to This Point

The official Senate page listing all the senators of the 114th Congress does not list Bernie Sanders as a (D) for Democrat, but as an (I), displaying his status as an independent. Bernie’s own Senate website still proudly states that he is “the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history,” in his “About” section. As a non-Democratic who in twenty-five years in the House and Senate combined refused to declare himself as or officially become a member of the Democratic Party, and who proudly maintained his independence as a democratic socialist, he has clearly, beyond any reasonable doubt, failed to take over the Democratic Party as a shining outsider white knight he had hoped to be, an outsider that would have forced the Party hard and far to the left. And it was a Democratic Party that he only just joined (apparently) in time for this election season, but one for which for he so long clearly harbored disdain.

Listening to his rhetoric on the campaign trail, he clearly still harbors this disdain, playing a delicate balancing act of repeatedly decrying “The Political Establishment” that favors Clinton while simultaneously seeking its approval and endorsement (even to the degree of trying to get superdelegates to switch their support from Clinton to him), a contradiction that increasingly has not gone unnoticed. 

Despite his surprising early success (a near-tie in Iowa and a resounding, crushing victory in New Hampshire), it has been clear to those willing to look at the hard numbers of electorate beliefs and trends, supported by masses of polling and social science research, from quite early in the race that Sanders’ ability to win the diverse type of constituency necessary to clinch the Democratic nomination was practically nonexistent. As I noted before, this precise moment came in Nevada, when Hillary Clinton won by staggeringly dominant support from African Americans and Latinos. Prior to this win, the polling data already heavily confirmed that Sanders’ core of support consisted of white liberals and young people, a core nowhere near large enough win the majority of the overall national Democratic constituency. The main question was as to if Sanders’ very strong performances in Iowa and New Hampshire would give African Americans and Latinos pause enough to consider, and then vote for, Sanders in large enough numbers for him to win the nomination. The Nevada contest on February 20th, coming just a week before South Carolina’s heavily black Democratic base would vote in its contest, and that coming just a few days before (the first) Super Tuesday contests that would award the most delegates in any single day and that would include most of South, with its heavily black Democratic constituency and with Texas and its huge Latino constituency, was Bernie’s one chance to show he could win over a diverse coalition of support before the South Carolina and the rest of the South would create a reality of, votes, delegates, numbers, and probabilities that would effectively end his candidacy in all practical terms if he failed to do so. 

After all, the laws of human behavior show that if a certain demographic of people favor one candidate generally by more than 4 to 1 (African Americans) or more than 2 to 1 (Latinos), those ratios will not switch in a matter days and weeks in the absence of some sort of remarkable event.

Such an event never happened in the run up to Nevada, and it has not since.  Clinton was not indicted by the FBI in relation to her e-mail scandal, a probability that might have even been lower than Sanders’ miniscule chances of winning the nominations, nor did she suffer a dramatic collapse or series of gaffes. On Sanders’ side, he stubbornly failed to tailor or alter his message in any significant way to appeal to new groups who had thus far not bought into it. Aggressively trying to court African Americans on his terms, not theirs, was never a sound strategy.

Sanders’s Ideological Disconnect

Yet it is a hallmark of his idealist, socialist, even pseudo-Marxist theories of social change that maintain if only the masses were educated in the right ideology, they would largely come on board and support the revolution (never mind that time and time again people have proven this theory wrong, from Russia to China and elsewhere). “Educating voters” was a phrase Sanders and his supporters constantly used when explaining how a conservative country like the United States would suddenly elect a socialist president despite a fierce, visceral opposition to socialism among huge swaths of voters, particularly many millions of voters in key, populous battleground swing states that are crucial for victory in November. Like many Russians, Yugoslavs, and others before them, African Americans are not receptive to ideas of Bernie’s socialist “political revolution,” its prospects even far dimmer than his sliver of a chance at winning the nomination. If Sanders can’t win over such staunch Democrats, how will more conservative non-Democrats and Republicans respond to his message?

In constant use of phrases like “political revolution” and “educate the American people,” Sanders, like most ideologues, demonstrates his disconnect with—even war against—reality. For the ideologue, data, facts, context, research, all matter little; ideas, inspiration, and ideals are what matter most; and yet, that is why the vast majority of ideologically-driven revolutions have failed miserably and have often descended into mass-murder of the very masses the revolutions are ostensibly designed to save after these masses speak out and say “no, thank you,” to revolution. 

Of course, Bernie Sanders and his movement are not violent like the Bolsheviks, Maoists, or Nicaraguan Sandinistas.

But there are similarities in mentality. 

That’s why the nickname applied to Sanders supporters of Sandernistas is so apropos; the revolutionary Nicaraguan Sandinistas were also self-styled populist “democratic socialists.”

One similarity that I’ve already noted is the arrogance of belief that most people are simply with them, a belief that is simply an assumption and not based on any wider research and is based at best on anecdotal experiences. Another similarity in mentality is that those who disagree must have been brainwashed. Still another is that every single power structure or mainstream institution is nefariously stacked against them. There are not rational people, institutions, or credible authorities that disagree with the revolutionary ideals and plans, these ideologues say, because the powers that be have either warped or bribed the vast majority of policy, political, and economic experts and academics, as well any non-“alternative” news media (“alternative” meaning media that is for the revolution, its plan and ideals, not critical of them). And Mayor of Burlington Bernie Sanders in the 1980s vigorously supported the Sandinistas, even arranging to have their TV programming broadcast on Burlington’s local public-access cable stations.

Rob Swanson/File

The idea that thinking people can either rationally disagree or rationally conclude that such ideas might be nice but are not practical on a variety of levels simply does not occur to the ideologue. In my many exchanges with Bernie Sanders supporters, I have to yet to hear or watch or read, or even see from the candidate himself, any kind of thought-out, intelligent, detailed, worthwhile response to this concept of rational disagreement. Instead, the response is snark and slogans, castigation and conspiracy theories, as if somehow, to question Bernie Sanders (!) even on his quest for the presidency automatically makes us somehow deficient, all the while these ideologues never question their own deficiency when it comes to anything regarding the nuts and bolts of actual governance. This campaign has, among too many of Sanders’ followers, become something of a messianic cult, where the messiah is come and if you don’t get it you’re part of Team Devil. And, to a degree, the contempt that Sanders’ supporters have for anyone who disagrees with them—regardless of how rational the disagreement’s basis is—is mirrored, though more politely if still quite rudely, by the candidate himself.

Decoding the Debate

This contempt was on full display in the last Democratic debate, but has hardly been limited to just that stage.

AP Photo/Seth Wenig

Without a doubt, that latest Democratic debate in the Brooklyn Navy Yard (you can watch the full debate here) was the most spirited, eventful debate on the Democratic side yet: nasty, full of contrasts, and even with a few big surprises. But like all the other debates, in which Hillary Clinton had commanding leads in some sort of combination of delegates, votes, and polls, this debate once again featured a Bernie Sanders that needed to do something dramatic to alter the dynamics of the race to have even a prayer of a chance of winning the nomination, and, once again, that he failed to do.

It wasn’t for trying or lack of trying, but, as has often been the case with Sanders, the level of effort and level of strategic and tactical planning did not match each other. Both candidates were claiming that New York state was their home turf: Sanders, with his thick Brooklyn accent and his youth spent growing up in Brooklyn, and Clinton, with her service as a New York’s Senator from 2001-2009 and living in the state since those days up through the present day. Sanders made the calculation that perhaps he could afford to be, by far, his most aggressive and condescending yet to Clinton, perhaps feeling that NY would, in the end, prove to be more his home state than hers. He was snide, dismissive, and sarcastic; he laughed at her, mocked her, repeatedly used sarcasm; his body language and motions all evening were hostile, with him contorting his face constantly in expressions of derision and amusement while Clinton was talking (she, conversely, was often calm and stoic while he spoke) and literally pointing his finger at her incessantly, wagging and waving it at her invasively, raising it often while she was still talking, interrupting her, too (not that she did not interrupt him a few times as well). He was hypocritical in his modes of attack (her tiny amounts of fossil fuel industry contributions that her campaign and PACs received are, apparently, fair game, but not the small amount of high per-capita guns coming from Vermont into New York City; her votes should be viewed in black and white, his with respect to his environment and details). He even questioned her motives, again—what has been a staple of the Sanders campaign—implying that Clinton is a corrupt hack, bought and sold by her special interest donors, without actually directly leveling the accusation. Apart from interrupting Sanders, Clinton did none of these things. She stuck to a more elevated tone and to the issues, and did not question his motives for voting on gun issues the way he did with her even though he did not return the favor on other issues. 

Some would say because Bernie did not attack Hillary on the e-mail and  Benghazi issues that this is somehow him taking the high road, an example of his being exceptionally civil. I find that to be wholly unconvincing; unlike Republicans, Democrats do not see these issues as either terribly substantive or evidence that Clinton did something seriously wrong. Like most politicians, Sanders decided to attack Clinton where he could gain points for doing so; in a Democratic nomination contest with mainly Democrats voting, that was on issues of campaign contributions and super PACS, not on what Republicans were throwing at her. If anything, Bernie holding back on the e-mails and Benghazi is a just sign that Democratic voters would not have responded well to such attacks. Had he gone down that road, Bernie would have looked and sounded just like the desperate Republicans have if he had attacked her on those issues; it would have hurt Brand Bernie. So no, Bernie didn’t avoid those lines of attack out of charity and kindness; it was in his interests not to come off sounding like Republicans. When the topic resounds with the Democratic base, he has been happy to attack Clinton.

Conversely, I have not heard Clinton attack Bernie Sanders for broadcasting Sandinista propaganda in Burlington, for how he campaigned during the Vietnam War to reduce the American military to “local citizen militias and Coast Guard,” for how in 1980 he served as an elector in an obscure Trotskyist political party that called for “solidarity” with the Iranian Revolution even as its regime held Americans hostage, among other gems from Sanders’ past. And yet, you never hear Clinton being given credit for playing nice with Sanders, even though she clearly is, overall. The general approach for both seems to be that they attack each other from the left, not the right or with other tabloidy-stuff. And, as nasty as this race has gotten, the tone is astronomically more mature, substantive, and polite than the race on the Republican side. 

Of course, as the front-runner, it makes sense that Clinton would not come out swinging the way Bernie did, who was far behind and had to make up a huge gap. That is politics, and Sanders, lest we forget, is still a politician, much like Clinton. Neither has been a saint, but Sanders campaigns on being one while Clinton never has. So attack her he does, and often not fairly, often by insinuation, often indirectly, and often letting his surrogates and supporters do the dirty work, whom he often fails to restrain. That has not been much of a high road for those who have been playing close attention, although this has largely escaped scrutiny because of the outlandish conduct on the Republican side that has made it seem tame in comparison.

And in the debate, happy to attack her he was; Bernie clearly felt comfortable not holding back much against her. 

This calculation, in the end, would prove to be disastrously wrong.

In Bernie’s opening statement, he noted how far behind Clinton he was at the beginning of the race, and attributed how close it was to what claimed was the “radical” move of “telling the American people the truth” (the clear implication is the Clinton is not).

As usual, Sanders attacked Clinton for the support that she and organizations that support her received from special interests, including Wall St.

Sanders’ first big stumble was in saying he didn’t think the government should break up the banks, that the banks should break themselves up, a thoroughly unconvincing response from a man who has made the big banks one of America’s great public enemies in his campaign.  The second came right after, when he could not name a single instance of when Clinton’s money she received from Wall St. influenced a specific decision of hers when she was in power in the Senate. He followed up with his inability to do this with a salvo of nasty sarcasm belittling her speaking out against the big banks, noticing mockingly and acerbically that the bankers “must have been crushed by this.”

One line of attack that I thought was particularly unfair was Sanders’ minimum wage cheap shot swipe against Clinton. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. I will point out that from 1998, when I had my first job one summer while I was in high school, through mid-2013, the vast majority of the jobs I had and the vast majority of the hours I worked were at or near the minimum wage ($7.25-$8.25 an hour). Much of this was in the retail industry while I was in school or trying to transition to something better suited to my background and skills. So I know what it’s like to work a minimum wage job more than many Americans, and I care about this issue a lot. Hillary Clinton wants to raise the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour, a huge increase of over 65%. She further thinks that in many localities, like New York City, $15 makes more sense, and she has supported such efforts at the state and local levels to make the minimum wage $15. The thing is, Clinton and many experts recognize that a one-size-fits-all minimum wage is not a good solution for the country as a whole; the cost of living in Northern Virginia, New York City, Los Angeles, and Boston, among other places, is dramatically higher than in most other parts of the country, particularly rural areas and small towns. A $15 minimum wage in the near future would be very difficult for many small businesses outside of major U.S. metropolitan areas to handle or afford. Clinton’s nuanced approach is very much called for, Sanders’ oversimplistic approach (as is often his type of approach to many issues) is not and would harm the economy in many parts of America. For Sanders to try to portray Clinton as if she is somehow against American workers, as if she has not fought for a $15 minimum wage in important instances, and to attack her so strongly on this issue, to me does not seem fair. Sanders’ calling for a nearly 107%, unrealistic increase in the minimum wage across-the-board, period, and to attack Clinton’s over 65% increase—still a major, historic increase—is attacking someone who is still fighting hard on an important issue to most Democrats, just in a different way than Sanders, and seems to be splitting hairs on an issue where they are far closer than they are apart. I would also add that it is telling that Sanders wants to discuss who wants the higher federal minimum wage instead of actually discussing the actual policy itself and the differences between $12 in a rural area and $15 in NYC, between federal efforts and state and local efforts. Sanders should, if his mantras are to be believed, be better than hyperinflating such differences. 

One could be tempted to say the same for Clinton on Sanders with, say, guns, except that she is generally responding to attacks from Team Sanders that have been going on for months. If he is going have some major attacks that focus on minor differences, it is entirely reasonable that Clinton respond in kind. Further, I would argue that their differences in guns are more substantive than their differences on the minimum wage

Bernie, as was his usual response to the issue of gun violence, noted that he had a rating grade of a D- from the NRA. Hillary was very effective in attacking his votes that were in line with the interests of the NRA (for these he had a nuanced explanation, but for all the issues with Clinton where her votes are questionable, it’s black and white to him!), but she should have mentioned that her grade is an F, and while that might not seem like a big deal to some, Sanders voting against the Brady Bill five times and for shielding gun manufacturers from liability are not insignificant differences; they are differences that may very well account for lives lost and lives saved, and certainly account for the different grades they have received from the NRA and for why Clinton’s grade was lower than Sanders; even in the NRA’s view, Sanders did not do everything he could to restrict guns; in its view, Clinton did; otherwise, both candidates would have received and F. And, while only a tiny number of the overall traced guns from crime scenes in New York came from Vermont, Clinton is still absolutely right that Vermont had more guns per capita showing up in New York crime scenes than any other state, so using that statistic to point out that that laxer gun laws in Vermont have had negative consequences for New York—an effect outsized for its tiny population—is fair game when discussing gun policy in general before the New York state primary, since both Sanders and Vermont have been less tough on guns than Clinton and New York.

Israel, Palestine, and the Politics of Political Theater

The one moment where I was by far the most impressed by Sanders was when he was bold in speaking out on the plight of the Palestinian people. I have written numerous pieces in which I have been extremely critical of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians, of its tactics and strategy, of its occupation, of Netanyahu.  I agree with Sanders 100% that, overall, the military intervention in Gaza in the summer of 2014 was disproportionate. A part of me was disappointed that Clinton did not express some of the same sentiments time in her recent AIPAC speech that Sanders has expressed, but at the same time, Sanders did not make the comments in question to AIPAC, which he skipped and which would certainly have been hostile to his message, and made the comments instead in an interview with the New York Daily News. Rather, Hillary (understandably if not admirably) tailored her message in a close race with Sanders, where even some polls in NY had them close, and, while not denying Sanders’ points, certainly avoided discussing them at all in favor winning over America’s Jewish political establishment in what has been a difficult primary (with NY state voting soon after this speech, NY being home to a huge portion of America’s Jews and, therefore, the world’s) and looks to be a difficult general election, one in which Republicans will try to make Democrats and Clinton look weak in terms of support for Israel. Sanders, as an American Jew and as many Jews do, may feel freer to criticize Israel than Americans who are non-Jews. Sanders also made the aforementioned comments to the New York Daily News as someone whose chances of ever being president were very slim; months from now, when Sanders is not the nominee or the president, he will face little scrutiny, and pay few penalties, for uttering them. Yet, if Hillary Clinton had said these things the way Sanders had said them, she could very well pay a price in November in a close race with Trump, or even once in the White House as she seeks to engage Israel and win reelection.

I can’t fault Hillary for not taking a big political risk on publicly speaking out for Palestinians the way Sanders has, though I would have preferred that her AIPAC address contained more lines addressing the plight of the Palestinians. Playing her cards closer to her chest is more than warranted in this instance, and I take far more comfort in Clinton’s actions over her long career rather than ascribe much to her statements made on the campaign trail when it comes to demonstrating fairness to both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She came out for a Palestinian state as First Lady, before her husband, and when she was Secretary of State, she repeatedly criticized Israel and Netanyahu for their treatment of Palestinians and settlement expansion, both privately and publicly.

As admirable, then, as Sanders’ speaking on the plight of the Palestinians was, it also demonstrated how politically unsavvy he is.  And political savviness is a crucial trait that one trying to run the American political system and run one of its two major political parties must possess. Sanders was even forced to suspend his Jewish outreach coordinator after it was discovered just days before the NY primary that she had posted some very pointed criticism of Netanyahu, utilizing offensive language, on social media. It is entirely possible, even probable, that Sanders comments and the story of his outreach staffer may have cost him some Jewish support in NY; Clinton did, after all, outperform the final polling that was conducted in the state, and Sanders underperformed. If she campaigned strongly right now during the election for Palestinians rights, it might cost her votes in a crucial state like Florida, and if she lost the election, she would also lose her ability to push for those very rights even as she spoke for them on the campaign trail. Sure, she slyly dodged the issue at AIPAC and the debate, but doing so was simply smart if not admirable politics (the former often more effective than the latter in terms of public discourse), and her record shows that there is little reason to believe she won’t stick up for Palestinians while still vigorously defending Israel’s right to defend itself.

If only politics were as simple as simply saying what you think, directly, all the time, consequences be damned, then Bernie’s style would make sense. But it’s far more complicated. Sometimes politics involves holding your tongue, playing your cards close to your chests, not saying everything you believe, tailoring your message, waiting for the right time. People who support Bernie like him for generally doing none of these; even some people who don’t support him like him for the same reason. 

But politics is often a dance, a game, kabuki theater; in Bernie’s world, most people agree with him (the silent masses!), and if you just mobilize their support, presto! That’s how you get change done, that’s how you transform America from a plutocracy to one of shared socialist values.  And that is what Sanders and his supporters believe.

Except it’s never that simple, that is not the real world, that is not the real America. 

The bottom line is that such an approach has not made him a winner in this race (it was clear since Nevada he would not win, clearer since Super Tuesday I, and now only painfully, obviously clear to all but his most die-hard, delusional partisans). But even before this presidential campaign, his approach has only led him to pass one—just one—of his own bills in twenty-five years in Congress to Clinton’s ten bills in eight years. His mentality and worldview have not made him an effective legislator; relative to Sanders, Clinton was a very and far more effective legislator. Sanders might not realize this as deeply as he should, but there is a hell of a lot more to politics than simply standing up and saying what you believe. Millions of people in the streets may sound nice, but that is not how any major change came about in America, certainly not without numbers and leadership in Congress to back up such forces. As Sanders’ candidacy has proven beyond a doubt, filling tens of thousands of people in a park, street, or stadium is hardly representative of the level of support a candidate has: Sanders drew a remarkable 27,000 people to a rally in Washington Square in Manhattan about a week before the New York primary, yet lost 42% to 58% to Clinton, by about 300,000 votes.

Truce, Peace, or an Alliance with Sanders and Sandernistas?

I know I’ve been hard on Sanders, and his followers. I just don’t have much patience for “movements” that are clearly doomed from the start, that at best, succeed only in highlighting a few issues a bit more than usual, but that most often simply succeed in inflaming the passions of a minority of millions, filling their heads with unrealistic expectations, causing their hearts to swell with hope, a hope that will only be crushed and let down, feeding a roller coaster of emotions that crests mightily, continues to crest well-after all reason has warned them this will not end the way they envision, and inevitably leads to disappointment in one way or another. The Sanders “movement” is but one of many of such “movements,” and whether or not it is generally forgotten and just a minor blip on the political radar, has less to do with Sanders himself and more to do with whether his adherents buy into the two-party system, make their peace with reality, and start to work on their causes as active, registered members of the Democratic Party, bolstering it during mid-terms (when it has recently suffered losses), and thereby earning a seat at the table and a right to help steer the course of the Party, having put in their time, having voted with Democrats for repeated election cycles, have been there to withstand the onslaught or organized Republicans. Because what is perhaps most offensive to me about the typical Sandernista, besides the gleeful and inaccurate denigration of Hillary Rodham Clinton, is the sense of entitlement that most Bernie Sanders supporters—most of them non-(registered)-Democrats, independents, unaffiliateds, who are and have been supporting third-parties, whose inaction or misdirected action has been as responsible for the Tea Party takeover of Congress and the election of George W. Bush in 2000 as any other single group of people—feel that they automatically have the right to participate, take over, and lead the Democratic Party for which they have long held disdain and have not fought for over the years. 

Sorry, but you haven’t been with us, you haven’t supported us, not enough. If you get to take part in an open or mixed primary, good for you, welcome to the action, but this is rightfully at the discretion of state parties, and the state parties that say “Democrats only for the Democratic primary” are perfectly within rationality and their legal and political rights to make their contests closed to non-Democrats. Nothing entitles you to have power in my party, not when you’re not a member, not when you haven’t been there fighting on our side. 

Sure, we appreciate the level of enthusiasm you have displayed; now, let’s see if you have the patience and maturity to stay engaged over time and apply that enthusiasm to actually making a difference. Simply latching onto a single candidate in a single election cycle that you think will change everything is not only foolish, but is the lazy, easy way out, when far more is required of you as a citizen over far longer a period of time than months or one year. I could have—and did—say many of the same things about Obama supporters in 2008; we got a fine president in Obama, to be sure; but the “hope and change” he campaigned on in that election, the transformative persona that so many of his supporters believed in, turned out to be a big disappointment, to no surprise to me. And yet with Obama, even if that more emotional aspect of his appeal never came to fruition, we had a candidate and a president who at heart was also a deep, substantive thinker, and thus disaster was averted and a pretty decent presidency emerged where “hope and change” failed. I was able to proudly cast my vote for him in November, both in 2008 and 2012. Bernie Sanders, as he has amply demonstrated time and time again, in interview after interview (most clearly in the now infamous New York Daily News interview), is not a man of substance, is not a deep thinker. It would have been with a large sense of unease if I had to vote for him in November in order to prevent Trump from winning the White House.

So no, I will not apologize for not respecting your movement, for not respecting your candidate, for not respecting the awful way you and he have treated the remarkable if imperfect woman who will be our standard bearer this fall. I was right to declare war on you when you and your candidate were out of hand and going to far.

But now I offer an olive branch: I offer a truce if you reign in your atrocious attacks on her, if Sanders is careful to encourage you to do the same, if Sanders stops allowing crowds to loudly boo Hillary at his rallies, if he himself reigns in his attacks on Clinton and focuses primarily on the issues for which he has been such a vocal and passionate advocate, then I happily offer a truce. I offer peace if you vote for Hillary in the fall, and do your part to stop a Trump and Republican takeover of the government. And I offer an alliance if you will register as a Democrat, be there election after election including midterms, stick with the Party and try to slowly change it from within, and maturely note as adults that, like in any relationship, there will be times that the Democratic Party will disappoint you, and such are no times to childishly storm off and say “I’m through.” 

Believe me, I understand being frustrated with the Party; I thought a few times about leaving myself, so full of disappointed was I. But that is no way to help the party, to change it over time, to make a difference. And the sidelines are no place to be for anyone who claims to care about politics, their countrymen, their nation, is not place for doers; the sidelines are for the narcissists, the delusional, the selfish, the self-indulgent, the noisemakers. And it’s not about me, about whether or not I respect you or vice versa, about any personal anger you may or may not feel in reading this or any of my other pieces, comments, or tweets, or those of anyone else; it’s about whether or not Bernie Sanders supporters are mature enough to become part of the solution—swallowing some bitter pills, compromising, even putting up with some things and policies they don’t like (gasp!) in the interest of the greater good—rather than being part of the problem.

There will be no revolution, no unicorns. Just the same type of political warfare we’ve had for generations. You have two sides; you don’t have to love one or both, but you either pick the one that is closest to you on the issues and help it move policy and itself in the better direction on those issues, or you are irrelevant at best, or empowering the side that moves policy in the worse direction on the issues at worst. This is reality. Declaring war no reality has not worked out well for you or the Sanders campaign. But history will judge you if you declare war on reality, if you aren’t part of the solution, of the real fight for real change.

Bernie Sanders is a passionate, exceptional advocate for the small number yet incredibly important types of issues he has chosen to take up, and he has drawn in millions of people who, together with him, can make a difference if they are willing to dance. They don’t get to dance on their terms; newcomers seldom do, and if they try to dance on their terms, they will dance alone, in a void, with no music. And even someone like Hillary Clinton is very constrained by both the realities of the political system and the American electorate. Operating within those constraints, and knowing how to do so, is the key to success in politics. And Clinton has understood this from her days as an undergraduate; even then she pushed against the Saul Alinksy tactic for disruption, and passionately knew that the best way to affect change in a messy system was to take responsibility for that system by working to change it from within, something Clinton has done ever since her days as an undergraduate at Wellesley, as this must-read article notes. 

This is the difference between her and Sanders, the realist and the fantasist.

Sure, it would be wonderful to destroy what we don’t like about the system by simply willing and haranguing it away. But that does not happen in reality, revolutions are incredibly rare, successful ones even rarer, non-violent ones that are successful even rarer than that. 

Sanders and his supporters never had more of a chance than hope and prayer; it is now time for responsible citizens to come together and to stop dreaming of a longshot Hail Mary, to not to make demands on a front-runner who will have more than enough delegates to seal the nomination, but to roll up their sleeves, and to get ready for the long-hard work of bringing about real change, to not bank an entire critical election against a terrifying opponent and the fate of a nation to hope and a prayer, but to bet more solidly on thought-out plans of workable change within the constraints of present reality and to back a candidate with an actual record of bringing about change by working practically within the system.

To be fair to Sanders, he and his wife Jane have signaled and begun to demonstrate over the last few days that the campaign will be toning down its attacks on Clinton and that they have no plans to play a “spoiler” role or run as a third party. This is both a welcome and a necessary step, if overdue. If this is indeed what they are doing, this is great news for all of us.

Join Us and Vote Democratic in the Fall

George Takei/Facebook

I know many of you Sanders supporters are angry and bitter. But that’s life. I was angry and bitter in 2008 when Clinton lost to Obama, but I came around to support Obama by November; Clinton lost and I did not feel she was entitled to make any major demands. I was also bitter and angry when Kerry and Gore lost in 2004 and 2000, respectively. But I didn’t give up. 

George Takei’s recent eloquent plea to unite for this fall election, to #VoteBlueNoMatterWho, should not go unheeded. We are defined just as much by what we do in defeat as what we do in victory. Sore losers and sore winners are both noxious forces. Yet as a Hillary Clinton supporter, I don’t feel like we’ve won anything yet. It’s all about November. And it’s been clear since the last Republican debate that the Republicans will not be nearly as big a mess as liberals were hoping they would be, as I have noted before, and the conventional wisdom that the Republican Party will deny Trump the nomination if it comes to a contested convention, thereby leading to a Republican meltdown and schism and the Party’s destruction, is misleading, as I have also noted before. In other words, Democrats will face an organized and tough foe in the fall, one led by Trump, who has an unprecedented ability to play the media in his favor. Unless Trump and the Republicans are kept out of the White House, their hands kept far away from Supreme Court nominations, we will all have lost. Like it or not, you’re stuck with Clinton if you’re on the left. But it’s up to all of us to make sure we aren’t stuck with Trump and the Republican Party that produced and empowered his rise over many years of anti-intellectualism, nativism, hatred of government, of division. Love or hate Hillary, she is against all of these things. So the choice in November is no choice at all. Are you with me? Are you with her? Are you with us? Or will you help them, even by inaction or misdirected action?

I’m with her. And you should be too, Sandernistas. And who knows, once you see what she can do in power, maybe you will actually like her. Even if you never like her, you still have a part to play if you want to be a responsible citizen in stopping the Republicans and Donald Trump. It’s up to you to convince your most die-hard compatriots that Clinton is better than Trump and worth supporting against him.  Get to it!

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Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse January 18, 2016   

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) January 18th, 2016

Evan Vucci – Pool/Getty Images

AMMAN — President Barack  Obama began his final State of the Union speech by speaking undeniable facts about the strength of the economy, later followed by undeniable facts about the security threats from terrorism: how bad they were, and how bad they were not, with a caution against fear and bigotry, in addition to discussing other issues.  These are facts that most Republican candidates want to ignore or deny.  In fact, Obama sounded like a reasonable man asking for reasonable things.  Not, generally, pie in the sky idealism, not calls for the improbable but just the doable.  He busted myth after myth, from the economy to climate change to immigration to foreign policy.  He mentioned smart, sensible, non-extremist goals and strategies on domestic and foreign policy. The rational man calling for rational things was a sad picture, though, too: he was addressing a Congressional body that has been anything but rational since the advent of the Tea Party.  Thus, there is a tragic quality to the scene of such a rational man addressing a multitude consisting of mainly the irrational.

There were many bittersweet things about watching Obama’s final State of the Union speech.  Actually, that’s an understatement because there were many bittersweet feelings as I was watching this man, my president, for whom I had voted twice, give his final address to Congress as outlined in Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution.  This meant that my reactions went from being proud and pleased to being disappointed and frustrated.  But even for his faults, very humanely put on display last night, I could not help but like, admire, and respect this great man as I saw and heard him speak.

No matter how frustrated I am with President Obama, his greatest traits always shine through.  Let’s go through them in detail, as displayed in this final State of the Union speech:

THE GOOD

Charles Dharapak/AP

1.) The sheer force of his vast intellect and his willingness to use it

Acclaim Images

Even if you absolutely hate Obama and are a rabid Trump supporter, it is impossible to deny that this man has a brilliant mind.  You might disagree with how he uses it, you might think his understanding of the world is naïve and childish and flat-out-wrong, but the man is unabashedly a thinker and is clearly a man who thinks through things deeply, who is very articulate and well read, and who clearly was not out of place intellectually at Harvard Law School, where he stood out among one of the highest concentrations of brilliant and ambitious minds in the world. 

This is a man who got to see much of the world at an early age and became wiser for his experiences abroad, who clearly displays both a boundless intellectual curiosity and strong tendency to spend time deliberating over problems rather than carelessly rolling dice and jumping into situations impulsively with the feeling of some sort of grand divine wind at his back, markedly unlike his predecessor.  After overdosing on a wanna-be “cowboy” (whatever that means) who thinks that John Wayne is an acceptable source for political philosophy, I was perhaps always and foremost grateful for this aspect of President Obama after eight years of George W. Bush.  I knew that Obama was a man who would spend time thinking over issues and was smart and worldly enough to make his own decisions based on his own understanding, not just rely on personal relationships and trust to make decisions based mainly on who were better advocates of their own agendas because of a Bush-esque lack of a command of the issues.  Like Lincoln, Obama had many smart people around him, his own team of rivals, and more often than not he played them and their disagreements against each other to get the best advice and then make his own decision with their input.  Bush, on the other hand, was a victim of his own team’s rivalries, and lacked the knowledge and judgment to realize when his closest, most trusted people were flat out wrong until it was far too late. 

If anything, Obama moved the pendulum too far into the deliberative mode at the expense of action some of the time, but, frankly, this is exactly what the American voters as a whole decided they wanted after George W. Bush: they would rather have their leader overthink than underthink, rather not act after the “decisive” impulsive blunders of Bush lead to national disasters unprecedented in modern history than act too rashly.  We’d had enough of “the decider” and his “decision points;” in many ways, the image of our president being Rodin’s The Thinker was a comforting one, and an image we badly needed to send to the world at the time.  His general policy—“Don’t do stupid shit”—may not be perfect but it was just what we wanted (and in many ways needed) after what many consider to be a “lost” decade of recklessness and missed opportunities.  To be fair to Obama, while I would argue that there are some big moments when he should have acted more and thought less, I am willing to admit that I respect the fact that he respected the fact that out power is not limitless and that our capacity for error and for the possibility of unintended consequences were rational reasons not to do more. 

His thoughtful, deliberative State of the Union certainly reminded us that we had a thoughtful, deliberative president.

2.) A superb understanding of the problems of America and the world

AP Photo/Jacky Naegelen, pool

I’ve studied politics, international relations, foreign affairs, conflict, and policy for over fifteen years now.  Most Americans have not.  That places a gulf between most of them and me, the same way an electrical engineer, surgeon, or mandarin speaker who each studied their crafts for over fifteen years would put a vast gulf between themselves and me on those subjects.  It therefore gives me great comfort to see, in Obama, someone who thinks like me: he looks at a problem, studies it, and then uses that info to figure out what needs to be done.  There is not a tremendous amount of ideology in this approach, save aversions to cynicism, selling people out, and acting on emotion.  He knows how to look at the world and he understands it in the general sense of the way I do.  He understands that complex problems do not usually have simple solutions and that reducing things to “good” and “evil” is not usually a productive way to problem solve.  He is also culturally sensitive and has a knack for speaking to people on their terms, not his or ours (that, my friends, is how you reach people).  With Obama, I never had to worry about some sort of irrational, emotional, born-again, religious-driven approach to public policy and political problems.  Regardless of how effective he was as a leader, knowing that Obama could see problems, America, and the world clearly and appreciate that strategy and tactics, speech and deeds, are different things, gave me great comfort.

That in his speech he put a proper perspective on things like terrorism and immigration, where so much misinformation, emotion, and irrationality are omnipresent, was fitting and characteristic of Obama indeed.

3.) Cool, calm, and collected

Buzzfeed video

Another thing I love about Obama is that that man has self-control and knows that getting worked up, and working people up, is often part of the problem in Washington.  He can be relaxed and actually crack some good jokes while being cool and professional.  I appreciated that he made decisions based on a cold analysis, not raw emotions.  The man generally keeps his composure in a way far too many politicians now, especially Tea Partiers, routinely fail to do.  Sure, sometimes people wanted him to be more emotional, but are we that childish that we need our leader to explicitly and loudly express whatever emotions we are feeling at the moment?  Sometimes, I think Republicans think being president is like being a high school football coach (no wonder the areas where high school football is so popular tend to vote Republican).  Obama knows that a cool delivery is all the more effective: Republicans freaked out when Obama didn’t start screaming and bombing in response to Putin’s moves in Ukraine, but Obama fairly quietly implemented sanctions that have helped to cripple Russia’s economy; that’s some Darth Vader stuff, with Obama practically Force-choking Putin economically.  That’s pretty badass in a leader. 

Obama always carried himself with grace and dignity, not with goofiness and shooting-from-the-hip eye-roll-inducing gaffes.  After Bush, Obama felt a bit like James Bond, and that was refreshing.  Yes, sometimes he would tear up when talking about murdered children, sometime he would channel the great African-American rhetorical tradition to communicate in a different style than his normal approach, but Obama was usually one cool customer in an era where the rhetoric has increasingly become hyperbolic and extreme.  Often, those making the most noise and spewing the most venom were quick to blame Obama for the partisanship, but just listening to Obama and taking in his delivery, it was clear they had no one to blame but themselves for the tone and partisanship of the era. 

Throughout most of the last seven years, at the very least the President of the United States did his best to personally set an example of a tone that was respectful and measured, grounded and cordial relative to what was devolving around him.  That he kept his cool so well in these trying times was a credit to him and his presidency, showing that it was possible to operate a measured, mature approach.  And often (see the Benghazi hearing with Clinton) but not always, he laid down an example that his party followed much more often that the Republicans did.

4.) Obama’s likability

Admit it: Obama is just likable.  He’s obviously super smart but also has a common touch, able to talk sports or music and crack a good joke while he is out and about. He smiles a lot (and what a killer smile) and can speak and appeal to people of all kinds of diverse backgrounds.  The man can also sing, whether it’s Al Green or “Amazing Grace.”  He is relaxed, and easy to talk to, and thrives in town-hall style meetings. In fact, the second town-hall-style debate against Romney was the moment for many when Obama successfully fended off Romney’s candidacy.  It’s not bad to have a cool president that people at home and around the world actually like and can identify with when he travels around the world.  Heck, even some Republicans admit that Obama is a likable guy.  This quality of his was very much on display as he delivered his final State of the Union speech, which he even opened with a joke about the 2016 presidential race.

5.) Obama’s idealism

Shepard Fairey

Soon, I will be brutally honest about Obama’s idealism’s limitations and its downside, but, to be fair, I must also acknowledge its positives.  Many Americans find themselves cynical and jaded (myself among them); some are so desperate to find change that they flock to dangerously naïve, inexperienced, and unprepared candidates, or to those who have virtually no shot at winning a general election.  To have our head of state not give into this cynicism and to be constantly promoting a lofty idealism, and at least show the American public and the world that even if we have given up on each other and ourselves that our leader has not, is not insignificant.  Even if they seem distant, the visions of America, its people, and its politics that Obama keeps dangling in front of us that at least remind us what is, theoretically at least, possible, even if not this year or even soon.  And it is important for us to hear these things.  Obama keeps confidently projecting that our best days are ahead of us, and, in spite of all the problems we face, he may be right.  One thing Obama that deserves credit for understanding is that if Americans don’t believe we have better days ahead, that makes it that much more difficult bring about a more positive reality.  Even if Obama has failed to convince many of this, you sure can’t blame him for trying. 

Obama also knows how essential it is that the Democrats and Republicans work together to pass legislation to solve America’s problems, even if Republicans in Congress are not very interested in working with him or Democrats at all.  That Obama tried, and tried hard, to reach out to Republicans—for example: helping to incorporate many conservative, Republican-originated ideas into the Affordable Car Act (ACA)—is something else which for which he is to be commended to a degree, at least in principle.  Even in his final State of the Union, Obama pleaded not only with politicians but with the American people to work together for the common good with passion and eloquence, laying a vision of the future that should be a common aspiration for all Americans.

Having just gone over what I will miss most about Obama, using his speech to illustrate these points, now, I will go over what I find most frustrating about him, using the same speech.

THE BAD

AP

1.) Obama’s idealism

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

Yes, we have some overlaps here: one of Obama’s greatest strengths is perhaps also his greatest weakness.  Obama came into office ready to hold hands with Republicans, take their ideas into account and include them in his programs, ready to sit down at the table with them and discuss, discuss, and discuss… He expected reasoned and prevailed argument to prevail.  His expectations were lofty indeed, and reality never came close to them.  As I noted, to a degree this is admirable.  But pretty early on—in fact, even before he assumed office—it was clear that a dark undercurrent of America’s polity, harnessing racism, ignorance, fear, demagoguery, regionalism, and obstructionism at some of its worst manifestations since the Civil Rights Era—was coming to take corporeal form; it was clear when only three Republican senators and zero Republican representatives voted for the stimulus package, but the form of this dark undercurrent was most visibly demonstrated in the gestation of the Tea Party in the season of the great “debate” over health care reform.  In many places in the country, mobs shouted down congressman attempting to defend or discuss the Administration’s attempts at healthcare reform during town hall meetings with their constituents.  The Democrats’ plan advocated by Obama incorporated several significant conservative and Republican-originated ideas, and gave up on some long-held liberal dreams like a public-option or a single-payer system, but this made no difference to congressional Republicans in the end and got him not one single Republican vote for the Affordable Care Act.  Basically, Obama began negotiations with major compromises, intended as an olive branch to win over Republican goodwill, but seeking that goodwill proved to be a fool’s errand as, in the end, the Republicans were only interested in obstruction or sabotage.  This meant that Obama began from a weakened bargaining position, having already offered compromises publicly to a hardened and intransigent Republican Party that had no interest cooperating with Obama whatsoever. 

Yes, it made sense for him to try to work with Republicans, but not long after it was clear they would not work with him, he should have gone into combat mode.  Instead, he kept trying to earn their support long after it was clear it was not coming.  What was most unforgivable is that Obama continued this style of “leadership” well after the lessons of the stimulus and ACA, for years, even into his second term, and this resulted in Obama being repeatedly outplayed on budget deals, to the frustration of his own party; through this approach, Obama also unwittingly helped to legitimize threatening both government shutdowns and not voting to raise the debt ceiling as legitimate hostage-taking-style tactics for Republican extremists because he rewarded such threats, while his own efforts at bipartisanship have gone largely unrewarded.  It was hard for me not to laugh out loud when Obama suggested in his speech that even now Republicans and Democrats could work together to pass meaningful legislation…

In his speech he also seemed to think that somehow the American people will improve the tone and tenor of our politics, which seem terribly naïve, given that we ourselves are becoming increasingly more partisan and that we are the ones who have been electing increasingly partisan people to office who are reflecting the pressures that we are placing upon them.

Sadly, the same idealism that made him such an attractive candidate and helped propel him into the White House was one of his largest constraints while he was in office.  Even as he appealed to our idealism in his final State of the Union, for many, including his supporters, the limits of his idealism and the problems it caused were only too painfully obvious.

2.) Obama’s disdain of politics, or, Obama the professor vs. Obama the president

Obama campaign

There are times when I wonder if Obama knows the difference between lectures and leadership, being a professor and being a president.  This State of the Union speech, sadly, was one of those times.

I will admit, I kind of felt stupid when I was watching the speech.  When Obama started talking about how much our system needed to change, when he mentioned redistricting (which I have identified as one of the major problems facing our democratic republic), I thought for the briefest of seconds that he was going to say advocate constitutional amendments to address redistricting and money in politics (Hillary Clinton has been advocating a constitutional amendment to help address campaign finance for some time).  Barring some sort of major disaster/attack, this is the last time Obama will command the attention of this large a number of Americans, so I thought he might, I don’t know, be bold.  That he would call for a constitutional amendment, that he would announce a plan to mobilize activists to lobby state legislatures and congressmen and that he would tour the country to drum up support and force the issue just in time for the election.  But that’s kind of a lie; I knew deep down that this is what I wanted, that this is what I wished, but that this was not on Obama’s nature or character.  This was classic Obama, giving a lecture to university students: “Ok class, today I’m going to lay out what the problems are, and discuss what needs to be done to solve those problems.”  And, much like a professor, Obama does both these things excellently.  But then the lecture is up, like all situations with all professors and all classes, nothing happens after class.  Like a professor, he steps away from the podium as if it is not his role to take a commanding lead and tell us step-by-step what his plan is and how he will take us all forward, how he will overcome obstacles, how he will get things done.  Like a professor, he look at the presidency in a pure, academic form, where the Constitution does not call for the president to campaign for his party and its agenda.  Thus ends theory, but in practice the party of the president very much relies the president to be its campaigner in chief.  But Obama, with his clear disdain of politics, shunned this role, tried to remain aloof and apart from the party politics.  In fact, he did this to such a degree that members of his own party angrily complainedthat he was not helping them enough in their reelection campaigns, a traditional if informal part of the modern presidency.  In general, Obama stayed out of the trenches and preferred to delegate lobbying Congress to his vice president, Joe Biden.

Even on his greatest domestic policy accomplishment—The Affordable Care Act—this is more than amply demonstrated.  Obama the professor campaigned on the broad outcomes we needed in healthcare reform.  Obama the professor then let Congress and the American people debate for months about what a plan would and would not look like, let congressional democrats take the lead in crafting a plan.  Obama the professor even held an academic-conference-like summit with Congressional Republicans and Democrats (it accomplished nothing: note the lack of similar summits after this one).  At no point did he simply say “Here is the plan my team and I have come up with” and pressured his own party like hell to pass it when Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate.  Obama the professor preferred to stay aloof and above the politics as much as possible, Obama the professor viewed a clear line between Congress and the Presidency when it came to legislation, preferring to let Congress, not his team, write the bill.  Obama never made any public attempt to advocate for single-payer or a public option, and the Affordable Care Act was significantly weaker and less impressive than it could have been, starting from a position already offering compromise and hanging in the air for months while the President stayed on the sidelines and during which public opinion, exposed to unified Republican distortions and misinformation without President Obama leading Democrats with a vigorous counternarrative, soured on the bill.  The end result reflects all these tactical and strategic mistakes by the Obama Administration, and even for all its accomplishments, the ACA fell far short of what it could have been. Thus, in the end, ACA/Obamacare was far less than the outcomes Obama had campaigned for, but having delegated the task of crafting the solution to lesser men, the result is hardly surprising. 

This was how Obama acted when it came to his signature piece of domestic legislation, so I must have been crazy if I thought Obama was going to help lead and guide an attempt at a constitutional amendment overturning the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

Even now, I want to scream at Obama, “You have time!  Pick one big thing and just throw yourself into it, be relentless, tour the country, lobby individual Congressman, president like your time presidenting is almost over, because it is almost over!”  But it would be useless.  And this is probably the most vexing thing for me when it comes to Obama, something I will never understand.  What happened to the “fierce urgency of now???”  It sure could have been fiercer.  And with a gifted politician like Obama in the vanguard… well, the tantalizing thoughts of lost possibilities, especially in the crucial first few years, especially when there was a chance to dent the impact of the Tea Party, are heartbreaking to consider…

This last Obama State of the Union speech was Obama at his best, but also his worst.  It was Obama being Obama.

*****

THE LEGACY

How, then, in the end, will Obama be remembered?  Perhaps, not altogether fairly, he will be remembered primarily as America’s first non-white and first black president (even though he is half white!).  This is an extremely symbolic thing and yet the making it happen was quite a thing of substance.  Yet this has nothing to do with the man’s accomplishments once in office: digging America out of the colossal economic ditch it was thrown into by the Bush Administration, first with the continuation and implementation of TARP and then Obama’s implementation of the stimulus, putting America on a slow but steady path to recovery; making America the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world and greatly reducing America’s dependence on foreign energy while also dramatically increasing America’s use of renewable energy; singing into law the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), the greatest piece of domestic legislation and step forward for the American healthcare system since the Civil and Voting Rights Acts and the creation of Medicare and Medicaid under Lyndon Jonson in the 1960s; appointing two competent, fine women judges to the Supreme Court; bringing Osama bin Laden to justice; ending the U.S. occupation of Iraq responsibly; and achieving major diplomatic breakthroughs with both Iran and Cuba, achieving a nuclear agreement with the latter that should prevent a war between Iran and the West for many years to come and perhaps far beyond that.

The White House

Yes, Obama could have achieved so much more, could have fought harder and led more boldly, and it is a tragedy that he was unable to use the office of president more effectively.  But it was the better angel of his nature—his desire to bring Republicans and Democrats together, to work in a bipartisan manner, to transcend party politics—that often led to his greatest frustrations, that led to his domestic power and accomplishments being very little for the last five years of his presidency after his initial two had accomplished so much.  But his failures came from a place a good intentions in a way that is somewhat admirable, and, in the end, the balance sheet of history will show that his failures will not drown out his accomplishments and that he will be viewed positively by historians, at the very least a pretty good president presiding over extraordinarily difficult times, even if he will never be regarded as great.  Especially coming after the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush, Americans of all stripes should be grateful for his presidency; of course, the reality is that many of them will never realize this, let alone admit it, but history will vindicate him, if not the quality of American politics that took hold during his tenure, though that deterioration occurred in spite of his best efforts, not because of them.

SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

I’ll miss him, even as I hope the next president is better.

Getty Images

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse January 18, 2016   

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) January 18th, 2016

AMMAN — Right away, this latest Republican debate started on a ridiculous note, a note it sustained throughout the entirety of its proceedings.  Moderator Maria Bartiromo asked Ted Cruz—now in second place behind perpetual front-runner Donald Trump—a question about jobs; instead, he began by answering with a monologue about ten U.S. sailors that it was reported were being detained by Iran at the time; stating that:

“Today, many of us picked up our newspapers, and we were horrified to see the sight of 10 American sailors on their knees, with their hands on their heads.  In that State of the Union, President Obama didn’t so much as mention the 10 sailors that had been captured by Iran. President Obama’s preparing to send $100 billion or more to the Ayatollah Khamenei. And I’ll tell you, it was heartbreaking.  But the good news is the next commander-in-chief is standing on this stage.”  (That remains to be seen, Ted)

Cruz then made a meaningless and ludicrous pledge: “And I give you my word, if I am elected president, no service man or service woman will be forced to be on their knees, and any nation that captures our fighting men will feel the full force and fury of the United States of America,” as if any president is capable of preventing any U.S. military personnel from being captured.  He looked like someone who had spent hours and hours and hours standing in front of a mirror practicing his “presidential” face to use when saying these macho but empty crowd-pleasing lines.  More than anything else, Cruz comes off looking like an actor from a for-cable B-quality action movie when he tried to give the audience his “I will kill terrorists face!” and I am not sure what is more pathetic: that this politician knows such theatrics will work so well with the simpletons of his party’s base, or that so many of those in his party find this appealing and have catapulted him to the Republican race’s #2 spot.

But most farcically ridiculous of all is that even as Cruz uttered these words, what had not yet been announced was that the sailors had already been released after unintentionally wading into Iranian waters.  Iran very quickly released the sailors not long after their detention after working out the details with the Obama Administration, and then Iran released five other Americas just hours before the nuclear deal between Iran, the U.S., and five other major world powers (UK, France, Germany, Russia, China) officially began being implemented whom Iran had detained or imprisoned.  What Cruz and his colleagues on the stage would never admit but what is undeniable is that the releases were almost certainly made easier, perhaps even made possible, because of the nuclear deal—which has opened much stronger lines of communication between the U.S. and Iran—that all of the Republicans are so strongly against.  So, here we have a bunch of people on the Republican debate stage who would have prevented this nuclear deal from occurring and most of whom vow to rescind it, which means fifteen Americans would almost certainly still be in Iranian custody; here we have Ted Cruz threatening military action when diplomacy more than sufficed and making an outlandish promise that American servicemen would never be captured under his watch, a promise that is impossible to keep. Then Ohio Gov. John Kasich said some stuff that didn’t make him sound like a crazy person, some of which sounded downright reasonable; nationally, he is polling at roughly 2.3% by Real Clear Politics’ average of the most recent polls, giving him close to a zero-percent chance of winning the nomination.

Yep, this all basically tells you everything you need to know about Republicans, the Republican Party, and Thursday night’s Republican debate.  I could stop here, but there is so much more to discuss.

I will admit that this was the most enjoyable Republican debate since the first one, largely because there were many fights between the candidates.  There were zingers abound.  Multiple people attacked Cruz and Sen. Marco Rubio, as was to be expected since those two senators are between all the other candidates and being within striking distance of Trump, still reigning supreme.

It didn’t take too long for the burgeoning issue of whether or not Cruz is constitutionally eligible to run for president—the whole “natural born Citizen” issue arising from Article II Section 1 of the Constitution—since Cruz was born in Canada.  Cruz dismissed the issue with a technique he would use to dismiss any and all attacks or tough questions about him or his record: he accused those of bringing it up as playing politics or playing into the narrative of “the mainstream media,” which played well with the Republican-base debate audience but will get him nowhere in a general election.  Trump was given a chance to opine on this issue after Cruz had tried to swat it away, and to Trump’s credit (that is not a phrase you will see me write often), Trump did not back down, but repeated the very sound points that 1.) there is no consensus and that legal opinion is divided and that 2.) it is better for Republicans to handle and settle this now than allow Democrats to use it as an issue in the general election. 

Cruz supporters booed loudly during this explanation but Trump stayed strong and ended his points with loud applause from others in the crowd.  It is nice to see that Trump’s birther antics can be effective on both sides of the aisle, as not only was Trump able to help fuel a cloud of (inane nonsensical) doubt around Obama concerning his eligibility to be president and his citizenship years ago, but now Trump has been able to help fuel a similar (more legitimate) cloud of doubt around Cruz and his eligibility.  I plan to address this whole eligibility question in a separate article, but for now, it is suffice to say that Cruz’s attempt to push this issue aside at the debate will have failed miserably in the eyes of far too many people in his own party, let alone non-Republicans, as even before this debate one of every four Republicans felt Cruz’s Canadian birth location disqualifies him from running for president; Cruz’s defense, and Trump’s attack, will hardly see subsequent polls produce a lower measure on this metric and it will dog Cruz throughout the primaries. 

New York Daily News/Reuters

Trump also got in another response to Cruz that, I am ashamed to admit, I thought was great: I consider myself a New Yorker, so perhaps I am biased, but I thought that when Cruz stood by his “New York values” comment, Trump really did a great job of making Cruz look “callous” and hollow.  Frankly, it was Trump’s best moment in any debate as far as I’m concerned; with just that one moment, Trump may have increased his support even more so.  While Cruz cheaply and repeatedly plays regional politics, Trump, as far as I can tell, has been careful to build his appeal all over the country.  Additionally, Cruz’s blame-the-media mantra as a response to a question about his recent loan scandals (he failed to properly disclose about $1 million in personal loans when he ran for the Senate, including a major loan from Goldman Sachs, where his wife worked at the time and still works) also, I believe, will fall flat with many primary voters.

Trump was not the only one to go after Cruz: Rubio and he also sparred on immigration.  Cruz effectively painted what he termed “that Rubio-Schumer amnesty bill”—simply noting Rubio’s bipartisan effort is enough to be an effective attack in this setting—while Rubio accused Cruz of flip-flopping (an understatement, as Cruz might have engaged in one of the most carefully planned, most shameless and calculated lies in American political history in an effort to play both sides of the immigration debate and to leave his options open depending on where the political winds and popular mood shifted throughout his quest for power, as William Saletan of Slate shows in his epic and irrefutable takedown and its accompanying timeline; I’ve written before that Cruz is undeniably a disingenuous charlatan and demagogue, but now we can demonstrably prove that Cruz is an “spectacular liar,” thanks to Saletan).  Cruz’s response to Rubio was to jokingly compliment him on being able to recite his team’s opposition research on him, and Rubio incredulously interjected “No, it’s your record!” back at Cruz, what I felt was one of his best lines of the night. 

Cruz sure talked a lot (more than anyone else) and had plenty of chances to make his points and be heard, but did little to reassure when he played defense

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, within striking distance of emerging as a strong second-tier candidate behind Trump, also got a good swipe in on Rubio, noting how hypocritical Rubio was at an earlier debate for chiding Bush for attacking him, Rubio had said, to help his poll numbers, when it seemed that Rubio was doing the same on the campaign trail when it came to Christie:

“I stood on the stage and watched Marco, and rather indignantly, look at Governor Bush and say, someone told you that because we’re running for the same office, that criticizing me will get you to that office.  It appears that the same someone has been whispering in old Marco’s ear too.  And so the indignation that you carry on, some of the stuff, you have to also own, then.”

Additionally, Christie contrasted his executive experience as a governor with the “talking” senators.  Christie also often appeared more adult that the candidates who were bickering but also managed some good zingers throughout the night that were well-received by the crowd.  Christie might have helped himself a bit, but he has never been terribly popular with Republicans nationally. And yet, the type of Republicans who could really help him—the independent, moderate-minded New Hampshire ones—might see his stronger series of performances after this one as reason enough to move to him from Kasich, who is less of a solid performer on debate stages even as he is ones of the most sensible candidates (Christie had several memorably positive moments in this debate, while it  is hard to identify any specific moments where Kasich could be said to have possibly increased his support).  Still, Kasich seems to be running a good campaignin New Hampshire.  They are both competing to be able to have some sort of result in New Hampshire that they can use to build momentum, and it is likely that only one of these two will be able to do so there.  After that, it becomes difficult for both as they are more or less Northerners in the eyes of Southerners who will be competing in a number of key primaries in Southern states, where they have almost no support.

Rubio was not bad, but was certainly not great.  He opened his comments with a deceitful, slanderous, already debunked attack on Hillary re: Benghazi, as well as with other spurious, empty attacks on her re: foreign policy, and later, even Fox-News conservative moderator Neil Cavuto pushed back against Rubio’s ludicrous, unsubstantiated claims that Obama “would” “confiscate every gun in America” and “get rid of the Second Amendment” if he “could.” Of course these played over well with the crowd and the base, but effective attacks from Cruz and Christie limited his ability to shine and he still struggles in trying to break out.

Jeb Bush, well, poor Jeb: he is campaigning much, much better now than he was this summer but it is probably too little, too late.  He spoke out passionately, yet again, against banning all Muslims from coming into America.  His content is better than most of the others’ on stage, but his delivery is still just a bit off even as it has gotten better.  It makes sense for him to stick around since he has so much money and thus a realistic chance to exert some influence on the race, the party, and the GOP platform, but as far as winning his party’s nomination, we may as well be writing his political campaign’s obituary… And yet, a glimmer of hope: the most recent South Carolina poll has him third, climbing back into relevancy; perhaps his money is paying off? And while it’s hard to see how he make up the huge gap between him and Trump there in one month, that bit of good news coupled with Cruz’s recent scandals is the only thing preventing me from declaring his campaign dead in the water.

And Dr. Carson?  Well, the oddballs who still support him likely didn’t see anything to make then run away from Carson in this debate, but it is certain that nobody else saw anything from him to bring them over to Carson.  In fact, he may as well have not even been there for all the good it did him; he himself joked, when asked his first question, that he was about to fall asleep, and frankly, I can’t see how that would have made any difference whatsoever on his impact in the debate.

Part of me missed Rand Paul, but I’m not a foaming-at-the-mouth GOP-baser who was never going to support him in the first place.  I did not miss Fiorina from the main stage at all: as I have written before, her business record is horrendous and she is a master of distortion while she also plays the gender card as cheaply as I’ve seen anyone ever play it in politics.  The only person who sounds as rehearsed as her is Cruz.  I’d love to see them both marginalized for the sake of the health of our democracy, but at the same time, a Cruz-Fiorina ticket (which is, to me, extremely unlikely) would be a dream come true for the Democratic Party.

So what happened?  Trump, Cruz, and Christie all had strong moments, but Cruz took some damage while the other two seemed pretty unscathed.  Rubio appeared competent and confident but was not the standout he needed to be even as he also took damage, while Carson and Kasich might as well not have been there for all their presence did to actually help them.  Bush either fits in with Carson or Kasich, or, if his campaign has a chance of being resuscitated, he at least didn’t do anything to have its life support cut off, but he remains a longshot unless either Christie or Kasich drop out after New Hampshire and endorse him (a lot of ifs there, and both are running ahead of him there), and even then would be nowhere near a favorite.

My prediction is that Trump—who could be said to be the big winner in this debate—stays on top and gains nationally and in Iowa and New Hampshire at Cruz’s expense, though I’m not sure how much.  It is hard to say whether Cruz will yield his spot to Rubio in Iowa or stay strong there and within striking distance of Trump.  It’s hard to say if Rubio goes up or down, and who gains at his expense if he goes down (Christie?  Kasich?  Bush?).  Maybe some evangelicals worried about Cruz might even flock back to Carson, though not because of anything Carson himself did.  Are either Trump, Cruz, or Rubio vulnerable enough to provide an opening for anyone else?  I have a feeling that those who left Carson won’t come back, but then again, Iowa does have a lot of evangelicals…  The Christie-Kasich dynamic in New Hampshire is interesting, so it will be telling to see where they move in the polls there between now and Iowa, where neither of them have a chance for any kind of a respectable showing; their hopes lie in New Hampshire.  As for Cruz, I think he absolutely needs a strong showing in Iowa to have a shot; if he does not finish in at least second place, evangelicals in Southern States will likely drift to other candidates.  If not Trump or Carson, does this mean a surprise, zombie-like surge from Huckabee or Santorum?  Fiorina is done as presidential material, but she could be quite an attractive vice-presidential candidate so expect her to stick around as long as she possible can.  All in all, lots of possibilities here.

In the end, though, I think this debate will remembered as the moment when Trump successfully fought off Cruz and also as the moment when Cruz entered peaking and left on the decline, and though I wouldn’t rule him out of Iowa yet, my prediction is Trump wins Iowa or virtually ties with Cruz and wins big in New Hampshire even if he doesn’t win Iowa.  Cruz’s scandals have the potential to really hurt him if he continues to trot out the garbage responses he gave to them in this debate. Trump is also way up in South Carolina, so the chance for someone else to derail Trump is now and after this debate, it is going to me much more difficult for Cruz to be that person, and right now there is not anyone else even close to derailing trump, as I can’t see Rubio and don’t see anyone else succeeding in that task, either, even if “The Establishment” is coalesces behind someone.  Keep in mind that more Republicans now see Trump as someone they could support being their nominee, a clear majority and dramatically way more than this summer. 

As I wrote back in early August, don’t dismiss The Donald.

What else does all this clearly show?  That the Democratic Party is the only mature, sane major party in America.

Other GOP debate coverage from this author:

December Republican Debate Exposed GOP As Joke on National Security

Republican “Debate” Circus Round 2: Trump vs. Fiorina and Why the Kids’-Table Debate Was Better

The Republican Field & Debate: Substance vs. Style: What Trumps What?

Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg.  If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, andTwitter(you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

The events of the past summer and fall have clearly shown that there is only one major political party for rational, thinking adults in America, and here you will see the eleven major events from this period that have shown beyond all reasonable doubt that the Republican Party is no longer a serious political party and that only the Democrat Party provides Americans with an actual ability to govern.

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse November 13, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) November 13, 2015

Reuters/Lucy Nicholson

AQABA, EILAT, HAIFA, and TEL AVIV — An extraordinary series of events has occurred over the past few months: more so than at any other time in recent decades and possibly far longer than that, the American people have been treated to an exceptionally clear, stark contrast between its two major political parties. The contrast clearly shows there is a moderately-left-of-center Democratic Party that is inclusive, interested in governance, and pursues data/study-informed policy competing with a far-right, being-pushed-farther-to-the-right Republican Party that is exclusive, hates government, and is increasingly basing its positions on fear, irrationality, emotion, and anti-intellectualism.

Several events of late have made this contrast absolutely clear:

1.) Trump and Trumpism

When Donald Trump exploded onto the scene this summer, he immediately catapulted to the top spot in the Republican race and has held steady nationally there and in most states ever since, only recently sharing that spot with Dr. Ben Carson. There is no equivalent to The Donald on the left, or anywhere else, for that matter. That a loud-mouthed, brawling TV personality and real estate magnate like Donald Trump could rise to dominate the Republican Party is a uniquely Republican phenomenon.

The contrast is clear: if there was someone like Trump running for president now on the Democratic side, he would be shunned as a fringe candidate by Democratic voters and would likely not have even been invited to participate in the debates. There is not a chance the Democrats would flock to a Trump the way Republicans have, and this is a glaringly obvious difference.

Furthermore, his style of trading playground insults, making grandiose claims without providing details, and constantly describing one’s self in an unending stream of superlatives (“HUGE” and “THE BEST”) is simply anathema to the Democrats’ style: they have preferred candidates who are more measured, wonkish, and specific for many years.

2.) Everything about the Iran nuclear deal

I have written about this before, so I will just reiterate here: on an issue of such momentous and historic importance as finally being able to thaw our-decades-long cold war with Iran, the Republican Party has shown itself to not only to be blindly ignorant of the real world consequences having this deal or not having this deal, but also of the very basics of how diplomacy and international negotiation work. As I wrote previously, there simply is no logical argument against this deal when it stacked up against the real-world feasible alternatives. Republican (and Israeli) opposition only takes us far closer to war, further instability, and nuclear proliferation. In addition, the Republicans showed they were far from above treating this issue in the most partisan manner possible. That the GOP is willing to play politics with global war and peace and issues of national security is not something lost on the experts, and even some major Republicans who have held significant security-related positions in the past, like Gen. and Sec. of State Colin Powell, Sec. of Defense and CIA Director Robert Gates, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, and NSA Director Zbigniew Brezinski, have come out for it. But the people in the driver’s seat of today’s Republican Party did not seem to notice this. Many others will.

3.) The Republican debates

One after the other, the Republican main-stage debates provided a juvenile attempt at kow-towing to the base and trading insults in an atmosphere of fantastical illogic, devoid of substance and reason. The most substantive candidates were relegated to the sidelines, while the least qualified and most foolish were front and center. The leading Republicans candidates tended to focus on issues that are hardly the main issues affecting the American people: a blatant distortion of Planned Parenthood resulting from some highly edited videos, thus returning to the culture-war issue of abortion, along with a heavy and illogical focus on illegal immigration and vague talk of “leadership” in international affairs. The first two debates, especially, had a real circus-like atmosphere, while the third saw the candidates behave as if they finally realized they looked like a circus in the previous two and then saw them unite to whine about the so-called “liberal media” asking unfair (i.e., tough) questions. This is from the party that says Obama is not tough enough to stand up to ISIS, China, and Putin, but who cry like babies because of a few low-stature cable news moderators giving them a tough time. Most recently, Dr. Carson has engaged in a megawhinefest just because the media is asking reasonable questions about his background and his rather shocking claims on everything from boyhood fights to the Egyptian pyramids. I have not seen the latest GOP debate, but from all the coverage I have seen, little seems to have changed.

4.) Relative position of more extreme candidates in terms of support in Republican, Democratic Parties

While I touched on this in the last section, this point is important enough to make it separately: in the Republican race, generally the crazier less serious the candidate, the more popular that candidate is with Republican voters: hence, Trump and Dr. Carson are vying to be #1. Rubio seems to be a semi-exception in the #3 spot, but the champions of irrationality and foolishness can be happy again with Ted Cruz solidly in the #4 spot. That’s right: 1, 2, and 4 are extremists who say the most outlandish things. One can accuse Bernie Sanders with some fairness being a relatively extreme candidate in terms of his rhetoric, and he is a declared socialist. And yet, Sanders has pretty much always been far behind Clinton nationally, and never been close to being supported by a majority of democratic voters. He has only led temporarily in two states (Iowa and NH) and has since lost ground to Clinton who now leads handily in Iowa and is neck-and-neck in NH. Clinton is a moderate, pragmatic, and practical politician who is focused on results and not ideology or crowd-pleasing rhetoric. So, with the Democrats, the electable, mature, more serious candidate has dominated almost entirely, while the on the Republican side the candidate who is a verbal brawler and has no political experience—Trump—has dominated the race national and locally since he announced his candidacy and now shares the top spot with Dr. Carson, who has zero political experience as well and is a virtual wind-up-toy that spews nonsense and offensive commentary non-stop. The contrast in the thoughts and composition and maturity of the two parties could not be clearer.

5.) The Planned Parenthood “scandal”

It is a well known fact that in general, Republicans oppose abortion. Less well known factually is that Planned Parenthood is not an organization whose primary purpose is to provide abortions and access to them, but, rather, focuses on a variety of other health services to women; abortion accounts for only about 3% of its activities for roughly 12% of its clients. But Republicans don’t seem to want to know such details, and seek to 1.) frame the organization as “an abortion factory” and 2.) to completely defund all government funding for the organization regardless of how it would negatively impact the 97% of non-abortion activities and how that would harm millions of women who otherwise have limited access to certain health services. The Republicans have made so much noise about this you would think it is both the #1 issue on the minds of Americans and the #1 issue in terms of importance (it is hardly either). They have also engaged in outright massive distortion of the issue, trying to portray Planned Parenthood as some sort of organization that is focused mainly on abortion and on harvesting organs from live babies to sell to research organizations based on a few isolated, misinterpreted anecdotes. Republicans even went to the extent of the threat of a government shutdown over the funding of this organization; basically, the House, controlled by the Republicans, would refuse to pass any spending bill that would include funding for Planned Parenthood, including routine bills to increase the debt ceiling (without which the United States would default on its debt payments and jeopardize its credit rating) and keep the government fully open and functioning; such bills completely defunding Planned Parenthood would not pass the Senate and would not come anywhere near enough the two-thirds support required in either the House or the Senate to overcome a presidential veto from Obama.

And as far as the Democrats distorting an issue and an organization that provides invaluable services to women’s health and trying to defund said organization by using the threat (on ANY issue!) of a government shutdown and/or the U.S. defaulting on its debt obligation? Yeah, that’s just the Republicans, 110%.

6.) The first Democratic debate

By the time the first Democratic debate occurred, the Republicans had made clear to the world what they were about and how they conducted themselves. In stark contrast, Hillary Clinton engaged with Bernie Sanders in a relatively substantive discussion that showed they had a command of the issues and that was mostly cordial, polite, and focused on problems that Americans are actually concerned about. The discussion was more about policy and less about rhetoric, slogans, and talking points. Even the “attacks” that came most often from the (distantly) second-tier candidates were low-intensity and far more civil than the insults being flung at the Republican debates. But even the fringe candidates came off as serious and able to discuss issues of substance in a way the Republican front-runners have generally been unable to do. Jim Webb, the conservative Democrat who dropped out after the first debate, would immediately be one of the more substantive candidates in a Republican debate.

So, on the Republican stage, you have a massive clown car stealing center stage, and the substantive people are kept of the car and struggle to be relevant in the race; on the Democratic stage, the most serious candidates dominate, and even the lesser candidates behave like relatively substantive adults. That’s about as different as it gets.

7.) The Benghazi hearing fiasco

I wrote quite a bit about this before, so I will just give a brief summary here: a bunch of junior upstart House Republicans decided it would be a great idea to investigate Hillary Clinton on Benghazi even though there have been eight previous investigations (one State, two Senate, and five Republican-led House investigations) that did not succeed in tearing her down. Their committee uncovers Hillary’s ill-fated decision to use a private e-mail server in her home for her work as Secretary of State and, rather than focus on Benghazi, it focuses on her e-mails. Several Republicans came out and admitted that this is a political witch hunt. The Republican upstarts then confront Hillary Clinton, one of the most seasoned and experienced and articulate politicians still in service in America, in an eleven-hour public hearing that totally exposes them for the ill-prepared, ignorant, imbalanced, rude, and partisan hacks that they are while practically turning the hearing into a campaign commercial highlighting Clinton’s many strengths. On top of that, her fellow Democrats on the Committee fully exposed the hypocrisies, falsehoods, and inconsistencies in the behavior of the committee’s Republicans. Basically, the GOP came off looking like total ignorant fools whose partisanship knows no bounds and in front of the whole nation and they succeeded in enhancing Clinton’s national position greatly by sending such underwhelming nobodies to take on the force of nature known as Hillary Clinton.

8.) Pope Francis comes to America

Pope Francis came to America recently. Besides moving Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner to tears (repeatedly!), Pope Francis reminded Americans that Christians can at least have the ability to be loving, kind, inclusive, open, warm, and fun. In other words, cool. Like Pope Frank. We even found out that the Pope did not want to meet right-wing intolerantand religiously crazy Kim Davis and that his people distanced the Pope from herafter the “meeting” was made public. Basically, Frank was letting America know that he did not endorse her views, actions, or brand of Christianity. Yet Kim Davis’s Evangelical version of Christianity—intolerant, hypocritical, imposing, harsh, exclusive, judgmental, and white ethno-centric/nationalistic—is the version that the Republican Party has embraced; Francis’s Catholicism, on the other hand, was a stark contrast as he surrounded himself with the poor and people of color and all nationalities during his visit. A Republican Francis ain’t.

9.) The exit of John Boehner

Partly moved by the Pope’s visit, partly frustrated with being one of the only pragmatic, practical, and realistic voices in the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, and getting little love on the right or the left for his heroic and taxing roles in preventing government shutdowns, longtime conservative and Republican leader and Speaker of the House John Boehner surprised Washington with his resignation. The Republican base cheered, making it clear they felt there was no room in their party for pragmatic compromisers. As a parting gifts to America, Boehner avoided a shutdown and then rammed through a spending bill to prevent further shutdown fights for the next two years, with mostly Democratic and only modest Republican support. When the Republican party base and many of the Republican presidential candidates complaining that Boehner isn’t conservative enough and cooperated too much with Obama, it’s clear something is rotten in the state of Denmark…

10.) The rise of Carson and Carsonism

Add the inexperience of trump, but take away Trump’s brawling approach and the desire to actually govern and add a whole lot of right-wing Christian religious gibberish, and you get the soft-spoken Dr. Ben Carson. Carsonism combines the lack of political and governance experience of trump with an even higher level of irrationality and the big addition of the Evangelical Christian worldview, based wholly on nonsense. His unexpected rise to the tophas confounded all stripes of pundits and is even more shocking than the rise of Trump (I personally predicted Trump would be a force to be reckoned with but dismissed Carson almost immediately and was definitely wrong about his ability to gain voter support). Together, he and Trump speak for half of Republicans, and when you add in support for the super-Christians Cruz and Huckabee, you get closer to two/thirds of Republicans that are for Trumpism, Carsonism, or a governing style awash with Evangelical Christianity. Carson is a combination of Trump and Cruzism/Huckabeeism, which can be said to make him worse because there is even more content undeserving of respect in governance. Like Trump (and like Cruz and Huckabee), there is no equivalent on the left that has any real support. Just another crystal-clear contrast.

11.) The fall of Bush

Finally, we have the failure of the Bush campaign. Yes, I am already calling it a failure because I just don’t see how he comes back from where he is now(and where he’s been for some time) to win the nomination. I come to bury Bush, not to praise him, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Mark Antony, so I’m not saying Bush is great. But especially in this field of Republicans, Jeb Bush speaks with a moderation in tone and language the leaders of his field do not, and has some moderate policy positions to back that up that they do not. He has years of experience in politics and governance, and while not a good governor, it is hard to argue he was awful in the mold of, say, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, and at the very least, he stakes out reasonable positions on immigration and on not using the threat of government shutdowns to achieve political goals. This makes him a dramatically more reasonable candidate that those leading the Republican field, and yet, even with $100 million in PAC money, Bush is at best in the middle of the second-tier candidates, polling in single digits; he is also in fifth-place even in Florida, where he was governor for eight years. Just like Boehner not doing well with his own party, if a man like Bush is losing to the likes of Trump, Carson, and Cruz, that says a heck of a lot about the party.

*****

Yes, when all this is added together, it is clear: we have one party with a strong majority ready to project a strong, experienced, accomplished, mature, and moderate candidate to the American people, and you have another party with a majority of voters ready to project weak candidates devoid of relevant experience, who engage in either brawling public spats of a childish nature or spew irrational conspiracy theories and extremist Christian theology as a substitute for an actual political campaign. The majority of the top Republican candidates and a majority of their voters are committing seppuku (Japanese samurai ritual suicide), disemboweling themselves in front of all of America. Hillary is looking with bemused disdain at the mess to her right, and is marching forward past the mess, along with the majority of her party and what should be a clear majority of the American public come November 2016. The nearly certain inevitable result—the return of the Clintons to the White House—will belong to Hillary and her coalition, but it will in no small part also come about because of the insanity of the Republican Party and in all the many ways this was made obvious in the summer and fall of 2015.

More Election 2016 coverage from this author:

Republican “Debate” Circus Round 2: Trump vs. Fiorina and Why the Kids’-Table Debate Was Better

Scott Walker’s Weak Wisconsin Record (and What His Candidacy Says About Today’s GOP)

The State of Illegal Immigration 2015: Reality vs. Republican Fantasy

The Republican Field & Debate: Substance vs. Style: What Trumps What?

Don’t Dismiss The Donald: 4 Reasons Why Trump Could Win GOP Nomination

All Hail Hillary! Her Political Nature Is Just What Washington Needs

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

January 13, 2019 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse November 3, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) November 3rd, 2015

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

As I begin to write this piece, I must confess that I am filled with some very mixed and intense emotions.

I am so proud of Hillary Clinton and how she conducted herself in the face of what was clearly a witch hunt of epic proportions and during proceedings disrespectful to her from the moment questions began, proud of the Democrats on the Select Committee on Benghazi who substantively and skillfully exposed the nonsense and deception of their Republican colleagues and stood up for truth and justice; I am hopeful and confident after seeing Clinton’s amazing conduct in the hearing, and after her “spectacular” debate performance a few weeks ago, that soon-to-be President Hillary Rodham Clinton (barring a disaster initiated by Clinton herself or a major change in the Republicans’ behavior, I see this as almost inevitable and I see this hearing as the moment when she cemented herself as far and above the best candidate in the eyes of enough of the American people to make it happen) has a chance to save America from itself and build on the Obama legacy. 

At the same time, I am sad at seeing the sorry level of dysfunction and the utter lack of seriousness or genuine interest in serving the people that the Republican Party as a whole has displayed; I am disgusted at the level of games and tricks based on selective presentation and false, repeatedly debunked (even by Republicans) claims that the seven right-wing Republican partisan hacks on the Committee who were utterly devoid of substance threw at Clinton over and over again; and I am enraged at the level of unmerited disrespect that so high and so substantive a government official as former Secretary of State and First Lady Hillary Clinton has had to endure, enraged by a hearing in which a committee claiming to be focused on the Benghazi attacks and honoring the memory of four dead public servants instead twisted their memory to attempt to win cheap political points against Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton.  That the Republicans utterly failed is an honor to the memory of those brave public servants who perished on September 11th, 2012, letting the country know that their deaths cannot be easily used for partisan shenanigans.

What Eight Prior Investigations Have Already Told Us 

The record is important.  This record involves eight prior investigations: in order, one commissioned by the State Department and produced by an Accountability Review Board (ARB) initiated by then-Secretary Clinton and led by former Ambassador Thomas Pickering who had served both Republican and Democratic presidents for over forty years and by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Admiral Mike Mullen, one Republican-led House committee that investigated the ARB, two bipartisan Senate committees, and finally four more committee investigations by the Republican-led House.  While a few of these included criticism of Clinton, they were unable to tie any specific decision or non-decision of Clinton to any wrongdoing or negligence, e.g., one report criticized Clinton for the State Department’s reduction of security personnel in Benghazi from 2011 to 2012 even though she testified that she did not personally receive any requests for additional security in Benghazi; what they did generally show was specific wrongdoing by a handful of other people not directly part of Clinton’s staff and some confusion amid conflicting reports and mixed messaging throughout the Obama Administration; in other words, Clinton was not deserving in any way of a significant portion of the blame for the failure to protect the lives of four Americans in the attack and was not the person responsible for making the specific decisions that led to inadequate security.

Republicans Hope the Ninth Benghazi Investigation Will Magically Blame Clinton in Ways Eight Others Could Not

As for the current, and ninth official, investigation, Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy, Republican Representative of South Carolina, opened proceedings with a statement that was petulant, partisan, angry, defensive, and self-congratulatory in tone, a tone that, as chance (or, more accurately, design) would have it, characterized the entire proceedings in regards to the behavior of the seven Republicans on the Committee: Gowdy (202-225-6030), Susan Brooks of Indiana (202-225-2276), Jim Jordan of Ohio (202-225-2676), Mike Pompeo of Kansas (202-225-6216), Martha Roby of Alabama (202-225-2901), Peter Roskam of Illinois (202-225-4561), and Lynne Westmoreland of Georgia (202) 225-5901).  None of these representatives were in office before 2007, and most were not in office before 2011, some only since 2013; in other words, note the lack of senior, well-respected Republicans with gravitas (feel free to call their offices and let them know how you feel after reading this!).

In some ways, the aforementioned tone was not and should not have been surprising.

Yet in other ways, it was very surprising: the sheer repetitiveness of the questions; the shocking ignorance of the most basic inner working of the State Department and other federal agencies; the stunning myopia of an inability to see the larger picture; the rehashing of old arguments that have repeatedly been debunked on a bipartisan basis before, during, and after the hearing; the striking inability to incorporate any of Clinton’s testimony into their reasoning or statements or questions; the level of rudeness and disrespect… all these combined to truly make the Republicans look childish, uninformed, unstable, and pathetically unfit for office in what can only be described as a blatant and obvious manner.  When they tried to muster anger and indignity, they simply came off as silly, unserious, ridiculous, forced, and, frankly, as bad actors in a bad movie. 

If that is not bad enough, they all repeatedly demonstrated these qualities in the presence of a Hillary Clinton who is one of the few active elder states(wo)men left in American politics.  Throughout the proceedings, she generally remained cool, calm, and collected, with a near-superhuman level of patience during her eleven-hour ordeal.  Never once did she descend the level of those attacking her, and the few times she expressed exasperation and wounded pride (most often in defense of others) at the shameful suggestions, among others, that she did not care or try to help her staff when they were in danger, she did so in a dignified way and only after repeatedly enduring the same accusations, displaying some fire and emotion in such a way that any non-conservative-partisans (and perhaps even some conservative partisans) would not be able see as anything other than justified.  Clinton also demonstrated a depth and breadth of knowledge that put those taking cheap shots at her to shame, effortless recalling an astounding level of detail and providing very sensible explanations for every line of attack mounted against her.  She skillfully showed that those interrogating her had either not reviewed relevant material or were either selectively presenting an incomplete picture.  Perhaps most amusingly, most of the Republicans repeatedly smirked smugly, clearly thinking they had got the better of Clinton when only they themselves and their core supporters are delusional enough to even come close to thinking that. 

With some fellow Republicans expressing concern about how this would play out, that this hearing could backfire against the Republican Party, it is dumbfounding that the Republicans on the Committee proceeded as they did, the very definition of hubris and incaution, seemingly oblivious to the possibilities that any of them could be wrong in their calculations or that the public would not see things in the way they wished them to see them, so visceral, it seems, was their hatred of Hilary Clinton.  Every single one of them spewed non-stop contempt, not realizing the amount of public and national contempt they were earning themselves.  In the end, the eleven hours of proceedings became a marathon campaign commercial for both Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, and the hearing may very well go down as one of the key moments of the 2016 presidential election.  After this hearing and the debate, it is very difficult to see how Hillary can be stopped in her quest for the presidency, either by Bernie Sanders or by the Republicans.  It is now hers to lose, largely thanks to an unintended own-goal on the part of the Republicans that could go down as one of the greatest political blunders/gaffes/miscalculations in modern memory.

Don’t believe me? You can watch the entire proceedings here: part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4; also, transcript here.

But, if you don’t have an entire day to do so now (although I strongly encourage you to do so over time), I will break the hearing down for you and discuss it here.

Let the Inquisition Begin 

Rep. Roksam was the first in a series of salvos against Clinton.  Roksam’s effort, consistent throughout his questioning, was to portray the entire Obama Administration’s policy as being Clinton-concocted, Clinton-pushed, Clinton-owned, basically a Clinton policy.  The idea he kept pushing was that she was responsible for Libya overall and that Libya overall was a failure.  Such a simple characterization of responsibility for a policy defies reality and defies this case specifically; as Clinton explained, she was just one person in the Administration, President Obama himself was the one who made the decision, and there were a number of America’s closest allies who were eager to join together to intervene and to have U.S. assistance in any intervention.  As for the idea that the Libya policy is a failure, that is incredibly myopic; the appropriate question to ask is what was the situation before the intervention, what effect did it have, and what is the condition of Libya in the period after the intervention.  Republicans seem to think that Libya was some sort of paradise before NATO intervention, and that the intervention ruined Libya; the reality is that Libya was in the middle of a raging civil war and that massive amounts of civilians were under immediate threat from Qaddafi’s forces, who had threatened mass killings.  The intervention prevented many of these killings and brought an end to the war in months, both of which saved many thousands of lives.  Yemen, Syria, and Iraq are only the latest examples of how civil wars and civil conflict in the greater Middle East/North Africa region, left to their own devices, generally burn out only over long periods of time and take many, many years to resolve at a high cost in human life.  Afghanistan and Algeria are other examples stretching back further in history.  It is far more likely that the Libyan Civil War of 2011, left to its own devices, would have continued to rage at a high level, drawing many foreign fighters, displacing millions of people, and destabilizing its neighbors, not only in North Africa but also in Southern Europe.  As bad as the situation is in Libya today, it could have been far worse, and just because Libya faces severe instability and continued fighting does not mean that the NATO intervention was not successful in mitigating the levels of violence and saving many thousands of lives; it was never designed to produce a stable, secure, safe Libya in the long-term as that was wisely not a responsibility NATO chose to undertake, but, rather, left that to the Libyan people and its neighbors.  That they have not succeeded is not something a sound analysis can place within the responsibility, President Obama, or Hillary Clinton.  That is not to suggest that more could not or even should not have been done, but the idea that Roksam aggressively pushed, that Hillary Clinton is personally responsible for ruining Libya and, therefore, for the events that led to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi in September, 2012, is simply ridiculous.  It is important to have a discussion about our Libya policy, and how it could have been better but also what good it did do.  However, the scope of this hearing is supposed to be focused on the September 11th, 2012 Benghazi attack, not to put the Administration’s entire Libya policy on trial.

In addition, Roksam tried to portray Clinton’s ideas on Libya as motivated mainly by a desire for personal political gain and being able to take credit for the policy, twisting the contents of a handful of e-mails to make his flimsy case for such an outrageous and disrespectful accusation for which there is no serious evidence.  These unfair and unsubstantiated charges were repeated throughout the hearing by Roksam.

Up next for the Republicans was Rep. Brooks.  With a smile on her face, feeling that she was about to have a “gotchya” moment with Clinton, she put two stacks of paper printouts of Clinton’s e-mails in front of her; one contained all her e-mails about Libya from 2011, when U.S. military forces were intervening in a raging civil war, and it was a big pile; the second pile was a tiny pile, and contained all the e-mails from the beginning of 2012 until the day of the attack.  Brooks clearly felt as if the number of e-mails sent and received on the subject in her e-mail account signified a “lack of interest,” as if e-mail is the primary method that a U.S. Secretary of States uses to conduct business, not phone calls, meetings, classified documents that are not allowed to be transmitted through e-mails, memos, briefings, etc.  This absurd notion betrays a stunning ignorance about how the State Department and presidential Cabinet officers operate.  Clinton gave a reasonable and substantive answer that detailed how she did not conduct most of her work over e-mail, but Brooks continued her line of questioning as if Clinton had never explained that, continue to focus on the lack of e-mails in 2012 as if that proved that Clinton did not care about Libya then.  What was not said was that it was appropriate for Clinton to put less energy into Libya and have a reduced focus on Libya in 2012 because the NATO intervention had ended.  The Secretary of State has to deal with crises all over the world, and it is natural that focus shifts over time.  So of course Libya was not going to warrant the same attention in 2012 when the war and intervention were over as it did in 2011.  That does not mean Clinton did not care, nor that the attention she gave to Libya was insignificant.

Republican Rep. Roby continued in this same vein of complaining about the disparity in the number Libya e-mails from 2011 to 2012, annoyingly, as if Brooks had not just done the exact same thing.  At one point she cited a tiny number of e-mails from two State Department employees who seemed to question if Clinton knew State had a facility in Benghazi, two employees that she referred to as “your staffers” when addressing Clinton.  Clinton asked for their names and it turned out they were not her staff at all, except in the large sense of the fact that they worked for the State Department, as did over 70,000 other people, but they were not at all part of Clinton’s personal team and therefore did not work for the Office of the Secretary.  Clinton rightly pointed out that she could not be responsible for any confusion or mistaken impressions two staffers out of tens of thousands had regarding her Libya policy.

Roby then opened up a line of attack that would be repeated ad nauseam throughout the hearing: that Secretary Clinton was personally responsible for the specific security measures taken at the Benghazi facility, and, by implication, all of the more than 250 State Department installations around the world.  The way that Roby and other Republicans would frame this issue, everything from the physical defenses to the number of security guards are the personal and direct responsibility of a Secretary of State and (OR?) Hillary Clinton.  If something goes wrong at any of these 250+ diplomatic facilities, the Secretary of State should be shamed into disgrace.  It is hard to imagine anything more absurd than such a gigantic level of ignorance about basic State Department and Executive Branch agency operations, which makes me consider that these Republicans, in fact, actually do know better and are simply maximizing the political theater.  It is hard to say because it is hard to imagine an elected official being so wrong and so ignorant, but then again, the bar seems to be getting lower and lower in recent years.  For the sake of argument, let us take their statements at face value:  such a concept of responsibility is the equivalent of saying the Secretary of Defense is personally responsible for the details of every single military base’s defense, or that the New York City Police Commissioner is personally responsible for every single police department’s security details.  In fact, with cybersecurity being such an issue of late, using the Republicans’ logic one could say that the Secretary of State is personally and directly responsible for all details of cybersecurity in the State Department.  Considering how specialized the field of IT is and how only IT experts can be reasonably tasked with such responsibility, that is clearly also absurd; well, physical security is similarly also a very specialized field, and a person with such diverse responsibilities as a U.S. Secretary of State is invariably not going to be a top-notch, specialized expertise in the realms of IT and cybersecurity or physical diplomatic security and planning specific defenses against violent attacks; invariably, such tasks are and should be handled by dedicated specialists.  Yet the Republicans on this committee seem oblivious to this reality.  Such an utter inanity would be amusing, were the subject not so serious.  Of course a senior Cabinet-level position is not even supposed to come close to micromanaging details of security such as physical barriers and the number of guards present.  Such responsibilities are necessarily delegated to lower-level specialist positions.  It is simply a poor use of the time of someone as senior as the Secretary of State to spend a significant amount of time micromanaging such things and the Republicans of the Select Committee who do not understand this are unfit to even be in government at all, let alone lead an investigation ostensibly dedicated to looking into attacks on American government facilities.

Democratic Rep. Adam Smith was up next, and complained about the Republicans’ focus on Clinton’s e-mails and on criticizing the Administration’s overall Libya policy rather than a focus on a more relevant scope that might actually help the Committee learn more about the specific events surrounding the attacks in Benghazi (you know, the stated purpose of the Committee’s existence!).  He noted that the CIA and Defense officials were absent from the current hearing even they were all heavily involved in the events in question, that only Clinton and only the role of the State Department that she led were being questioned.  He noted that when two attacks six months apart in 1983 in Beirut, Lebanon, killed 258 Americans (the first attack being a bombing of the U.S. Embassy that killed seventeen Americans—including both the CIA station chief and the CIA’s top Middle East analyst—and dozens of others, the second a bombing of a military barracks that killed 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 French paratroopers) that the then-Democratic Congress actually conducted a demonstrably non-partisan investigation of the Reagan Administration that was focused on avoiding a repeat of such a tragedy, not on scoring political points, even though the Reagan Administration’s negligence then was far worse than the failures that contributed to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi in 2012 (Reagan’s ludicrous explanation for his Administration not taking better precautions six-months after a major attack? “Anyone who’s ever had their kitchen done over knows that it never gets done as soon as you wish it would.”).

Smith also spent some of his initial time discussing with Clinton the fact that while Republicans were focusing on individual requests for security that were turned down within a vast State Department bureaucracy, they were totally avoiding the fact that the Republican-dominated House had been leading the way in underfunding the State Department’s diplomatic security (with even some of the those most prominently criticizing Clinton over Benghazi voting for the cuts) and that the partisan gridlock in Washington that has failed to pass annual budgets for some time, making it far more difficult to plan ahead and allot resources for security issues preemptively, was also an issue.  That is not to say that it is not State’s responsibility to plan with the resources it has, but it is to point out a level of hypocrisy among those so concerned about security and especially blame after an attack, but who were not willing to give the State Department the funds it had requested in the run-up to the attack.

Next up for the Republicans, Rep. Westmoreland; he tried to disparage diplomatic security (who continually risk their lives and who successfully protect thousands of Americans in hostile environments 24 hours a day, 365 days a year), which got a polite though stern rebuke from Clinton. He continued, as others had and others would, to hold Clinton personally and individually responsible for specific security decisions at specific diplomatic installations. 

He also built up on Brooks’ line of attack, that Clinton seemed not to care about Libya that much in 2012, but his accusations took on a much more sinister and despicable turn, and he would not be alone in this: he noted she was friends with Sidney Blumenthal, a former reporter and a confidante and friend of Clinton’s, and that Blumenthal had her e-mail; he then noted that Clinton said she was friends with Stevens, and asked whether Stevens had her e-mail, and Clinton answered that she did not believe he did, to a smiling Westmoreland; the clear implication was that Clinton was lying about really being friends with Stevens, and that if they really were, and that if she really cared, Stevens would have had her e-mail.  Quite an insulting, baseless absurdity, given that Clinton has already explained she did not conduct her business primarily through e-mail.  Yet in the mind of Westmoreland, one can imagine a dramatic scene in which Clinton tearfully says goodbye to her dear friend Chris Stevens, gives him a warm embrace, and then after he turns to go, clasps his forearm with her hand, and says, heavy with emotion, “Chris, if you need anything, anything at all, e-mail me!  Here is my e-mail!”  Except this cartoon fantasy is not at all how Cabinet and senior-level officials interact with each other in Executive Branch agencies; e-mail is for friends like Blumenthal to reach another friend in an unofficial capacity, to discuss event planning, for tech support, for coordination; e-mail is not where serious policies are made, and it is most certainly not the norm for a sitting ambassador to use an e-mail channel directly to the Secretary of State for official requests concerning security measures and personnel.  That Westmoreland smugly and clearly felt he “nailed” Clinton by getting her to admit Stevens probably did not have her personal e-mail is primarily an advertisement of his own stunning ignorance of basic State Department culture and operating procedure.  Clinton herself cannot hide her bemused expression as she explains to him that when she and Stevens had something important to discuss, it was in meetings and phone conversations, not over e-mail.

The next myopic grandstander for the Republicans was Rep. Pompeo, who wore a scowl of scorn throughout all of his interactions with Clinton and tried to suggest that the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Defense Review (QDDR), a major review of America’s diplomacy initiated by then-Sec. Clinton, only having two pages on diplomatic security out of over 270 means that it was not important to Clinton.  But once again, here, and this is common theme with Republicans these days, a stunning ignorance of what the QDDR is was displayed here; the document is intended to lay out the global strategy for both the State Department and USAID; were this Apple publicizing its global business strategy, how much of such a document would be devoted to talking about specific physical security procedures for Apple facilities?  The idea of the departed Steve Jobs laying out his vision for Apple at a major company meetings and talking about gates, guards, security cameras, and locks at such meetings is absurd, just as is Pomepo’s purpose in bringing up the QDDR.  

After, like his predecessors, he continued to hammer Clinton with the idea that somehow Clinton was responsible for the specific security approvals.  He then adds another layer of inanity to complement his and his colleagues’ previous ones: he tries to fault Clinton for not firing someone after the Benghazi attacks.  Here again, we are being treated to a stunning display of ignorance in Pompeo’s bombast: it is illegal to fire bureaucratic government workers except under very specific conditions—breach of duty—so Clinton did not have the personal discretion to fire these people because of the very regulations of the agency and government for which she works.  Even if those conditions are met, there is a complicated series of laws and regulations that govern how such a process can be carried out and offers individuals methods to challenge and protect themselves.  In other words, Clinton cannot pick up a phone and say, Trump-like, “You’re fired!,” to the vast majority of State Department employees.  But Pompeo was not interested in the rules and procedures or even knowing about them, clearly; he was more interested in his own talking points, unfounded on anything resembling reality or a familiarity of the subjects he was tasked to investigate, a trait he shared with his Republican colleagues.  Additionally, he talked about a meeting between State Department personnel and jihadists on the day of the attack before the attack.  He had no information on which State Department employees were at this meeting, but still referred to them as “your team” when addressing Clinton, as if they had some sort of close personal tie to Clinton.

He also continued to go after Clinton on the Blumenthal e-mails, claiming that Blumenthal was her primary source on Benghzai, an outrageous claim that also displays a stunning level of ignorance and that has been repeatedly refuted as “factually not correct.”  For one thing, Pompeo should know that actual intelligence of a sensitive nature does not go through e-mail in that way, and that most of the information being conveyed to her about Benghazi that she could not read in a newspaper would come from diplomatic cables, classified briefings/documents, and phone calls on secure lines.  In any event, After Pompeo’s waste of everyone’s time, Democratic Rep. Sanchez had a clip played from a major interview in which Pompeo’s absurd claims about Blumenthal were corrected on live national television by a reporter with an extensive background in covering the State Department.

The next Republican lightweight, Rep. Jordan, chose to traverse ground already well-covered that bordered on conspiracy theorist lunacy, one that centers on a truly myopic understanding of the world and the attacks.  Like many others before him, Jordan tried to portray some confusion about mass, global protests that were inspired by an anti-Islamic video denigrating the Muslim prophet Mohammed and its relationship to the attacks in Benghazi as some sort of deliberate cover-up on the part of the Obama Administration, in which then-Secretary Clinton was deeply involved and lied directly to the American people while telling what Jordan termed “the truth” to her own family and foreign leaders.  Because of the very real confusion at the time surrounding these incidents and some very confused and sloppy messaging on the part of the Obama Administration, this line of attack has been proved to resonate among the uninformed particularly well, especially among partisans and conspiracy theorists for whom there is no such thing as sloppiness or honest mistakes in communication.

Specifically, in the days before the Benghazi attack, the American produced-and-originated video that heavily mocks Mohammed was uploaded to YouTube in versions accessible to Arabic speakers.  The videos generated outrage and mass protests throughout the world on the part of Muslims, especially in Muslim countries.  Both Tunisia and Egypt, to Libya’s northwest and east, respectively, experienced massive and violent protests on September 11th, 2012, that required the intervention of Tunisian and Egyptian security forces in order to save American lives.  Attacks and violent protests were hardly limited to these two countries, either.  As was made clear throughout the hearing, the U.S. only had a minimal presence in Benghazi at the time, though this presence included Amb. Stevens and his small security team.  Still, the lack of American personnel means there was very little information coming in directly from U.S. personnel and a lot confusion resulted when things began to go badly on September 11th, 2012.

Now, here is where things get complicated: in some countries, there were protests that turned violent, without the violence being part of any planned attack.  In the situation in Benghazi, the attacks were premeditated and planned, and not part of any protests that became violent spontaneously, though some people seemed to have joined the attack and/or looted spontaneously.

With very little information coming in and widespread outrage in the Muslim world over the video, it was a perfectly reasonable assumption that the violence in Benghazi was related to the video (and, I will soon explain, that still has not been disproven).  At this point in time, senior officials at the time like Sec. Clinton, Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, President Obama, and various press officials for the White House and various agencies were having to respond to unfolding events around the world, all of which either already had or potentially could have put American lives and facilities in danger.  And without detailed knowledge of what was going on, the whole series of global and often deadly incidents looked very much to be in reaction to the video.  The day of the attack, Clinton released a press statement and Rep. Jordan chose to focus on one sentence of that statement as grounds for his claim that Clinton lied and was telling the American people that the attack was all because of the video: “Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet,” read her statement.

Read, and reread, because Jordan’s claim is so stupendous as to boggle the mind: Clinton is clearly mentioning that some were using the videos as an excuse to commit violence; in no way is she justifying the violence, in no way is she saying “I have sought to justify,” in no way is she saying this video is the only explanation or motive.  Clinton asked to and then read more of her statement before the Committee, including a line which Jordan had conveniently chosen to not read, one three sentences after the line he did read: “But let me be clear, there is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.”  Jordan then focuses on two conversations and an e-mail, two conversations that Clinton had the evening of the attack, one with the President of Libya, one with the Prime Minister of Egypt, where she discussed that it was an attack by a terrorist group and not simply a protest gone spontaneously violent; she also noted in an e-mail to her family that evening that it was a terrorist attack.  In the time between her initial statement and these conversations and e-mail, a terrorist group had claimed responsibility (and later retracted) so Clinton’s story evolved with the information she had at the time.  U.S. officials also did not receive video of the incident until September 18th, the first time it became clear to them that there were no protests involved in the attacks in Benghazi.  

However, this should be made clear: distinguishing between protests against the video that became spontaneously violent and premeditated attacks does not mean that the premeditated attacks were not also inspired by the video, in part or fully.  But the way the Republicans seize on this, in their worldview is has to be either one or the other, and if this distinction is not rigidly made, it is evidence of a cover-up and outright lying.  Such a mentality reduces terrorism and its motives to a cartoon and clear-cut understanding of a very complex phenomenon with very complex reasons, motivations, and actors involved.  Jordan and his colleagues’ view that linking the premeditated attack in Benghazi to the video in any way amounts to willful lying shows them to be grossly unfit to analyze anything involving foreign policy or terrorism.  One can hope voters will notice this, too.  In any event, when one of the leaders of the attack was apprehended almost two years later by the U.S. military, he told his interrogators that the video was very much a motivation for the attack, that the attack was a response to the video.  This, of course, Jordan does not mention.

Picking up where his colleagues left off and telling the world absolutely nothing new, Chairman Gowdy focused his first session (but hardly stopped there) exclusively on the Blumenthal-Clinton e-mail exchange.  Clinton had said they were unsolicited in general, but that she did respond to some and occasionally asked for more.  Gowdy, an experienced prosecutor, played on the fact that Clinton had actually responded to and asked sometimes for more information to try to damage Clinton’s credibility, to make her look like a liar since she had used the word unsolicited but had actually engaged him some of the time.  Really, he spent his entire first session playing word games.  Clinton easily made clear that it was both quite possible to receive unsolicited e-mails from a source in general, but to occasionally engage and respond while still characterizing the body of e-mails as “unsolicited.”  Gowdy utterly failed to make anything out of “unsolicited” or to actually even discuss anything specifically related to Benghazi.  And he is the Chairman of the Committee…

Thus ended the first of many, many rounds of questioning that were to last some eleven hours including breaks.  After the first round of questioning, Democrats and Republicans blew up at each other, complete with interrupting and shouting in what is exceedingly rare behavior during a Congressional hearing.  Democrats complained about the focus on Clinton’s e-mails and Blumenthal at the expense of actual issues related to Benghazi, and claimed that Blumenthal’s own testimony before the Committee contradicted Republican assertions and thus demanded its release, noting that only his e-mails and Clinton’s had been released but that his testimony was behind closed doors.  When the second session began, a vote to release Blumenthal’s closed-door session into the public record was defeated in a party-line vote, with all five Democrats voting to release the information, and all seven Republicans voting against the release.

The shouting match, and subsequent partisan vote, served an indicative point of symbolism for the entire proceedings.

CNN

*****

More (and More) of the Same and Going Nowhere

Over the many subsequent hours of testimony, the Republicans stayed on their favorite topics: Clinton’s e-mails, Blumenthal and his e-mails to Clinton (what Gowdy unprofessionally termed “drivel”), the idea that Clinton was personally responsible for the specific security arrangements in Benghazi, the idea that Clinton did not care about the safety of Amb. Stevens and other personnel, the “issue” of the video in relation to the Administration’s sloppy early attempts to explain the Benghazi attacks, and the idea that the whole Libya policy was designed by Clinton as a vehicle of self-promotion.  Most tediously, the Republicans not only unproductively repeated the statements and questions of their Republican colleagues as if they not already been made (and discredited/refuted already), the individual Republicans even often repeated their own statements and lines of questioning rather pointlessly, in ways that revealed nothing new; not only could they not coordinate effectively among themselves, but they also failed to mentally do so within their own heads.  All throughout, their “evidence” amounted to little more than splitting hairs in regards to sets of one or several e-mails out of tens of thousands or presenting information devoid of context that did not involve Clinton or her specific scope of action (for example, presenting data on security requests even though Clinton did not personally handle those, a fact repeated many times but, sadly, to no effect).

The ensuing sessions were simply more of the same in either content or style or both. Pompeo later read from an ARB from 1998 that stated “first and foremost, the Secretary should take a personal and active role in carrying out the responsibility — ensuring the security of the U.S. diplomatic personnel abroad” in an effort to portray Clinton as negligent for not having personally taken control of the details of security specification, procedures, and personnel at American diplomatic facilities around the world, but it took Democratic Rep. Schiff to read from the rest of that section, which stated that “in the process, the Secretary should re-examine the present organizational structure, with the objective of assuring that a single high-ranking officer is accountable for all protective security matters and has the authority necessary to coordinate on the Secretary’s behalf.”  Pompeo’s selectivity, manipulation of the facts, and dishonest partisanship could not be more apparent, but Pompeo and other Republicans showed no sense of shame throughout the proceedings.

Occasionally, a Republican might actually bring up something that had not been beaten repeatedly like a dead horse.  Most notably, Rep. Martha Roby brought up the issue of when, specifically, Clinton spoke to the survivors of the attack and where she physically was the night of the attack.  This continued the despicable “You didn’t care!” motif and truly made the questioners appear despicable, Roby doing her part here.  Roby tried to act as if Clinton not personally speaking to/meeting the survivors right after the attacks and going home the night of the attack were indicative of some sort of dereliction or uncaring approach.  She did, in fact, meet with them shortly after they returned to the U.S. and the State Department.  CIA Director David Petraeus also went home that night and monitored the situation from home, just like Clinton, who stayed up all night and operated from a skiff complete with secure lines built into her house.  But this was not enough for Roby, who badgered Clinton with insulting questions designed to make it look as if Clinton could care less about her personnel and went home for a full night’s sleep the night of the attack, a portrayal that is nothing more than fantasy serving partisan politics.

In contrast, the Democrats seemed like schoolyard teachers (appropriately) defending  Clinton against a gang of bullies.  They were generally very measured, mature, and calm, but even they became exasperated and lost patience and some self-control, most notably Elijah Cummings, the Ranking Member (leader of the minority side in the Committee).  Even a big chunk of the conservative media saw that Clinton had performed well and that the Committee’s Republicans came off looking terrible. The differences between the two parties could not have been starker, and the fact that this “hearing” was a farce was on display for all to see.

The Big Picture

In the end, the highly public and covered proceedings succeeding in highlighting the Republicans’ mean-spiritedness, ignorance, myopia, willingness to mislead and be selective in their presentation, their pathological hatred of Clinton, their blind rage and irrational approach to an issue of deadly seriousness, their obsession and need to make her personally responsible for the deaths of four Americans, and their utter contempt for decorum and respectful behavior, while at the same time highlighting Clinton’s best qualities: her patience and endurance, her command of the facts, her ability to discuss just about anything in detail, her distinguished career as a diplomat, her statesmanship, her willingness to be tough when her questioners crossed a line, her quiet but visible emotion when she was insulted beyond any degree of propriety, her willingness to sick up for committed public servants, and her grace under fire.  Let Donald Trump or Dr. Ben Carson, or a party that set up such a sham investigation, compete with that.

© 2015-2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcomeBrian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating hereFeel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Below is the most comprehensive analysis of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail “scandal” you will find anywhere.  There certainly are some legitimate questions about what happened and Secretary Clinton’s judgement in this instance, but those questions have yet to be answered in full and are unlikely to show anything terribly scandalous on Clinton’s part (and have not thus far).  The real scandal is the Republican partisan witch hunt against Hillary masquerading as a Benghazi investigation and the media’s terrible, relentless coverage of this issue as a major “scandal.”

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 21, 2015   

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 21st, 2015 (See September 2016 follow-up article: Clinton E-mail / Server: What You Need to Know: Clinton Not Careless, Real Issues Overclassification & Classified Info Sharing Practices)

Kevin Lamarque/AP

Updated 1/30/2016 (see end of piece)

Updated and expanded slightly throughout the evening of 10/21; major update on security section,  including information on encryption, coming very soon

Note: all of the thousands Clinton’s publicly released emails can be easily browsed, searched, and read here

How to Create a “Scandal”: E-mailgate as Benghazi 9.0

AMMAN — If you understand the political history of the Clintons, Hillary’s e-mail “scandal” is but the latest in a long line of faux “scandal” witch hunts. Manufacturing scandals has often been a smart (and profitable) political ploy on the Republican side, even if it is cynical and plays to the very worst tendencies of American politics and culture. Throughout Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Clintons were assaulted by constant partisan investigations. To this date, the only proof of any wrongdoing on the Clintons’ part in any of these so-called “scandals” was when President Bill Clinton committed perjury when being interviewed about his sexual relationship with a White House intern; the investigation that produced the finding that he had committed perjury cost taxpayers over $50 million. The other Republican witch hunts on Bill and Hillary Clinton have turned up zero proof or admission of guilt on the part of the Clintons, with the single exception of an admission of a single sexual encounter between Bill Clinton and Gennifer Flowers long ago.

Now, we have a new pair of “scandals,” one about Hillary’s e-mails and her e-mail server that Republicans are almost certainly praying will yield some sort of damning personal evidence against Hillary Clinton in relation to the other supposed “scandal,” the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya that killed four brave American public servants, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens.

Just as in the past, there truly is a “vast right-wing conspiracy” (to use then-First Lady Hillary Clinton’s words from 1998) against her and her husband. The strategy is clear and effective: throw enough mud and crap and tar at someone, and some of it sticks, some of it stinks. From a distance, people just assume that this is the natural look, smell. Hence the term “Clinton Fatigue,” a nonsense term used by partisans to slime the Clintons. This helped to damage Bill Clinton’s presidency throughout his two terms. “Scandal” after “scandal,” “investigation” after “investigation,” and the only thing that turned up was that Bill Clinton cheated on his wife, provably occasionally, possibly more than that. The most inexcusable thing Clinton did politically was mess around sexually with Monica Lewinsky, simply because it empowered his enemies to tar and smear him to such a dramatic degree. He left office with a high approval rating, but that mud and tar and crap rubbed off on Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s vice president, and was a huge portion of the basis of George W. Bush’s campaign to “restore honor and dignity to the White House;” without this collateral damage done to Al Gore, it is almost inconceivable that Gore would have lost and that Bush would have won, since the actual election was won by Bush by a historically razor-thin margin.

The primate-like fling-a-bunch-of-crap-at-your-political-enemy approach is alive and well and serves as the main Republican strategy against Hillary Clinton. Republicans have been at this for some time, politicizing the tragedy at Benghazi (a objectively relatively fairly minor tragedy given the sheer scale military blunders in recent American history) to perpetuate an aura of endless suspicion and doubt around Hillary. They tried to use the same tragedy against Obama in the 2012 election cycle, and it was a disaster. Mitt Romney famously tried to attack Obama over this in the second presidential debate in October 2012; Obama skillfully brushed off the attack, and it was a disaster which backfired badly on Romney (see part 1 and the more devastating part 2 of the Benghazi discussion during the debate here). After that debate, Romney more or less avoided attacking Obama on foreign policy for the rest of the campaign, and, in any event, we all know the Romney was not sworn in as president the following January.

Of course, Republican being Republicans, they did not learn from this or let it go. Since attacking Obama is more or less useless as Obama is not running for office again, the focus of Republican fire switched even more so to Hillary Clinton when it came to the Benghazi “scandal” because she was expected to run for president. Since the attacks in Benghazi, there have been eight completed investigations: one internal State Department investigation, two bipartisan investigations led by the U.S. Senate; and five Republican-dominated investigations from the U.S. House of Representatives; every single one came out exonerating Clinton and made it clear that main the reasons for the lack of security were procedural, bureaucratic issues and misjudgments that occurred lower in the chain of command than the offices of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or President Obama, and rather than any cover-up or deliberate attempt to mislead the American people after the attack, confusion was generated merely by some unclear and conflicting messaging coming from different parts, offices, and agencies of America’s vast national government, messaging that was fair to question at the time but is hardly a major “scandal.”

Predictably, Republicans have decided it is time for a ninth Benghazi investigation (will the marathon ever actually end? Remember, this is a Republican Party that has voted against Obamacare fifty-five times in the House since it became law), dominated by Republicans from the House of Representatives (like five other investigations) and chaired by right-wing firebrand and shrill grandstander Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina. Since neither the Benghazi “scandal” or Hillary’s e-mail “scandal” can stand on their own legs as scandals, this devoid-of-gravitas political freshman, who rode into office in 2011 surfing atop the Tea Party tsunami, has decided that the best thing to do to make a whole scandal is to combine the two faltering scandals into one. So, on the assumption that there must, just must, be something, some shred of a farce of a circumstantial link in Hillary’s e-mails to prove… um, something bad about her, let’s continue on ground where eight investigations have already gone before. Yep, most assuredly worth an investigation. Thus, Gowdy and the other Republicans on the committee are now focusing the Benghazi “investigation” on Hillary’s e-mails.

Yes! That other “scandal!” Now we can get to the bottom of…something.

Yep, you’ve heard all about it! Hillary did… something… with her e-mails. Something about a server in her house when she was Secretary of State. Yeah that, um, has to be bad, right? Because Republicans are saying it’s bad. Over and over again. So… there must be something bad… about the server? Or the fact that she had an e-mail server at home, in the house she shared with Bill Clinton? So, yeah, a server in the house of a former President, and of former First Lady, former U.S. Senator, and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sounds… really irresponsible? I’m sure there’s no security at all and anyone can hack anything from there, right? Um… right? Or, maybe it wasn’t so crazy?  Hmmm…

Sure, you’ve seen the headlines, but there’s nothing juicy about “e-mail server” in a headline. There’s no sex, no violence, no cash bribes… try to imagine a House of Cards episode based on a “scandal” this tame and you can imagine the worst possible episode of House of Cards. This goes back to the muck/mud/crap approach. See, almost no one actually reads the articles about an “e-mail server scandal.” Not with ISIS, Syria, the Iran nuclear deal, Donald Trump, Game of Thrones, mass shootings, refugees, and so many other more exciting headlines. Nope. People see the headlines, the non-stop front-page deluge of this story and that story related to the e-mails. But almost no one actually reads those stories. They sound boring, and people just assume it’s bad because it keeps getting coverage and the Republicans act like this is the greatest threat to U.S. national security since 9/11 or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. With all the other stories, almost the only press coverage Hillary Clinton has been getting all spring and summer has been about the e-mail scandal, especially on TV news, where most Americans get their news and more so than any other source. Over these months of coverage, has anything specific turned up that has shown Hillary to have lied, betrayed American interests, been corrupt, of behaved incompetently in a way that had serious consequences for the United States of America? No, of course not. But, they haven’t seen all the e-mails yet so… THERE MIGHT BE! The headlines for some time now have consisted of “There Might Be Something Bad, But There Isn’t Yet, But, Hey, We’ll Keep Covering This Story Almost Daily Anyway.”

Benghazi Committee Hits “Send” For E-Mail “Scandal”

So how did this whole e-mail thing start?

It was uncovered by the investigation of the current Republican-dominated House special committee (the sixth House committee, eighth Congressional committee, and ninth committee overall).

The committee uncovered that Clinton has never actually used a @state.gov e-mail address while Secretary of State. Instead, she used a private e-mail address on a server she set up inside her own home, the home in Chappaquiddick, NY, that she shares with Bill Clinton.  The State Department as a whole either was not aware of this or chose to do nothing about it.

Almost two full years after she stepped down as Secretary of State, the State Department requested all her relevant e-mails in response to the current Benghazi committee investigation. In response, she and her people turned over 30,490 messages to the State Department that they determined were work related, but erased 31,830 messages that they classified as personal to Clinton and not related to her role as Secretary of State after individually reviewing each email; the Department of Justice maintains that she had the authority to delete the emails she regarded as personal. Her private server was then wiped clean.

When confronted with why this separate e-mail server had been set up, the scandal was not helped by Team Clinton’s response: other officials have taken at least a somewhat similar path, including, especially, Colin Powellwhen he was Secretary of State, they said; they claimed that this is more of a politically driven-issue than a substantive one; they told us we should trust in her as a public servant that the relevant work-related e-mails were turned over. When she finally personally addressed the media over this controversy this March, her main explanation was one of convenience:

“When I got to work as secretary of state, I opted, for convenience, to use my personal email account, which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal e-mails instead of two Looking back, it would’ve been better if I’d simply used a second email account and carried a second phone, but at the time, this didn’t seem like an issue… the vast majority of my work emails went to government employees at their government addresses, which meant they were captured and preserved immediately on the system at the State Department… I took the unprecedented step of asking that the State Department make all my work-related emails public for everyone to see.”

I will be completely honest: I am a Democrat and a big fan of Hillary Clinton, and I find this a totally reasonable explanation. But I don’t think that I am being biased at all. See, Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State was not one rigged by scandal; the Benghazi incident was the clear low point, by far, of what was generally thought by many Republicans as well as Democrats and people all over the world to have been a positive, solid performance as Secretary of State by Clinton. This was not a woman under constant investigations of personal wrongdoing with credible scandals dogging her tenure throughout; after eight investigations into Benghazi, there is now no serious doubt that she was trying to cover anything up; and any other speculative, imagined scandals are just that: speculative and imaginative, not based on any facts or evidence of wrongdoing or the existence of a real scandal. Both Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice under Bush were also generally thought to have put in good stints as Secretary of State. If they had done the same thing and issues had been brought up regarding either of them in the same position, I would have given them the benefit of the doubt just as I am giving Hillary the benefit of the doubt that, in the absence of any major scandals or evidence of personal wrongdoing, there was no cover-up, no deliberate attempt to hide anything. The same would go for any public servant, regardless of party, who had a generally clean record devoid of a series of major personal scandals tied directly to their individual behavior.

Hillary Said She Is Sorry And Took Responsibility

Clinton, from her first public comments on this issue back in March, has admitted her approach was not the best; this position evolved to her saying“It clearly wasn’t the best choice. I should’ve used two emails: one personal, one for work,” and adding that “I take responsibility for that decision,” while most recently she said that she made a “mistake” and accompanied that with a full-fledged apology. President Obama also recently characterized her decision on using exclusively using a personal server as a mistake but also added that it “is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered” and echoed Clinton’s husband when he added “The fact that for the last three months this is all that’s been spoken about is an indication that we’re in presidential political season.”

Every public official has lapses of judgment, every public official makes mistakes. The real and most important questions we can ask in such situations are:

1. Were laws or rules broken? (no, not that we know of, and it is unlikely this will be found to be the case)
2. Has any significant harm come from the acts in question? (no, not that we know of, and it is unlikely this will be found to be the case)
3. Is the accused being cooperative and transparent? (yes, to an unprecedented extent)
4. Is this part of a larger trend or an isolated incident? (it’s an isolated incident)
5. Can we learn lessons from this to avoid similar problems in the future? (yes, the relevant agencies are in the process of doing this, and this should be the focus of the Select Committee on Benghazi, though apparently it isn’t)

Predictably, Republicans, and disturbingly, the mainstream media, though, have instead continued since she gave that press conference in early March of this year to provide an endless supply of discussion and stories and coverage along the lines of “what if there was something… incriminating in those personal, deleted e-mails!? WHAT IF!? IT’S POSSIBLE THERE… MAY BE… SOMETHING! We haven’t found anything specifically damning yet, but… MAYBE WE WILL!” Yep, over half a year of major media coverage on Hillary Clinton boils down to that, and this has resulted in what Nate Silver terms a “poll-deflating feedback loop” that certainly hurt her more than just a little).

Bill Clinton, though hardly a neutral observer, was pretty much right when he said in an interview that “I’ve never seen so much expended on so little.” He notes that the media was eager for a competitive race for the Democratic nomination, adding that “I think that there are lots of people who wanted there to be a race for different reasons. And they thought the only way they could make it a race was a full-scale frontal assault on her. And so this email thing became the biggest story in the world.” He was also pretty on-target when he remarked that

“The other party doesn’t want to run against her. And if they do, they’d like her as mangled up as possible. And they know that if they leak things and say things that that is catnip to the people who get bored talking about what’s your position on student loan relief or dealing with the shortage of mental health care or what to do with the epidemic of prescription drugs and heroin out in America, even in small towns in rural America, or how you’re going to get jobs into coal country given how much they’ve lost in the last 20 years.”

But it’s a bit more complicated up close, so let’s go into some details.

The Issue of Legality/Propriety: Clinton Clearly Within Law, Rules

From what we already know so far, there is zero evidence that Clinton violated the law in any specific way, which required, at the time, that her relevant work records be preserved for posterity. There are arguments as to which staffers—her personal staffers or more bureaucratic State Department staffers—should have reviewed her emails to determine which were “work” and which were “personal,” but as far as the specifics of any laws that were on the books at the time, there is zero evidence that Clinton broke any laws. As far as the rules at State (read the rule book here), while the State Department at the time strongly urged its staff to “avoid” use of personal e-mail as a “general policy,” there is clearly no ban, discretion is clearly left to staffers, and if anyone was going to have more leeway and discretion it would the person who was Secretary of State. And there was never a Secretary of State who before had been First Lady. It does seem there was room for improvement and more coordination and clarity, to be fair, but no explicit violations are known to have taken place. If there is not yet a standard operating procedure for the recovery of such information from personal servers, that is not at all the fault of Clinton. Of course, we can’t know for sure that she did not break the law. We also can’t know for sure that she has not murdered anyone, doesn’t drink blood, and isn’t fond of cocaine. But in the absence of any evidence pointing to such behavior, it is unfair and unreasonable to assume that there is any serious likelihood that there was. And given Clinton’s public record is not one of her being caught in scandals that demonstrate any patter of being deceptive or misleading while in office, it would be especially unfair to assume she had relevant work e-mails deleted purposefully and knowingly. In the future, it would be great if there were standard procedures in each agency for transferring such content and for classifying such content as “work” or “personal.” Maybe in the future, such use of personal email servers will be completely against the rules. It wasn’t when Clinton was in office, and we are in somewhat uncharted territory. None of this is on Clinton, but the questions raised are important and we can be certain they are being and will be dealt with in light of this situation. Speaking of classified…

It’s Classified… or, Is It? And What Does That Even Mean?

In examining the issue of classified information in regards to Clinton’s server, it is important to note that the world of U.S. Government classified material is both extremely confusing and plagued by incorrect popular assumptions. As Jeffrey Toobin, one of America’s great legal scholars, recently explained in The New Yorker when addressing this “scandal,” there is no standard definition within the government on what is classified and what is not. What is classified at the Department of Defense may not be classified by the State Department. What is classified at the Department of Homeland Security may not be classified at the CIA… and so on and so forth. Furthermore, information is often classified on a basis that has nothing to do with national security. For example, two of Clintons’ e-mails that were not marked as classified at the time they were sent but were after the fact (this happens often) were even questioned by intelligence officials for having been marked classified at all, with these officials complaining about a general overclassification of material (on a side note, to see a great example of the speculative, biased reporting I am taking about, and example by a highly questionable, at least partially discredited source who made false claims about being a spy, is a bullying defender of the NSA, and recently may have been outed as having sent pictures of his penis to someone, see this article’s discussion of the same issue). Of the two e-mails, one was just a discussion of a news report, the other could have come from information available outside of government channels; neither were marked classified at the time they were sent to Clinton. This is all related to the massive problem of rampant overclassification of information by the government; experts and officials estimate that between 50% and 90% of all classified material could even be disclosed without any detrimental effecton national security.

Thus, a headline could be generated “Classified Email Passed Through Clinton’s Server,” but a more accurate headline would be “E-mail Was Sent to Clinton That Was Later Classified but Maybe Should Not Have Been Classified” (though that doesn’t sell papers, now, does it?). Such headlines do raise questions, but have the effect of being communications coming from a student in the middle of writing a paper: a lot can change before the paper is done and it would be better to just read the final version. Imagine reporting a paper as it is still being researched to the tunes of dozens, even hundreds of articles… Something of a farcical exercise here, to be sure.

The questions raised, of course, are most certainly valid, thought, and some material that should not have passed through Clinton’s personal server mayhave done so; however, as of now, nothing is known to have been classified at the time, even after four months of releases, and there is still no evidence that Clinton herself initiated sending anything that is questionable with only a few slight, apparently unalarming exceptions. And legally speaking, Clinton cannot be prosecuted for any criminal wrongdoing unless she both knew what she was handling was classified and purposefully disclosed this to someone she knew was unauthorized to see it. It is therefore very unlikely that it will ever be possible to prove any wrongdoing even if it is found that Hillary herself sent classified e-mail to someone who should not have received it (and again, so far there is zero evidence that this happened).  And it is fairly likely that most of (and possible that all) the information labeled classified either at the time or after it passed through Clinton’s server (and, again, there is no definitive proof of the former) did not even need to be considered classified, as the above discussion makes clear.

Some common sense is in order here: if Clinton herself has not sent anything she knew was labeled classified, and people sent her information that was later classified—whether it should or  should not necessarily have been so so labeled—that’s not really on Clinton. If people sent her material that should have been classified but was not, and she opened the email anyway, let’s think about this for a second: how would she know what the material even was until she had already opened an e-mail that was not marked classified? And, frankly, in terms of incoming communication, I don’t think a typical Secretary of State generally spends much time evaluating the level of classification of incoming email; if anything, that is the definition of a bureaucratic staff task, below Secretary-of-State-level without a doubt. This is similar to the Benghazi issue, then, at least in this regard.

Another aspect to consider is that this involves new types of technology and a new series of issues a slow moving behemoth-of-a-bureaucratic-institution like the State Department is behind in adjusting to; more than anything else, this “scandal” is a symptom of twenty-first-century growing pains for an institution that is decidedly twentieth-century in manner. The system for classifying information and accessing it before the Internet age worked well, when people generally worked in their offices and that was that. Now, in the mobile, smartphone age, that type of work style is out-of-step with the times, as is the antiquated State Department system that has failed to keep up with the times, is time consuming and cumbersome, and forces you be stationary in an office to access and review classified information or even to classify or declassify material to begin with; it is also totally incompatible with mobile networks, forcing staff to often choose between security and the need to quickly pass on and access information while not physically in the State Department. In fact, the technology at the State Department was considered so behind-the-times that it was not uncommon for State Department staff to prefer and often work on their homes systems using personal e-mail addresses.

Communications and technology competence within the U.S Government has actually been a major problem in recent years. Keep in mind that in 2001, we saw that the government was very poor at sharing intelligenceacross different agencies; otherwise, signs pointing to the 9/11 attacks might more forcefully have been recognized and more preventive action may have been taken. The Pentagon under Rumsfeld did a terrible job of setting uniform standards for prisoner interrogation, helping to lead to Abu Ghraib; the State Department and the Pentagon had a dysfunctional relationship in the early years of the occupation of Iraq; and most recently, the Department of Veterans Affairs has been dealing with a massive backlog of its veteran patients and the Obamacare website launch was a total disaster; these are just a few examples of the oversights, dysfunction, and mishaps typical within the U.S. Government when it comes to technology and communications.

Thus far, over 12,000 emails and almost 20,000 pages of material have been released, with 403 of these e-mails today being considered classified and currently under review; however, of the 403 that have thus far been reviewed, none were officially labeled as classified at the time they came to Clinton’s attention, though this review is not yet complete. Almost all of these 403 e-mails are labeled with the lowest possible classification rating, and it appears thus far that the number of e-mails beyond that lowest level is in the single digits. There are, however, some confusing disputes as to whether or not a small number of e-mails should have been regarded and handled by Clinton as if they were marked classified even though they were not (as that they may have contained classified secrets even without having a classified label) and whether some were specifically labeled classifiedthough whether this was the case has yet to be determined.

Those crying foul when comparing Clinton’s situation to that of former General and CIA Director David Petraeus would do well to remember that Petraeus confessed to knowingly divulging classified information to his mistress.

The E-mail Release… Schedule?!?

The State Department actually came up with a sensible plan to release all of Clinton’s e-mails at once, after what is understandably a lengthy review process, as all the other relevant agencies in any emails relevant to them have to make their own rulings on whether and/or how to classify the material. But the District Judge Rudolph Contreras ruling on the relevant case—a Freedom of Information Act request from the press—ruled perplexingly instead that the State Department must release the e-mails in batches on a rolling basis, rejecting the State Department’s sound proposal. Furthermore, he later rejected State’s response offer to release batches every sixty days, and instead ordered that they be released every thirty days. I am honestly not sure why a federal judge is micromanaging how an executive agency like the State Department releases its records, and why it is appropriate for a judge to make a distinctions between a full-release in six months and partial releases every two month vs. every month. In all three cases, the e-mails would have been made public prior to any of the 2016 political nomination contests and far before the general election. After spending hours looking at this specific decision, it is odd that there not much of an explanation or much scrutiny regarding such a decision in the media. The way the judge ruled ensured a near constant focus on this in the public eye over many months and this over just parts of the (not the full) picture. One would be forgiven for thinking the ruling was designed to create maximum exposure of the issue; instead of a long movie we’re getting a whole TV series, complete with constant running commentary and speculation about the next episodes. For her part, Clinton has been saying for months that she wants all the relevant e-mails released as quickly as possible, but monthly batches is probably not what she had in mind.

Apart from the main body of e-mails, the e-mails related to Benghazi were released first, nearly 300 of them. Nothing particularly incriminating or damning was contained in them; rather, they show Clinton going about her job and trying to get to the bottom of what happened, as well as the inner workings of an American Secretary of State and her staff. Later, a very small number of additional e-mails (nine and portions of six others) were submitted by a close Clinton confidante—Sidney Blumenthal—that also dealt with Benghazi, and late last month, the State Department uncovered an additional 925 e-mails related to Benghazi (can we see how forcing them to rush and release under pressure may not be best approach?).

Starting at the end of June, the State Department began releasing more of Clinton’s e-mails in the court-ordered, court-schedule batches. Much of them involve the mundane and show a new Secretary of State adapting to her new role. Another batch was released at the end of July, still anothermassive batch at the end of August. The latest disclosed batch was released at the end of September. Some of these e-mails show everything from Clinton’s taste in television shows to her sense of humor. At least six e-mails Clinton herself sent contained what apparently later became classified information, but officials with access to them did not seem to think any harm was done in the process or that the information was particularly sensitive.

All of the released e-mails can be read, browsed, and searched through online here.

About Those Deleted Personal E-mails…

In order to look into who was sending material that perhaps should have been labeled classified, how it was sent, and how it was labeled the way it was, the FBI opened an investigation (not one focusing on Clinton and not a criminal one, contrary to an acknowledged major reporting error from The New York Times). As part of the investigation, the FBI now has Clinton’s server and will probably be able to recover some of her e-mails her staff labeled personal and deleted. Much of the focus on the ongoing investigation, appropriately, is on whether the main problem is in the decisions of the people who sent the information under review to her personal server. As of yet, if it was able to recover any of the those e-mails labeled as personal by Clinton’s team, no information on any of them has been released by the FBI.

Also, apart from any official investigation, a Republican senator obtained and released information from e-mails of an employee of the company maintaining Clinton’s server backup that mentioned an entity tied to the Clintons sought to greatly reduce the time period covered by backups this August, and this single employee muses that there could be a cover-up but we are shown no evidence to support this; this is far from a complete picture, it clearly does not involve a review or access to all the company’s e-mails and communications on the subject, and it is not any kind of an official statement from the company. Since she has been for some time and is currently a private citizen (though one running for president), this may very well be a legitimate effort to protect her own privacy. Until we know more about this (and we know very little about it), there is no reason suspect anything nefarious is at work here. With the Clintons as high profile as they are, it is highly conceivable that the instance of a single employee at a company maintaining the backups for Clinton’s server voicing the possibility of a cover-up (of what, exactly?) is just the musings of single employee with his own strong opinions about the Clintons; at this point we just don’t know.  This is why leaks that come in the middle of ongoing investigations should always be taken with a grain of salt.

Security: Clinton’s One Weakness?

Amid all the talk of the security of Clinton’s e-mail server, it should not be forgotten that even our government networks have not been terribly secure, and that this has been the case for years, including in 2007 for the Secretary of Defense’s unclassified government email account. And the situation is only getting worse. That’s not to say that her e-mail server had the same level of security as a State Department server, but with all the hacking going on, it might not have made a difference.

Of course, that does not get Clinton off the hook. Where Clinton is most vulnerable in this situation is, in fact, on issues of the security of her server. The aforementioned FBI investigation is also looking into how secureClinton’s server actually was. What we do know is that the Clintons paid a State Department staffer—Bryan Pagliano, who had earlier run IT for Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign—to run the server. The State Department is not commenting on the situation with Pagliano because there are “ongoing reviews and investigations,” and he is not answering questions on the basis of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to avoid incriminating himself (possibly because he may have violated a regulation that forbids non-government outside work compensation to exceed 15 % of his government salary and did not list the income from the Clintons as required by State), though Team Clinton has urged him and all relevant current and former aides to cooperate with investigators. We know that several colleagues and staffers of Clinton’s expressed concerns about the system’s security. We know there were attempts to hack into her serverusing SPAM, but, let’s be honest, SPAM is usually fairly obvious and requires you to click on an attachment to work, and Clinton at that point would likely have had enough experience using e-mail to recognize this message as SPAM and at the very least would quite likely have known not to click on the attachments. In any events, there is no evidence that hackers succeeded in obtaining sensitive information from Clinton’s server or even managed to hack into it at all. The FBI is also currently looking into whether foreign intelligence was able to spy on Clinton’s e-mails (no evidence yet), but even her successor, John Kerry, thinks that his official State Department e-mails are “very likely” being spied upon by the Russians and/or Chinese, so this goes back to my earlier point, that whether she had a private e-mail server or not, Clinton would have still been vulnerable.

The important question is: was her e-mail server less secure than a government server? Probably, but at the same time (and I have yet to hear anyone raise this!) if we—and apparently the State Department—had been unaware of the existence of the server for so long, perhaps foreign governments would also have been unaware, i.e., since they would have been targeting State Department servers to begin with, perhaps Clinton’s information would have been more secure on a private server not because of it technical safeguards but because it was more under-the-radar. At this point, it’s all just speculation, either way.

But we also know that, in the words of Hillary Clinton, “the system we used was set up for President Clinton’s office. And it had numerous safeguards. It was on property guarded by the Secret Service. And there were no security breaches.”

Still, the fact that she exclusively used a personal server to exchange e-mails does raise the questions mentioned above, and there were probably a set of additional risks doing so added to the equation.  There are cases to be made that these risks both did and did not offset the risks that already existed with security of the State Department’s official servers, and this remains to be see until the conclusions of the investigations.  That her use of a personal private server could very well have increased the security risks and increased the chance of exposure of sensitive, if not necessarily classified, information is certainly a distinct, perhaps even likely, possibility, one that must be acknowledged, but at the same time not overblown.  President Obama’s characterization of this as a “mistake” that is unlikely to have done major damage seems to be a fair and accurate characterization based on what we know thus far.

If this was a revelation from the Select Committee on Government E-mail Reform, we could say job well done to the committee, and this would all make sense and be relevant. Since this is all coming out of the Select Committee on Benghazi, this is simply ridiculous. Regarding the Committee itself…

The Select “Selective” Committee on Benghazi and the Media’s Complicity in Nonsense

When it comes to all these accusation and inferences, after enough time, the mud sticks, the crap smells, and after seeing this constant barrage of headlines, even though no one can actually explain how any hard evidence against Clinton has come out of this, people just assume bad things about Hillary and what was going on with her e-mail server, whatever that may be even though nothing yet has been shown to have been going on. And in fact, the recently former prospective successor to Speaker of the House John Boehner (who touchingly announced plans to resign from his post and Congress after the Pope’s visit made him cry a lot and realize there is more to life than dealing with crazy Tea Party Republicans), California Representative and House Majority Leader (the #2 Republican post in the House behind the Speaker of the House) Kevin McCarthy, confirmed as much, that the main point of the committee investigating Benghazi was to tear Hillary down and derail her campaign. His specific words were:

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would’ve known any of that had happened had we not fought and made that happen.”

He tried to backtrack his statements, and soon after withdrew himself from consideration to succeed Boehner (there were also rumors of an affair with a female congresswoman). But the cat was out of the bag, and Team Hillary is relishing this “gift” from McCarthy, which has been the catalyst for a dramatic turnaround for Clinton’s campaign and in her press coverage, culminating in her “spectacular” debate performance earlier this month. If that is not enough, a recently fired Republican staffer (who is suing on that grounds that he was illegally fired for not playing partisan politics) on the committee came out and confirmed the same thing: that the committee is a witch hunt against Clinton, and shortly after that another Republican congressman voiced the same opinion. Yep, that’s three Republicans—the House Majority Leader, another congressman, and a staffer who worked on the actual committee—who blurted out that the new Benghazi committee is mainly motivated by partisan politics, even if one of the three (McCarthy) recanted.

And yet, the mainstream, respectable media (let alone right-wing media, for now) keep playing into the Republicans’ hands: no matter how outrageous, inaccurate, nonsensical, downright false, or blown out of proportion Republicans’ claim are, the more noise they make, the more coverage their tantrums receive in the mainstream press and the more their positions are presented as simply the other side of a coin, equal in validity to other far more sound positions. Thus, we have “debates” on the existence of man-made climate change/global warming, the existence of evolution, whether Planned Parenthood is an abortion factory or selling baby organs harvested from live fetuses on a mass scale, whether illegal immigration is a growing problem, the validity of Obama’s identity as an American who was born in America and eligible to be president, the list goes on and on, and now, it’s Clinton’s e-mail server and Benghazi. To a degree, the media does come down on the side that, yes, some of these “debates” are silly; but to another degree, the media does not quash these things at their inception, instead giving oxygen to these inane counter-“arguments” and allowing them to gain traction and be considered valid positions. Of course, the fact that Republicans are the ones as a group taking these inane positions while simultaneously perpetually calling the mainstream media biased in favor of liberals—and thus creating the myth of “the liberal media”—is a clever double game, pressuring the media to cover their side more leniently than they should. But it cannot all come down to that, and, in the end, the TV media at least has failed to do their job properly. In this case, it is problematic that the media did not really question Gowdy’s committee before McCarthy’s stupendous gaffe.

As Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy and his Republican colleagues prepare to publicly confront Clinton when she comes to town to testify publicly before  their committee on Thursday, there is bipartisan rancor surrounding the proceedings. Chairman Gowdy and Democratic Ranking Member (the head minority position on the committee for Democrats) Elijah Cummings are already feuding over the purpose and conduct of the committee. Democrats and even several Republicans, as I have noted above, are doing the same. When they first decided to call her publicly as witness over the summer, Clinton seemed vulnerable, and her campaign was losing steam to Bernie Sanders. Now, after McCarthy’s gaffe and her own top-notch debate performance, Hillary is coasting on a wave of positive publicity and seems to have more than regained her footing; you get the sense that Republicans are nervous that this may very well backfire against them, much like Romney’s attack against Obama on Benghazi backfired in 2012 and other past overzealous investigations of the Clintons backfired before. Still, the committee’s Republicans seem likely to try to pounce on Clinton like a mangy, starving pack of dogs attacking a strong, fit, well-fed lioness.

However, at the worst possible moment for Chairman Gowdy, rather than there being increasing doubts about Clinton and her credibility, there are increasing questions about the Committee’s credibility as well as his own, concerns being raised not only Democrats in general, pundits, and the media, but also some Republicans and even the Democratic members of the committee itself, and these concerns threaten to destroy everything Gowdy has been working towards as committee chair this past year-and-a-half. Gowdy himself acknowledging all this in an interview with Politicoreporter Rachael Bade. To be fair, in his public statements as the committee’s chairman, Gowdy has maintained an air of nonpartisan impartiality. At the same time, were a committee chair to consistently express himself throughout a very sensitive investigation in the middle of a presidential election cycle in an overtly partisan manner, this would just be bad politics and harm whatever purposes—whether substantive or political—he and the committee had, destroying its and his credibility from the start. Despite his claims to the contrary—that he is not focusing on Clinton and her personal aides—his actions very much contradict this, and his actions speak much louder than his more measured words.  He even made the generally rare move in naming a witness ahead of time in the case of Clinton’s close personal aid and confidante, Huma Abedin, who had almost no relevance to the Benghazi attacks but was called as a high profile witness anyway.  And, of course, let’s not forget Gowdy has previously demonstrated his ability to be extremely partisan in previous Benghazi hearings.

Perhaps most embarrassingly, Gowdy himself committed a careless, inexcusable blunder of the type he is accusing Hillary Clinton of committing while Secretary of State. See, Gowdy recently accused Clinton of endangering, in his words, “not only national security but human lives” by sending and receiving e-mails that contained the name of a CIA sourcethrough her personal server; such information is “some of the most protected information in our intelligence community,” said Gowdy (sounds pretty serious, right?). Well, it turns out that the CIA does not consider the sources’ identity classified at all; Ranking Member Cummings wrote a public letter to his committee colleague Chairman Gowdy explaining that the CIA had informed him that Gowdy’s claim that the source’s name was classified and that Clinton therefore had been irresponsible with highly classified information was false, and that none of the information exchanged in 127 e-mails between Clinton and her confidante Blumenthal contained any classified information, with Cummings’ characterization confirmed independently by Newsweek. Gowdy did not back down even though the source was publicly known at the time to have been be in contact with the CIA for years and the CIA chose not to redact the source’s name.  Gowdy, in an attempt to bolster his case, released the e-mails in question to the public along with a sniping public letter in response to Cummings’ letter. In this letter, Gowdy wrote that “Sources and methods of intelligence are among the most closely guarded information our government has.  We will continue to redact that information and treat it with the highest level of confidentiality and sensitivity, and we would advise you to do the same.” The only problem is, Gowdy had failed to notice that the State Department had not redacted the source’s (non-classified) name in the e-mail copies it had sent to Gowdy, so that when Gowdy released these e-mails (which he was apparently so strongly focused on and concerned about) to the public, he released the source’s name to the public in the process. That’s right: the name he was so worried about was not a piece of information Gowdy even took the most basic cursory steps to prevent public release of and he accidentally released the name because of sheer carelessness. He even did so before the State Department had completed its review process for releasing the e-mail to the public.

If anything, the hearing is likely to empower Clinton, showcasing her strengths while broadcasting her critics’ weaknesses for all to see. And in the long run, it is far more likely that the Select Committee on Benghazi’s uncovering of Clinton’s private e-mail server will only help make Clinton a much stronger candidate than she would have been otherwise. From the large portion of e-mails that have already been released, none making Clinton look bad, incompetent, or unprofessional, we are seeing the destruction of the Republican Party’s last semi-effective attack against Clinton: that she is not open, that she is dishonest, that she has something to hide regarding her actions on Benghazi or maybe even engaged in a cover-up. By having so many investigations, and now spending all these many months focusing on her e-mails, whether the relentless questioning from Republican Congressman and presidential candidates or the nonstop focus of especially the conservative media but also the mainstream media, the Republicans are essentially prematurely playing their last effective handagainst Hillary—the perception that she is untrustworthy—well over a year before the general election. If—and it is seeming more and more like when—Clinton’s e-mails exonerate her with an unprecedented level of transparency, the Republicans’ ability to attack Clinton on her trustworthiness will be the weakest, most diminished it has ever been. It is as if they are pinch hitting the spot of their best and current pitcher in fourth inning, leaving little down the stretch for the more critical innings.

Hillary’s E-Mail “Scandal” as Part of the Big Picture

Yes, in the short term, during the summer before the election, the Republicans managed to sag Hillary’s poll numbers. Now, a resurgent Clinton, as sharp as anyone in politics, comes to Washington tomorrow to confront Gowdy and his Republican colleagues on the Select Committee on Benghazi. They think they are putting her on trial, think that they can score some political points at her expense, with much of the country and media watching, and just while Clinton has shrugged off a slump and seems to be hitting her stride. And after months of pouring over her e-mails, they are right where they have started: with nothing substantive or specific that can do much damage to Hillary, and no new useful information about the attacks on Benghazi that will bring the victims’ families a deeper sense of justice or contribute in any way to meaningful reforms (apart from regulations of personal email use, hardly a towering achievement or the design of a committee nominally focused on Benghazi). A Republican Party in a state of implosion and disarray that seems unable to even decide on a new Speaker of the House is challenging one of the ablest Democratic politicians of this generation to combat on Capitol Hill. Additionally, with some fourteen years between today and the 9/11 attacks and a “huge” assist from Donald Trump, Republicans overplaying their hand on Benghazi and trying to blame Obama before and Hillary Clinton now for the Benghazi attack has left them vulnerable to renewed, quite legitimate criticism of Republicans’ failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks when they controlled the Executive Branch through the George W. Bush Administration. It is a particularly glaring hypocrisy that the Republicans never pursued investigations into 9/11 and Republican-led and Republican-mismanaged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—each of which cost thousands of American lives—with the same zeal and demand for detail they are now displaying in the investigations into an attack in Benghazi under a Democratic president’s watch that cost four American lives. And with a whole host of issues the American public as a whole are deeply concerned about, it is quite telling that Republicans are focusing most of their energy on things like a caricature of Planned parenthood, a myth of illegal immigration being a major and growing threat, and, ostensibly, an investigation into a terrorist attack from three years in Benghazi ago that killed only four people (though one was an ambassador) and has already been investigated eight times, but an investigation that is actually and clearly focusing on Hillary Clinton and her e-mail woes.

Months ago, Republicans were gleefully trumpeting Hillary’s e-mail problems, certain they would prove a major screw-up or cover-up on her part, and thus do enough damage to derail her bid for the presidency. Now, going into tomorrow’s hearings, it is not Clinton who should be afraid. (And I was sure right about that!  See my later article: Benghazi Hearing: GOP’s Embarrassing Shame, Clinton’s Triumphant Vindication)

UPDATED: January 30th, 2016

Thanks to the media and Republicans, just a few days before the Iowa caucuses this political zombie is again back from the dead and refuses to die.  A typical example of the more abysmal news coverage is provided by The Hill with its article headlined: “FBI’s Hillary Clinton email investigation not letting up.”  Far past the opening paragraphs, the article notes that “Officials have indicated that the bureau is not targeting Clinton specifically, however, but is investigating whether any information on her account was mishandled,” and, towards the end: “It might not be Clinton herself who faces the music for any potential crime, however.  The former secretary of State did not appear to send most of the emails now marked classified. Instead, they were largely sent or forwarded to her by aides.”  So, Clinton is not even the “target” of the headlined “Hillary Clinton email investigation?”  Perhaps the editors could have come up with a better label for the investigation then…

As noted above, the State Department began releasing Benghazi-related emails this past May; starting in June, it began releasing monthly court-ordered batches of the rest.  The, eighth, final court-ordered batch’s release has been delayed because of the historic, massive snowstorm that just blanketed the Washington, DC, region and because of a mistake by the State Department regarding interagency coordination on reviewing the e-mails, but a small portion of the final batch was released Friday.  Like all the other e-mails out of the tens of thousands already released, these new e-mails contained nothing incriminating for Clinton. What was learned recently is that twenty-two emails were subsequently upgraded by the State Department to one of the highest levels of classification possible—“top secret/S.A.P” (special access programs)—at the request of intelligence agencies.  The rest of the e-mails that were later classified were almost all classified with the lowest possible level of classification.  Some of the classified e-mails reviewed in the past have dealt with Clinton and others discussing information publicly available in news reports or other types of public reports about sensitive programs like the covert U.S. drone warfare program; Clinton recently indicated that the some or all of small number of e-mails later labeled “top secret/S.A.P.” now receiving special scrutiny fit this description and were discussions of media reports publicly available to anyone.  Other senior officials, including a senior intelligence official, confirmed that at least some of these e-mails were concerning publicly available information about drones and termed these e-mails “innocuous.”  Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Ranking Member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, noted that Clinton did not author any of the recently referenced e-mails.  In addition, of the two other e-mails previously revealed as subsequently having been labeled as “top secret,” one involved a discussion of drones and the other involved a discussion of North Korea using publicly available information.  Even though such information is publicly available, agencies still classify such information, up to and even including discussions about such reports.  In terms of the entire body of e-mails subsequently classified by one or more agencies, as before, still almost all of them were sent to, not by, Clinton, though no details as to the especially sensitive twenty-two e-mails have been released other than their classification level.  And what has been confirmed repeatedly throughout these proceedings was just again confirmed, even regarding these twenty-two emails: that none of the emails in question were labeled as classified at the time they were sent or received or were. 

As has been the case over the many months since the e-mail story broke, still nothing Clinton has done has yet been shown to have harmed national security or American interests.  Even with the recent revelation of the twenty-two e-mails subsequently labeled a very high level of classification, until any specifics are released about what type of information was in these e-mails and why they were classified, there really is not much of story here at all, just more of the endless, tedious speculation that the media hopes will sell more papers and that the Republicans hope will bolster their numbers (or Sanders’) against Clinton.

There are other details of a but more ominous nature: a letter written by the inspector general for the America’s intelligence agencies was recently sent to the Republican Chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence first mentioning that some of the e-mails were subsequently labeled “top secret/S.A.P.” but this letter not released to the public.  Somehow, that letter was passed on to Fox News (out of all possible outlets…) and Fox then released it to the public, two weeks before the Iowa caucuses where Sen. Bernie Sanders and Clinton are polling neck-and-neck, suggesting that politics was at least partly behind the letter’s release.

Further update to be released at the conclusion of the FBI investigation

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*****

EXCLUSIVE analysis of information not yet reported in the necessary context shows that Trump the businessman, at best, was an unwitting tool used for Russian (mafia and government-tied) money laundering and that Trump the president is, at best, an unwitting tool for Vladimir Putin; at worst, Trump the businessman was a partner in Russian (organized and governmental) crime and Trump the president is the biggest scandal in American history. Even if Trump is an extraordinarily stupid leader with spectacularly terrible judgment and he is totally innocent of knowing what was really going on, it has been clear for some time that key associates of Trump are far less likely to be innocent when it comes to complicity and collusion and therefore treason, with the latest reports only confirming fire when the smoke was already suffocating. However the fire finally comes to light and whatever his personal involvement, since the best case scenario is that Trump is easily duped and manipulated, Trump is clearly unfit to be president.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse March 28, 2017 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981) March 28th, 2017 (Updated 4/3; Update of my pre-election piece.); War is Boring version in two parts

Built on part on these earlier pieces from July 30/31 2016: Trump, Putin, Russia, DNC/Clinton Hack, & WikiLeaks: “There’s Something Going on” with Election 2016 & It’s Cyberwarfare & Maybe Worse

November 4, 2016: EXCLUSIVE: Top Trump Aides’ Deeper & Linked Roles in Putin Agenda Revealed; Russian Mafia Nexus With Trump & Aides Goes Back Years

See major follow-up piece:July 27, 2017: Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind

Also, see his related piece from December 7, 2016: The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

Trump, Tevfik Arif, & Felix Sater (of whom Trump testified under oath: “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like”) © Mark Holden/WireImage

AMMAN — This information concerns business dealings over the last decade and then some of Donald Trump, who at the time was hurting for investors and investment as Wall Street had all but shut down its loaning operations to him; this information involved criminal dirty money laundering coming from Russia, Russian organized crime, and associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin at a time Putin, his government, his close associates, and future associates of Trump—most notably Paul Manafort, his future Campaign Chairman—were involved in a massive Eurasian natural gas and criminal money laundering scheme worth billions of dollars that was part of Putin’s grand plan to control Ukraine. Updates also discuss context involving lobbying efforts, financing for Trump’s projects, and new or related developments that, in terms of Russian intrigue, incriminate even further both associates of Donald Trump and his successful presidential campaign (and, therefore, perhaps even his very presidency).

At best, Trump himself may have had no knowledge of this money laundering and these ties, but even this scenario highlights serious deficiencies in Trump’s judgment in terms of who he did business and politics with and how he did business and politics, pillars of his management style and of urgent interest to the American people as Trump manages the nation as president.   

While there is no direct proof of Trump’s knowing involvement or collusion in any single aspect of these dealings when it comes to laundering money or tilting a U.S. election with Russian help, the sheer number of them over a period of years and his close association with a number of key players in these crimes, combined with his positions and public statements as a presidential candidate that are the most pro-Russian of any major presidential candidate or sitting president, create a picture that stinks to high heaven and makes it more likely—not less—that something nefarious is going on between Team Trump and Team Putin. 

We may never know exactly what happened or exactly who is responsible or exactly what Trump was and wasn’t aware of, but, despite ludicrous claims to the contrary, this has nothing to do with the media or with irresponsible speculation; with so many questionable people, actions, and circumstances, the only sane and responsible course forward is to continue to vigorously demand more answers to the questions Trump and his associates have raised because of their actions and no one else’s, especially since their accounts of these events and people keep shifting as more and more evidence comes to light. After all, contrary to American civil criminal law, in the court of public opinion, the burden is on a sitting President with so many questionable connections to shed light on his dealings and to clear any hint of suspicion if he wants to earn the benefit of the doubt.

Time to go over what we do know, and what, when put together and given proper context, what that information makes clear and what it suggests.

Executive Summary

In earlier work, I revealed significantly deeper relationships than previously understood from all other previous public reporting between associates of Donald Trump, his presidential campaign, and entities related to them on one hand and associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin, his Russian government, and entities related to them on the other hand, relationships concerning efforts to advance the Putin’s interests, Russian government interests, and Russian organized crime interests. 

Two figures in particular, former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort and former Trump campaign foreign policy advisor Carter Page, were involved in major geopolitical events and entities that convulsed Ukraine beginning in 2004 with the Orange Revolution and through a massive Eurasian gas and money laundering scheme designed to facilitate Russian dominance of Ukraine whose effects are still being directly felt up through today with the war in Ukraine. 

Manafort and Page were linked by lines of power and influence connecting them through a short chain of major players and entities, and their presence and roles in the region overlapped in key areas for several years as they worked for Putin’s key allies to enact a plan designed to corrupt and dominate the Ukrainian state and to serve the purposes of Vladimir Putin’s anti-Western, anti-American agenda. 

Page operated on one end as an advisor not only to the Russian energy giant Gazprom, whose pipes much of the gas involved in the scheme passed through on its way to Ukraine (a fact well-reported), but also to another major Russian company, a large domestic power company called RAO UES (which I was the first to report in the context of Putin’s gas scheme) that ended up using some of the Gazprom gas—after passing through Putin-allied middlemen—to power its Russian power plants in a circular scheme returning the fruits of the gas to their country of origin.

Manafort’s part—far more pivotal, central, and direct than Page’s—was working with pro-Russian, pro-Putin Ukrainian political elites (especially Ukrainian on-and-off-again President Viktor Yanukovych, which the Orange Revolution had exposed and deposed, and his Party of Regions, for whom Manafort was the top political advisor) and business elites (especially oligarch Dmitry Firtash) and with Russian political and business elites (especially oligarch Oleg Deripaska); Firtash was linked to Putin friend and Russian mafia godfather Semion Mogilevich, who worked together to launder billions to profit themselves, Yanukovych, and Yanukovych’s political allies so they, flush with cash, could be bribed to do Putin’s bidding, bribe others to do the same, outspend rivals, and thus, overall, dominate Ukraine’s political system.

Manafort himself worked with Firtash and Mogilevich to set up a massive money laundering scheme in 2008 involving a Manhattan development project that defrauded its partners of millions and for which all of them were later sued by the former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, whose loss in Ukraine’s 2010 presidential race to Viktor Yanukovych and subsequent politically motivated imprisonment at the hands of his government were facilitated in part by the Manafort-led Manhattan scheme. Manafort also worked with Deripaska to help launder millions in order to hide/protect the personal fortunes of Yanukovych and his allies. For these efforts, Manafort was paid many millions. A partner of Manafort’s—Richard “Rick” Gates—was also involved with burnishing his efforts there and in efforts to lobby U.S. official to help Yanukovych’s comeback government and hurt the imprisoned Tymoshenko’s reputation.

Manafort, Gates, and Page ended up on Trump’s campaign, from which they are easily among the prime suspects responsible for Trump’s and his campaign’s unprecedented pro-Putin, pro-Russian positions that have made them the most pro-Russian (and pro-Putin) candidate and campaign in American history.

Additionally, but hardly of least concern, Mogilevich is the link from the realm of the first scandal set to another roughly concurrent scandal set that ties directly to Trump at the time it unfolded (a fact not reported elsewhere before my earlier piece): a series of at least three real estate deals—one in Manhattan, one in Fort Lauderdale, and one in Phoenix—all spearheaded by a company called Bayrock and that all ended in scandal and disaster. One of the point-men for Trump on all of these deals was the son of Mikhael Sheferovsky—AKA Michael Sater—an alleged Mogilevich capo (an allegation not reported by any major news outlet before my previous piece); this son, one Felix Sater, has a mysterious but clearly Russian mafia-linked violent criminal past of his own that may have even involved working for Mogilevich. Sater and his Bayrock business partner Tevfik Arif helped bring in significant financing and financiers who were either Russians/former Soviets with Putin and/or Soviet ties and/or people with shady and/or criminals pasts, often tied to money laundering, especially Tamir Sapir, Alexander Mashkevich and the now-notorious FL Group of Iceland.   

Through Mogilevich and cores of illicit Russian funding and financiers, then, three international illegal money laundering schemes—the Ukrainian Eurasian laundering plot, its related Manhattan money laundering deal, and the series of Bayrock deals with Trump that all either involved, likely involved, or were likely set up for money laundering—are all linked together at roughly the same time for the first time here.

But in this case the devil—and the Trumps—are in the details.

Setting the Stage in Ukraine: Page & Manafort Arrive

To begin to understand the big picture, one has to go back to 2004.

In 2004, Carter Page moved to Moscow and set up Merrill Lynch’s branch there. His bio on the website of Global Energy Capital LLC, which Page founded and where he is currently a managing partner, states that “[h]e spent 3 years in Moscow where he was responsible for the opening of the Merrill office and was an advisor on key transactions for Gazprom, RAO UES and others.”

As Page was setting up shop in Moscow, Paul Manafort began running Victor Yanukovych’s political life. 

Yanukovych is a notorious, scandal-ridden Ukrainian politician that first attracted global attention in the Ukrainian presidential election of 2004. Leonid Kuchma, the outgoing president during these elections, had appointed Victor Yanukovych as his prime minister late in 2002 and had backed him as a pro-Russian (and pro-Putin) candidate in the 2004 election, even to the point of trying to rig and steal the election for Yanukovych, which sparked the Orange Revolution that, in turn, led to the Ukrainian Supreme Court-ordered redo election that resulted in the defeat of Yanukovych and victory for the more pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko, who had almost been killed by a mysterious poisoning incident (with poisoning hardly an unheard-of fate for opponents of the Kremlin and Putin). 

Yanukovych had already developed a reputation for extreme corruption by this time, but that did not stop Paul Manafort from running Yanukovych’s campaign late in 2004 for the redo election. Despite the loss, Manafort stuck around and was hired to take charge of both rehabilitating the disgraced Yanukovych and strategizing for his political party, the Party of Regions, helping them helping them over the ensuing years to gain power at the expense of Ukraine’s pro-U.S., pro-Western, post-Orange Revolution government.

This type of work was hardly out of the ordinary for Manafort, as his client list includes dictators like the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (then Zaire’s) Mobutu Sese Seko, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Somalia’s Siad Barre, Sani Abacha of Nigeria, and Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi; other clients include Jonas Savimbi (the leader of the Angolan human-rights-abusing rebel guerilla group UNITA), and the Kashmiri American Council (a front for the terrorist-dealing Pakistani government intelligence service ISI that had helped create the Taliban, among other nefarious activities).

Interestingly enough, the Associated Press (AP) just a few days ago revealed a bombshell of a story in which it was revealed that Manafort proposed (through a formal memo, no less) a massive lobbying effort designed to discreetly help promote Putin, the Russian government, and their agenda while undermining their critics, with efforts concentrated in the United States, Europe, and former-Soviet republics and targeting government officials, political groups, the news media and journalists, and businesses by acting to “influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and the former Soviet republics to benefit the Putin government.”

The proposal was pitched to Oleg Deripaska in 2005, a fabulously wealthy Russian oligarch with ties to Russian organized crime who has a very close, generally good—if not always great—relationship with Putin and who, as I noted before, was then working with Manafort to promote Russian interests in Montenegro in a campaign designed to get Montenegro to secede from its union with Serbia and allow greater Russian (and Deripaskan) influence with that result (Montenegro would secede anyway in 2006 but not under Russian auspices, and it is quite telling that only a few months ago a Russian plot to overthrow Montenegro’s government and assassinate its prime minister, who is now trying to join NATO, was exposed and foiled). 

Under the terms Manafort proposed, a contract was agreed upon in 2006 and lasted until at least 2009, one in which Manafort was paid $10 million a year and Manfort used a Delaware shell company—LOAV Ltd.—of his to conduct official business and transactions.

AP obtained numerous documents, memos, and wire transfer records to corroborate its story. 

Later, as I also wrote about before, Deripaska and Manafort had a dramatic falling out c. 2014 that resulted in a Cayman Islands court battle over $19 million related to their efforts to launder money for Yanukovych and his allies, but not before the aforementioned working relationship was well established. The recent AP story broke just hours before CNN reported that FBI officials have information describing how “associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.,” and AP soon after reported that U.S. Treasury officials are investigating Manafort’s offshore financial dealings. 

If these interactions seem dramatic, Manafort’s machinations involving Ukraine are even more so.

Criminal Scheme #1: Part I: Manafort & Putin Allies Oversee Flooding of Ukraine with Dirty Gas Money to Establish Russian Dominance

Court documents allege that Manafort first became acquainted with Yanukovych in 2003, a time when he also began cozying up to some of Ukraine’s and Russia’s most powerful oligarchs, at least ones allied with Yanukovych and Putin. Throughout the rest of the decade, Manafort entered into a variety of shady business deals with some of these oligarchs and others, deals that generally seemed to have some ulterior motive in advancing Putin’s agenda in the background. In particular, around the same time he began interacting with Yanukovych, Manafort befriended Ukrainian oligarch, natural gas businessman, and Putin ally Dmitry (Dmytro) Firtash, according to court documents. Firtash, featured in the Panama Papers revelations, had been the main middleman bringing in both Russian and Central Asian natural gas to Ukraine since 2002 and was linked to the essential head, or “boss of bosses”, of the Russian mafia, Semion Mogilevich, also a friend of Putin’s and on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list from 2009-2015.

A Swiss-registered company called RosUkrEnergo (RUE) was created in mid-2004 by the outgoing pro-Russian Ukrainian President Kuchma and the not-going-anywhere Putin to replace the company represented by Firtash that was handling Ukraine’s Russian-related natural gas imports. The imports ostensibly came from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan but through shady deals that seemed mostly orchestrated and subsidized by Gazprom, the Russian gas giant company then dominated, and soon to be majority-owned, by the Russian Government and close Putin allies; additionally, the gas traveled through pipes wholly owned by Gazprom that went mostly through Russian territory. But not much changed with RUE in that Firtash ended up owning 45% of the new company, a stake that is partially a front for Mogilevich to control the company. A total of 50% of RUE was owned by Gazprom, making clear the incestuous nature of the entire arrangement.

But there was a bigger picture, a greater purpose, to all these machinations than just Gazprom dominance of the region’s gas industry, and the specifics of the deal make the following scheme quite easy to understand: Gazprom would basically sell billions of dollars of gas to Firtash through RUE at a steal of a price; Firtash would then sell billions of dollars of the gas at hiked-up prices to Ukraine; the profits would then be used to fund pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine with billions of dollars; and, finally, bankers that were close Putin allies would open up lines of credit for Firtash in the billions of dollars so that Firtash could buy key Ukrainian assets and multiply his influence even further.

It’s no coincidence that this scam came into being not long after Yanukovych’s defeat at the hands of a more pro-Western candidate and as that candidate-turned-president’s relatively pro-Western government was trying to limit Russian influence in Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, some of the disputes between Ukraine and Russia involved fighting over gas deals. This all culminated in a January, 2006, shut-off of Russia’s gas flow into Ukraine and therefore into much of Europe as well, which received the vast majority of its gas from pipes passing through Ukrainian territory. 

Soon after the shutoff, a new arrangement was made: RUE would now be the exclusive and direct supplier of all natural gas coming from Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan) and Russia, and, along with Gazprom and Gazexport (Gazprom’s export subsidiary selling non-Russian produced gas), it would sell to the Ukrainian market to all of its industrial customers through a joint venture with Naftogaz Ukrainy, Ukraine’s state-owned energy company, the joint venture being called UkrGazEnergo (or UkrGaz-Energo), and would sell gas to Naftogaz to distribute among Ukrainian households and municipalities.

But there was another key factor in the deal: RAO UES—Russia’s major and majority-state-owned power company—would buy and import Ukrainian-generated electricity into European Russia, with the Ukrainian government providing that energy from the gas that RUE was being paid by Ukraine to import from Turkmenistan into Ukraine that had been purchased by the joint-venture UkrGazEnergo to sell within Ukraine; the government of Ukraine would deliver the electricity to RAO in exchange for the gas needed to generate it, with RUE (or another Firtash firm) apparently acting as the intermediary, buying the gas from UkrGazEnergo; that gas would then be delivered to Ukrainian power plants, which would produce the electricity that would then be sold to RAO to sell in Russia. One of the reasons for this confusing complexity is that at each stage along the way there was the possibility of marking up or down the price when it suited the purposes of those who set up the system in the first place.

Naturally, this overall deal was so unpopular with Ukrainians—who felt cheated at getting sold gas at hiked-up prices and allowing entities with little (or no?) supervision in a process that presented opportunities for massive corruption—that Ukraine’s parliament voted against the deal, albeit it ended up being a nonbinding vote and the agreement went ahead anyway. This arrangement would last from 2006 through early 2009, when another dispute derailed it.

A Page-Manafort Connection Through Gazprom, RAO UES, Firtash, & Mogilevich?

It is important here to note that Carter Page’s tenure at Merrill Lynch was from 2004-2007; the only two companies his aforementioned current bio mentions in relation to this tenure are Gazprom and RAO EUS, claiming that he was an advisor on “key transactions” of theirs; it is hard to imagine transactions more “key” than those involving gas being transported from Central Asia and Russia to Ukraine and Europe and being sold to both, than the creation of RUE, than RAO’s subsequent deal with Ukraine; if Page is telling the truth about his role, it is virtually inconceivable—considering that he advised both Gazprom and RAO and the way they would be tied together starting in 2006—that he would not be aware of what was going on. 

After all, as someone with a PhD and an MBA and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Page would certainly have been aware of the geopolitics of these deals and that they went against American interests at a time when Ukraine was trying to align itself with America and Europe and thus escape the stranglehold of the Kremlin.

However, Julia Ioffe’s profile of Page raises important questions about whether Page is exaggerating his role, and is filled with anecdotes from people knowledgeable about these types of deals who had never heard of Page and people who did know (of) him suggesting he was actually a nobody (though the veracity of their claims are unverifiable as well, some perhaps being of the sour-grapes variety, others perhaps not wanting information on him to get out and acting to throw the curious off his trail, others saying nothing to confirm that they had actually worked closely or directly alongside Page); maybe Page himself deliberately kept a low profile, staying under the radar purposefully. Without a more formal investigation, it is impossible to know what the full picture is; even if Page exaggerated his role, if he was still talking to people at both Gazprom and RAO at this time—even if his discussions interactions may have been more informal than formal (he was apparently often tasked with meeting and greeting, setting up meetings and seeing them through, presenting opportunities for many informal conversations and meetings)—it is certainly a realistic possibility that he still knew a lot and performed an advisory role, one that was perhaps unknown by his colleagues at Merrill.

Finally (and I raised this possibility last July), if he knew what was going on and was involved, there is certainly a possibility of interest being piqued if he came to know that another American in Manafort was involved on the other side of these deals, with the same being able to be said of Manafort, and that interest on either side could have led to either one making contact with the other, contact that may have led to some sort of coordination.

This is admittedly speculative, but a real possibility nonetheless, and is certainly not one bit less speculative than an enormous portion of the mainstream media discussion and reporting on both the e-mail/server situation with Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. The question of about a possible Manafort and Page link, and the fact that they were involved on one level or another in the massive Eurasian gas scheme, deserve more official scrutiny and need to be answered through a formal investigation because it is clear that those in question have no intention of sharing the truth.

Criminal Scheme #1: Part II: Manafort & Putin Allies Use Dirty Gas Money to Prep Yanukovych Comeback

Russian Government

As for the dispute that derailed the 2006 gas deal, the foundations were laid with the popularly unpopular 2006 deal itself. 

A former prime minister and gas tycoon in her own right and a co-leader of the Orange Revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko, rose to become prime minister again in December 2007, and it was clear that she was on a mission to drive out Russian domination of the whole gas system and push against Russian influence in Ukraine overall: this meant taking on Firtash, Mogilevich and the Russian mafia, and RUE. 

The first step was to get rid of UkrGazEnergo, run by RUE and Naftogaz, but then Tymoshenko set her sights on taking RUE and Firtash (and thus Mogilevich and the mafia) out of the loop, an admittedly more ambitious step, which lead to a series of hostile exchanges between Russia and Ukraine. But in October of 2008, Tymoshenko finally worked out a deal with Putin to remove RUE from Ukrainian gas deals, but they were subsequently unable to agree on pricing, leading to another shutdown on the part of Russia of gas going into Ukraine, and by extension, most of Europe, for almost three weeks in January. But on January 19th, a long-term, ten-year agreement was reached, and only a few days later normal flows were restored, much to the relief of not only Ukraine, but also Europe, as it was the middle of winter; additionally, the parties agreed to take future disputes to arbitration in an international commercial dispute court in Stockholm, Sweden.

If it seemed the players of Team Putin gave up too easily on having RUE taken out of the game, they had other plans in motion to counter Tymoshenko’s effort to limit Russian influence in Ukrainian politics…

Criminal Scheme #2: Manafort Key Agent in Laundering Dirty Gas Money to U.S. During Crackdown

Even before Putin agreed to let Tymoshenko kill RUE, his agents—including Firtash, Mogilevich, and Yanukovych (the latter with Manafort acting as his right-hand man)—were already putting in place plans to go around and escape her efforts; some of these involved setting up a fake U.S. investment fund that was initially capitalized with $100 million; Firtash (acting on behalf of himself and Mogilevich) paid Manafort and his people—including Rick Gates, (who had joined Manafort’s efforts as part of his consulting firm in 2006)—$1.5 million to handle the money. The main purpose of said fund was to act as a conduit to launder money from the Firtash/Mogilevich gas dealings that were being scrutinized by the Tymoshenko government.

Among the various fraudulent deals they went into was one in 2008 for $895 million for the site of the famous Drake Hotel on Park Avenue in New York, with Firtash wiring $25 million towards the project to make it look legitimate, and a further $25 million was later laundered through the project, but rather than truly move forward and apply the money to the project, the Drake property was never actually purchased: the deal, like their other deals, never closed and eventually fell through after many third parties had spent a lot of time and money trying to close it out and after many employees were not paid, but not before Manafort, Firtash, Mogilevich, Yanukovych, and their allies were able to keep substantial funds away from the prying eyes of Tymoshenko and Ukrainian authorities during crucial periods of her time as prime minister (remember this model, it will return…).

Unfortunately for Firtash, Mogilevich, and their backers, unlike money, natural gas is not something that can be laundered: in early 2009, Tymoshenko orchestrated a seizure by Ukraine’s own state-run Naftogaz—a seizure allowed under the agreement she made with Putin—of 11 billion cubic meters of gas from RUE’s gas stockpiles, a quantity worth billions of dollars at the time; Timoshenko had effectively cut out the middlemen who had been hiking up prices and using those profits to poison and pollute Ukrainian politics for Putin’s plans. 

Playing a longer-term game, Firtash initiated a lengthy arbitration process through Stockholm…

Other planted crops were already bearing fruit: unfortunately for Tymoshenko, though she had risen to be Prime Minister late in 2007, in that election and even in the prior 2006 parliamentary elections, Manafort had groomed Yanukovych’s Party of Regions into a party that campaigned using modern, highly effective techniques and tactics; in both elections, the Party of Regions ended up having the most seats in parliament of any single party by significant margins, but ended up being in the opposition because of alliances made between Tymoshenko’s bloc and other parties. Of course, Manafort and The Party of Regions were operating with a gigantic advantage: the enormous amount of money flowing from the massive Eurasian gas scam. All this meant that Yanukovych’s opposition was certainly within striking distance of taking over the government, and that even by 2006 Manafort and the gas scheme had already achieved great success in rehabilitating Yanukovych and his party and in making them together a smoother political machine with more power and influence.

The distance would close, and that strike would happen, in 2010.

Uniting Criminal Schemes #1 and #2: the Downfall of Tymoshenko & Setting the Stage for War

Early in 2010, Yanukovych won the presidential race (with a lot of money from Firtash, who had made over $3 billion from these crooked gas deals), defeating Tymoshenko in a runoff election, the culmination of over five years of work with Manafort and the whole gas scheme crew. Not long after, Tymoshenko lost her position as prime minister in a vote of no-confidence. Meanwhile, in the wake of his victory, Yanukovych worked to undo many of the Orange Revolution reforms, curbing democratic freedoms in areas ranging from the courts to the press. Most notably, in December, 2010, Tymoshenko was retroactively charged with abusing her power during her recent stint as prime minister, and, after a widely condemned(including by the U.S.) politically-motivated show trial, was sentenced to prison in October 2011. 

Manafort and Gates actually lobbied American lawmakers on behalf of Yanukovych’s government from 2012-2014, defending the imprisonment of Tymoshenko and trying to discredit her, as well as trying to improve the image of their client and his government; they did this without disclosing their lobbying activities as required by U.S. law. Incidentally, in these efforts—paid in part by Rinat Akhmetov: Ukraine’s wealthiest man for the last eight years, one of Yanukovych’s main patrons, and a client of Manafort’s since Manafort’s earliest days in Ukraine and for whom Manafort helped arrange a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney—they utilized the services of two Washington, DC, lobbying firms, including Podesta Group Inc., run by the brother of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign Chairman and later victim of Russian-government hacking and WikiLeaks disclosures (the day after this information was made public in mid-August, 2016, Manafort resigned from his role as the Campaign Chairman of the Trump campaign during a week in which his role had already been eclipsed by the addition of Kellyanne Conway and extreme-right-wing Breitbart News’s Stephen Bannon to run the Trump campaign; as for Gates, it was unclear at the time if he had stayed on board or left and the Trump campaign was refusing to clarify the matter). 

Lobbying efforts throughout this period for this circle were also hardly limited to Manafort and Gates, with those efforts for years having for years been tied to prominent Republicans in the United States.

Perhaps most prominent among the lobbyists, former Senator and 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole—for whom Manafort had been a strategist—was paid over half a million to lobby for Deripaska, who was then, and is still, denied a U.S. visa for his links to the Russian mafia. 

Yuri Boyko, a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician who is a close Yanukovych ally, former minister of several energy related sections of Ukraine’s government, and was heavily involved in setting up the Eurasian gas scheme, paid nearly $100,000 to a Washington lobbyist to meet with top Republicans. 

Barbour Griffith & Rogers, co-founded by the former Republican Governor of Mississippi and major GOP insider/activist Haley Barbour, was paid over $800,000 for lobbying efforts by a lawyer who “structured” the legal aspects of the Eurasian gas scheme. 

Though he had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, Mogilevich strangely enough has been able to retain the lawyerly services of Republican William Sessions, who was the FBI director from 1987-1993, to lobby on Mogilevich’s behalf for deals with the U.S. government to clear his charges; those talks, which failed, were arranged by Neil Livingstone, a prominent consultant whose firm, GlobalOptions, serviced many Russians and former-Soviet-republic-businessmen; GlobalOptions was introduced by Barbour Griffith & Rogers to a shell company called Highrock Holding(s) used by none other than Firtash as a prominent vehicle for his money laundering in the Eurasian gas scheme; Highrock paid GlobalOptions for at least two projects, one a mysterious “special operation” as named in a subsequent lawsuit for an unnamed member of the Ukrainian government. And just to give one example of Firtash’s European outreach, Firtash’ relationship with several Conservative MPs in the UK may prompt an official investigation.

For his part in engineering Yanukovych’s comeback and Tymoshenko’s downfall, Firtash also got some $3 billion in gas assets returned to him that had been seized by Tymoshenko’s government as a result of proceedings at the arbitration court in Sweden, as once Yanukovych was in power, Ukraine and Firtash essentially became the same party in the case, with Ukraine’s lawyers dropping opposition to Firtash’s attempts to recover the seized gas, now only too happy to see $3 billion in gas go from the ownership of the Ukrainian people back to Firtash; it was clear in this matter that the Yanukovych government was willing to fight for the interests of Putin and Firtash, but not its own people; without Ukraine’s representatives making any case whatsoever, the court simply sided with Firtash in June of 2010. 

Firtash also got his aforementioned credit lines from Putin’s bankers not long after Yanukovych’s victory, specifically some $11 billion in credit from a consortium of banks arranged by Gazprombank, the flagship banking arm of Gazprom (the corruption is so blatant that the companies apparently do not care that their names announce it to the whole world); Gazprombank would not disclose which other banks were part of this arrangement, but by itself it lent him $2.2 billion, the largest possible amount under Russian law and almost one-quarter of the bank’s total capital, making him Gazprombank’s single largest individual borrower; Firtash used this cash to expand his holdings (especially in the chemical and fertilizer industries) and power in Ukraine, all while staying close to Yanukovych. These moves actually made him the fifth-biggest fertilizer maker in Europe and helped him establish relationships with politicians throughout Europe; when reporters asked him where all the money came from to enable him to do all this, he coyly replied: “It’s a secret.” From January 2011 on, Firtash was again buying Gazprom gas at a discount through shady international front companies, then selling that gas back at a far higher price to his new assets, to the tune of billions in questionable profits to his shell companies, in something of a return to the old system before Tymoshenko had rocked the boat.

But the spirited Tymoshenko was not content to only be on defense during this period; during her trial and from prison, she filed a lawsuit in a U.S. District Court in Manhattan in April 2011; in it she names Firtash, Manafort, Mogilevich, Yanukovych, and their front companies as defendants, including initially RUE (but RUE was switched out to name the front companies that controlled it for Firtash and Mogilevich in later amended complaints); the suit accused them of setting up a series of racketeering, fraud, and money laundering enterprises in the U.S. designed to keep dirty gas money away from Ukrainian authorities when she was prime minister and that such activities resulted in material harm for her since they contributed to the downfall of her government and her unjust trial and imprisonment. After being rejected several times, a fourth and final version of the suit was rejected in September, 2015; while not ruling out criminal wrongdoing on the part of the defendants, the judge ruled that the higher-than-average standards for convictions under the RICO statute were not met; still, in the longer ruling rejecting the third complaint, it was noted that “the Court accepts as true the allegation that some of the money that passed through the U.S. Enterprise was ‘funneled back to Ukraine’ — albeit by unidentified actors — and somehow used as ‘financing’ for Tymoshenko’s ‘persecution.’”

*****

Yes, after the 2010 election, everything was going perfectly in regards to Ukraine for Putin, Yanukovych, Manafort, Gates, Firtash, Mogilevich, and their teams, but, as in 2004, there was one thing that they did not plan well for, and it was the same thing that confounded Soviet leaders for decades and led to the downfall of the USSR: the people had other ideas. 

Many Ukrainians—especially younger ones—realized what was happening to their country, and were hopeful of better opportunities and a better future by having Ukraine orient itself more to the West, towards Europe and the U.S. and less corruption. Yanukovych sought to placate these desires by courting a major trade deal with the EU.

But in November 2013, protests erupted over Yanukovych’s about-face backing out of this long-desired EU trade deal in the face of a Russian counteroffer. In particular, protests erupted in a main square (the Maidan Square) in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, protests that did not go away and came to be known as the Euromaidan protests. After months of a tense situation, security forces shot and killed dozens of protesters on February 20th, 2014; in response to the government’s use of violence, the protests swelled exponentially, fueled by mass public outrage at the bloodshed, and by the end of February 22nd, the Ukrainian parliament had voted Yanukovych out of office, security forces had melted away in Kiev, protesters had taken over the capital, Tymoshenko was freed from prison (in a wheelchair, recovering from what she said was physical abuse and ill-treatment at the hands of her guards and authorities), and Yanukovych has fled the city; soon, he would flee the country to Russia with the help of none other than Putin; today, he is still wanted by Ukrainian authorities for the deaths of the protesters, but he hopes to one day return to Ukraine again as president, which he still contends he is legally. 

Putin had overplayed his hand: his royal straight flush of an ace of natural gas, a king in Yanukovych, a queen in Firtash, a jack in Mogilevich, and a 10 in Manafort did not anticipate a wild-card joker in the form of Yanukovych’s allies fleeing him; that joker lined up with four 2s consisting of many of the Ukrainian people to make five of a kind, the people beating Putin’s flush. But Putin had invested a lot into Ukraine over many years, into controlling its politics and energy sector through gas, Yanukovych, Mogilevich, Firtash, and Manafort: faced with his whole house of cards collapsing in on itself in the face of popular resistance, and with a government hostile to him and his intentions once again in place after a decade of effort designed to restore and maintain Russian hegemony over Ukraine, Putin went to Plan B: the dismemberment of Ukraine and war.

Which is exactly where the situation is today (and, of course, gas is in the middle of the conflict).

Firtash has fled Ukraine as well, and is also wanted by U.S. authorities for a separate racketeering and bribery scheme; he was living in a sort of exile in Austria, but just late last month, a U.S. extradition request based on bribery and corruption charges in a Chicago-based case was approved in Austrian court (the ruling is almost unappealable), though in a bizarre twist he was arrested mere minutes after the ruling by Austrian authorities on a Spanish warrant related to charges of money laundering and organized crime.

In light of ties to Manafort and the related implications for Trump’s presidency, as well as the scandals and ensuing war in Ukraine, his relationship with the Russian mafia, and importance to Putin, this could be one of the most sensational and important internationally focused trials in many years. And, not to be macabre, but it is highly doubtful that either Putin or the Russian mafia will give Firtash the chance to prove his loyalty or show his disloyalty, as powerful men willing to orchestrate murder for far less have little reason to allow him to be tried and risk so much, especially as they have demonstrated a willingness to act through any means necessary to silence individuals who put them at risk.

In the end, Manafort made millions and Gates profited too to the tune of who knows how much off the activities mentioned here (e.g., hand-written records from the office of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions show the Party had set aside payments totaling $12.7 million specifically for Manafort from 2007-2012 alone; Gates was also involved with Manafort in the $19 million Cayman Islands fiasco with Deripaska, who accused both of the other two of illegally bailing out on him the fate of that $19 million is still unknown; all this is totally apart from the newly-revealed annual $10 million Manafort got from his Deripaska-brokered deal), profiting to an obscene degree all while helping to weaken and corrupt Ukraine’s democracy, assisting massively crooked international energy deals, undermining U.S. interests, helping Putin and his allies profit enormously, and helping Russia dominate Ukraine. The culmination of their work for over a decade can be seen in the first war on European soil in two decades. And it was this resume which earned them spots on Trump’s campaign as he sought to become the leader of the free world and succeeded. For some time it even seemed Manafort had more influence on Trump than anyone whose last name was not Trump.

Manafort and Gates have plenty of other questionable dealings, including one particularly scandalous piece of drama with a Russian oligarch featured in the Panama papers revelations and close to Putin. There are at least two U.S. government inquiries into Manafort and one into Page, and Trump associate and Republican political operative Roger Stone is being investigated by the FBI for his ties to WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, who have questionable ties to Russia and who the whole world knows is receiving information stolen by Russian government hacks related to Clinton, Podesta, and the Democratic party. There are also other Trump campaign staff and/or associates with questionable ties to Russia: Michael Caputo and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and one American ex-spy alleges a plot by the Kremlin to co-opt Trump against the backdrop of all this.

Less is known about Gates and his role, but after he was brought onto the Trump Campaign by Manafort), he was important enough to be trusted with the vetting of Melania Trump’s Republican National Convention speech—Donald Trump’s wife’s introduction to the nation as a whole—a task at which he famously failed, and failed miserably. It was not clear what the status of Gates was once Manafort resigned, but recent reporting has shown that kept a low profile after and acted a link between the campaign and the RNC; once Trump won, he was apparently planned Trump’s inauguration, and since then he was shipped off to a pro-Trump and strangely quiet-ish nonprofit called America First Priorities (which also landed Trump All Star Katrina Pierson), where he has stayed until this the new reporting on Manafort, after which it seems he was deemed too much of a liability and was nudged out just days ago.

As for Page, it still isn’t even clear who brought him into the Trump Campaign (Julia Ioffe’s account of Page, the most exhaustive yet, illustrates how multiple answers have been given and none have been confirmed, but people sure seem angry about being asked about him); what is known (and it isn’t much) is that he was one of only five foreign policy advisors Trump could actually name in a Washington Post interview from a year ago, suggesting his influence on Trump could be far from insignificant. As his relationships with important Russians are being looked into by the U.S. government, to simply dismiss him as being a charade would be premature, indeed—especially in light of information on Page apparently meeting with Russian officials coming out of the as of yet only partly-substantiated dossier from an ex-MI6 intelligence officer—despite questions of how serious his role was at Merrill and how deep his ties to Gazprom and RAO UES actually were. What is certain is that questions about his role remain, questions which need to be answered, especially in light of his incredibly anti-American, pro-Russian views that could just as easily be coming from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov or a “pundit” on RT and his continued investment in Gazprom. 

Direct Trump Involvement

Trump might have enough to worry about were it just for what has been described above; still, while both of the previous schemes are relevant to Trump insofar as three future Trump Campaign staff—Page, Gates, one of the most important and powerful people in his entire presidential run: Manafort—were involved in various ways in the just-outlined past criminal schemes and/or in the future acted to further the interests of Putin and his Russian government, now we get into territory where Trump himself was directly involved, and in not just one, but roughly a half-dozen situations linked to Russian organized crime.

A piece of context that is important to note for all of the following cases is that the setting for the following suspicious deals was a Donald Trump and a Trump Organization that was reeling financially.

By the mid-2000s Trump was having a hard time finding investors: he had just declared bankruptcy in 2004 for one of his major casino businesses to the tune of $1.8 billion in debt (and would declare another business bankruptcy in 2009, his fifth and sixth overall business bankruptcies, respectively) and all major Wall Street lenders—whose relationships with Trump had been souring for years—stopped offering Trump loans, in part because of his frustrating and suspicious business practices.

That is, all but one: Deutsche Bank, yet even that relationship “frayed” starting in 2008 because of Trump’s untrustworthiness as a business partner (Deutsche itself would later become involved in major money laundering scandals involving Russia, but more on that later).

So Trump was clearly hurting for investment after that 2004 bankruptcy, and yet, somehow, by 2008, Donald Trump Jr. was able to publicly remark that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” and that “we [i.e., the Trump Organization] see a lot of money pouring in from Russia;” yes, this was a time when Trump was aggressively courting Russian business (it should now be obvious why Trump has not released his taxes and why that information could, and likely will be, so crucial to the investigations into his Russia ties and to the public’s evaluation of Trump).

In fact, a report from Reuters from less than two weeks ago noted how in just seven Trump luxury towers in southern Florida, 63 Russian passport/address-holders have bought $98.4 million in property; they include “politically connected businessmen and other elites,” though “none of the buyers appear to be from Putin’s inner circle;” one buyer, Alexander Yuzvik, was senior at Spetstroi, a Russian state-owned company that has done construction for Russian military and intelligence, including the G.R.U. and the F.S.B. intelligence agencies that were heavily involved the 2016 American election hackings, with Yuzvik only stepping down in March 2016, after the hacking operations had begun, though as of now, no evidence has surfaced linking him to these operations.

The above figures may even be a conservative estimate: at least 703 out of 2,044 of the units in the seven towers were owned by limited liability corporations (LLCs), often designed to mask their owners’ identities; many owners’ nationalities could not be identified; and Russian-Americans without a Russian passport/address were not included.

*****

At the same time the aforementioned Eurasian gas and Manafort-led New York real estate dual schemes were taking place, and while Donald Trump was losing investors in the U.S., Trump was cultivating Russian/former-Soviet business relationships. One of his point men in these efforts was Felix Sater, the son of an alleged mob captain of Mogilevich’s Russian mafia operation; the offices of Bayrock, Sater’s real estate company where he was Chief Operating Officer and eventually the dominant force within, were even in Trump Tower itself.

Sater, a man with a violent, criminal, mafia-rife past of his own, had himself previously been caught up in an elaborate 1990s $41 million stock fraud scheme on Wall Street that had used the Russian mob to launder money at a time, it should be noted, when Mogilevich was active in large-scale stock fraud and laundering in North America. Sater ended up assisting U.S. authorities for years, even, apparently, on CIA-related national security issues involving missile terrorism-related purchases in either Afghanistan or Russia, and the details on all this remain something of mystery: his operations with the government remain secret and the juiciest details of the Wall Street case were sealed and remain so despite repeated efforts to unseal them (they were sealed at the time, interestingly enough, by then-U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Loretta Lynch, who just stepped down as U.S. Attorney General the day Trump was inaugurated president). 

As a result, there is also virtually no information on the specifics of the Russian mafia’s activities in Sater’s Wall Street scam, but there is a reasonably good chance or even higher that Mogilevich was running the Russian mob’s involvement in it, or was at least involved, since he was actively pursuing similar schemes in the U.S. at the time, possibly had a connection to his alleged old capo in Sater, and since Mogilevich was already such a major figure in the Russian mob at this point, keeping in mind that hierarchy matters quite a bit in organized crime; in fact, it is far less likely that the Russian mafia would be involved without Mogilevich when considering the points just mentioned. 

Now, that last point should not be taken lightly, considering that, just a few years later, Mogilevich was a primary actor in laundering billions of dollars on behalf of Firtash, Manafort, Yanukovych, and Putin; is it more or less likely that he would turn to an old connection—one with experience laundering money who had come to have the favor of the U.S. government, no less—to help with the laundering? Even without the Wall Street capers, Sater would have been an attractive candidate based on (possible) family ties alone, as would his nominal entry into real estate, as the real estate market in the U.S.has been an ideal avenue for money laundering for some time and is a top concern of U.S. officials, in part due to lax state, local, and federal laws.

Sater began working with Trump in in the early 2000s, trying to help him land real estate deals in Moscow, even showing Ivanka and Donald Jr. around the city in 2006 and introducing the Trumps to influential Russians. None of these potential Moscow deals ever went through…

Criminal Scheme #3: The Trump/Sater/Bayrock Deals

But a number of deals in the United States between Trump and Bayrock produced a far more interesting—and incriminating—history. 

Perhap’s Sater’s most famous partnership with Trump was an infamous deal to develop a SoHo property in Manhattan. The deal was concocted in 2006 by Trump, Sater, and two other partners from former Soviet states: one was Bayrock chairman Tevfik Arif, an ex-Soviet government official from Kazakhstan who’s rise to fortune is at least somewhat questionable; the other was Tamir Sapir from Georgia, who had decades ago established ties to numerous important Soviet officials after immigrating to the U.S., who may have very well been (once) part of—or even come to the U.S. secretly working for—the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (at whose academy he had apparently studied), whose source of his wealth had long been subject to rumor-fueled suspicion, who introduced Trump to Bayrock, and whose former business partner had pled guilty to racketeering conspiracy charges spanning 13 years with the Gambino crime family (incidentally or not, at the time of the SoHo deal, it seems Sapir was not exactly mentally fit).

It turns out that the SoHo deal had a significant portion of its Sater-and-Arif facilitated financing—some $50 million specifically approved by Trump for it and three other projects—flow from a firm in Iceland, FL Group, linked to the Panama Papers revelations and one apparently known as a hub for the money of Russians “in favor with Putin.” Financing for these projects was also secured from Alexander Mashkevich (or Machkevich), a Kazakhstani billionaire with a history of money laundering.

Considering Sater had helped pave the way for this investment and recalling his possible Mogilevich connections, it is hardly unreasonable to assume that there is a high probability that some of the money coming in from Russians was in one way or another tied directly or indirectly to the giant Eurasian gas scheme worth billions, as this period was especially a time when Russians tied to Putin and operating through Manafort, Firtash, and Mogilevich were aggressively trying to funnel money away from prying eyes of the likes of Tymoshenko. Besides the Russian financing, some of the transactions involving the property were clearly carried out by shell corporations for the purpose of laundering money, transactions from which Trump profited. Furthermore, the SoHo deal was structured to cheat the U.S. government out of tens of millions in taxes, as the investments were illegally restructured as loans (not incidentally tax-free) to avoid paying hefty taxes on them, loans that would also give FL Group a big chunk of theoretical future profits over time. 

In the end, the deal went terribly for Trump, who was sued for fraud—his children Eric and Ivanka had inflated the level of interest in order to attract buyers—and in a 2011 settlement, he refunded 90% of the deposits on the building’s condos. 

One must wonder why likely Russian investors were so eager to invest $50 million in this deal, and if it was an excuse to launder money, rather than an actual investment, as was the case with the Park Avenue deal involving Manafort & Co, and that model would seem to be repeated by Bayrock again and again, Repeated in deals with Trump and with Sater serving again as a point-man.

Even as construction on Trump SoHo began in 2007, another of the Trump/Bayrock projects was rising in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; this one, the Trump International Hotel & Tower, would also result in disaster and led to over a dozen lawsuits, with over 100 condo buyers suing for $7.8 million. The project was supposed to have been completed by the end of 2007 but fell way behind schedule; Sater and his Bayrock partners secretly and seemingly cashed out their stakes in this project and several others—including the SoHo deal—in a deal with the aforementioned Icelandic firm, FL Group. Trump eventually pulled his name from the project, and when its buyers learned this in May, 2009, this only increased their outrage and added to lawsuits already in motion accusing Trump and Bayrock of fraud. As in the SoHo deal, confidential settlements, this time with dozens of buyers, ensued, and Trump refused to accept any responsibility, blaming the problems on the economic crises. Florida courts declined to rule that Trump or his partners had committed fraud, including a state appeals court just last year. The project finished years late, cost some $200 million, and was eventually sold for merely $115 million at a foreclosure auction. And while the evidence of money laundering in this case is not as explicit or solid as the information publicly reported on in the SoHo deal, it is still a similarly structured deal with the same partners that led to a similarly dubious result, making it more likely, not less, that similar laundering was taking place.

Another Bayrock partnership with Trump in Fort Lauderdale (not part of the FL Group ventures) was originally conceived of as the Trump International Beach Club; an initial $2 million in capital was provided by Arif in 2003, and from that point, Sater and Arif conned a friend of Arif’s who was also Sater’s landlord, Elizabeth Thieriot, lying about the value of the club, hiding their own investment in the project, and convincing her to provide a $1 million investment for a mere 4% of the Club, 12 times what they had paid for that percentage and allowing them to make a 1,125% profit on her investment; as in the SoHo deal, they illegally labeled the investment a loan to avoid paying taxes on it and were using their fraud to hide skimming $1 million off the top; on top of that, when there was income finally generated in 2005, they defrauded their partner Thieriot of her rightful share; eventually Theiriot figured out some of what was going on and sued her scammers in court in 2006, and they pulled similar scams on other investors/members in the Club. The project was apparently eventually reconceived of as the Trump Las Olas Beach Resort, but was suspended in a declining market by Trump himself in October 2007.

Another deal among the four which received FL Group financing was a failed project that never even got off the ground in Phoenix, Arizona. Trump began eyeing the Camelback area of Phoenix, Arizona, for a luxury residential tower back in late in 2003, a project similar to the others; Trump’s team, and then Trump himself, met with the mayor, who wasn’t impressed with Trump, and at a meeting in January, 2005, when plans were unveiled, local residents showed up to argue against the development, yet by September, the appropriate city bodies had approved the plans. It seems Sater’s people organized intimidation, bribery, and deception as tactics to deter residents from gathering enough signatures to force a public referendum that could have overridden the city bodies’ approval; under this pressure, the city council voted to reverse its decision and pressed the developers and the neighborhood association to reach a compromise, at which point Trump himself abandoned the project, not wanting to be part of anything that would be scaled down any further in scope and ambition. Ernie Mennes, the owner of the Camelback property who had gone into a partnership with the Bayrock/Trump developers, sued Bayrock in 2007 in federal court, accusing Sater of both threatening to “cut off his legs and leave him ‘dead in the trunk of his car’” and of stealing money from the project for himself. The judge oversaw a settlement and the case was sealed, likely because of Sater’s special relationship with the government. This property was part of the $50 million pseudo-offloading to FL group, and by June of 2009, Bayrock was relieved of the property, which it had left $36 million in debt, when it was “sold out from under” the company at a trustee auction for a mere $10 million.

The final in the group of four projects of Bayrock tied to FL’s “investment” involved a Waterpointe property in Queens (apart from approving FL’s money, Trump was otherwise not involved as far as we know). Bayrock bought the property in 2008 for $25 million, but the soil was contaminated and had to be replaced, which Bayrock did with other soil that was even more contaminated and was fined $150,000 for doing so; when Bayrock defaulted on a loan in 2011, the lender took over Waterpointe and sold it for roughly $11 million, less than half what Bayrock had paid.

As for FL Group, it failed in spectacularly 2008, along with Iceland’s other major banks/funds and many others in the world during the great global financial meltdown.

In a 2013 NY State Supreme Court lawsuit rising from a process that began in 2008, former and then-business partners of Sater’s at Bayrock—Jody Kriss and Michal Ejekam—sued Sater and his accomplices for damages and nonpayment related to Sater’s hiding of his past and his use of Bayrock primarily as a vehicle for criminal activities; in it, Donald and Ivanka Trump and the Trump Organization are named as defendants and the federal government is accused of illegally concealing Sater’s past and crimes in a way that defrauded previous victims from 1998 scam—including Holocaust Survivors—and subsequent victims of the other above schemes of many millions in restitution. The NY State Supreme Court removed the Trumps and their Organization from the suit; the plaintiffs had only sought declaratory relief in regards to the Trumps, i.e., they asked the court to determine what liability the Trumps had in regards to the case, and they were removed “without prejudice,” meaning the removal was no comment on their guilt/responsibility/innocence and that they could be sued again on the same grounds later. 

*****

Taken together, these examples amount to catastrophic losses and colossal mismanagement on the part of Sater and Bayrock and, at the very least, gross negligence and incompetence on the part of Trump; at most, he might have been aware of some of what was going on and turned a willful blind eye, or, even worse, he might have been in on it, though no evidence exists that proves this).

Actually, the performance of Bayrock was so bad, one would not be faulted for concluding they did not care at all about performance. And that seems to be right on the mark: it seems, if anything, these schemes were designed to move large amounts of money, often Russian-tied, into temporary projects that never came to fruition, but that would benefit Sater, Trump, and others high-up in the deals, but rarely if ever the investing partners outside this upper echelon; it seems these other duped partners and especially Trump would lend an air of respectability to clearly criminal schemes that were so poorly managed that the only logical conclusion is that Sater and his friends at Bayrock did not care about the future success of the projects nearly as much as they cared about laundering money and skimming from the top. Furthermore, since FL Group was a stupendously bad performer even by the standards of the 2008 financial crisis, and given its close ties to Kremlin-connected Russian money, one could also be forgiven for thinking there was something more going on there than met the eye. We may never know all the details or whose money was laundered and for what reasons—and if I had a magic wand I’d love to see if any the Manafort/Yanukovych/Firtash/Mogilevich Eurasian gas scheme money made its way into any of these Trump ventures—but it seems clear a lot of dirty Russian money was involved.

When considering Sater, it is important to remember that he has been busted multiple times by law enforcement and yet has not served jail time in America (with the exception of one year for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass and severing a nerve in the man’s face, or, as Trump put it under oath, Sater “got into a barroom fight, which a lot of people do.”) and enjoys the favor of the U.S. government, suggesting he is anything but a generally and especially stupid person; also remember that Sater has a long history of money laundering. 

So, in fact, once you look at the Bayrock deals and Sater assuming Bayrock’s primary reason to exist is for RICO money laundering, these deals that were once seemingly mind-bogglingly stupid all of a sudden make a lot of sense, and, in series of lawsuits beginning primarily on behalf of two of Sater’s Bayrock partners—Jody Kriss and Michael Ejekam, who weren’t in on the fun—for money they say is owed to them, Bayrock is precisely described as a RICO criminal organization, of which money laundering is one of its primary activities (in the main complaint, the word “launder” or one of its derivatives appears 39 times in the document).

Sater Saga

After Sater left Bayrock in 2008, none of this stopped him from being brought into the Trump Organization in 2010 as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump” even after Trump was made aware of Sater’s criminal past, and circumstantial evidence points to Sater still being connected to the Russian mafia. For his part, Trump has issued his typically contradictory and slippery statements—more aptly called lies—in regards to these dealings and, in particular, his relationship to Sater, with Trump lying repeatedly about his relationship with Sater and Bayrock in an attempt to falsely minimize them. And there is no distancing Trump from Bayrock: one of Bayrock’s flagship presentations from as late as 2008 list its three Trump-named projects discussed above before all others and lists The Trump Organization as its first “strategic partner” (followed by FL Group), Donald Trump as its first “reference,” and “Trump Tower” in New York as its address.

The Huffington Post also recently discovered just a few days ago that Sater owns three shell companies—Global Habitat Solutions (GHS), United Biofuels Company LLC, and Sands Point Partners GP LLC—that are apparent fakes that “sell no products and have no customers,” ideal for being used to launder money; GHS had collaborated with another company named Titan Atlas in promoting itself, a company co-founded by Donald Trump Jr. and in which Trump Jr. also invested; Sater used promotional images from Titan Atlas’ website for GHS’s own after Trump Jr. introduced him to Titan Atlas’ other co-founder, Jeremy Blackburn (with an unsurprisingly troubled corporate past), and Tital is now owned by another company controlled by the Trump Organization, run by Trump Jr. since his father became president. .

Sater even donated the maximum amount allowed to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and the White House is even using Sater as a back-channel diplomatic go-between for Trump’s person lawyer, Michael Cohen, and a heavily-pro-Russian/pro-Putin Ukrainian legislator, Andrii Artemenko, who are discussing a Ukraine “peace plan” being pushed by close Putin aides; Artemenko also claims he has information damaging to Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s anti-Russian president facing off against Putin and his proxies in the Ukrainian Civil War. In an only partially-verified-by-U.S.-officials 35-page dossier on Trump and his people compiled by a respected ex-MI6 British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, Cohen is said to have secretly met with Russian government officials during the late stages of the presidential campaign, though it is not clear if this—or what—specific information has been corroborated by U.S. officials, with journalists having been unable to thus far verify the information on Cohen, who denies playing this role.

The reason a lot of what is known about Sater and his past misdealings is publicly available, besides a then-revelatory late-2007 New York Times article, is because of the intrepid efforts of two of the lawyers who often represented plaintiffs against Sater in court: Richard Lerner and Frederick Oberlander.

Going back to that 2013 lawsuit, because Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Kaminsky was included in these accusations for allegedly illegally aiding and covering up for Sater, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) Preet Bharara (more on him on in a bit) ended up being involved tangentially in defending him in his capacity as a U.S. Attorney, playing a role in trying to moving the suit from the state court system to SDNY jurisdiction, but it was ultimately moved because of Sater and his ties to the government, not Kaminsky. Once in the hands of the federal court, Kaminsky was removed without prejudice from the proceedings.

Which brings us to one of the untold stories of this election, and one which may never be told in full: how Sater’s cooperation with the government gave him government protection from being held liable in many cases for his misdeeds while also helping to suppress information about him and these misdeeds, and how, had his past and crimes been front and center over the past decade, this knowledge could have done much to derail and discredit Donald Trump, his brand and family at a time when he was building a national following with his hit show The Apprentice, which he even used to promote his fraudulent, money-laundered SoHo deal. 

That the public, including Trump’s and Bayrock’s clients and customers, were kept in the dark about Sater—a fact which undoubtedly helped all of these related deals and others advance, which was not lost on partners of Sater’s, and which is at the heart of much of the legal action against Sater—and were kept in dark because Sater cooperated with the U.S. government, adds quite a what-if twist to the tale of Trump and his dramatic rise over the last decade to become the most powerful man in the world: what if the government hadn’t protected Sater, and all that evidence was out in the open while Trump and Bayrock were courting buyers and were fighting court battles? What would that have done to Trump’s reputation if he became most known for defrauding customers and money laundering with a Russian mafia-deluged violent felon, to his hit show The Apprentice (one can just imagine NBC saying “You’re fired!” to Trump), and to his political aspirations? 

In a much less chaotic, less exciting world than the insanity that confronts us today, one can be sure such a salacious story involving a playboy New York tycoon would have been front, center, and dominant in national and international media coverage; lawsuits, trials, and investments may also have gone differently for Trump if such information was common knowledge, too; he may have just faded away in disgrace, or least into a sideshow, if not landing in jail.

Yes, if not for the favors the U.S. government did in protecting and, thus, abetting, Sater, it is far more likely that Trump would have collapsed in scandal than risen to be our current president. This abetting may very well be unwitting, but the two aforementioned lawyers—Lerner and Oberlander—believe differently, that the government cooperation with Sater yielded disappointing results, that Sater fooled and tricked the government into helping him in exchange for dubious assistance of questionable value and that this arrangement may have been such an embarrassment for the government that they covered up this and his past to save face and protect the careers of those involved. No court rulings have affirmed these assertions, yet it is notable that in the U.S. Supreme Court proceedings involved in arguing over Sater’s information being withheld from the public, the Court tacitly admitted that at least some of the points made by Lerner and Oberlander were valid when they ordered many of the documents surrounding Sater be made public, the only reason that much of information about him is now publicly available.

Epilogue of Intrigue

As for Arif and Mashkevich, two other major players in the whole Trump/Bayrock/FL Group saga, Arif was arrested in Turkey in September 2010 when he was at a sex party with apparently underage girls on board a Yacht (which had been once belonged to none other than Atatürk) under suspicion of running a complex prostitution and human trafficking ring in a scheme of which it seems Mashkevich was also a part, though Arif was later acquitted under mysterious circumstances and Mashkevich was not charged.

Going back to Trump’s sole major Wall Street lender, Deutsche Bank, since 2012, it has loaned trump over $300 million, a sum that is still owed. This amount presented a major conflict of interest for the newly inaugurated President Trump in late January 2017, because Deutsche was under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) for orchestrating $10 billion in illegal fake trades from 2011-2015 that might have been part of a massive Russian money laundering scheme; U.S. and UK officials levied $630 million in massive fines against Deutsche at the end of January 2017, but DoJ was not part of this and is still investigating, raising the question of the independence and impartiality of Trump’s own new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, himself under fire for possible improper interactions with Russian officials and forced to pledge to recuse himself from any investigations of into the 2016 election and Russian interference in it. Deutsche itself is under pressure to allow an independent investigation into Trump’s accounts with the Bank (his family also has accounts with Deutsche), even after its own investigation apparently found no link to Trump’s accounts and Russia. 

It was just revealed that Deutsche was also involved in another major laundering scam of Russian money to the tune of $24 million, including the specific division that Trump owes $300 million, with the overall laundering scheme—known as the Global/(Great) Russian Laundromat—involving dozens of Western banks and a sum ranging from $20-$80 billion through the years 2010-2014; the hundreds involved in the scheme include Russia’s notorious oligarchs and Russia’s F.S.B., the main successor to the famed Soviet K.G.B. intelligence agency, with Putin having longstanding intimate ties to both and with some of the money in the scheme apparently being used to further Putin’s and Russia’s interests.

As if there weren’t enough bad connections to Trump Tower, Mogilevich-associated Russian mafia boss and apparent all-around celebrity Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov was overseeing an illegal high-stakes international gambling ring for wealthy clientele that in part operated out of Trump Tower in New York. Among other prolific activities, Tokhtakhounov had gained notoriety for apparently fixing 2002 Olympic ice skating matches to help get a gold medal for a fellow Russian, as well as one for a pair of French skaters in exchange for a French visa, but was soon after in Russia and safe from prosecution. The gambling ring connected to Trump Tower, run by two of his capos, Vadim Trincher and Anatoly Golubchik, was popular with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs in both Russia and Ukraine, and besides the gambling ring, they also engaged in some $100 million in money laundering. Trincher himself in 2009 bought an apartment in Trump Tower just below an apartment owned by Trump himself, in which he nearly held a fundraiser for Newt Gingrich two years later, but had to cancel because of a mold problem and a water leak; it was from this apartment that Trincher ran a branch of said gambling ring. Another linked gambling/laundering ring was run by one of Trincher’s sons, who owned an entire floor in Trump tower, and another son of Trincher’s ran multiple illegal poker rooms throughout New York City. 

An indictment naming Tokhtakhounov and his people was filed by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, mentioned earlier, and the same Preet Bharara fired controversially by Trump just last month after Trump had promised Bharara he would not fire him, and it should be noted that several of the past and ongoing cases involving Trump and/or his associates occurred in the jurisdiction of SDNY and that a number of potential future cases would also occur there if they moved forward and would have been handled by Bharara if he had not been fired. It was Bharara’s indictment that led to a 2013 raid on Vadim Trincher’s Trump Tower apartment, and arrests made there and elsewhere nabbed 29 suspects. A mere seven months after he was indicted, a nonchalant Tokhtakhounov was a red-carpet VIP guest at Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, a city where, to this day, he is regularly seen at trendy public places.

We also have the curious case of the Trump’s fabulously ostentatious mansion—the “Maison de l’Amitie”—in Palm Beach, Florida, that he bought back in 2004 for $41 million. A representative of Trump claimed Trump put $25 million of his own money into renovating the house, but this is doubtful; plans obtained who improvements were relatively minor, and, Typical of Trump, he seemed to be lying through his teeth: when taking a local reporter on a tour, he claimed he installed gold fixtures in bathroom, but when the report scratched a faucet, gold paint came off to reveal not-gold underneath. Trump set his asking price at $125 million when he listed early in 2006, but had trouble finding a buyer; then, in March 2008, he brought his price down to $100 million, but it still wasn’t until that July that he got Russian oligarch billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev to buy the mansion for $95 million after some haggling in a deal said to be the largest U.S. residential real estate deal ever. If you’re thinking that Trump might have swindled Rybolovlev, that’s very possible: he has a habit of falling for tricksters, especially when it comes to art deals; the house was appraised at less than only $59.8 million in 2013, and though it rose to $81.8 million in the summer of 2016, that was still about 15% less than what he had paid. Just months after he bought the house, he ended up in a messy divorce drama with his wife, who was after the house; there are plans to demolish the house, and Rybolovlev has not even physically entered the house, which may be demolished.

But unlike other major Russian oligarchs doing business with Trump or his allies, either directly or indirectly, Rybolovlev is no apparent friend or ally of Putin or the Russian mafia, which seems to put this story in the category of mere trivial.

But then, multiple reports that Rybolovlev’s private jet had repeatedly been tracked to cities where and when candidate and later president Trump was: Las Vegas in October, just five days before Election Day in North Carolina, and in Miami in February, creating a sense of intrigue. One might be tempted to say this is meaningless, yet on top of this, his accounts of the mansion deal have changed, making people wonder if he has something to hide.

At the very least, this Palm Beach mansion saga is a good reminder that Trump is a swindler and a liar, and if you’re still not convinced, google Trump University, Trump Steaks…

And oh, we just found out that during the campaign, Republicans paid a private intelligence firm that works closely with an ex-K.G.B. officer to dig up dirt in Clinton.

Putting the Pieces Together: Not a Pretty Picture

Sorry, Trump fans, but it’s time a reality check: it’s more likely that you will soon be struck by lighting than that all of these threads together and tied together by a Russian mafia godfather end up as innocent, harmless coincidences when it comes possible connections between Team Trump and Team Putin.

It is also crucial to note that the whole Russian operation in Ukraine—using Russia’s natural resources, deals related to them, and the profits from selling them to dominate and corrupt political elites of neighboring and other countries along with hacking and (mis/dis)information operations—is hardly unique to Ukraine; Putin is trying to do much the same thing throughout Europe, and it was clear he successfully threw his weight around last year during our election to help Trump win in what I called the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar, part of his overall war on Western Democracy and promotion of what I call democratic fascism.

The question is now about whether or not there was treason going on during that (First) Russo-American Cyberwar. If (and we don’t know yet) Putin was able co-opt agents people Manafort, Gates, Page, and/or others, this would simply be current Russian standard operating procedure for how it spreads its power throughout the world in the era of Putin; such hybrid warfare and “Cold War”-type or non-hot warfare being directed at America should not only not surprise Americans, it should be expected. And it seems that, along with Manafort and Page, the record-fast-recently-resigned-due-to-Russian-related-stuff Trump National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn and longtime Manafort and Trump confidante Roger Stone are all under an official FBI “counterintelligence”—to use FBI Director James Comey’s exact word—investigation, and Manafort, Page, and Stone all just volunteered to testify before Congress.

Should those hearings be public, that would be epic.

Conclusion originally a Part II published here

Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, and Ivanka Trump on stage for a rehearsal at the Republican National Convention- NBC

Conclusion: Trump Has Terrible Judgment or Is a (Treasonous) Criminal or Both

I will never forgive the news media or the American people for not caring enough about the aforementioned information when it mattered most and had the chance to change the outcome of this election, since any one of these main three threads alone carried more weight than Clinton’s and yet got only a fraction of the coverage that red-herring of a “scandal” got. Nor will I forgive Comey for his political tone-deafness, the politically-suicidal liberals who empowered Trump by myopically and narcissistically not voting for Clinton, or the Republican Party for so willingly spreading its buttocks for Putin; anyone who doubts me on that last point can watch the disgraceful behavior of Republicans on the supposedly relatively non-partisan House Intelligence Committee, especially its Chairman Devin Nunes and shallow grandstander Trey Gowdy, the latter of whom led the partisan witch-hunt that was the last “Benghazi”—really Clinton e-mail—investigation. Yes, I have no faith in Trump—Team Trump has lied at least 20 times about its ties to Russia as of early March and only continues to do so in the most outlandish and unprecedented and Orwellian of ways, making the possible reality of a serious cover-up more and more likely—but seeing Nunes as the Intelligence Committee Chairman act in such an unprecedented way—blatantly covering for the president—made me tear up and almost cry because his behavior is such a dramatic sign of how our government is failing us and how the last bastion protecting this country from what I call democratic fascism—that bastion now being that the party in power won’t twist every organ of government it can to benefit itself politically no matter the cost—may be crumbling. As historian Douglas Brinkley (who implored the public after Trump won to “give…[Trump]…a chance”) said of all of this: “There’s a smell of treason in the air.”

Trump repeatedly claimed during his campaign he would surround himself with “the best people;” I’m sure he believed himself, and that is the problem. What has been outlined here is probably one of the strongest cases (if not the strongest) against Trump’s judgment as leader, whether in business or in politics; if you surround yourself on a regular basis with mobsters and criminals and those who favor the worldview (or purse) of America’s greatest enemy over America itself, there is no more discussion to be had: Donald Trump is too stupid and too incompetent a leader to be president as he simply cannot be trusted to make decisions about whom to give power to (for every supposed hit there are far more misses and we can’t delegate the fate of our nation a game of chance; sorry, but I’m nearly convinced that Trump picked Gen. Mattis to run the Pentagon simply because he like Mattis’ nickname of “Mad Dog”); Trump’s selection of Paul Manafort alone would be disqualifying enough, and that’s just the beginning.

And that is the best case scenario that he was too stupid to see that his people were playing him for a fool or were abusing their power in a way that could destroy his potential presidency and do the nation irreparable harm. But if Trump himself in any way knew about any possible collusion with Russia, that takes us from disqualifying incompetence into the realm of treason. Even if that is not the case, the newest revelations are making it more and more likely that some sort of treason from within his camp will be uncovered—Comey recently noted that this counterintelligence investigation began in July, some ten months ago, and if it was clear there was no collusion it would probably have ended long ago—and it is increasingly likely that this issue will cripple Trump’s presidency in ways not seen since the later nineteenth-century, when Reconstruction’s war between President Andrew Johnson and Congressional Republicans, as well as the scandals of the Gilded Age, dramatically weakened the presidency.

Russia is as defiant as ever, just in recent months and weeks assassinating—or trying to assassinate-—opponents, arresting hundreds of peaceful protesters and Russian’s main opposition leader (Alexey Navalny, again) during Russia’s largest protests in five years, trying to overthrow democratically elected foreign governments (Montenegro), hacking foreign politicians in ways designed to sway elections (from Hillary Clinton to France’s Emmanuel Macron and beyond), fanning the flames of war in Ukraine, slaughtering civilians in Aleppo, and assaulting the world of norms the West has known since the end of WWII.

And Donald Trump is in the White House and wants to be Putin’s friend.

*****

Sometimes, if there’s enough smoke, it’s undeniable that there is a fire even if the flames are obscured or not visible from afar. Back in July, when I began my in-depth exploration around the same time the FBI did, I wrote that

… it’s possible there is  some sort of coordinated effort going on between Trump or people in his campaign and Putin or people associated with him. But I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we also have two groups of actors here  acting mostly independently yet with common purpose. I also wouldn’t be surprised if some of Trump’s associates, especially Manafort, are part of some sort of deal (tacit or otherwise) to promote Putin’s agenda within Trump’s campaign between several staffers or just himself on one side and Putin’s agents on the other, given Manafort’s and several staffers’ histories. And it’s certainly believable—in fact,  almost certain—that Putin would like to see Clinton defeated and Trump in the White House, since it would be  hard to envision a leader that would or could play more into Putin’s hands than Trump. 

This may yet backfire on and Trump and Putin, since the  Russian interference is so obvious…

Sometimes I hate being right.

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

See related articles:

The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

Trump, Putin, Russia, DNC/Clinton Hack, & WikiLeaks: “There’s Something Going on” with Election 2016 & It’s Cyberwarfare & Maybe Worse

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