A Special Commissioned Report of Real Context News Intelligence (PDF version here)

by Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content, my Linktree with all his public links/profiles); contact Brian with your own requests about any topic to have your own custom reports produced

August 29, 2023

1. Some Context of the U.S. Relationships with Taiwan and China

Unlike arms sales to all other foreign “entities” (a term used in large part because Taiwan receives much in U.S. arms sales but is not formally recognized as a an independent country by the U.S.), arms sales to Taiwan are uniquely not covered by The Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) of 1961 and The Arms Export Control Act (AECA) of 1976, most of those handled through the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program—in which the U.S. acts as an intermediary between vendors and foreign recipients and handles the sale and delivery of entire weapons systems and full support packages—and Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) licenses—in which U.S. vendors sell directly to  foreign recipients.  There are some other less common options, such as coming from existing Department of Defense stockpiles through Excess Defense Articles (EDA) provisions and Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), the latter increasingly common in the current emergency climate and available to FMS-eligible entities.  But all Taiwan arms sales are regulated by the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which explicitly states that “the United States will make available to Taiwan such defense articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability” and restricts the factors that can play into the decision-making process of what to send Taiwan and when: “The President and the Congress shall determine the nature and quantity of such defense articles and services based solely upon their judgment of the needs of Taiwan, in accordance with procedures established by law” (emphasis added).[1]

All this means that Taiwan is a special case when it comes to U.S. arms sales.

And the reasons for this are easy to understand: China is essentially the second most powerful nation on earth, thus overtly recognizing Taiwan as a fully independent, separate legal state from China could carry severe consequences.[2]  As the last bastion of World War II-U.S.-ally Nationalist China, Taiwan held onto China’s seat on the United Nations Security Council even after it lost the Chinese Civil War in 1949, as the U.S. did not recognize the Chinese Communist Party-led People’s Republic of China’s government in Beijing, but the Nationalist government in Taipei, Taiwan, as the legitimate Chinese government.  But in the wake of The United Nations General Assembly installing the People’s Republic of China in China’s United Nations seats in the General Assembly and the Security Council in 1971 and around the time of Nixon’s breakthrough visit to Mao’s China in 1972, what would become known as the “one China” policy would emerge and come to be official U.S. policy of the Nixon Administration and every administration since.[3]  Following the emergence of that policy, the Carter Administration began to lay the groundwork in 1978 for formal U.S. diplomatic recognition of the Communist People’s Republic of China as “China” in place of Taiwan on January 1, 1979.[4]  In response, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) later in 1979 to assure Taiwan that while it was recognizing the communist mainland Chinese government, it was not abandoning Taiwan and would empower the government in Taipei to defend itself from a military takeover at the hands of the government in Beijing with “defense articles and defense services” (e.g., arms).  After a bit of wrangling, during the summer of 1982, the Reagan Administration would broaden and deepen the general “one-China” framework to include six general “assurances”:

1. In relation to specific language from an earlier Reagan Administration communique the same year stating a vague plan to eventually reduce and end arms sales to Taiwan with the culmination of a “peaceful,” “final resolution” between Beijing and Taipei, it was stated that the U.S. had not agreed to set any specific date for ending arms sales to Taiwan.
2. The U.S. had not agreed to consult the government in Beijing on any of these arms sales to the government in Taipei.
3. The U.S. would not attempt to play any mediating role between Beijing and Taipei.
4. The U.S. had not agreed to revise the TRA.
5. The deliberately ambiguous assertion that U.S. had not changed its stance on sovereignty over Taiwan.
6. The U.S. would not pressure the government in Taipei to negotiate with the government in Beijing.

These six assurances, the TRA, and three sets of communiques—two the circumstances of which were touched on above in 1972 (Nixon Administration) and 1978 (Carter Administration) and a third in 1982 (Reagan Administration) stating U.S. policy was to support a “peaceful reunification” between Beijing and Taipei—are what the Biden Administration regards as its and America’s main guidance for the “one China” policy, with the text of the “Six Assurances” clarified by Congress during the Obama Administration in 2016.[5]

Short of formally legally recognizing Taiwan as a fully independent country, Washington has had considerable freedom of action for decades, though as China has risen considerably in power and stature in recent years and seeks to be more assertive on the world stage, there is growing concern that, above all other issues, Taiwan may propel the U.S. and China onto a collision course resulting in war between the two most powerful countries on earth.  Among the most prominent individuals who share this concern is noted scholar Graham Allison, renown for decades for his now textbook analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis; Graham’s famous analysis first appears in 1968 as a RAND Corporation paper, then in 1969 in The American Political Science Review, then in 1971 in a much-expanded book version, Essence of Decision, itself reworked in a new edition in 1999 once significant amounts of information on the event were declassified.[6]

Graham popularized what is now known as the Thucydides trap.  The name of this trap refers to the fifth-century BCE ancient Greek historian Thucydides, considered the founder of the so-called “realist” international relations theory framework and who has become one of the great historians in human history for his chronicling of the great war between rising power Athens and established power Sparta (“The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable” [1.23]).[7]  In this vein, a “Thucydides trap” refers to a situation where the rise of one power is confronted by a more established power and results in a direct war between the two powers, which Allison very much sees will be the case with China and the U.S.[8]

Not everyone is on board with the degree of concern broadcast by Allison, who is convinced war will happen unless there are “more radical changes in attitudes and actions, by leaders and publics alike, than anyone has yet imagined.”[9]  While I would hardly dismiss his concerns, I find the likelihood far less: for me, it is hard to see or the U.S. or China gaining much from such a conflict but it is easy to see both losing much and their economies and, indeed, societies, are terribly intertwined even if their militaries and political systems are not.

Still, while the latest caches of arms going to Taiwan from the U.S. will hardly improve, and, indeed, will at least ostensibly harm Sino-American relations, even if there will hardly be a diplomatic break or a halting of trade, this latest arms transfers between Taiwan and the U.S. are worth looking into in some detail.  But it can be confusing where to start.  If a sale is announced, it may literally be years before it arrives.  What about gifts that are not sales that will arrive in Taiwan far earlier than sales that happened earlier?  Or financial grants for Taiwan to purchase weapons?  What about training and support services?  I was confused by all this myself, hence my longer-than-anticipated report on the variety of military support the U.S. is offering Taiwan, any of which could be counted among the “latest” arms or intended/future U.S. arms transfer to Taiwan.

To understand the latest transfers, it is important to understand that there are both sales and other types of assistance going to Taiwan.  To start, we will begin with the sales.

2. U.S. Arms Sales to Taiwan and Their Implications

The Biden Administration announced it intended to seek $1.1 billion in Foreign Military Sales of U.S. arms and support services in early September 2022.  The packages announcement came at a time of heightened tension with China shortly after then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan a month earlier, which resulted in angry denunciations from Beijing and aggressive military training exercises violating Taiwanese waters and airspace, the largest military exercises in China’s history.[10]  While a number or public figures condemned Pelosi’s act as irresponsibly provocative, I felt China’s reaction was more kabuki performance-theater (or xiqu, if you will) than anything else: was much ado about very little, but Chinese President Xi Jinping felt compelled to make a very public, “strong” reaction.  Still, the fact that China reacted so theatrically and so symbolically (but not in any substantive, far-reaching ways) to the peaceful visit of a senior civilian legislator who was then an eighty-two-year-old woman to me hardly projected strength, but, rather, insecurity.  In any event, over a year later there still have not been any far-reaching consequences from Pelosi’s visit.[11]

The more than $1.1 billion in arms was the largest yet proposed by the Biden Administration and included up to 60 anti-ship Harpoon missiles for $355 million, up to 100 Sidewinder AIM-9X Sidewinder air-to-air missiles for $85 million, and $655 million in logistical support for Taiwan’s early-warning air-defense radar surveillance systems.[12]

As Taiwan is an island China can only attack from air and sea, such a package would greatly increase the cost of any assault against Taiwan for Beijing’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and Air Force (PLAAF), to say the least.  With the Japan-and-South-Korea-allied U.S. Navy protecting the waters nearby and with China having only three aircraft carriers and only several dozens or the larger types of ships (cruisers, frigates, corvettes, destroyers., and amphibious landing ships) so essential for any major amphibious assault given those U.S and its allies’ navies nearby, even after a rapid buildup, the untested navy of China’s that has not seen any combat in decades (over forty-four years ago it had a border war in 1979 that was a loss to Vietnam, besides that there was just a small skirmish since then in 1988) remains vulnerable.  This is especially the case after seeing the damage that Ukraine—which barely has a navy of its own—has been able to do to the Russian Navy with relatively inexpensive anti-ship missiles (the same type as or similar to the ones the West is supplying to Taiwan) and drones, Russian vulnerability I was keen and early to point out in April, 2022.[13]  That is not to say PLAN is just like the Russian Navy: the Chinese ships are far newer than Russia’s, yet have not been tested in combat.  In any situation, though, the overall U.S. capabilities are far ahead of China’s, factoring the interrelated systems each can deploy (China’s larger number of ships is hardly the be all and end all), and that does not even get into how much some of the major U.S. allies in the region—especially Japan, South Korea, and to a degree France and even Australia—are also considerable naval powers in the region; even the U.K. plans to send a carrier strike group to the region soon, in 2025.[14]  And do not not forget all these sales and transfer are for Taiwan itself, which is also engaging in a rapid, impressive military buildup of its own, punching far above its weight in key areas, with rough ratios of 1 to 4 in fighter aircraft (set to increase), 1 to 2 in trainer aircraft (particularly important for producing high quality pilots), and 1 to 3 in attack helicopters against a China that is just shy of sixty times more populous and with a GDP nearly 24.5 times larger![15]

After this the package announcement in September, in early December the State Department announced that it intended to allow another package with the FMS sale of $428 million in U.S. military aircraft spare parts—especially for F-16s and C-130 transports—and equipment especially as Taiwan’s military aircraft have seen heavy use with in patrolling all the aggressive Chinese military exercises nearby.[16]  To me, this sends a clear signal that the China cannot expect to wear out Taiwan’s aircraft through its aggressive exercises.

That announcement was followed upon at the end of the month by another of a $180 million FMS sales package of Volcano anti-tank mine-laying systems and training, ammunition, and services for those systems.^[17]  I feel this is a way of reminding China that even if it were to land troops on Taiwan, the fight would definitely continue on land at a cost to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

2023 saw the Biden Administration begin by announcing in early March that it intended to sell 200 medium air-to-air AMRAAM missiles and 100 AGM-88B HARM ground-radar-targeting missiles in a $619 million FMS package.[18]  This would bolster both offense and defense for Taiwan’s combat jets.

Another FMS sales package for over $440 million was announced late in June, including $332 million in Bushmaster autocannon 30mm ammunition for some of Taiwan’s CM-34 wheeled infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) as well as $108 million in spare parts for vehicles, small arms, and support systems and services.[19]  The way I see this package, if the Volcano package was a reminder that Chinese armor may pay a price, this is a reminder that the Taiwanese infantry and their support vehicles would be well-equipped and well-supplied.

Finally, just last week, yet another FMS arms package was announced by the Biden Administration, this one $500 million to equip Taiwan F-16s with infrared search tracking systems and related spare parts and equipment.[20]  This is an added reminder that Chinese aircraft may pay a dear price in any attack on Taiwan.  Just days after this sales package was announced and just days ago, China responded by sending dozens of combat jets towards Taiwan, with many violating Taiwan’s airspace and causing Taiwan to scramble its own fighter jets to intercept.[21]

This year-long-period’s worth of packages worth well over $3.2 billion demonstrates to China that its forces at sea, in the air, and on land will potentially face a steep price as all three vectors are receiving substantial boosts from U.S. military arms and equipment sales to Taiwan.

3. Delays in Delivery of Sales to Taiwan

Unfortunately for Taiwan, supply-chain and manufacturing issues have led to a backlog for some $19 billion in weapons deliveries of previous U.S. arms sales packages for Taiwan—including 66 F-16s, a proportionally major increase (see above graphic), HIMARS, and some 400 Harpoon anti-ship missiles and 100 Harpoon Coastal Defense Systems—and that was before all but one arms sales packages discussed above.  Ukraine is also playing a role in somewhat competing for attention with Taiwan, but it is not playing the role that some like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) are claiming (see note 30 and discussion in IV).  For the most part, the idea that FMS weapons sales to Taiwan are being affected by PDA transfers to Ukraine is a red herring: they are coming from two entirely different sources—U.S. private sector manufacturers producing orders for Taiwan and existing U.S. defense stockpiles for Ukraine, respectively, with only one recent existing stockpile PDA having been authorized for Taiwan, the first of this type for Taiwan—so they are not coming from the same pot and are therefore not in immediate competition with each other.  That is why Ukraine has been able to quickly receive various weapons systems and Taiwan is facing a $19 billion backlog, as the manufacturers are suffering from a number of production and supply-chain issues but the U.S. already has its stockpiles.  Indeed, before Russia’s February 2022 escalatory further invasion of Ukraine, the Taiwan arms sales delivery backlog was still a whopping $14 billion, and most of the delayed items were purchased from 2015 to 2019.  As Jennifer Kavanagh and Jordan Cohen noted in War on the Rocks:

Across U.S. arms deliveries to all clients completed between 2012 and 2021, the average time between sale and delivery was about four years for air defense systems, 3.5 years for aircraft, and 2.5 years for missiles.  Sometimes these delays stretch up to almost 10 years. Taiwan’s delays are in line with these figures.  Notably, while clients of major U.S. adversaries like Russia and China often receive faster arms deliveries in general, they face similarly lengthy backlogs when it comes to more high-end systems.

The same authors outline a number of major reasons for this:

1. The U.S. industrial base has been unable to keep up with increasing demand
2. Defense business sector consolidation has meant a smaller number of production lines and suppliers
3. The supply chains are long and production methods are complex, vulnerable to geopolitical, weather, and economic disruptions
4. The political instability in the U.S., particularly the budgeting shenanigans that have increasingly become a reckless norm, means contract authorizations are delayed and defense-contractors are becoming more averse to long-term investment (I will add my own thoughts to this later and name the perpetrators)
5. We are still recovering from the issues in supply chain upheavals and production halts caused by the COVID-19 pandemic
6. Inefficiencies in the long process from sale to delivery are increasing because of increasing U.S. global arms sales, leading to the prioritization of bigger, more expensive systems being moved faster than some of Taiwan’s more “asymmetric” items
7. An outdated Department of Defense process for allocating funds for FMS is also slowing things down
8. Delays from export controls can even occur after the deal is done, a result of byzantine legal rules that can slow things down
9. (The authors also note a ninth general reason that has not that been the case with Taiwan: congressional committees can further put informal yet indefinite holds on delivery until the sitting administration addresses their concerns) 

Numbers 6.) and 7.) are also affecting PDA transfers that until recently Ukraine benefited from and Taiwan did not (and number 9.) while not affecting Taiwan, is definitely affecting Turkey as Sen. Bob Mendez (D-NJ), Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has put a hold on the Biden Administration’s sale of F-16s there).  As more and more PDA packages are considered for both Ukraine and Taiwan, there will be an issue of direct competition for resources from the same pot, but those have yet to truly present themselves in any significant way and that simply is not the case with the $19 billion backlog for Taiwan.  There are some other bandwidth issues related to Ukraine, and those will be discussed in section IV, but those are also unrelated to Taiwan’s arms sales delivery delays.  Thankfully, the Biden Administration and Congress are moving to mitigate some of these issues, including throwing substantial funding into shoring up and further developing and expanding many aspects of the industrial defense sector.  Additionally, both the Department of State and Department of Defense are well aware of the problems and have announced specific plans to combat them in May and June of this year, respectively.  While results generally remain to be seen, the Biden Administration has already opened and recently used the Presidential Drawdown Authority to speed up new transfers of weapons to Taiwan, and those betting against this administration when it puts its mind to something have often been objectively and severely guilty of underestimating it.[22]

4. U.S. Arms Grants, Loans, Other Military Aid for Taiwan in an Era of Political Dysfunction

There are instances when Congress authorizes acts and appropriates money for them separately.  Overall, there are three types of spending in Congress: mandatory, discretionary, and interest.  That last one involves interest payments on the national debt, and mandatory spending involves programs that are budgeted for in their laws establishing them (healthcare costs and social security together account for 77% of mandatory spending in 2023).  But discretionary spending involves programs established by law that are not funded for in their enacting legislation and that must be funded by one of twelve separate appropriations bills put together by House and Senate Appropriations Committees and Subcommittees, but some or all of those bills are often combined into omnibus bills (defense spending accounts for nearly half of discretionary spending this year).[23] What makes this year’s non-sales Taiwan arms package interesting is that it is part of discretionary spending and there has thus far been more authorized in its enacting legislation than has been appropriated in the appropriations legislation due to a complicated debate and set of circumstances.

The Taiwan Enhanced Resilience Act (TERA), sponsored by the aforementioned Sen. Menendez, was approved by Congress as part of the the $858 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2022 and signed into law by U.S. President Joe Biden at the end of 2022.[24]  TERA included up to $10 billion in grants for military purchases—up to $2 billion per year for fiscal years 2024-2027—and $2 billion per year in loans for the same over the same period.  It represents the first time Title 22 Foreign Military Financing (FMF) run by the State Department is being authorized for Taiwan.  The bill also authorized deeper military training and collaboration between the U.S. and Taiwan, created a regional weapons stockpile, and fast-tracks weapons disbursement to Taiwan—allowing the same type of methods being used to deliver much of the U.S. weaponry going to Ukraine that permits disbursement from existing U.S. stockpiles, in this case, up to an additional $1 billion in arms per year for Taiwan.  The bill goes further to authorize the setup of a fast-track FMS method to get Taiwan arms it has purchased more rapidly than it currently receives them.[25]

As this was all discretionary spending, though, the funding was appropriated separately from the authorization in the $1.7 trillion omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023.  And that bill did not include the $10 billion in grants that would come from the State Department’s FMF program.  During the negotiations, the Senate leaders on the appropriations committee handling the State Department, Chairman Chris Coons (D-DE) and Ranking Member Lindsey Graham (R-SC), agreed that this large amount of $10 billion might end up coming from other duly authorized military grants and humanitarian aid programs, as the State Department’s entire funding level for FY 2023 was only set at $59.7 billion.  The $2 billion per-year is no small amount, then, and other top FMF program recipients—Israel ($3.3 billion) and especially Egypt ($1.3 billion) and Jordan ($425 million) all have much lower GDPs than Israel, with Taiwan has increasing its defense spending 13.9% in 2023 to $18.3 billion.  The two senators formed a strange bipartisan combination and faced other strange bedfellow sharing bipartisan concern for their bipartisan opposition to the grants, but especially with serious a serious global hunger crisis and the war in Ukraine, Coons, Graham, and others wanted to make sure other urgently needed aid is not impacted.  The bill did include the $2-billion-a-year in loan offers, but Taiwan has since stated is it not interested in taking out U.S.-offered loans.[26]

But the bill with TERA has since resulted in the first of the Presidential Drawdown Authority disbursements, one worth $345 million out of the $1 billion authorized by the late December 2022 legislation.  This drawdown from existing U.S. stocks was announced at the end of July, is expected to arrive in Taiwan fart faster than the previous FMS purchases, and is supposed to include missiles, firearms, MANPADS portable air defense systems, intelligence and surveillance equipment, training, and education.[27]  And, according to Politico quoting one unnamed official, it is to include MQ-9 Reaper drones, though the details are being kept quiet from official, public channels for now because of “sensitivities” involving China.[28] If those drones are actually included, Col. Cedric Leighton, U.S. Air Force (Ret.)—who is one of CNN’s go-to military analysts—wrote that this would be “noteworthy” in a Twitter direct message to me.  He continued: “So far, only the U.S., U.K., France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the Dominican Republic fly this…so if Taiwan were to receive this system as part of this package it would immeasurably enhance its aerial surveillance capabilities.”  He further explained that “the system Taiwan would receive is the unarmed reconnaissance and surveillance version.”  When it comes to the reaction from the other side, the former Air Force colonel commented that “China would undoubtedly find the addition of the MQ-9 to the Taiwan battlespace highly provocative, but it would serve to better integrate Taiwan’s intelligence capabilities with those of the U.S.”  For Col. Leighton: “These systems would greatly enhance Taiwan’s ability to defend itself.  There’s been no confirmation that Taiwan will actually receive four MQ-9As, but it’s difficult to fight today’s battles without such capabilities.”

My own analysis is that this is a big deal more symbolically than anything else, in that this represents a new way to get Taiwan military support in a way that bypasses the deeply backlogged FMS system.  The $345 million package is not game-changing as to the substance, but it does get Taiwan its first Reapers in its hands soon, and the point is that this new PDA method is important because the U.S. will keep sending smaller amounts of military weapons, ammunition, hardware, and training programs that will slowly but surely add up over time and amount to quite a lot over the course of the next several years.  As Taiwan is not expected to be invaded in the next few years, the priority will be Ukraine in its current hot war, but even drops will eventually fill a bucket and make a large difference over a longer timespan.  So few details of this package are known so far, and that will likely be the case with the next several that will very likely be announced for Taiwan.  Breaking them up is also sound strategy: China is almost certainly not invading next year or the year after, and keeping the packages small traps China into looking ridiculous if it overreacts.

Going back to the gaps in the two late-2022 bills, to make matters a bit confusing, a top Pentagon official—Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner—reiterated the Department of Defense’s position that all NDAA authorizations should be appropriated for after Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman had demurred to committing to requesting funding for those FMF grants, her State Department being the body overseeing FMF and not the Department of Defense; those grants were not requested in the State Department’s budget request for 2023 and have not been included in 2014 but were added by the TERA legislation for 2023 within the NDAA for 2023.  So there are dueling committees in Congress, one inserting authorization for grant funding and the other declining to include appropriations for that grant funding, which the Department of State oversees but has not explicitly asked for and seems not inclined to push for but which the Department of Defense supports as a result of its authorization.[29]

But now it is time to talk about the Republican Party.  In my own view (though I am hardly alone), there is something of an issue in the Republican Party, with many in the extreme right even being pro-Russia or anti-Ukrainian and anti-foreign humanitarian aid, some of those folks contrasting that with their staunchly anti-communist, anti-Chinese views; there is an effort on the part of some of these Republicans (Sen. Hawley just being one example) to divert money from Ukraine to Taiwan, as opposed to Democrats in general or Republicans like Sen. Graham who want to forcefully support both Ukraine and Taiwan, just the latter more once the Ukraine situation is much improved or even after Ukraine wins.[30]  With recent budget brinksmanship flirting with a shutdown, there is almost certainly concern that there could be a faction of Republicans who would push for funding for Taiwan now and then not ensure the U.S. had enough funding to meet obligations for Ukraine or humanitarian aid elsewhere.  The language of both Sens. Graham and Coon from the first few months of the year suggests that it is not so much that they oppose grants to Taiwan but want to seek additional funding to ensure those grants would not impact other programs and would be properly appropriated in concurrent legislation.  Ukraine faces a far more immediate threat in a hot war at the moment, China’s attack (if it comes) is not expected in the immediate future, and the U.S. has demonstrated an ability to move air defense systems and other equipment relatively quickly once it decides to do so.  So Ukraine for now will remain a more immediate priority and in later 2022, those grants for Taiwan were set aside to give funding to more pressing needs elsewhere.  Yet Taiwan still is getting a substantial boost in aid, especially for a wealthy country.  There is also the simple fact that the different sections within the State Department that are coming up with their own policies and priorities that are not currently exactly the same as the committee that drafted all the details of TERA, and then you have the Department of Defense commenting on FMF funding that is not its responsibility.  Some of this just seems to be bureaucratic complications, as the State Department staff working on FMF and the Defense Department Indo-Pacific Security Affairs staff are, by design and the natural bureaucratic way of things, not generally working together but with others in their own departments, with policy being approved up the chain to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin up at the top, respectively, and then with senior national security staff in the White House.  There was the whole political mess in which the legislation was also, simply, rushed at “the eleventh-hour to avoid a government shutdown, very much increasing the likelihood of disconnect and incidents like this one.  If anything, then, this issue really would seem to be the product of the political brinksmanship on the part of Republicans departing from normal procedural and political practice, manufacturing crises and leaving officials and lawmakers without enough time to smooth over details that take time, meetings, and long negotiations to review and finalize (this is me naming names as to who is responsible item 4. from the earlier War on the Rocks list; Republicans are far more to blame for the climate of current delays than Ukraine aid has had any affect by far).  Normal procedure was not the case of the process at all with the bills passed at the end of 2022, and we are seeing here its implications for national security policy and why Fitch downgraded the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+ first and foremost because of an “erosion of governance.”[31]

But the situation geopolitically and politically is, nevertheless, complex.  Ukraine is not only a situation competing with Taiwan for U.S officials’ and lawmakers’ attention as well as weapons, but it is also competing for attention among U.S. media outlets and analysts.  Very little discussion of some aspects of this legislation and weapons transfers situation has appeared until the past few months even though the bills were signed into law in December 2022.  Between the war in Ukraine, the 2024 election cycle, extreme weather events, and, perhaps most of all, the first federal and state indictments—four thus far–of a former president of the United States for crimes related to cheating or overturning an election, obstruction of constitutional procedure and justice, and trying to maintain presidential authority over classified documents after leaving office, all on top of the declining business environment for many media outlets, there is just not much bandwidth left to cover many stories in their proper context and giving them their proper depth.  The author of this very report found it challenging to put all this information together and had to find bits and pieces spread out over a great many months of coverage just to ascertain the exact provisions and ramifications of two major bills passed at the end of 2022.[32]

5. The Current Pending Legislation Enmeshed in an Epic Culture War Showdown

The House and the Senate each passed their National Defense Authorization Acts for Fiscal Year 2024 this July, both for $886 trillion.  And yet, there is perhaps an even more absurd form of brinksmanship (hard to imagine in other times but not these) than that of last year occurring in the context of the differences between the two chambers’ bills that will have to be resolved in conference committee—a committee of members from both the House and Senate that will have to agree on a single version to be presented back for approval to both chambers (last year, the House and Senate approved their versions in July and June, respectively, and issues were forebodingly not resolved until December). [33]

When it came to Taiwan, there are yet again some differences.  Senate appropriators are pushing for much more funding for Taiwan than House appropriators, meaning “the Senate’s move…again puts Republican defense hawks at odds with deficit hawks in their own party.”  The Senate appropriators want $1.1 billion for FY 2024 to replenish stockpiles that would be transferred to Taiwan under PDA, but as to the previously authorized $2 billion in FMF grants (the late December 2022 NDAA did this for 2023-2027), Sens. Graham and Coons only relented from no FMF funding for Taiwan to just $113 million in the current appropriations framework, incidentally or perhaps purposefully, the same amount the State Department has requested for all FMF grants worldwide.  Those opposing larger FMF grants to Taiwan in the Senate are doing so in the context of House Republicans on the appropriations side, who ironically are seeking to appropriate $500 million for Taiwan from the FMF grants but are trying to overall drastically cut the State Department budget from where that FMF funding would come from by 24% from what the Biden Administration requested on top of cutting the foreign aid budget and domestic spending, so any and all funding shifts or cuts will carry risk and drama.[34]  The NDAA committees in both chambers have also been working on steps to address a number of factors crippling the speed of arms delivery, but it will remain to be seen what makes into the final bill that goes to conference.[35]

Yet in the end, all the NDAA and appropriations bills are in doubt because of deeper divisions in the never-ending all-out culture war consuming American politics these days: the House FDAA only narrowly passed as extremist Republican elements succeeded in removing abortion access, transgender care, and diversity training for military personnel, utter brinksmanship conflating deeply controversial issues with defense and international security authorizations.[36]  Sadly, while more extreme than any time in my life, the politicization of national security by Republicans is not a new trend, but, as I have noted before, one that began just after the end of Cold War.[37]

Then there is the issue of the first PDA transfer from the Biden Administration to Taiwan.  As discussed, TERA as passed with the NDAA for 2023 opened this drawdown as an option for Ukraine.  This is the first drawdown from stocks that would also be available for Ukraine, the first time where there is hard, direct competition in immediately available stockpiles.[38]

At the same time, the drawdown is not that large and the priority is currently Ukraine, so it seems likely Ukraine will keep getting more and larger drawdown transfers than Taiwan, with a minimal loss or perhaps none at all to Taiwan if more funding is appropriated, whereas given the Ukraine situation, Taiwan’s wealthier status compared to Ukraine, and that Taiwan has now a well-over-$19-billion-in-sales-delivery backlog that will eventually make its way to Taiwan, Taiwan will not be “losing” much if anything in the end to Ukraine, since the PDA arms going to Taiwan are primarily being rationalized as a temporary stopgap (at least for now) to address the FMS delays and speed up delivery of weapons for Taiwan in this massive backlog context.  As noted, some have misleadingly attempted to portray things in a zero-sum way, but the less dramatic reality is what I have outlined herein.  And the numbers being talked about are not terribly large when it comes to PDA numbers for Taiwan—$1 billion authorized for FY 2023, $1.1 billion in reimbursement to replenish stockpiles related to potential Taiwan PDA transfers for FY 2024—that it is more so the unwillingness of many House Republicans to further fund Ukraine or the State Department—the budget of the latter from which FMF money comes—that is the real issue.  But if there is one thing the House Republicans under Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) in the era of Trump excel at, it is creating hurricanes of drama out trivial matters or manufactured issues.

6. Concluding Analysis

As we have seen with the war between Ukraine and Russia, single shots from modern Western anti-air/air defense (e.g., Stingers and NASAMS), anti-ship (e.g., Harpoons), anti-tank weapons (e.g., Javelins), and rocket artillery (e.g., HIMARS) paired with modern effective targeting systems can effectively destroy or severely limit the use far more expensive and larger planes, ships, and ground vehicles of all types, even the most advanced Russian surface warships and jet aircraft.  Compared to the Russians, Ukraine makes every shell count far more, and a similar edge may end up with Taiwan against Chinese weapons untested in any heavy-use, sustained combat operations.  That is not to say I am an expert or up to speed on the military hardware of China, but at least against Russia, we have seen the huge edge Western weapons have over their Russian counterparts, and their ability to perform well under heavy use and with proper maintenance is not in dispute.  If anything, Taiwan will be able to benefit from lessons learned from similar weapons or even the same as being used in Russia’s imperialist war against Ukraine.  As Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, U.S Army (Ret.) noted about a year ago, “Make no mistake, China is watching” Russia’s performance in Ukraine with consideration for Taiwan.[39]  And it is not just the battlefield there that should worry China: Russia’s performance on the battlefield has left Putin’s position at home not just weak, but in a state of near-certain doom over time, if not sooner, no matter who Putin shoots down in a plane flying on the outskirts of Moscow.[40]

A concern for Taiwan and Ukraine has to be the political brinksmanship and dysfunction of the American political system, much as it been for the Fitch credit rating agency.  At least the ridiculous backlog Taiwan has been going through has received enough attention that wheels are in motion undertake some serious reform aimed at speeding up its related processes.  China, to be sure, is a threat, but it seems almost certain China will not invade this year or next and there is time to get not just the $19 billion of arms sales that is backlogged to Taiwan, but the several billion offered since then and some stocks that PDA would access in the meantime, in addition to billions more that will be authorized in the future.  By the time all this equipment arrives, Taiwan will be substantially better equipped with substantially more arms of the very types that have proven so effective in Ukraine in essentially destroy the Russian Military 1.0 that was arrayed against Ukraine in February 2022.  Very little of that force still exists, with Russia dragging half-century old tanks and century-old rifles out of storage and handing them to raw recruits that are getting slaughtered on the battlefield.

China will be better equipped that Russia, to be sure, but they have less combat experience now than the Russian military did in February 2022 and far less than that losing Russian military has now.  A military fighting on the offensive against a well-equipped, well-trained enemy fighting for his home on his home turf is a nightmare for any invading army.  To do so across the sea or by air against an island nation with a significant mountain chain tunning down the length of its island through the middle, where artillery can easily be entrenched in mountain bunker positions that can have the whole coast facing China easily covered is one thing.  But to do so while the U.S. arming that county with anti-ship missiles that can make any amphibious landing a nightmare, with anti-air missiles and air defenses that can make airstrikes and air support a nightmare, and with mines and anti-tank missiles that will make it difficult for any troops that survive the crossing or the jump out of the plane to advance further inland or even survive on a beachhead, well, that is, to paraphrase the U.S. Civil War Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, “hell.”  China would need to spend a lot of time trying to soften up positions before landing or its troops would get slaughtered (and they may even after).  And that time buys time for the U.S. and others, maybe even the powerful militaries of Japan and South Korea, to come Taiwan’s aid and for world diplomatic pressure to come down hard on China and severely damage its economy and other interests.  And that does not even account for the small Taiwanese-controlled Islands between the main Island of Formosa and the Chinese mainland—the Penghu islands near Formosa and the Kinmen islands near the Chinese coast—also being major obstacles to any invasion and serving as early warning stations.  China would likely need to neutralize them first and that only prolongs the time between the beginning of hostilities and getting large numbers of troops to land on Formosa.  There is a reason why Mao and China after the end of the Chinese Civil War neve tried to outright take Taiwan by force.

The large number relatively inexpensive, proven-effective weapons that the U.S. and other Western partners have flooded into Ukraine partnered with some smaller numbers of more expensive systems have dashed Russia’s hopes of imperial revanchism for all the world to see, and, at a smaller pace and over time, the U.S. is doing the same flooding, if at a smaller scale or at least a slower pace, in Taiwan (indeed, has been doing this for many years before Russia’s escalatory 2022 further invasion).  The costs for China could be incredibly severe should they opt for an invasion and there is hardly any guarantee of victory.  Just ask Russia.

Thus, the arms the arms packages—sales and the first of the Presidential Drawdown Authority releases—laid out here may just be a bit over $3.6 billion in military aid in the span of a year, but they include incredibly effective weapons with significant amounts of ammunition, support equipment, servicing, and training to ensure they can remain operable over time, and this is not an end, but just another drop in a bucket of years of support from the past and years to come in the future, with more than $19 billion in backlogged equipment on its way.  To use just one example, if we go back to that Deutsche Welle infographic, currently, China outnumbers Taiwan in fighter jets about 4.2 to 1—1199 to 285.  But Taiwan has 66 F-16s on order, already paid for: once they arrive, that ratio drops to about 3.4 to 1, an advantage for China that decreases by about 19% with that one order and that increases the number of Taiwan’s fighter jets by 23%.  And, again, this is just the effect of one delivery of one weapons system.  There are so many more that came before and will yet come.  China is not the only one building up, and the U.S. has been careful to offer full-spectrum support: air, land, sea, ammunition, surveillance, support equipment, training, and logistics.  Thus, the $3.6 billion in specific packages are a microcosm of the steady support of the U.S. in augmenting Taiwan’s ability to defend itself, and other U.S. efforts to fix its own supply chain, delivery, and manufacturing issues represent a desire and ability to do better.  That the U.S. still keeps trying to find more and better ways to stand by Taiwan even amidst serious dysfunction at home and while supporting Ukraine with a major active war in Europe that is the largest on that continent since World War II speaks to the strength, rather than the weakness, of the American commitment to Taiwan’s defense.

[1] Christina L. Arabia, Michael J. Vassalotti, and Nathan J. Lucas, Transfer of Defense Articles: U.S. Sale and Export of U.S.-Made Arms to Foreign Entities (Congressional Research Service [CRS], 2023); “The U.S. arms sale mode of ‘Direct Commercial Sale’ influence on Taiwan Military Industry development (paper presented at International Studies Association Global South Caucus [GSCIS] Singapore, January 2015); Foreign Military Sales FAQ (Defense Security Cooperation Agency, n.d.).

[2] For a discussion of Russia’s power relative to China and the U.S., see my article: Brian E. Frydenborg, “The Post-Putin World Will Be So Much Better than This One,” Real Context News, February 28, 2023.  

[3] The Learning Network, “Oct. 25, 1971 | People’s Republic of China In, Taiwan Out, at U.N,” The New York Times, October 25, 2011;  Name redacted, China/Taiwan: Evolution of the “One China” Policy—Key Statements from Washington, Beijing, and Taipei (Congressional Research Service [CRS], 2015); Winston Lord, Oriana Skylar Mastro, Timothy Naftali, and Douglas G. Brinkley, President Nixon’s Trip to China: Fifty Years Later (Council on Foreign Relations, 2022); David Shambaugh and Robert Sutter, “50 Years Later: Richard Nixon’s Historic Visit to China,” GW Today, March 22, 2022.

[4] Stephen Orlins, “Lessons We Can Learn Today From President Carter’s Legacy on China,” The Diplomat, March 11, 2023.

[5] Susan V. Lawrence, President Reagan’s Six Assurances to Taiwan (Congressional Research Service [CRS], 2023); Caitlin Campbell, Taiwan: Defense and Military Issues (Congressional Research Service [CRS], 2023).

[6] For his Cuban Missile Crisis analyses, see Graham T. Allison: Conceptual Models of the Cuban Missile Crisis: Rational Policy, Organization Process, and Bureaucratic Politics (RAND Corporation, 1968);  “Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” 63, no. 3 (September 1969): 689-718; Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971); and Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2^nd ed. (Reading: Longman, 1999).

[7] Probably the best edition of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to The Peloponnesian War, ed. Robert B. Strassler, trans. Richard Crawley (New York: Free Press, 1996).  For Thucydides as the father of realist international relations theory, see Gregory Crane “Truest Causes and Thucydidean Realisms,” in his Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity: The Limits of Political Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

[8] See Graham Allison, “The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?,” The Atlantic, September 24, 2015 and his much expanded argument in his book, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) along with Harvard University’s Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs companion website, including case studies throughout history of other Thucydides traps (12 of 16 examples in the last 500 years have led to war) and many additional insights from Allison and various collaborators.

[9] While a whole separate briefing could be written on this subject, for larger discussions of Graham’s views on this and the U.S.-China Thucydides trap in general, see Alan Greeley Misenheimer, Thucydides’ Other “Traps” The United States, China, and the Prospect of “Inevitable” War, National War College (Washington: National Defense University Press, 2019); Richard Hanania, “Graham Allison and the Thucydides Trap Myth,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, 15, no. 4 (Winter 2021): 13-24; Michael Desch, War Is a Choice, Not a Trap: The Right Lessons from Thucydides (Defense Priorities, 2022); Michael A. Peters, Benjamin Green, Chunxiao Mou, Stephanie Hollings, Moses Oladele Ogunniran, and Fazal Rizvi, “US–China Rivalry and ‘Thucydides’ Trap’: Why this is a misleading account,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 54, no. 10 (2022): 1501-1512; Yanzhong Huang, “The Four Traps China May Fall Into,” Council on Foreign Relations, October 30, 2017; Jonathan Marcus, “Could an ancient Greek have predicted a US-China conflict?,” BBC, March 25, 2019; Win McCormack, “The Thucydides Trap: Can the United States and China avoid military conflict?,” The New Republic, March 17, 2023.  The quote is from Allison’s Atlantic article, cited earlier.

[10] Oriana Skylar Mastro, “China’s huge exercises around Taiwan were a rehearsal, not a signal, says Oriana Skylar Mastro,” The Economist, August 10, 2022; Lily Kuo, “China’s military extends drills near Taiwan after Pelosi trip,” Lily Kuo,” The Washington Post, August 8, 2022.

[11] Jennifer Hansler, “Biden administration approves more than $1.1B in arms sales to Taiwan,” CNN, September 2, 2022; U.S. Arms Sales to Taiwan (Forum on the Arms Trade, 2023); For more views of Pelosi’s visit, see Thomas L. Friedman, “Why Pelosi’s Visit to Taiwan Is Utterly Reckless,” The New York Times, August 1, 202;, Jonathan Guyer, “The drama over Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan travel plans, briefly explained,” Vox, August 4, 2022; and Isaac Chotiner, “The Provocative Politics of Nancy Pelosi’s Trip to Taiwan What is the House Speaker’s high-profile visit really about?,” The New Yorker, August 4, 2022.

[12]Matthew Lee, “US OKs $1B arms sale to Taiwan as tensions rise with China,” Associated Press (AP), September 2, 2022; and Hansler.

[13] On China’s last non-minor battle in 1979 and skirmish in 1988, see Derek Grossman, “Vietnam Is the Chinese Military’s Preferred Warm-Up Fight,” The Rand Blog, May 15, 2019.  On the numbers behind China’s naval buildup, see China Power Project: How Is Chona Modernizing Its Navy? (Center for Strategic and International Studies [CSIS], 2022) for a very useful graphical representation of China’s and all major global naval powers’ fleets and recent histories.  On my own prescient take on anti-ship missiles being a huge threat to a very vulnerable Russian Navy, in particular the Black Sea Fleet flagship and Slava-class cruiser Moskva, which now sits at the bottom of the Black Sea, see Brian E. Frydenborg, “Ukraine Will Easily Destroy or Sideline Russia’s Navy with Game-Changing Anti-Ship Missiles,” Real Context News, April 10, 2022.  For a detailed albeit slightly outdated visual representation of the military strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. relative to each other overall as well as the rapid increase in China’s military capabilities, see Project Air Force: An Interactive Look at the U.S.-China Military Scorecard (RAND Corporation, 2017).  For a much more recent report on China’s naval buildup relative to the U.S., see Ronald O’Rourke, China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities—Background and Issues for Congress (Congressional Research Service [CRS], 2023).

[14] Mike Yeo, “Britain, Germany give update on future Indo-Pacific naval deployments,” Defense News, June 5, 2023.

[15]William Yang, How prepared is Taiwan for a potential Chinese attack?, Deutsche Welle, May 12, 2023; author calculations using data from: International Database (IDB), China and Taiwan selection, U.S. Census Bureau, 2023; and World GP Ranking 2022, Knoema (2022).

[16] “U.S. to boost Taiwan’s stretched air force with $428 mln in spare parts,” Reuters, December 6, 2022; Kayleigh Madjar, “Taiwan thanks US for military sales,” Taipei Times, December 8, 2022; Forum on the Arms Trade, 2023.

[17] Kapil Kajal, “US approves sale of Volcano anti-tank systems to Taiwan,” Jane’s, January 2, 2023; Forum on the Arms Trade, 2023.

[18] Ben Blanchard “Taiwan military to get $619 million U.S. arms boost as China keeps up pressure,” Reuters, March 6, 2023; Forum on the Arms Trade, 2023.

[19] Jon Grevatt, “US approves 30 mm ammunition sale to Taiwan,” Jane’s, June 30; Forum on the Arms Trade, 2023.

[20] Matthew Lee, “US approves new $500M arms sale to Taiwan as tension from China intensifies,” Associated Press (AP), August 23, 2023; Forum on the Arms Trade, 2023.

[21] “China sends aircraft and vessels toward Taiwan days after US approves $500-million arms sale,” Associated Press (AP), August 26, 2023.  

[22] Jennifer Kavanagh and Jordan Cohen, “The Real Reasons for Taiwan’s Arms Backlog — And How to Help Fill It,” War on the Rocks, January 13, 2023; Joe Gould, “Slow arms deliveries to Taiwan blamed on US production bottlenecks,” Defense News, February 24, 2023; Nick Wilson, “Ratner: Taiwan weapons transfers delayed by systemic industrial base issues,” inside Defense,July 20, 2023; Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer, “Taiwan Faces No Trade-Offs With Ukraine But Taipei is also getting tired of supply chain issues,” Foreign Policy, June 1, 2023; John Grady, “U.S. Needs to Clear $19B in Arms Sale Backlog to Taiwan, says HASC member,” USNI News, December 14, 2022; Patricia Zengerle, “US Senator Menendez says he has not changed opposition to Turkey F-16 sale,” Reuters, July 27, 2023; U.S. Department of State Office of the Spokesperson, “FMS 2023: Retooling Foreign Military Sales for An Age of Strategic Competition,” May 18, 2023; U.S. Department of Defense, “Department of Defense Unveils Comprehensive Recommendations to Strengthen Foreign Military Sales June 13, 2023.  On the chronic underestimation of the Biden Administration, see my own thoughts in several Real Context News articles: “A BIG F**KING DEAL: Biden’s Infrastructure Bill in Historical Perspective,” November 15, 2021; “Media Keeps Portraying Democrats and Biden as a Mess, Ignoring Data Proving that Could Not Be Further from Truth,” July 11, 2022; and “Biden’s and Democrats’ Historic Awesomeness Cannot Be Denied: Midterms Edition,” January 6, 2023.

[23]James V. Saturno and Megan S. Lynch, The Appropriations Process: A Brief Overview (Congressional Research Service [CRS], 2023); Policy Basics: Introduction to the Federal Budget Process(Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2022); Budget Basics: Spending (Peter G. Peterson Foundation, 2023; Budget Process (Peter G. Peterson Foundation, n.d.).

[24] Maegan Vazquez, “Biden signs vital $858 billion defense bill into law, nixing military’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate,” CNN, December 23, 2022; Patricia Zengerle, “U.S. military bill features up to $10 billion to boost Taiwan,” Reuters, December 8, 2022.

[25] Tami Luhby, “Here’s what’s in the $858 billion defense bill,” CNN, December 15, 2022; Mark F. Cancian and Bonny Lin, A New Mechanism for an Old Policy: The United States Uses Drawdown Authority to Support Taiwan (Center for Strategic and International Studies [CSIS], 2023); Cambell, Taiwan CRS; Bryant Harris, “Pentagon to use new Taiwan arms transfer authority, similar to Ukraine,” Defense News, April 6, 2023.

[26] Bryant Harris, “Congress forgoes $2 billion Taiwan security grants in favor of loans,” Defense News, Dec 21, 2022; Bryant Harris and Joe Gould, “Congress clashes on loans vs. grants for Taiwan military aid,” Defense News, December 15, 2022; Joe Gould and Bryant Harris “Congress wants to arm Taiwan, but hasn’t figured out how to pay for it,” Defense News, December 1, 2022; Russell Hsiao, “The Security Assistance for Taiwan Debate: FMF Loans versus Grants,” Global Taiwan Brief, 8, no. 5 (March 2023): 1-3 [this source is a useful discussion but seems to be confused about the FMF aid being set up possibly as loans, but the text of the TERA section of NDAA bill is clear that there is FMF aid set separately as both loans and grants]; Patricia Zengerle and Michael Martina, “Analysis: How a U.S. budget dispute imperils funding for Taiwan weapons,” Reuters, February 22, 2023; Campbell, 2023. 

[27] Nomaan Merchant, Ellen Knickmeyer, Zeke Miller, and Tara Copp, “US announces $345 million military aid package for Taiwan, July 29, 2023; Forum on the Arms Trade, 2023.

[28] Lara Seligman, “U.S. announces $345M weapons package for Taiwan,” Politico, July 28, 2023.

[29] Evaluating U.S-China Policy in the era of Strategic Competition, 118 Cong. (2023) (statements of Ely Ratner, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, and Wendy Sherman, Deputy Secretary of State, February 9, 2023).

[30] For a prominent example an either-or thinking wanting to divert Ukraine aid to Taiwan, see the Dec. 6, 2022, letter from extremist Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) to Sec. of State Blinken.

[31] Ali Zaslav, Ted Barrett, and Clare Foran, “Senate passes $1.7 trillion government funding bill to avert shutdown,” CNN, December 22, 2022; Fitch, “Fitch Downgrades the United States’ Long-Term Ratings to ‘AA+’ from ‘AAA’; Outlook Stable,” August 1, 2023.

[32] As an example of the delays, the Cancian and Lin CSIS briefing did not come out until August 2023.  The relatively lesser-known Defense News covered this well throughout, and I have relied on it for some of the details, but there was little major news or major institutional coverage until more recently.  On the general crisis of the U.S. news media, see State of the News Media (Project), Pew, n.d.; Lauren Harris, “Five big findings from the Journalism Crisis Project,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 3, 2021; and Penelope Muse Abernathy and Tim Franklin, The State of Local News 2022 Expanding News Deserts, Growing Gaps, Emerging Models The State of Local News 2022 (Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communication, 2022).  Currently, there are very few reporters covering the details about Taiwan in the current NDAA and appropriations fights, so my regrettable overreliance on Harris of Defense News (who is usually solid, but it is always regrettable to rely so much on one source and corroboration of his details are few and far between in other sources).  Perhaps the more confusing current coverage is a result of resources being spread thin among so many outlets/institutions covering major stories happening at once at a time of shrinking newsrooms and resources.  It would take a lot more time for me, writing this report, to go into more detail on this subtopic in large part because of this.

[33] Patricia Zengerle, US Senate backs sweeping defense policy bill, sets up clash with House bill,” Reuters, July 27, 2023; “Actions Overview: H.R.7776 – James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023,” U.S. Congress, 2022; Fareed Zakaria, U.S.’s political madness takes place against a backdrop of astonishing strength,” The Washington Post, 26, 2023; Julia Horowitz, Denmark has a debt ceiling, too. It’s never been a problem Julia Horowitz,” CNN, May 10, 2023.

[34] Quote from Bryant Harris and Leo Shane III, “Senators rally to boost defense spending, with $1 billion for Taiwan,” Defense News, July 27; Bryant Harris, “Taiwan military aid granted by once-reluctant appropriators, Defense News, June 22, 2023; Bryant Harris, “House narrowly passes defense bill after Dems defect over abortion,” Defense News, July 14, 2023;   Various sources present different numbers for the NDAA bill totals, which is odd; for examples, Roll Call, extremely reliable on Congressional matters, has the Senate NDAA at $874 billion and relatively deep-diver Harris for Breaking Defense had $874 billion for the House NDAA; but CNN, Washington Post, and New York Timeshad $886 billion for both House and Senate, so I went with that number.  Some of the confusion may be due to differences between what relevant committees passed before the full chambers approved the NDAAs.  The lack of detailed coverage and conflicting numbers suggest a news media spread thin as much as anything else considering how big these bills are along with the fact that most detailed discussions of the two large bills passed in late 2022 did not occur until months later.  But it also a cry for this basic information to be clearly presented within the bills in question, perhaps a total figure broken down into components at the top or bottom, Congress?

[35] Bryant Harris, “Congress aims for faster arms sales with defense bills and task force,” Defense News, June 28, 2023.

[36] Justin Katz, “Ducking the culture wars, Senate passes NDAA 86-11,” Breaking Defense, July 27, 2023; Karoun Demirjian, “Senate Passes Bipartisan Defense Bill, Setting Up a Clash With the House,” The New York Times, July 27, 2023; Dan Balz, “House Republicans wage ‘woke’ culture wars with the military,” The Washington Post, July 15, 2023.

[37] See my piece: Brian E. Frydenborg, “9/11 Marked Continuation, Not Beginning, of Politicization of Foreign Policy & National Security,” LinkedIn Pulse, September 15, 2016.

[38] Cancian and Bonny, New Mechanism CSIS; Kavanagh and Cohen, Real Reasons for Backlog.

[39] Mark Hertling @MarkHertling “Make No Mistake, China is Watching“, Twitter, August 4, 2022, 10:54 A.M.

[40] See my Russia-Ukraine war articles at Real Context News: “Russia’s Defeat in Ukraine May Take Some Time, But It’s Coming and Sooner Than You Think,” July 30, 2022; “Russia’s Pyrrhic Advances at Soledar Near Bakhmut Setting Up Ukrainian Counteroffensive, Not Russian Victory,” January 13, 2023; “Why Putin Has Doomed Himself with His Ukraine Fiasco,” September 27, 2022; “Putin’s (and Russia’s) Naked Weakness,” June 28, 2023.

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  September 26, 2020; UPATE September 21, 2024: BE SURE to check the Rachel Maddow-produced, Bill Corden-of-Cocaine Cowboy-directed From Russia With Lev (trailer here), the MSNBC documentary focusing mainly the exact same events and people I chronicled five years ago, excerpted below!

This is the Epilogue from my eBook published on November 23, 2019.  For the full context in one place, check out that eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), a detailed look at Trump-Russia and how its Ukraine machinations led to Trump’s impeachment (Sept. 27 update: this eBook also goes into detail on Trump’s long history of scandalous, criminal business dealings, bankruptcies, and financial problems that are of increasing interest since the bombshell report on Trump’s taxes was released on 9/27, and this article of mine offers a less complete version of those misdealings). As far as articles, for more info on Trump’s nefarious, criminal business dealings in Panama and how they connect to pro-Russian Ukrainian political force Viktor Medvedchuk; for specific context on now convicted-by-Mueller’s-team felon Paul Manafort’s work on Ukraine on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stooge Viktor Yanukovych alongside Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, one of the top partners in Ukraine for years of Russian mafia “godfather” Semion Mogilevich, himself a right-hand of Putin; for how Konstantin Kilimnik was a link between Manafort and the Kremlin; for how Andrii Artemenko fits into all this; and how Rudy Giuliani’s longstanding ties with Mogilevich-connected Sam Kislin are also of interest, as is the history of Kislin’s old partner Tamir Sapir in Trumpworld, especially the infamous Felix Sater-brokered Bayrock deals, see my articles How Cohen’s and Manafort’s Ukraine Ties Tell the Deeper Story of Trump-Russia and the Mueller Probe and Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind, which link to some more detailed work of mine on some of these individual subjects (the second article contains information on Trump’s banruptcies and business fiascos relevant to the 9/27 major report on Trump’s taxes).  For more on the inner workings of the Burisma issues in Ukraine involving various Ukrainian prosecutors, including Viktor Shokin and Vitaliy Kasko, and how they do—and do not—relate to the Bidens, see my other piece The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma.  You can see all my Trump-Russia coverage here.

The Circus Comes to Ukraine and Blows Everything Up

The Government Accountability Institute should be famous, but it is not.  Founded by none-other than Steve Bannon—former maestro of right-wing-propagandistic site Breitbart, former CEO of Trump’s presidential campaign (something of a replacement for Manafort), former top advisor to President Trump, and current orchestrator of a European pan-national right-wing movement—the Florida group was critical in advancing debunked disinformation on the Clintons during the 2016 election cycle.  Its then-and-current president, Peter Schweizer (also an editor at Breitbart), wrote the notoriously error-riddled Clinton Cash.  One thing he was good at, though, was getting mainstream media—including The New York Times—to feature his work prominently and help to get these false stories mass traction: myth would become reality and some of the main talking points used against Hillary Clinton during the election were first given prominence through Schweizer and his manipulations and continued to be amplified by him and his allies all throughout the election.  It was a concerted, deceitful, coordinated effort from right-wing media using dubious financing that depended on co-opting mainstream media outlets for legitimacy, and it succeeded wildly in its aims of damaging Clinton.  Such tactics actually even mirror Kremlin disinformation campaigns.

Defying belief, Schweizer and his Institute are doing the same thing again—and succeeding—with a newer book, Secret Empires, to target the Bidens with debunked disinformation and even eventually succeeded in 2019 in once again co-opting The New York Times for the same thematic purpose as before, among other outlets. 

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor now acting as Trump’s personal lawyer, picked up on the new Schweizer false narratives late in 2018 and began engaging relevant Ukrainians in person in New York and Ukraine, including ousted former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, to advance them.  He also enlisted one of Shokin’s successors, Yuriy Lutsenko, in January, when Lutsenko made unsubstantiated incriminating claims about Hunter Biden (it was, interestingly, under Lutsenko’s watch that the aforementioned criminal record of Igor Anopolskiy, involved in the Trump Panama fiasco and apparently financially connected to Medvedchuk’s wife, was purged). 

Lustenko has a reputation for using his power as a personal political weapon and for being an amateur, and proved it for Giuliani, agreeing to work to reopen inquiries into Burisma and to focus on Hunter Biden, which he did in March even though he had earlier cleared the Bidens.  He was already clashing on corruption issues with then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch—who had pushed him to act more against corruption—and sought ways to discredit her with Giuliani, hoping his actions against the Bidens would earn him favor from Giuliani and Trump when he was not getting along with Yovanovitch.  Lutsenko accused her of giving him a list of certain untouchables, implying the Bidens, but later admitted he lied about this.

Yet the “political hit job” on Yovanovitch was successful: she was recalled from her post in May, in part because of the disinformation fed to Trump by Giuliani, right-wing media, and others as well as the complicity of her boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (it was this silence and inaction on his part that led to the abrupt resignation of Michael McKinley, one of Pompeo’s senior advisors, who has since testified in detail to investigators).  Also, in what could be an example of an earlier inappropriate quid pro quo with the Trump Administration, Lutsenko in early 2018 froze Ukraine’s investigations into Manafort and others related to the Mueller probe right when Trump Administration was deciding whether to provide Ukraine with advanced anti-tank Javelin missiles that could help check Russian armor (Lutsenko was also responsible for allowing Manafort’s colleague Kilimnik to escape to Russia without being asked questions that would have aided Mueller’s investigation).  Lutsenko would later even talk with Giuliani about the unsubstantiated wild conspiracy theory that Manafort was set up by Clinton supporters.  Lutsenko was fired for his misconduct in September, after which he admitted there was no evidence on which to base investigations against the Bidens and is now facing his own criminal investigation for abusing his power.

Another key Ukrainian Giuliani enlisted in this effort, Kostiantyn Kulyk, was Lutsenko’s deputy.  An opportunistic current prosecutor, he is known for corruption, for targeting his political opponents with investigations, and for ties to a Russian intelligence agent who set up a paramilitary unit of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s east to fight the Ukrainian government.  With Lutsenko’s blessing, Kulyuk went all in on Giuliani’s Biden scheme in March, joining in the smearing of U.S. diplomats (including Yovanovitch) and even Democrats by accusing them of covering up for the Bidens, accusations he has not substantiated.  Also unsubstantiated was an apparently fabricated dossier authored by Kulyuk about the Bidens, purporting to describe the corruption of both Joe and Hunter Biden.  Fittingly, Kulyuk will soon be fired, much in the manner of his old boss.

Giuliani even began trying to coordinate strategy with Pompeo, who would be one of the most senior Trump Administration officials to parrot Biden disinformation and conspiracy theories, in essence encouraging a witch hunt.  Fox News began getting in on the action, too, and a prominent figure at The Hill, John Solomon, began intensely advancing debunked false narratives through a series of columns in the spring of 2019, even coordinating with Giuliani and interviewing Lutsenko.  They were not only attacking the Bidens though: they, too, began attacking Amb. Yovanovitch, spreading unsubstantiated claims that Ukraine had tried to help Clinton win in 2016 (sure to grab Trump’s attention) and repeated unsubstantiated, self-serving claims from Shokin about Biden.  On April 25^th, 2019, the very same day Biden officially began his presidential campaign, Trump himself called into the Fox News show of Sean Hannity—who has been predictably trafficking the Biden smears—and told Hannity he wanted to have his Attorney General, Bill Barr, to look into the Bidens.  The following month, The New York Times would have a major story on the “controversy” involving the Bidens.

As to this problematic May, 2019, New York Times piece: it was co-authored by Kenneth Vogel and Iuliia Mendel; in 2015, Vogel, writing for Politico, seems to have known how to properly characterize information coming from Schweizer, so it is not sure what changed in 2019.  His co-author Mendel was a Ukrainian freelancer at the time and was controversially hired the month after this article was published as the press secretary for freshly-elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, raising serious questions about her background, motives, and conflicts of interest.  The article was a major boost, perhaps even a turning point, in the attention given to the Bidens’ activity in Ukraine.  Earlier, just before Trump’s inauguration and during his Politico days, Vogel was also instrumental in advancing the false Kremlin propaganda that Kilimnik had fed Manafort who, in turn, fed it to Trump that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election and did so to help Clinton and hurt Trump.

A follow-up piece a week later in May by Vogel for the Times even portrayed Giuliani’s trip to Ukraine as a legitimate fact-finding mission and failed, again, to note the problematic, baseless origins of the claims even though Vogel was familiar with Schweizer.  Just to name one example of the mirror effect, even the BBC had a piece on the Bidens and Ukraine a week-and-a-half after.

It was 2016 all over again, just this time Biden was the target of the coordinated assault, not Hillary Clinton.

A conspiracy of lies had been birthed, raised in an accelerated program, and was now of fighting age, much like a clone trooper from Star Wars.  This clone trooper, like in Star Wars, was not produced randomly but was part of an organized plot pushed by people with nefarious, deceptive interests and operating and funded from the shadows.  And that false narrative of the Bidens is what is existing as reality in the eyes of many millions duped by this concerted right-wing disinformation campaign.  For those who can remember Kerry vs. Bush, this takes what happened with GOP attacks in 2004 on John Kerry—referred to as “swiftboating”—and injects that with steroids, especially in utilizing the official powers of the presidency and Executive Branch in doing so.

Within the context of this fabricated reality, Giuliani engaged in gross antics in Ukraine, to be detailed below in a bit.  Trump himself engaged in pushing this nonsense onto Ukrainian President Zelensky during a July 25^th phone call between the two, freezing aid authorized by Congress to Ukraine before the call and verbally pressuring him during it, both as part of a bid to try to force the new Ukrainian president to play along with the alternate-reality Biden fantasy world (and the “Ukraine was behind U.S. election interference” fiction) just to be able to receive aid for his country as it fought Russian aggression.

Trump’s goofy power play almost worked with the desperate Ukrainian president, but pressure from Congress on Trump to release the aid just two days before Zelensky was about to cave in to Trump’s demands in September salvaged propriety.  Even so, Ukraine’s new president still finds himself in an extremely uncomfortable situation with America even as he tries to defuse tensions in his own country.

For many, this moment was a Rubicon that had been crossed.  The actual U.S. government professionals who had spent years running Ukraine policy or enforcing ethical norms—from the State Department to the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, from the National Security Council to the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General—were aghast at what was happening.  And, throughout Trump’s own Executive Branch, they revolted (including Yovanovitch and William Taylor, whom Firtash tried to sweet talk all those years ago), many coming out already to testify to Congress about Giuliani’s misdeeds and other details, with Trump and his minions attacking them in response in ways that amount to clear witness tampering.  And it is that revolt that has been dominating headlines lately, fueling the impeachment inquiry, and increasing support for impeachment like never before in Trump’s presidency.

Some of what has been happening on the ground in Ukraine involves some important details that may have been reported but have not received nearly as much attention as they deserve, nor been made top stories from top outlets, as they should be.  But these details are explosive in the context of everything outlined in this book and bring disparate elements of this narrative together, so are therefore discussed below.

Rather incredibly, Dmitry Firtash is trying to align his defense with claims made by Trump and Giuliani.  Yet, when one realizes that Firtash switched up his defense team in July to include Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova—a conservative married couple who are prominent media defenders of Trump (often passionately so on Fox News) and who work closely with Giuliani as business partners—this is hardly surprising.  The duo met with Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, also in July, to ask him to end the U.S. effort to extradite Firtash and present a case against the charges levied against their client, but Barr chose not to become involved.  It is worth nothing here that Brady Toensing, the son of Victoria Toensing and stepson of diGenova, began working for Barr’s Department Justice as a senior counsel for the Office of Legal Policy the month before his parents started working for Firtash.  Indications are he will recuse himself from at least some areas from which he should recuse himself, but the potential for conflict of interest here should not be forgotten.

Strangely, none other than the Ukrainian prosecutor ousted by pressure from Joe Biden and others pushing Ukraine on corruption, Viktor Shokin, submitted an affidavit on Firtash’s behalf to his legal team, claiming that Biden had had him fired to protect Hunter Biden and had pressured Ukraine’s government not to allow Firtash back into Ukraine in order to limit Firtash’s political influence (this second point is quite believable since Biden was working against corruption in Ukraine).  The idea was to discredit Biden, and Giuliani has made this affidavit a major pillar of his Biden attacks.

Here is where Soviet-born Americans Lev Parnas (from Ukraine) and Igor Fruman (from Belarus), two partners of Giuliani’s working for him to dig up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine, enter quite interestingly into our story.

After their dramatic arrest early last month at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, DC, trying to use one-way tickets to get out of the U.S. and travel to Vienna, Austria, they were front-page and round-the-clock TV material for a while.  They were charged by federal prosecutors from SDNY for breaking campaign finance law to feed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican groups and candidates including a pro-Trump super PAC.  Their indictment mentions that they were funneling money into these campaigns from an unspecified Russian to help gain leverage with certain state and national politicians regarding a recreational marijuana “future business venture” in Nevada and other states.  The indictment also notes that Parnas met with a congressman (former Republican Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas, who had lost to a Democrat in 2018 and is hoping to mount a comeback) to whom money from the scheme had been donated to try to get him to work towards the removal of then-Amb. Yovanovitch from her post, and that this was done at the request of at least one Ukrainian government official.  Sessions would join this effort, and now he has had to respond to federal grand jury subpoenas.

The whole investigation into Parnas and Fruman is part of an ongoing investigation, as Parnas and Fruman were arrested as a matter of necessity because they were leaving the country, not because prosecutors preferred that time for the arrest.  That piece of information and the keeping of several individuals’ identities in the indictment secret indicates that the SDNY prosecutors are holding their cards close to their chest and that more charges can be expected.  And it would hardly be surprising if the unnamed Ukrainian government official(s) were Lutsenko and/or Kulyuk and that this investigation into Parnas and Fruman were actually part the SDNY investigation into Giuliani’s finances and activities in Ukraine and his overall activities involving Parnas and Fruman (incredibly ironic since Giuliani made a name for himself as the SDNY U.S. Attorney), given what will be outlined below.

As part of their efforts in Ukraine as directed by Giuliani (who, it seems more and more, was in turn directed by Trump), Parnas and Fruman connected Giuliani with Shokin late in 2018.  We also just learned that, according to Parnas’ current lawyer (who claims his client has text messages and other documentation backing this up), at or near the same time, Shokin met in Vienna with, of all people, egregious Trump apologist and disinformation-and-conspiracy-theory all-star Devin Nunes, the disgraced leader of the Republican side on the House Intelligence Committee, which has been the recent front line in the impeachment fight (some of his most controversial efforts involved baselessly attacking the legitimate FISA surveillance of Carter Page).  Nunes was seeking to combine his efforts to dig up “information” on the Bidens with Giuliani’s intrigues, along with efforts to boost a discredited, baseless conspiracy theory pushed by the Kremlin that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the 2016 U.S. election meddling.   Nunes also met with Parnas around this time and directed his staffer, Derek Harvey, to coordinate efforts with Parnas, and they met repeatedly after.  Such meetings were confirmed by Solomon, whose “reporting” was a basis for some of Nunes’s lines of inquiry.  Nunes engaged and directed this activity after the 2018 midterm elections—in which Democrats took the House back from Republicans—but before the new Congress was seated specifically in order to avoid having to reveal details about his trips and meetings to the incoming Democratic leadership.   It is obviously extremely problematic that, in the public impeachment hearings exploring all of this, the highest-ranking Republican present during and helping to lead these public hearings has not disclosed that he was involved in the very efforts that are currently under the impeachment microscope.  It should be noted that, concurrent with Nunes in recent days spewing these lies about Ukraine on the record at these hearings, Putin himself exclaimed “Thank God, no one is accusing us of interfering in the US elections anymore; now they’re accusing Ukraine.”

We also know that in January of 2019, Giuliani asked the State Department to grant Shokin a U.S. visa: State said no, so then Giuliani asked the White House, and an official there also said no after discussing with State.  Giuliani also met Lutsenko with both Parnas and Fruman that same January in a meeting arranged by the pair, who engaged frequently with the then-prosecutor.  In February, the pair tried pressuring Poroshenko in person along with Lutsenko to announce an investigation into the Bidens, just months before Poroshenko lost to Zelensky.  They offered a formal state visit to Washington for Poroshenko in return—something he was actively seeking—and present at this meeting was Lutsenko.  Such a state visit in Washington could have bolstered Poroshenko’s support at home just before an election, but it never came and Poroshenko was crushed by Zelensky just two months later in April (voters had tired of Poroshenko, hamstrung as he was by competing interests and falling short of what he had promised).  In March, Parnas was the guy who orchestrated Lutsenko’s interview with The Hill conducted by Solomon in which Lutsenko disseminated lies he later retracted.  Parnas’s intro to Solomon, in turn, was facilitated by Rep. Pete Sessions, and Parnas and Solomon continued to coordinate after the Lutsenko interview.  Adding to the idea of a coordinated campaign, Solomon is represented legally by Toensing and diGenova; clearly, Solomon’s role is far beyond that of a just a writer.

Just days before Zelensky’s inauguration in May, Parnas and Fruman had a meeting with Serhiy Shefir, a member of Zelensky’s “inner circle;” according to Parnas’s lawyer, in that meeting Parnas laid out a list of demands: the Zelensky Administration must announce an investigation into the Bidens or both Vice President Mike Pence would not attend Zelensky’s inauguration and the U.S. would freeze aid for Ukraine, and these demands were made by Parnas on orders from Giuliani. 

In the end, Trump ordered Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration, a clear a sign of retaliation for non-compliance with these demands.

Fruman and Giuliani deny the above account, at least so far; Fruman is represented by one of Trump’s former White House lawyers, John Dowd, who represented Trump as his top lawyer during the Mueller probe but ultimately resigned over Trump ignoring his advice and what he viewed as Trump’s risky approach to the whole situation.  With this current situation, Dowd tried to get Parnas to claim executive privilege to not have to answer questions, but that clearly did not happen.  Fruman’s other main lawyer is Todd Blanche, who also represents Manafort.

Sherfir, now President Zelensky’s top advisor, confirmed the May meeting but rather coyly said military aid, specifically, was not discussed (giving him a lot of wiggle room), but this statement, like Zelensky’s affirmation that no one pressured him, must be seen in the context of the extraordinary situation in which the Zelensky Administration finds itself.  Obviously, Zelensky is trying as hard as he can to appease and not to alienate Trump and must walk a delicate line with all his public statements relating to America since the brand new politician has been sucked into impeachment proceedings in an election year, so you can expect him to try not to say things to make either Trump and Republicans on the one hand or Democrats on the other hand think he is helping the other side, at least up to the point Trump looks as if he really will withhold aid or do something worse, as has kind of been happening already.  And all this happens while the young Ukrainian leader faces immense overall challenges in Ukraine.

Parnas and Fruman specifically clearly helped facilitate meetings designed to pressure, and to get Giuliani access to, Zelensky and others close to him (and Poroshenko before him) and were therefore very much a part of setting in motion the July phone call between Trump and Zelensky, with the May disputed meeting only the most emphatic example of the duo’s pressure.

And yet, ties get even more incestuous as far as our threads are concerned.  What received less attention was that one of the two associates of Giuliani, Lev Parnas, was working as a translator for Firtash’s legal team, but both Parnas and Fruman had worked for Firtash before “in an unspecified capacity.”  Toensing, diGenova, and Parnas were trying together to dig up dirt on Democrats with ties to Ukraine, involved Solomon in these coordinated efforts, and Parnas has even tried to portray Firtash as a victim.  Federal prosecutors working on Firtash’s case on Chicago for which the U.S. is supposed to extradite him reached out to their counterparts in New York about the relationship of Firtash with Parnas and Fruman.  The Chicago prosecutors had been investigating their ties to Firtash for some time and when the pair was arrested, they were heading to Vienna; Giuliani was supposed to fly there the following day, but canceled after the arrest.  The trips were to coordinate a meeting with Shokin to prep him for an interview he would do with Sean Hannity from Vienna.  But they could also easily have been trying to engage Firtash.  Either way, it is clear that the two camps of Firtash/pro-Russian Ukrainians and Team Giuliani/Trump were now coordinating, uniting on messaging and strategy.  Giuliani has even admitted to personally looking into Firtash as a resource, and clearly, Russian media along with America’s right-wing media are all too happy to further these narratives and provide assists. 

Firtash’s right-wing lawyers see any way to discredit Biden as corrupt and as going after both Shokin and Firtash for personal political reasons as the best way to help their client other than getting charges dropped.  Firtash even paid diGenova and Toensing $1 million to find incriminating information on Biden.  In this context, if Shokin (rewriting history, Trump is now saying that Shokin was “very good” and that it was “unfair” to fire him) and Firtash are remade into the good guys, then Biden must the bad guy and Trump benefits.

Reforms Biden pushed for intensely on corruption and for the gas sector may have cost Firtash up to $400 million a year, and he feels a rage towards Biden, calling him an “overlord” who wielded inappropriate and “enormous” influence on the Ukrainian government after Yanukovych’s ouster.  Lacking self-awareness, Firtash and his team seem not to have considered that such assertions, if anything, are a vindication of Biden’s efforts to fight corruption in Ukraine.  But maybe they are instead playing to an audience of one, hoping like so many others that winning over Trump is enough and will result in interference on his part that might save Firtash from extradition.  It seems Biden is to Firtash what Hillary Clinton was to Putin: his main American enemy, at least in his mind. 

Parnas and Fruman were also concurrently trying to pursue a change at the top of Naftogaz along with replacing Yovanovitch, with both moves designed to help them personally sell gas to Naftogaz and to benefit Firtash.  They worked with and received funding from Firtash towards this effort, advocating for the wiping out of the exiled gas tycoon’s debts with Naftogaz.  The current CEO of Naftogaz, Andriy Kobolev, is seen by Ukrainians and Westerners as a star of Ukraine’s anti-corruption efforts and had been tough on Firtash, accusing Firtash of illegally keeping some $2 billion since 2017 by not making required payments to Ukrainian state-owned companies.  Since Yovanovitch was supporting Kobolev, Parnas and Fruman thought getting rid of her would help them deal with Kobolev more easily.

Despite Parnas and Fruman being photographed repeatedly with Trump and working closely with Giuliani on behalf of Trump, Trump denies knowing either of them.  This has apparently hurt the feelings of Parnas, who now seems to be cooperating with investigators.

A third associate of Giuliani’s we should well remember: Ukrainian-born Sam Kislin, whom U.S. authorities believe is an important figure in the Mogilevich Russian mafia outfit and who did business with Trump both with Tamir Sapir—strongly linked to Sater’s Bayrock—and by selling a Trump condo to a future member of Ukraine’s Party of Regions.  Kislin also supported Giuliani politically by raising several million in fundraising for him and served on important New York City bodies at the behest of Giuliani while he was mayor.  Giuliani had denied in 1999 knowing that the U.S. government considered Kislin a serious Russian mafia member or associate, but that claim is impossible for him to maintain in recent years, when he engaged Kislin to help in these Ukraine shenanigans. 

See, Kislin, too, is neck-deep in the current Ukraine drama.  In January 2018, Kislin tried to push then Amb. Yovanovitch to assist in helping to release millions in funds in a Cyprus shell company of which he was the current owner.  That company held part of some $1.5 billion Yanukovych had criminally looted from Ukraine.  His effort to unfreeze the funds had, strangely, earlier been blocked by Lutsenko, of whom Kislin alleged improper conduct.  This mirrors a similar effort from another Ukrainian oligarch with another Cyprus-based shell company holding some of Yanukovych’s ill-gotten fortune, an oligarch named Pavel Fuks (or Fuchs) who was also tied to Giuliani and one of several attempts to make a Trump Tower happen in Moscow.  Fuks, who was introduced to Trump by Tamir Sapir, was also more recently involved in helping Giuliani go after the Bidens.  The shell companies owned by Kislin and Fuks held $20 million and $160 million, respectively, primarily in government bonds Ukrainian authorities now say were issued illegally by Yanukovych’s government.  Kislin had purchased his company, Opalcore Limited, in November, 2016, the very month Donald Trump was elected president.  In what seems to be a shady scheme to take money that belongs to the Ukrainian people, Kislin claims he did not know that the assets were frozen when he bought Opalcoare and alleged procedural malpractice by Ukrainian government officials during the freezing process, hoping that claim would lead to them being unfrozen and requesting Yovanovitch get involved to this end.

But Kislin is also currently advising Giuliani on Ukraine, is meeting with Ukrainian government officials, and seems to even have been an informal emissary for Trump there on the Biden smear campaign while also agitating against Poroshenko as the former president, too, is under investigation there.  Kislin is now apparently also “good friends” with Andrii Artemenko (to quote Artemekno himself), with the two coordinating and exchanging information on some of these efforts.  Somehow, Artemenko is now living in Washington, DC, and is a regular guest on Kremlin-run television, offering negative takes on Ukraine’s current leaders and now also pushing for a probe into Hunter Biden.  It was reported in October that Kislin was in communication with the House investigators, who are interested in his Ukraine activity in relation to Giuliani’s efforts.

Amid all of this context of clear, overt political pressure on Ukraine from the Trump Administration, in the middle of October, Ukraine’s new prosecutor general announced that he was auditing one previous case concerning Burisma’s owner, Zlochevsky, and that Hunter Biden could be fair game even though neither Burisma nor Hunter were specific points of focus, noting that this audit was a part of a general audit of fifteen high-profile cases handled by the previous administration.  The shady General Prosecutor’s Office is in the midst of a massive overhaul the Zelensky Administration hopes will fix the corruption that made it untrustworthy in the eyes of Ukrainians and Westerners alike, taking away its investigative powers and shifting them to other departments.  Kasko has been restored and promoted to the number-two spot in the office, and the new top prosecutor, Ruslan Ryaboshapka, has a history of working for transparency.  Different departments are expected to take up several cases involving Manafort, but there is worry that much of the information on them and other cases will be lost in the transition.  Perhaps this is in part a shrewd move to stall any findings during a turbulent time in American politics that Ukraine’s new president fears could provoke serious retaliation from Trump should either bad things come out about Manafort or the Burisma probe yields no dirt, likely outcomes given what is known that could leave the country exposed to the rage of President Trump.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006.

This article is an excerpt from Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here). Also be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

© 2019-2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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. 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!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) November 24, 2019 (Update: December 7, 2019: we now know Giuliani has been meeting in Ukraine with Andrii Artemenko and is still meeting with Lutsenko, Kulyuk, and Shokin!; December 19: added bullet-points)

WESTON — Herein is a preview/excerpt of Brian Frydenborg’s brand new eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia: An Epic Saga with Companion Sections in Fifteen Parts, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials

Available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook

(You don’t have to own a Kindle or Nook, you can use free apps to read!)

• The media has consistently miscovered “Ukrainegate,” portraying it at worst as a separate scandal from Trump-Russia/the Mueller probe, to, generally, at best, a related scandal. 
• But a deeper exploration reveals Ukraine has been at the center of Trump-Russia from almost the beginning.
• Not only are the same issues involved going back to even before Ukraine’s Orage Revolution (2004-2005) a decade-and-a-half ago, but many of the characters involved before in Trump-Russia and of note in the Mueller probe have ties to the people involved now in more recent Ukraine developments, or, it is even the same people involved in both.
• The saga involves two main threads:
  1. Russian mafia and Kremlin-linked people (often the exact same thing) connecting with Trump and/or people who were close or would be close to Trump, starting in the 1980s and through the present.  Central to all this is Russian mob boss Semion Mogilevich, close to Putin and who had many operatives in the U.S. making contact with Trumpworld.
  2. A massive Eurasian gas scheme that seems to have been planned by Mogilevich and other mobsters and the Russian government since at least the mid-1990s, only a few years into Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union.  The scheme amounted to billions of dollars and was designed to corrupt Ukraine’s ruling class to bend to Putin’s will and keep Ukraine under de facto Russian control.
• Multiple people involved in both schemes would cross over and join the other or become entwined in both.
• This has culminated with the now infamous Rudy Giuliani forays into Ukraine’s politics, with his and Trump’s efforts to get Ukrainian officials—including multiple presidents—to smear former Vice President and current 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden based on disinformation and propaganda with zero factual basis.
• The smears on Biden are based on circumstantial associations with no evidence, but the only evidence we do have—circumstantial or otherwise—is that, after both Joe Biden and Hunter Biden got involved, there was positive movement on corruption issues, including with Burisma, the gas the company on the board of which sat Hunter during the positive developments.
• Biden’s involvement in Ukraine was actually part of the West’s overall effort to reduce corruption in Ukraine and, therefore, to weaken the tools by which Putin dominated Ukraine and kept it from reducing corruption and orienting itself with the West politically, economically, and militarily, despite the wishes of Ukraine’s people.
• Essentially, Ukraine is the center of the main front line in the New Cold War between the West and Russia.
• In this New Cold War, Trump’s actions are essentially handing victories over to Putin.
• Putin’s efforts amount to an effort to corrupt the U.S. system through Trump to change it into what Ukraine resembled under Putin’s old stooge, Viktor Yanukovych, who was deprived of a cheated victory in the Orange Revolution (2004-2005) and driven out of power in the (Euro)Maidan Revolution (2013-2014).
• Since then, Ukraine has been plunged into occupation, annexation, and civil war, all orchestrated by Putin.
• The efforts by Trump to force Ukraine into helping him attack his political rival, Joe Biden, center on Ukraine’s desperate efforts to secure military and diplomatic support in its struggle against Putin’s Russia.
• Most tellingly, the people against whom Biden and the West worked against to fight corruption in Ukraine have untied with Giuliani and Trump to advance Trump’s and Putin’s interests at the expense of Western influence, democracy, and transparency. 

These issues that have now exploded this all into impeachment for Trump show the union of the two main threads in ways that make the corruption and duplicitousness of Trump and the bad actors in Ukraine painfully obvious, erasing any doubt about whether or not the Trump Administration and the Kremlin are working to advance their shared goals at the expense of longstanding U.S. interests in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Preface

Trump’s current Ukraine insanity is just an extension of old Trump-Russia and the media still does not know how to cover it.

As the Hunter Biden “story” keeps receiving attention, the myopic mainstream media—just as in 2016—is unable to present a coherent big-picture understanding of what is happening or how things fit together.  In a stunning lack of self-awareness, its top news outlets are once again playing into Trump’s and Putin’s hands, sabotaging the Democrats and spreading Kremlin and Republican disinformation.  The roots of much of this lie with the media’s overall failure both to understand the bigger picture of the Trump-Russia saga and, in part as a result, to realize that these “recent” Ukraine scandals are not something new so much as a continuation of the old Trump-Russia saga that was the focus of the Mueller probe.

The only way to get anything approaching a full sense of what is going on with Ukraine, Trump, Russia, and the media is to painstakingly trace the threads of corruption and Russian influence operations related to Putin’s Ukraine drama, Putin’s and his top mafia boss’s co-opting of Trumpworld, and the actors involved throughout the many stages of this overall saga.  These threads can be traced from their origins in the 80s and 90s directly into today’s White House and the battlefields in Ukraine.  Only then will the centrality of Ukraine to the whole Trump-Russia saga be understood, only then can the full scale of the horror be comprehended, but it can and must be.  The threads are solid and come together to form a powerful and clear line of remarkable influence of the Russian government in Moscow’s Kremlin and Russian mafia into the major players, policies, and decisions of the Trump White House.  As this exploration will make clear, simple logic and the sheer amount of billowing smoke plumes coming from so many points obviously show that Trump has been raised up and co-opted by Russian influence to the point of being an asset—whether willingly or if he is too stupid to realize it, he is a “useful idiot”—for Putin and his allies.  Even if the actual flames are obscured, the heat can be felt as we choke on the smoke: those fires still exist and are presented here even if most of the top media news outlets, playing Trump’s and Russia’s game in their inability to sustain focus, have largely missed these conflagrations.

Table of Contents (Main chapters)

I. Introduction: Trump and Putin, Playing the Media Like a Fiddle

II. A Song of Gas and Politics Prologue: How a Meeting in Tel Aviv May Have Set Up Two Decades of Ukrainian History

III. How A Russian Web Enveloped Trumpworld Starting in the 1980s & Kept Expanding

IV. A Song of Gas and Politics Part One: The Chess Pieces Begin to Move

V. The Collapse of Russia’s European Influence

VI. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Two: A Game of Revolution

VII. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Three: Putin’s and Manafort’s Gaslighting of Ukrainian Politics

VIII. Russian and Former Soviet Money Rife with Putin Ties Comes to America and Trumpworld when Trump Is Hurting for Cash

IX. The Curious Case of Michael Cohen: Linking Trump and Ukraine

X. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Four: Putin’s Triumph in Ukraine

XI. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Five: Hubris and Revolution

XII. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Six: The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma

XIII. A Song of Gas and Politics Part Seven: Manafort Crosses the Not-So-Narrow Sea & a Shady “Peace” Deal, or, How Our Saga’s Two Main Threads Unite

XIV. A Song of Gas and Politics Epilogue: Trump and Giuliani Bring Everything Together Full Circle (but the Media Misses It)

And, included below in this preview: XV. Conclusion: Collusion Beyond What Was Imagined and the Need for a Media Self-Correct

“Chaos Is a Ladder”

What makes Giuliani’s escapades in Ukraine so useful is that they present amazing illustrations of the overall dynamics of Trump-Russia, with all the key elements.  There is some sort of past event or incident involving someone who stands up to Putin and Trump—in this case Joe Biden and his push against Shokin specifically and corruption in Ukraine in general—and then the gaslighting begins.  Reality is turned on its head and then barely tangential facts—e.g., Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma—are blown enormously out of proportion.  A mostly demonstrably false narrative is built from a few tiny kernels of truth to try to tear down an opponent of both Putin and Trump in ways that help advance both their interests, in this case helping Trump in the 2020 election and seeing that Putin’s influence is extended in Ukraine.  The false reverse narrative is repeated and amplified so much that it becomes reality for a great many and even more so casts doubt where its creators want it to be: whether the e-mails of Hillary Clinton or Biden’s dealings in Ukraine, the fantasy narrative forms the backdrop for all other discussion.  People not even in the camps of Putin or Trump will buy into the narrative, then, or at least let it enter their calculus.  The very propagation of the narrative puts those slandered by it on the defensive, forcing them to adjust and react on ground not of their choosing.  What is constant throughout are lies, repetition, deliberate manipulation of the media, corruption, co-opting of parties that should be more neutral—the media, the State Department, Ukraine’s presidency and prosecutor generals—and an emphasis on factional loyalty best exemplified by following the lead of a cultish leader.  Whether Trump’s 2016 campaign or Putin’s second presidency, this is how these two and their camps operate.

If we may quote Game of Thrones again, both Putin and Trump are strong devotees of the Littlefinger School of Politics, which proclaims that “Chaos is a ladder.”  Confusion, disinformation, war, they all can be useful to those who know how to manipulate them for personal gain.  Ideals like democracy and the rule of law?  At Lord Petyr Baelish’s School, they are simply “a story we agreed to tell each other over and over ’till we forget that it’s a lie.”  Fools cling to such ideals and when they try to manage the chaos with such “illusions,” they lose.  They fail to realize the main truth: “The climb is all there is,” that all that matters is the pursuit of power.  This is how Trump and Putin live and how they govern.  They actively seek to undermine, then destroy, ideals and institutions so that all that remains is horse-trading.  In a world stripped away of ideals, the raw power of Trump, Putin, and their models suddenly become far more attractive. 

Trump has helped make this the true battle of American politics now, just as that is what Putin has done in Russia and what he aims to bring back to Ukraine, which he is currently doing with Team Trump’s help.  Zelensky is a perfect example: the young idealist is trapped, for either he assists Trump in his quest to damage Biden, thereby undermining the very ideals and personality of Zelensky’s that got him elected—turning himself into the opposite of that on which he campaigned, corrupting himself and Ukraine’s institutions in a way that serves Putin’s long-term goal to reestablish corruption as the fuel of Ukrainian politics—or he stands strong on his principles in a way that earns Trump’s disfavor, causing Ukraine to lose aid and support when his nation is spread thin standing up to Russian war, occupation, and corruption.  Zelensky loses no matter what, and Putin gains no matter what.  All that is required are lies, their repetition, and a willing partner in power: Kuchma and Yanukovych before, and now the far more powerful American president.  Trump truly is the biggest seed of doubt about the West Putin could ever hope to realistically have planted in such a position of power: nations and factions that work with Trump are still repelled by him and, therefore, the United States; they move away from the U.S. in their hearts and see working with America more as a naked power move than being representative of any true affinity or value system.  In doing so, they are more open, at least subconsciously, to the Russian model.  And since Trump clearly favors Russia, being closer to Trump brings them closer to Russia, too.  And if they move away from Trump and the America?  Russia is there, too, watching and waiting: you make your devil’s bargain one way or another, and Putin is the devil behind it all.

To be sure, Putin plays Littlefinger’s game (spoilers in that link) far better, but Trump is still dangerously good at enough elements of it to succeed.   From the war in Syria to Brett Kavanaugh, from border detentions to journalists’ assassinations, pretty much any issue for either man is approached with this gaslighting model.

As noted, Trump, Republicans, Russians, their agents, and Shokin himself have lied, engaging in a chaotic assault on reality by subscribing to not the obvious reality but its opposite: not that Biden had put his son’s position at risk to push for a prosecutor general in Ukraine that would actually tackle corruption, but the lie that Shokin was actively looking into Burisma and that Biden had him removed to protect his son and Burisma’s corruption.  That lie—we already established it was completely unsupported by any substantive evidence, and Shokin can certainly not be thought of as credible—has become the mantra in a Kremlin-style disinformation campaign of the Republican party, Trump, his White House, Giuliani and his associates, and Shokin himself, along with the Kremlin and its media arms joined with right-wing American media, much to their discredit and disgrace.  The even bigger disgrace is the impression of false equivalence put out by all too many of the more respectable outlets.  The favoritism shown Hunter Biden is far from rare and he is far from the poster-child of nepotism, but there is a place for a conversation about his preferential treatment.  Yet that place is not the 2020 election cycle, since the actions of the father—a different person and regarding whom zero evidence exists he did anything other than put aside thoughts of his son’s job with Burisma when engaging in Ukraine policy as a representative of the United States Government advancing the interests of the United States and its ally Ukraine—are not the actions of the son and since the Trump family, whom Biden hopes to oust from the White House in November 2020, are in a league of their own crassness in American national-level politics.  The counternarrative pushed by Trump, Giuliani, their associates in the U.S. and Ukraine and by extremist Kremlin and American media fly in the face of clear reality, and that their counternarrative at all even has a major place in the public discussion is already a defeat.  And with more and more of an unholy alliance between Kremlin media, American right-wing media, and even media in other countries, this will only get worse.

Furthermore, the manipulations that got to this point are also are blatant and beyond doubt.  Between the approval of Javelin missiles for Ukraine near the time when Manafort’s and Mueller’s cases were frozen, the offer made to Poroshenko for a state visit, the May pre-inauguration meeting with Zelensky’s top advisor (if Parnas is to be believed), and the phone call with Zelensky that sparked an impeachment drive in America, that is four possible examples we know of so far of attempts at an improper quid pro quo involving actions prescribed for Ukraine’s government designed to benefit Trump politically in exchange for policy favors from the Trump Administration. At least three of these involved Giuliani.

While there are so many different key players in Trump’s own administration raising grave concerns over his Ukraine actions, they are being extensively laid out and discussed well elsewhere.  What is overwhelmingly clear—no matter how much detail is released or not beyond that initial “transcript” that is not a transcript and the whistleblower complaint—is that Trump withheld both U.S. military aid to Ukraine that had been approved and authorized by Congress through law and the offer of other benefits to pressure and bribe the newly-elected Ukrainian president to go after Trump’s most formidable political rival in the upcoming 2020 presidential election as a personal favor (remember that “bribery” is one of the only specific offenses outlined in the U.S. Constitution as impeachable).  Between the American and Ukrainian sides, no one misspoke, there was no ambiguity, no confusion, no misunderstanding: by the end, the parties knew what was being asked for, and what was being dangled in response was also quite clear.

The late Christopher Hitchens once wrote that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” In this extraordinary Trump-Russia saga, both ends of his maxim have been easily satisfied as far as proving Ukraine is of a nefarious centrality in collusions between Trumpworld and Putinworld.  But nether end is met with the claims made by Trump and his people about the Bidens in Ukraine.  The media must internalize this going forward and immediately shutdown even the mention of any “wrongdoing” when it comes to the Bidens in any discussion about Ukraine in the context of 2020.

The only hope of beating Trump and Putin at their game of chaos—especially since the well-documented reality is so blatantly clear on one side and so absent from the other—is for the media to steer clear of the false gods of whataboutism (a classic Soviet-style propaganda technique well utilized by Team Trump) and false equivalence; bowing down to them does not make news “fairer” or “neutral.”  It must stop doing Trump’s and Putin’s work for them, stick rigorously to the facts, avoid overdoing speculation, and shutdown and deprive of oxygen the false flames of the Bidens in Ukraine “scandal,” which only exists as it does because of the mainstream media’s myopia.

Ukraine: The Heart of Trump-Russia

Besides not falling for and being used by Russian and Trumpian propaganda, the media also needs to see the bigger picture for what it actually is and to actually start explaining it to people far more robustly than it has tried before.  As it is, the larger tapestry is being missed, obscured, or only partially described in everyday mainstream coverage, and this is a huge problem, since if the public is not even really aware of what is happening, it cannot be properly alarmed about it, let alone make informed choices about how we as a nation should respond.  Simply put, analysis must be better and more robust.

The first and most immediate way to start fixing this crisis is for the media to begin presenting the reality of the current Ukraine firestorm as being the latest in a long series of Ukraine issues that form the heart of the Trump-Russia saga, which hardly ended with the release of the Mueller report.  Too many of the presentations of what is now hurtling Trump and America into impeachment have characterized it as something separate and distinct from the Trump-Russia scandal and its accompanying Mueller probe.

Yes, this chapter is easier for people to understand on its surface than the massive Trump-Russia scandal since it is a smaller chapter of a much larger, more complicated whole.  But that is like saying a piece of lettuce is easier to understand than a salad.  A piece of lettuce is not much by itself, but as part of a salad, it is so much more and has far more meaning, the same as a word in a sentence or a scene in a movie: the true meaning cannot be grasped in isolation.  Framing this as part of the old Russia scandal rather than some bright shiny new scandal is a necessary first step, then.

The next step is to find an easy way to demonstrate how these new developments tie into the older ones.  And Giuliani must be given credit for perhaps presenting the easiest opportunity to be able to do so with the cast of characters he has assembled in Ukraine.

Overall in our exploration, we have here so many threads coming together it can be challenging to keep track of their interweaving parts.  But in Ukraine this year, thanks to Giuliani, we have these key figures from earlier in our narrative working on behalf of or in coordination with Team Trump at the expense of the Bidens: Firtash, Kislin, Artemenko, and Shokin.  In Kislin and Artemenko, we have people who go back to early stages of Russian organized crime elements—especially tied to Mogilevich—that would be allied with Putin engaging Trumpworld and Ukraine, respectively.  Kislin is then later getting a future Party of Regions official an apartment in a Trump property.  We then have in Firtash a bridge to the main gas scheme and Manafort, who also hooks up with Artemenko, who, in turn, brings us up to the “peace” plan episode once Trump is president.  With Shokin we have the post-Maidan Biden situation, and then they all come together.  And they come together with the assistance of newer players in our discussion: Lutsenko, Kulyuk, Parnas, Furman, Fuks, diGenova, Toensing, Rep. Sessions, Solomon, and Sean Hannity, something of a goofy version of the Legion of Doom that took on the Justice League (the Legion of Doofuses?).  This second list brings people with connections to Trump, right-wing media, and Ukraine’s corrupt underbelly into the mix.  They are all joined by Secretary of State Pompeo, the White House, U.S. right-wing media, Kremlin run-and-linked media, and most Republicans in Congress in pushing the false narratives and standing by while the lies spread and people’s careers and lives—even U.S. policy—are ruined by them.  Here, we have Ukrainians, Americans, Republicans, Trump confidantes, media personalities, politicians, prosecutors, and mobsters and all holding hands in broad daylight working to advance a Russian agenda.  We see how Putin uses media, politicians, intelligence operatives, “businessman,” and organized crime like a modern general uses combined arms tactics.  Coming together, they represent decades of planning and preparation on the part of the Kremlin and its Russian mafia allies to both dominate Ukraine and co-opt Trump and people around him to turn him and his people into their useful idiots.

There are various words that can describe so many nefarious actors acting on behalf of a hostile foreign power and organized crime surrounding one person and his associates for decades and continually reengaging him and his people at different points on related issues with the same and/or connected people, but one of the words for sure is not “coincidence.”  Add to that more abstract description that we are dealing with the Presidents of the United States and Russia, and the word coincidence is even more surely not applicable in an exponential sense.

While there is also a good number of other connections between Trumpworld on one side and Putinworld on the other, here we have kept the focus on where those networks meet in Ukraine or are related to Ukraine.  No other topics in the Trump-Russia saga bring as many nefarious players together for nefarious purposes.  Thus, just this chunk alone—a significant portion of, but by no means all—of the Trump Russia saga, is deeply illuminating.

The Trump-Putin Assault on Biden in Ukraine Just the Latest Battle in Russia’s War with the West

As we consider Joe Biden’s earlier efforts in Ukraine, it is crucial to remember Ukraine’s identity crisis.  On one side, there is the old Ukraine, firmly in Russia’s orbit through a system of corruption and oligarchic machination in which gas and other resources are leveraged in ways to maintain Kremlin political control in Kiev.  On the other side, we have a younger Ukraine, looking eagerly to the West—the EU and America—that wishes for transparency, freer and fairer democracy, accountability, and independence from both Russian and oligarchic control.  Biden’s request concerning the prosecutor was very much a part of helping the second Ukraine rise at the expense of the first, part of longstanding U.S. policy since the end of Cold War, helping to advance American interests by seeing Ukraine transform into a fellow democracy committed to the rule of law, fighting corruption, and avoiding conflict in Europe. In this tug of war over Ukraine, those who foster conflict, thrive on corruption, and disdain the rule of law along with democracy are aligned against Biden and with Putin.  With Giuliani’s band of brigands trying to attack Biden, support shady prosecutors in Ukraine, oust a principled head of Naftogaz, restore Firtash to power, and corrupt hard-pressed leaders, it is clear which side Giuliani and Trump have chosen.  Putin has his own soldiers to do his dirty work in Ukraine, to be sure, but when Trump sends in Giuliani with his own people to come work on the ground with Putin’s allies and agents, we have an unprecedented amplification of Putin’s reach and capabilities because of his co-opting of the Trump Presidency.  And this is hardly limited to Ukraine: from Ukraine to Syrian Kurdistan, we are seeing the real-life effects of this play out and, to be sure, the U.S. is losing while Trump and Putin are winning.

In one way or another, all these folks mentioned here are working to further Trump’s and Putin’s interests in Ukraine are all contributing to undoing the reforms Joe Biden pushed for in Ukraine, reforms to make it less corrupt and less susceptible to Russian machinations.  Here, we have the most obviously blatant examples of agents with strong, direct, clear ties to Trump, Putin, and the Russian mafia all colluding together to boost Putin’s interests in Ukraine at the expense of reform long desired by both the West and Ukrainians themselves as well as to help Trump and damage Trump’s strongest electoral opponent, Joe Biden.  Here, the gas scam players and Team Trump are one team, with veterans from many a past campaign coming off the benches to work with younger blood.  Here, we see how Ukraine and gas really are at the heart of Trump’s candidacy and presidency as well as the heart of Putin’s relationship with Trump.

It could not have been executed more brilliantly by Putin: a sitting American president in 2019 uniting his agents with those of Putin and Mogilevich to advance perhaps Putin’s most important foreign policy goal: Russian dominance of Ukraine through corruption to the detriment of pro-Western forces in the country.  Ukraine is, then, ground zero for the New Cold War, the prime focus of competition between Russia and the West, viewed as an essential prize for Putin and Russian nationalism at he seeks to expand his influence into Europe.  This is not hyperbole: since the federal investigation into Giuliani and his Ukraine mischief includes a broader counterintelligence probe over concerns he may be the target of foreign influence operations, former FBI counterintelligence agent and current lecturer on national security law at Yale University Asha Rangappa notes this “means that the FBI believes …[Giuliani] may pose a national security threat to the United States.”

It is also crucial to note that the approach of 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, media, and business elites of neighboring and other countries, all coupled with disinformation and misinformation operations and eventually joined with hacking and cyberwarfare—is hardly unique to Ukraine; Putin is trying to do and has done much the same thing throughout Europe, has done the same to the U.S., and will keep trying to do so.

Putin’s Campaign to Turn America into His Ukraine

Tellingly, throughout this tale, we see here corrupt Russians, Ukrainians, and others from former Soviet Republics who are usually linked to the Kremlin trying to actively engage and collude with Team Trump in corruption by appealing to Trump’s personal interests (as opposed to America’s).  They see themselves and the corruption of their old-school post-Soviet systems supported by Putin in Trump and his candidacy, then his Administration.  That they even think this blatantly corrupt, bribery-and-extortion-laden approach will work with an American president speaks volumes about how low Trump has brought the United States, its credibility, and its reputation, as well as why Trump and Putin like each other so much.

The irony is that we are seeing something of a repeat in history.  Meddling in an election, Putin pushed for an easily pliable crony to take power in a foreign country.  Using corrupt methods but in a free and fair election and facing divided opposition, his candidate triumphed, yet in the span of four years, the extreme obsequiousness shown to Russia coupled with blatant corruption rubbed voters the wrong way.

This could describe either Yanukovych or Trump.  The people did rise in 2014 to oust Yanukovych, but it remains to be seen whether or not this will happen in America.  Many Ukrainians viewed Yanukovych and his Party of Regions not as pro-Russian but as “Russian-controlled,” and Trump and Republicans are facing similar views among many Americans.  For voters to make a truly informed decision in 2020, the media must realize that the Ukraine scandal propelling Trump and the nation towards impeachment is not separate at all, but the latest chapter in America’s Greek tragedy.  We fail to see how Putin uses the same techniques against America as he does against Ukraine, Syria, Georgia, and Europe.  And our willful inaction is empowering Putin to just keep doing it more and more to us and more and more around the world.

The number of people with close ties to the Kremlin and pushing for Russia’s interests—especially when it came to Ukraine—working for, or colluding with, Trump’s presidential campaign and presidency is a modern singularity without parallel and makes clear that Trump’s campaign was highly compromised by foreign agents.  Foreign interests interfering in American elections and co-opting top officials in their then-new American constitutional order was one of the greatest of all the major fears of the Founding Fathers, and Trump would have been their nightmare.  On leaving office, George Washington himself told us in his magisterial Farewell Address that “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

In tragic plays, from ancient Greece to Shakespeare, our heroes failed often because they failed to learn from their mistakes and adjust, hence the tragedy format.  As Trump tries to make Putin-and-Yanukovych-style corruption the norm in American politics, will Americans, the media, Democrats, progressives, and maybe even some Republicans learn from theirs, or will the third decade of the twenty-first century in the U.S. become a tragedy as well?  Time will tell, but based on how people are behaving now and especially on how the media has miscovered Trump’s efforts to use America’s Ukraine policy to score a political hit job on his most intimidating opponent, it seems not.

What many people forget is that Mueller’s probe consisted of two parts: a criminal probe about which he was required by law to write and submit a report and a counterintelligence probe that would be far broader about which he was required to share nothing.  Asha Rangappa, the former FBI counterintelligence agent cited earlier, has written extensively about the Mueller probe and has been careful to make these points repeatedly.  More recently, she noted that the counterintelligence probe that was a huge portion of the Special Counsel’s overall probe may still be ongoing and that knowing if this is the case is important.  Even if it is not, her broader point is key, because Trump-Russia is not just the Mueller report, nor was Mueller’s full investigation simply what was in the Mueller report.  Those larger issues are at the heart of everything dealt with in this piece.

President Trump has acted to benefit Putin on everything from sanctions to Syria, Ukraine being just one hot front in a many-front war that still includes an active home front in America.  These operations thrive on chaos, which is only amplified by poor media coverage.  It is far past time for respectable media to frame “Ukrainegate” in its proper Trump-Russia context, presenting the full and clear picture to the American people of how Ukraine has been at the center from 2016 through today and is central to understanding Trump-Russia collusion, Trump’s rise to power, and Putin’s war against Western democracy.  It must do so by the beginning of the 2020 Democratic primaries and caucuses, and it must do so without juxtaposing demonstrable lies about Biden, Trump’s most threatening opponent.  Doing otherwise advances Putin’s interests by gaslighting the American people and committing election interference to the benefit of the Kremlin.  Especially after 2016, there is even far less excuse to miss the big picture, so the idea that the media would not know any better can no longer be an argument: laziness or carelessness would in this case make the media a willing useful idiot for Russia’s anti-American plans.  The media still can and must course correct and avoid a repeat of 2016 or worse, as the survival of both our American republic and the West itself may very well depend on it.

November 23, 2019

UPDATE: December 7, 2019: Giuliani is as of now back in Ukraine and has been meeting with Shokin, Lutsenko, Kulyuk (Kulyk), and even Artemenko. The layers of incrimination and collusion keep adding up!

A Song of Gas and Politics is available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook!

A sample of reviews below:

See related articles: Ukrainegate Proves the Media Has Learned Almost Nothing from 2016, The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma, and Time to Play Hardball with Russia

In the interest of full disclosure, the author interned for then-Senator Joe Biden for the last quarter of 2006.

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

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. 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!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse June 20, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 20th, 2018 (republished in slightly edited form on the English version of Al Bawaba News on June 20th, 2018, and by The Muslim Times on June 20th)

AFP/Getty Images

AMMAN — Recent protests have led some analysts to characterize Jordan as weak and going through destabilization. Instead, Jordan has pretty much schooled the entire Middle East (and, indeed, many other places) on protests, civic engagement, and how government can and should respond to both. Rather than produce fear and apprehension in the eyes of analysts and other observers, Jordan and Jordanians have rightfully earned a tremendous amount of respect, whether or not those that should show this respect realize this.

Longstanding Grievances Flowing Together

Something remarkable has happened—is happening—in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the past few weeks. The small but relatively very stable country has seen a confluence of several trends and grievances that have spilled over—erupted would be rather too strong—into a flowering of national protest.

One long-running trend in for Jordan is that it has been a dumping ground for refugees from various regional conflicts for years now (really decades, but especially of late). The majority of today’s Jordanians are Palestinian refugees from the wars with Israel and those refugees’ descendants. A decade ago, Jordan was hosting from around 700,000, perhaps as many as a million, Iraqi refugees. Today, there are some 1.4 million Syrian refugees in Jordan, including informal, unregistered refugees, comprising roughly 20 percent of the small Kingdom’s total population. The Syrian refugee influx, in particular, has had serious negative economic consequences for Jordan, especially in terms of soaring rent increases, food price increases, and increased youth unemployment, with Syrian refugees costing Jordan some six percent of its GDP, or about one-quarter of Jordan’s yearly governmental revenue, roughly $2.5 billion a year according to a 2016 World Bank report.

Many Jordanians see the conflicts driving these refugees to Jordan as being driven and orchestrated by the U.S. (conspiratorially, so much so that, after four years in Jordan, I have yet to hear a Jordanian that blames the American people, whom they usually see as pawns being manipulated by elites, and many do not even blame Trump, Obama, Bush, or other past presidents, seeing them as puppets of a mysterious international cabal) and Saudi Arabia.

With recent Saudi comments and moves indicating an informal alliance of common interests between Saudi Arabia and Israel, many in Jordan (especially Palestinian) see the Saudis as selling out to Israel, and feelings towards Saudi Arabia in Jordan are far from warm.

Indeed, there is a perception among many Arabs that there is an emerging U.S.-Israeli-Saudi axis that is throwing the Palestinians under the proverbial bus. And it was in this context that Donald Trump threw more gas onto the fire when he announced in early December, 2017, that he would move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, breaking decades of official U.S. neutrality on the subject (both Israelis and Palestinians claims Jerusalem as their capital) and prejudicing the Israeli side in any future negotiations. After the first Friday noon prayers (the Muslim equivalent of Christian Sunday mass) at al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem (Islam’s third holiest site after Mecca and Medina) after Trump’s announcement, worshippers, of course, vented anger at Israel and the U.S., but were also very vocal in blaming Saudi Arabia, too, for seeming to at least tacitly support the U.S. decision behind the scenes. Saudi Arabia is also a driving force behind the rebellion against Assad, particularly in its support of Sunni rebel militias challenging his rule, and yet, Saudi Arabia has not taken in a single official Syrian refugee, content to let Jordan and others shoulder that burden despite the Saudis intense involvement in Syria.

That same Friday, this led to massive (but peaceful) protests in Amman, witnessed by yours truly. 

Protests were hardly limited to Jerusalem, Amman, or Jordan.

In particular, protests have been organized mainly by Hamas in Gaza—under an Israeli semi-siege for over a decade—since late March, protests in which many thousands of Palestinians have approached, and even rushed, Gaza’s militarized border manned by Israel. While the vast majority of these protesters, including women and children, have not been armed, many have still thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails at Israeli troops, as well as rolled burning tires towards them and sent kites with burning material attached over Gaza’s border with Israel in an attempt to start fires on the Israeli side. No Israeli soldiers have been killed or wounded by these actions, but Israeli gunfire against the protesters have killed over 120 Palestinians and wounded another 3,800 more in actions much of the rest of the world calls disproportionate.

Many Jordanians, even those not of Palestinian descent, feel an intense emotional connection to their fellow Arabs—often kin—living across the Jordan river under some form of Israeli control. Thus, is has been very difficult these past few months for them to accept Trump’s decision and to witness the violence from the Israeli army in Gaza meted out on the protesters.

The bloodiest day was the day of the official move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, a day in which at least 58 people were killed and several thousand more injured.

The move was officially made on May 14th of this year, on the Western calendar reckoning of Israeli’s Independence Day, in this case the 70th anniversary the end of the British Mandate and the declaration of Israel as a state, an event Palestinians remember as al-Nabka, the Catastrophe, in which some 700,000 Arab Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes during a conflict in which the Jewish state of Israel was established on most of British Mandate Palestine, an area which had been majority Arab for many centuries. The embassy move in 2018 came just two days before the holy month of Ramadan began, a month of intense day-long fasting, reflection, and spirituality. But with this Ramadan coming right after U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the bloody Gaza protests, and the relocation of America’s embassy to disputed Jerusalem, from a Palestinian-centered standpoint (a view shared by an overwhelming majority of Jordanians, whether they have Palestinian blood in them or not), this was a Ramadan with all too much that was unpleasant left to linger in the minds of Jordanians as they engaged in deep reflection.

Tone-Deaf Policies Lead to a Chorus of Protests

In the months leading up to this, there was another form of violence occupying the minds of Jordanians besides the violence in Gaza: the assault of steady price increases throughout 2018. The year began in January with a series of tax increases in January, first increasing sales tax and taxes on a range of goods, including cigarettes (extremely popular in Jordan: Jordan has the 8th-highest smoking rate in the world), with the first major decrease in bread subsidies since 1996 announced shortly after, leading to the main staple bread in Jordan going up in price by 60%. The move sparked unrest back in 1996, and the deeply unpopular moves to start this year were also met with some protests. Early in 2018, Jordanians in general were estimated to have to increase spending by 10-15 percent just to maintain their current living standards after these changes.

A least a proposed tax increase on medicines that month was canceled after over half of the parliament voiced disapproval, though.

But more pain was to come.

While in February, Jordan raised the minimum wage, a tax increase was levied that month on non-essential goods and the government also raised taxes on cigarettes again and on widely-consumed soft drinks and telecom services, including mobile phone plans and credit used by virtually everyone. There were further increases in electricity in March (sparking some protests) and also in April, and in In May, it was more increases, a minor one in fuel and an over 13 percent increase in electricity costs.

While in these months, the increases in electricity excluded households that consumed lower amounts of electricity, that exemption was absent for an announced whopping 23.5 percent increase in electricity prices for June that was also accompanied by a smaller fuel price increase.

The series of price increases and proposed tax increases were in part a result of an agreement made between the International Monetary Foundation (IMF) and the Jordanian government. Despite a lot of ignorance and conspiracy theories about what the IMF is and what it does, it is not simply a tool of U.S. control and “neoliberal” “imperialism” designed to keep countries like Jordan poor and weak, though, as with so many things in this region, it is easy to understand why such misperceptions and conspiracy theories flourish. In reality, the IMF is a global financial institution that is part of the United Nations group of institutions and is somewhat economically proportionately dominated by the wealthiest nations with the biggest economies and that contribute the most to the IMF’s fund. The U.S., as the largest contributor and world’s largest economy, has by far the largest voting share (less than 17 percent) in the IMF, and, to be sure, it wields a lot of influence in the institution beyond that voting share, but the point to recognize here is that the IMF is a broad international financial institution that generally reflects the collective will of the world’s largest economies, and if they decide to provide financial assistance to other countries, like any loaner, they have a right to attach conditions to those nations who want their money. At the same time, the agreement for a $723 million IMF loan between Jordan and the IMF—reached back in 2016—seems to have clearly overestimated Jordan’s capability to enact reforms at the desired pace and significantly underestimated the continuing problems posed by the refugee crisis and other maladies plaguing Jordan, and that should have been clear to both sides when the agreement was made.

Even before June’s price increases were announced, on May 22nd, a major proposed income tax law overhaul designed to keep pace with agreed-to IMF reforms was approved by the Cabinet, to be sent to and debated by the parliament. This tax law would have greatly increased the corporate tax rates, empowered tax collection capabilities to deal with tax evasion, and doubled the income tax base (only 4 percent of Jordanians currently pay income tax).

By May 30th, Jordanian civil society had organized a massive general strike of the professional middle class: doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, pharmacists, journalists, and others, along with some of the key related professional organizations and unions. Other Jordanians, in particular youth, joined the protests. 

A tone-deaf government then announced the aforementioned June major price hikes the following day, the day before Friday prayers and during Ramadan, no less, when fasting and reflective moods would only contribute to the agitation felt by the new policy proposals after many months of steady increases. In fact, one could not think of a much worse time than on a Thursday during Ramadan, the day before main Friday noon prayers—the traditional time to go through with major protests in the Muslim world—and coming so soon after the Jerusalem-Gaza drama that affected so many Jordanians so deeply on an emotional level.

These Jordanians may not have been able to stop violence in Gaza or reverse Trump’s Jerusalem decision, but they were not going to look at these latest government tax increases and price hikes with the same spirit of frustrated (if rage-filled) resignation. Unlike Donald Trump and Israel, Jordanians would expect their government to listen, and they would be sure to make sure their government heard their voices loud and clear.

The same day as the announcement, and just one day after the civil-society-orchestrated general strike against the tax law, a far more spontaneous series of mass protests broke out throughout Jordan against the utility price increases specifically and in general against the overall price/tax increases. As noted, the timing all but guaranteed mass protests on Friday, after noon prayers. Seeing the mass public outcry, later that day King Abdullah II froze the just-announced price hikes, responding swiftly to what was clearly widespread public pushback against them.

Yet the protests did not diminish, not Friday night, not throughout the weekend. If anything, they grew and intensified around the country. No one-off temporary freeze on price hikes would suffice: the people were focused wanted an indication of deeper change, also taking up the cause of the earlier civil society protests against the changes to the income tax law; if anything, the two seemingly separate protests had clearly merged into one nation-wide movement.

These were the most intense protests in Jordan focused on domestic policy since the 2011-2012 “hirak” protests over a range of issues that were concurrent with the heyday of the Arab Spring, then fluctuating between price (especially gas) increases and tribal and Islamist issues, peaking in early 2011 and late 2012, with a few notable flare-ups in violence that were still ultimately minimal, especially considering the regional context.

Arab Spring 2.0?

Unlike the wider Arab Spring protests, despite some exceptions the overwhelming focus of the 2011-2012 protests were not overthrowing the government but on calling for action on specific policies. Those protests were more sporadic and less representative of the overall population that the recent protests that just took place, which had a very unified, mass-participatory character that transcended what happened before even as Jordanian protesters and civil society organizations built upon what happened back then.

In fact, Jordanians in the past few weeks seemed largely committed to avoiding the mistakes of the larger Arab Spring with these latest protests, almost as if they had studied them in detail and took away specific lessons of what not to do, making clear their peaceful intentions and enthusiastically waving abundant Jordanian flags. The same could be said of both government leaders and security forces. If 2011-2012 could really be seen as a major emergence of civil society, even a birth (or rebirth?) of it in Jordan, then 2018 can be said to be Jordanian civil society’s coming of age, perhaps even an Arab Spring 2.0 that can avoid much of the tragedy of the first iteration.

As the 2018 protests continued into the following week, on Monday the King sacked Prime Minister Hani Mulki, who had stood by seeing the bill through to a parliamentary debate and had thus drawn the ire of protesters. But still the protests continued.  So the King appointed reform-minded, liberally-inclined Omar Razzaz as the new prime minister, who had been a supporter of civil society and had also held a significant position at the World Bank and was thus poised to be able to balance the competing interests in question. Yet still the protests continued, and for several days, until Razzaz promised to withdraw the income tax law. He promised dialogue and an unprecedented, robust engagement with civil society. The King himself directed that such an approach be undertaken, too, so it seems clear that Razzaz will have support from the highest levels of the Jordanian system.

It truly seems as if the people and civil society have won: by all indications since Razzaz took over, the government will take into account input from the people and civil society, especially on reforming the tax law, and it seems highly unlikely that the same attempted price hikes will be tried again to that degree anytime soon, as the people made clear they were able to organize quickly and sustain their pressure if only cosmetic adjustments were made. Thus, after the eighth day of what were almost entirely peaceful protests, after it was announced the tax law changes would be tabled, the protests basically ended on Thursday, June 7th, one of their epicenters in Amman’s Fourth Circle near the Prime Ministry with a far smaller group of young people celebrating their achievement that evening, replacing the protesting crowds of earlier, far tenser nights.

In fact, things seem to be coming together nicely for Jordan: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait just pledged some $2.5 billion in aid to Jordan, the EU has indicated that it will keep supporting Jordan economically, and Jordan has indicated it will push the IMF for a slowdown in the reform plan. Together, these three things could really alleviate the strain of the increasing economic burdens on Jordan’s weary population.

It is probably safe to say that, when the civil society-organized strike began on Wednesday, May 30th, that nobody imagined that things would be where they are now. In a region—heck, a world—starved of positive political developments and hope, this series of events in underappreciated Jordan is nothing short of remarkable.

*****

A Model the Cynics and Extremists Can’t Easily Dismiss

In the end, Jordan—its people, its civil society, its security forces, its government, and the King—all faced a series of challenges in the past week and then some; all overall conducted themselves in a deliberative, focused, organized, respectful, restrained way. The preceding adjectives are basically impossible use if you are trying to describe the angry hordes of protesters and activists, both right and left, that seem to monopolize protest scenes in the West and many other places of late, as well as both traditional and social media and can, therefore and unfortunately, be more effectively described as ineffective mobs content to do what satisfies their emotional needs as opposed to doing anything that might even be remotely described as helping to bring about effective change. 

This was not a group of radicals hijacking a disciplined civil society movement, as has happened far too often in history.

This was no amorphous Occupy rabble, no Tea Party mob, no Women’s March asserting their collective identity as a gender against a misogynistic president but not having any overwhelmingly clear aims.

This was not a Tahrir Square crowd vaguely demanding unspecified massive change or a whole new government, and this was certainly not a mass of Palestinians calling for a total reversal of the entire status quo.

No, this was a disciplined, focused, restrained coming together of civil society, the middle class, and the working class. 

It was the population of Jordan speaking out more or less in one clear voice, about clear specific desires on specific issues.

And this is a model the whole world can learn from, as much of it seems to have forgotten that this is how change happens: incrementally, with discipline, organization, patience, and non-violence.

Twitter/@AlghadNews

As opposed to weapons, Molotov cocktails, or rocks, protesters chanted peaceful slogans and even handed refreshments to security forces, and the security forces returned the favor. Only very small numbers on either side were looking for trouble: the rest were looking to make a difference and/or keep things peaceful. There was respect all around here in Jordan over the past few weeks, between protesters and security forces, between the people and government, between civil society and both the people and the government.

Twitter/@AlghadNews

That’s right: tiny little Jordan has just schooled the world as how to mount an effective protest movement that leverages civil society to bring about meaningful change, bringing the people and the government closer together in their positions on specific policies.

What is remarkable is that so few people either here in Jordan or in the international media seem to understand what has happened, and how urgently this needs to be celebrated and respected and—most importantly—copied.

In the end, a reformer who is perfect for this moment now leads Jordan’s parliament, the two major problems—the tax law amendments and the price hikes that were the focus of protesters—will not proceed as originally planned, civil society showed it is now truly a force to be reckoned with in Jordanian politics, the government showed its people and the world it is ready to listen and respond to the people, and the people showed all would-be protesters how to get the job done.

If you’re Jordanian, you can hold your head up high after a truly special week in Jordan’s history. And if you’re not Jordanian, swivel that head to pay attention to Jordan, and be sure to take notes.

See a related article by the same author in Venture Magzine: Relief and Development: Ending the Zero-Sum Myth

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg in an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area currently based in Amman, Jordan. The views expressed here necessarily represent only his own, not necessarily the views of any organization with which he has been, or is currently, associated. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

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. 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!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse June 6, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) June 6th, 2018 (based in part on an earlier piece published on October 29th, 2016: Comey Damages Clinton With Horribly Timed Weiner Speculation in Historic FBI Injection Into Election)

Michael Conroy/AP, Cliff Owen/AP

AMMAN — Former FBI Director James Comey might be more of an anti-Trump hero now, but that does not erase the stain of the spectacularly bad he showed throughout 2016 in his handling of the Hillary Clinton e-mail server probe. As Justice Department Inspector General Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s investigative report is about to be released, now is a good time to revisit these issues in a way that finally avoids the myopia of much of the previous discussion that nearly always missed or failed to give enough attention to the issues discussed below.

But first, a quick recap:

After Comey’s unprecedented disclosure eleven days before the election that potentially relevant e-mails may have been on Anthony Wiener’s laptop, two days before the election he let it be known that she was, again, in the clear. 

It was later revealed that Huma Abedin had only forwarded two e-mails to Weiner’s computer relevant to the investigation, duplicate e-mails with classified content that had already been reviewed by the and that ten other relevant e-mails with classified content had been automatically backed up to Wiener’s laptop, also duplicates that had previously been reviewed by the FBI. None of the e-mails were marked as classified.

All that was over just 12 duplicate e-mails. And by itself (hardly ignoring other major factors that could also be characterized the same way, not the least of which involve Russian cyberwarfare, racism, misogyny, and absolutely atrocious media coverage), this can be said to have cost Clinton the election.

*****

Beyond the above, there are deeper, neglected issues with how Comey looked at and framed core issues of the investigation throughout 2016, most notably how he characterized Clinton “extremely careless,” beginning in an extremely controversial (to say the least) 2016, press conference.

Now, before I continue, I want to stress that I still believe Comey was and is a straight shooter and public servant of honesty and integrity, and that it is clear many of Trump’s and Republicans’ attacks against Comey are absurd, disgusting, blatantly false, and hypocritical in the extreme; but all that does not mean Comey is infallible, and Comey was flat-out wrong and myopic in his famously characterizing Clinton and her team as “extremely careless” in the handling of classified information, mainly because of five things:

1.) Numbers

To delve into the topic of classification itself, there are the only three actual levels of classification: CONFIDENTIAL (the lowest), SECRET (the middle), and TOP SECRET (the highest). It has often been erroneously reported that SAP (Special Access Program) is a higher level of classification, but it is actually 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 within the classification level. These days, SAP often has to do with the U.S. drone program (more on that later).

In 2016, 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 detail how many e-mails had contained classified information at the time they were sent to or received by Clinton’s server: about 200 e-mails in 82 e-mail chains that passed through Clinton’s server out of about 47,000 e-mails were what was at issue in 2016. All but 13 of these chains were turned over by Clinton as part of 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 TOP SECRET.

Overall, of the 82 e-mail chains: 69 were still classified in 2016 (16 of which have 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 SAP), 37 chains were classified as SECRET, and 37 chains were classified as CONFIDENTIAL. 

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 even considered classified at all by Clinton’s own State Department. 

This means over 99.5% of the e-mails reviewed had no classification issues whatsoever.

No official in the history of the modern United States has ever 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 in which we live. 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…

2.) Overclassification

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, which might be included in the 7 or could even be the 8th; the State Department did not consider the North Korean e-mail classified at the time, through at least one other agency did. In both cases, anything from an eyewitness account published by an NGO to a newspaper report about drones would be considered classified. This raises 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.” 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 in 2016, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, was 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.”

The only indications we have in terms of the content of the most sensitive material of the highest classification level is that it was publicly available information.

3.) Labels

Zero of these e-mails were properly marked as classified. 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 1 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 as 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 not actually classified and should not have been marked in the body with “(C)”s at all).

That’s right: only 1 e-mail chain with classified information had any classification markings, and it was not properly marked, with no headers and only the “(C)” indicator showing up buried in the body.

Practically no one 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 seen as a nuisance.

The idea that Clinton was careless and irresponsible because she a.) did not know that about 200 e-mails out of tens of thousands were classified but had no classified markings and b.) that she did not know that classified material was in 1 e-mail chain 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 in question 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.

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. That was clearly not the case here.

As Comey said during congressional 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. This directly contradicts Comey’s assertion that Clinton was “extremely careless” with classified information.

4.) Sending vs. Receiving

The FBI 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.

Returning to the issue of labels, taking into account that neither Clinton nor her people sent anything properly marked as classified on this e-mail system would actually mean that Clinton and her people were quite carefully trying not to send anything that was and that they knew was classified, contrary to the popular narrative and the conclusion of Comey, who even 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.

5.) State Isn’t the FBI

Another important thing to note is that agencies often differ as to both what they classify and on levels of classification. Thus, 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.

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 issues; thus, using standard secure terminals was impractical, impossible, or both, and skirting around that was the common practice under certain conditions.

The last point 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 before Clinton’s tenure, 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 (“extremely careless”) 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.

Comey’s viewpoint as an FBI man failed to give proper weight to or understand the unique challenges and responsibilities of a global and very fluid State Department and the distinct culture it has in terms of handling classified information as a result of all that and why this unique approach is necessary. The FBI uses and handles classified information in ways that differ greatly from the State Department, and, if anything, it seems Comey imposed the FBI’s standard on Clinton and the State Department, without considering that the different approaches at State were longstanding necessary workarounds for a problematic system that was a particularly bad fit for the State Department.

*****

Conclusion: Clinton & Co. Were Careful, Comey Was Careless in His Characterization

Taking into account the aforementioned five points, at least as much an issue as Comey’s July press conference and his handling of what went down late in October and early November 2016 was his understanding of the underlying issues surrounding the whole Clinton e-mail saga.

In the end, no evidence existed 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. This was less by luck and more because Clinton and her people actually were careful with how they handled the information as they understood it and could have been expected to have understood it in the condition they received it.

If anything, the focus on Clinton herself has been a distraction from the real problem at hand: the lack of 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 and necessary for modern diplomacy. But that has been lost in the conversation. And that itself is a true scandal, one which Comey’s report would have addressed had he been more careful.

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg, all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg in an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area currently based in Amman, Jordan. The views expressed here necessarily represent only his own, not necessarily the views of any organization with which he has been, or is currently, associated. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

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, and  are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. 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!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse December 12, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) December 12th, 2017

UPDATE: While my overall prediction was wrong, the dynamics described here still stand, and since late-breaking voters broke for Moore overwhelmingly, it stands to reason the Jerusalem announcement had the desired effect, just not strongly enough to put Moore over the top.

NBC News

AMMAN — If you haven’t been paying attention, you might think that Donald Trump is just being an excellent Friend of Israel and the Jewish People.

If you have been paying attention, you know that Donald Trump doesn’t do anything unless there is a clear benefit (at least in his mind) to himself. And it’s quite possible that Trump’s recent move to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and to eventually move the United States Embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem has at least as much or more to do with white Evangelical Christians in the state of Alabama, as that state is voting today to fill its U.S. Senate seat left vacant by Trump’s picking of Jeff Sessions as his Attorney General. 

America has the largest Jewish population in the world (even including Israel) and a far larger population of extreme white Christian Evangelicals who literally believe that the Jews must control all of the Biblical “Holy Land” in order for Jesus to return, prejudicing them wholly against the Palestinians in favor of Israeli Jews, even more so than American Jews, with 82% of white Evangelicals believing that land of Israel was given to the Jews by God, a belief rooted in a literalist interpretation of the Bible. Among major world powers, America is the nation most supportive of Israel, one of only a few nations around the world that don’t view Israel negatively, and Evangelicals are big part of the reason why. Thus, Republicans courting Evangelical voters often try to out-pro-Israel their Republican primary and Democratic general election rivals, and the GOP is markedly less critical of Israeli government policy than today’s Democratic Party. So Trump announcing that he was taking a bold step in being alone in the world in recognizing Jerusalem (no qualifiers, not just West Jerusalem, as Russia and only Russia has done) as Israel’s capital is a move that will be extremely popular with white Evangelical Christians in America.

Nationally, 46.1% of all voters supported Trump and 48.2% Clinton, with 26% of all voters in the 2016 presidential election being white self-identified Evangelical or “born again” Christians, with 80% of them voting for Trump and just 16% for Clinton (the highest margin of Evangelicals ever recorded, even more than George W. Bush, who was himself an Evangelical). 

Alabama is nowhere near the average for American politics, though: 62.7% voted for Trump, 34.7% for Clinton, 16.6% higher than the national average for Trump and 13.5% lower for Clinton. It is the state with second-most self-identified conservatives in the nation, only behind neighboring Mississippi. Only five states had a higher percentage of voters who voted for Trump, only seven had a larger gap between Trump and Clinton, and only ten states had a lower percentage of Clinton voters (to put this into perspective, by the 2010 Census numbers, Alabama has the sixth-highest percentage of African Americans—both alone and alone combined with mixed-race individuals—and African-Americans voted overwhelmingly for Clinton over Trump, 89%-8%, yet the state still had those lopsided numbers for Trump). 

There were no exit polls conducted for last November’s presidential race in Alabama, but we can be sure that white Evangelicals overwhelmingly supported Trump: they voted 88% for Bush in 2004 to Kerry’s 12%, while against Obama, 92% voted for McCain and 90% for Romney and we know Trump outperformed all three with Evangelicals nationally.

White Evangelical voters sure surprised many analysts by favoring Trump in the Republican nomination contests compared with other candidates: Governors. Mike Huckabee (who dominated Evangelicals in the 2008 Republican primaries), Jeb Bush, and Rick Perry, Sens. Ted Cruz and Rick Santorum (who dominated Evangelicals in the 2012 Republican primaries), and Dr. Ben Carson, who had all been popular with Evangelicals for years. Nationally, Evangelicals make up 25.4% of the vote, with 76% of those being white (making up 19.3 of all voters nationally), while during the 2016 Republican primaries, white Evangelicals amounted to roughly half the participants, with about 40% supporting Trump, 34% supporting Cruz, and third and fourth-place spots barely breaking into double-digits. And we know that, once Trump got the nomination, white Evangelicals had few qualms about uniting behind him.

Evangelicals are a particularly key voting bloc in Alabama, forming 49% of the state’s entire population (tying for the second-highest portion of any state), with over 41% of the state being white Evangelicals. Evangelicals in the state loved Trump in the 2016 Republican primary: in a five-way race, Trump won with 43.4% of the vote: more than the totals for second-place Ted Cruz and third-place Marco Rubio combined. Some 77% of Alabama Republican primary voters identified as Evangelical/born-again Christians, with 43% voting for Trump, and 68% of GOP primary voters were whites who identified as Evangelicals/born-again Christians, also with 43% voting for Trump, but keep in mind that that was with two other candidates in the race who were intensely popular with Evangelicals: Ted Cruz and Dr. Ben Carson (the latter now being Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development).

Obviously, Evangelical Christians are pretty conservative and uptight when it comes to sex, and theocratic Roy Moore’s very troubling, more-than-just a few credible allegations that he dated or molested teenage girls (one as young as 14) when he was in his early thirties and a state official (he was banned from an Alabama mall for preying on girls there) have certainly offended the sensibilities of many a serious Christian in Alabama, let alone the particularly devout Evangelicals. Though Moore was a terrible candidate for other reasons long before these disturbing allegations, there is no question that his alleged sexual behavior has cost him support and is a major explanation for why an Alabama U.S. Senate race that would normally be a Republican blowout is now too close to call. An unweighted polling average has Moore with a clear but small advantage over his Democratic opponent Doug Jones, but there is a strange and wide variation among the polls, with each candidate up by a healthy margin in different individual polls.

All this context makes Donald Trump’s Jerusalem announcement, just six days before this election, pretty easy to understand. Trump could have given Middle East parties to the conflict notice well in advance rather than suddenly and surprisingly making an announcement. He still ended up signing another of the six-month waivers in order to keep the Embassy move from being immediate, so why was the announcement made so suddenly, catching all parties by surprise?

Frankly, I’d be shocked if Moore loses. I am thinking he will win and win by more than the polling average suggests, and if he does win or win with more support than expected, that will be in no small part because Trump gave his loyal white Evangelical base something about which to be ecstatically excited, which too many were unable to be when it came to Moore for obvious reasons, making the race as close as it is. With the Jerusalem move, Trump is hoping that enough Evangelicals will come home to him (he has heartily endorsed Moore even over the objections of his own daughter, Ivanka) and the Republican party in this election with a new reason to be enthused when their troubled candidate made enthusiasm among too many Evangelicals too lacking for Trump’s and the GOP’s comfort.

The road to victory in Alabama may indeed run through Jerusalem.

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See related article by same author: Trump’s Jerusalem Jeopardy: A Hackneyed “Holy” Hot Mess

See author’s Amazon eBooks here!

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). 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!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 18, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) October 18th, 2017

AP Photo/Hank Walker

AMMAN — I’m 35 years old and I can’t remember ever seeing anything so alarming in relation to the Korean Peninsula as what has been happening in the toddler-months of the painfully birthed Trump Administration. Obviously, there has always been a tremendous amount of tension there since the Korean War ceasefire was reached in 1953 (that’s right, just a ceasefire: the war never formally ended and is still technically ongoing even in 2017). But things are happening so fast since Trump took office, and the main actors so comfortable with hyperbole and brinksmanship, that we can safely say that we are now in more danger of having war erupt on the Korean Peninsula than at any time in decades.

But to understand where we are today, and where we may be going, it’s imperative to understand some history, and far more and far earlier than the start of the Korean War in 1950.

Imperial Entanglements

Koreans as something of a distinct people go back thousands of years, and from quite early in their history, being on an isolated peninsula and in relatively inhospitable parts of Manchuria and Siberia, they tended to absorb and reinvent culture (an ability/trait that would become very Korean) from the neighboring Chinese. In the first century B.C.E., three major kingdoms emerged, and by the mid-seventh century C.E., one of the kingdoms emerged to defeat the others with the help of China, then turned on China to drive its forces out of Korea.

The following centuries were generally filled with disorder and rebellion until a new kingdom reunified Korea in the tenth century, but it would eventually come into brutal and devastating conflict with the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century C.E. Koreans put up quite a fight but eventually came to vassal terms with the Mongols, retaining formal independence for their efforts, unlike many others. 

A new dynasty took over in just before the fifteenth century, but would suffer a depopulating cataclysmic invasion at the hands of the Japanese and the end of the sixteenth century, one they were able to pyrrhically beat back, but only several decades later they were defeated by the Chinese Qing dynasty, and though they retained independence, the Koreans were forced to become part of China’s international tributary state system and give China control over its foreign policy; a resentful peace ensued in which Korea seldom had contact with the outside world and because of this isolation, Korea became known as the “Hermit Kingdom” from this period onward.

By the late nineteenth century, with Qing China in decline and coming under Western pressure, and with ambitious Russia and Japan eyeing Korea, the days of conflict were about to return to Korea. 

Like Korea, Japan was forced to pay tribute to China for centuries, but did so less consistently and did not suffer the full vassal status that surrendered foreign policy control to China that Korea did. Like all Asian nations at the time, Japan was forced in the mid-1850s to contend with encroaching, predatory Western powers and was forced to “open” itself to Western trade and influence; this caused a great deal of unrest that culminated in the Meiji Restoration/Revolution of 1868, from which point Japan would start its rapid rise in power and modernization that would culminate in ill-fated war with Western powers in WWII. 

Especially after 1868, Japan’s leaders, scornfully observing its nominal overlord China suffer humiliation at the hands of Western powers, sought to emphatically alter the balance of power that had been the political reality in Asia for centuries, with China as the unquestioned center of power. Caught in the middle would be Korea, over which Japan sought to extend its power and influence (especially as Russia was encroaching on Korea’s northern border), even though technically both Japan and Korea were part of the subservient China tribute system. Among other reasons for targeting Korea, Japan felt Korea’s geographic proximity was a major security risk to its homeland, while the traditionalist Koreans looked with disgust on Japan’s Westernizing ways and as to ancient regional values and identity.

Japan would take aggressive actions to alter the status quo and to open Korea to its trade, just as the U.S. and other Western powers did with Japan years earlier, but Japan’s diplomatic efforts could not sway the stubborn Koreans. By 1871, though, Japan had begun a formal diplomatic process of redefining its relationship with China, itself facing the brunt of Western pressure in East Asia. Korea’s stubbornness made many Japanese leaders feel it deserved to be punished with an invasion, and this idea was even encouraged by America’s representative to Japan. Though divided, Japan’s leadership decided to bide its time rather than invade Korea, instead opting for a strike against the weaker and more isolated island of Taiwan, nominally under Chinese control, in 1874, a step that further highlighted the rise of Japan at the expense of China. After a series of confrontational incidents, in 1876, Japan was able to extract from Korea an “unequal treaty” of the kind imposed by Western nations on Japan and China, in which Japan was clearly given better terms and the prying away of Korea from China’s traditional sphere of control and influence was firmly begun.

Finally realizing that their traditional vassal-state empire was disintegrating before their very eyes, China’s leaders belatedly decided to reassert China’s influence on the Korean Peninsula. Over the next two decades, China and Japan would seek ways to outdo each other’s trade advantages, power, and influence when it came to Korea, which, in turn, seemed to accept the necessity of modernization, though Koreans were deeply divided as to how to go about it; infighting only made the Koreans weaker, even as China now found itself competing in a Korea where it had just recently enjoyed centuries of unquestioned dominance; the more traditional Korean royal court favored China but younger reformers favored Japan. As tensions mounted, both China and Japan moved troops into Korea, with war nearly breaking out over a coup attempt in 1884, but in 1894, mounting tensions and a peasant rebellion would finally spark war between China and Korea; Japan’s more modern military easily defeated the larger Chinese forces and by 1895, a humiliated China was asking for peace from a Japan that had invaded mainland China and had secured sea lanes to Beijing and islands near Taiwan; in the peace treaty that followed, China ceded Taiwan to Japan and rescinded any claim of formal authority over Korea, allowing the Japanese to conquer the former and to dominate the latter.

Japan would trounce Russia in 1904-1905’s Russo-Japanese War, keeping another major power out of East Asia and making clear to all that Japan would now be the dominant power in East Asia, one that, significantly, could also take on Western powers. American President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt even mediated an end to the war, and though he publicly maintained neutrality, unbeknownst to the world at the time, he undertook this mediation at the secret request of the Japanese. In fact, Roosevelt privately very much favored the Japanese, wrote “I should like to see Japan have Korea,” and even desired that Japan would become a hemispheric hegemon just as the U.S. had become in its hemisphere. Still, he publicly kept up a neutral stance to the degree that the Japanese were frustrated by the U.S. negotiated-treaty, which denied Japan an indemnity from Russia and left the Japanese wanting more.

Korea had been sold out by the U.S. and was formally annexed by Japan in 1910, which began a period of brutal colonial Imperial Japanese rule that would not end until Japan’s defeat in WWII in 1945; the Japanese were hated when they left and still are very much hated in Korea today.

The Long Shadow of WWII Over Korea

Starting in 1931, Japan would use its base in Korea to begin expanding into Chinese territory in a conflict that would merge into WWII. Strangely enough, Japan’s puppet state in Chinese Manchuria would become a well-planted garden of future East Asian politics. During that war, a Korean named Kim Il-sung fought under Chinese Communist and Soviet leadership as the Japanese in Japanese-occupied Chinese Manchuria and distinguished himself greatly. Koreans actually formed the bulk of the anti-Japanese in Manchuria, and one of the main Japanese figures in Manchuria, against whom Kim fought, was Kishi Nobosuke, who served as Japan’s prime minister from 1957-1960; his grandson is Abe Shinzo, Japan’s current Prime Minister, so, yes, that means Kim Jong-Un’s grandfather fought against Abe’s grandfather. Additionally, the Korean Park Chung-hee fought for the Japanese occupiers in Manchuria and specifically against guerillas like Kim while wearing a Japanese uniform; he would overthrow South Korea’s democracy in 1961 and install a military dictatorship (one that relied heavily on other Korean collaborators with Japan from WWII) that would last until his assassination in 1979, only to be replaced by a new dictatorship that would last until 1987; his daughter, Park Geun was president of South Korea from 2013 until her impeachment and imprisonment earlier this year.

As for Kim, while Chinese communists returned to prioritizing fighting the Chinese Nationalist government after WWII, Kim and a cadre of other Koreans who had fought as guerillas came back to Korea under the patronage of the Soviet Union. There was no clear specific Allied plan for Korea after Japan surrendered, but the Americans proposed to the Soviets dividing Korea into occupation zones at the 38th parallel and the Soviets agreed. Soviet forces had already made their way into a sliver of northeastern Korea, and the Americans would belatedly make their way into the south. With all the division and confusion, neither appeared eager to have full responsibility, but once assigned a formal zone, the Soviets quickly established control and order, while the Americans did anything but, engaging in what was perhaps the most poorly planned and executed occupation until the launch of George W. Bush’s Iraq misadventure in 2003. The Americans did not even feel that Koreans were ready for self-rule, soon came to view them as enemies that needed to treated as a surrendered (rather than “liberated”) people, and avoided using the divided, preexisting political groups (ones that that had already started on the path to self-rule) to form any kind of Korean government, though the Americans did favor conservatives since they were anti-communist even though the environment was one in which the long-oppressed (by both Japanese and Korean overlords) Korean masses favored leftist candidates; since America’s main reason for being in Korea was to contain Soviet expansion, it was hardly eager to set up a democracy that would be ideologically disposed towards the Soviet Union; in fact, they even kept many of the hated Japanese in low-level bureaucratic and security positions, while the Soviets were quick to sweep away Japan’s colonial structures in the north. Though Americans and Soviets were publicly committed to trying to forge a single national Korean government, the American zone only became more fractious internally and the Americans increasingly favored un-representative rightists and those who had collaborated with the Japanese, while by February 1946—after some initial atrocious behavior by Soviet troops who were then replaced by more disciplined, restrained troops—the Soviet had stifled dissent and seen to it that Kim and the Communist Party were leading a proto-government; clearly, prospects for a unified government were dim. Also at this time, Western-Soviet relations were rapidly deteriorating; by the fall of 1947, it was clear the U.S. and Soviets would not come together on Korea and that Korea would be divided. Later in 1948, a new U.S.-backed Republic of Korea (ROK, a.k.a. South Korea) emerged south of the 38th parallel and a Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, a.k.a. North Korea) emerged north of the 38th parallel, each with clearly stated designs on ruling the entirety of the Korean Peninsula.

The Soviets were confident enough in what they had built that they fully withdrew their occupation forces from DPRK in 1948, well before the U.S. had fully withdrawn their occupation forces from ROK in mid-1949; both sides, though, left military advisors.

Kim would be in firm control of DPRK while his counterpart could hardly claim the same for the south after several years of inept U.S. policy, and while each side sought to unify the Peninsula under its own control, only Kim and his DPRK were in a position to do so as ROK was destabilized and fractured within its own borders, but that didn’t stop Syngman Rhee, ROK’s leader, from devising his own plans to take over the whole of Korea just as Kim was doing the same. Their American and Soviet patrons were not as eager for war and sought to restrain their clients’ offensive ambitions. In particular, Kim almost nagged Stalin for permission to invade the south, but Stalin repeatedly declined to give his assent. By the end of 1949, the Soviet Union had conducted its first nuclear test and mainland China was then firmly under the control of Mao’s Chinese Communists, who trounced the American-supported Nationalists and drove them to Taiwan, meaning the U.S. would be nervous about further communist gains in Korea during 1950. Likewise, Stalin and Kim were nervous that, with U.S. aid, ROK (and perhaps the strongly anti-communist Japan and Nationalist Taiwan) would eventually be much more powerful and seek to unify Korea under ROK control, just as Rhee was threatening, and South Korean forces actually crossed the 38th parallel repeatedly to conduct operations in North Korean territory not long before the Korean War erupted in 1950. 

In January 1950, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a speech that would later become infamous, with many later blaming it for the start of the war. In that speech, South Korea was conspicuously not included in what was defined as U.S. vital national interests, meaning there was no U.S. guarantee of military protection and defense in the event it was attacked by communists. It was thought that this essentially gave a green light to Stalin and Mao to do as they please in Korea and that this was why Stalin gave his blessing to Kim in April for an invasion. Such was the conventional wisdom, anyway, until Soviet archives later painted a much more complicated picture…

North and South Korea, Seeking War 

Both before and after Acheson’s speech, Stalin was concerned that the U.S. would intervene directly into the conflict if North Korea attacked South Korea, even right up until the outbreak of the war, and wanted above all to not risk a major confrontation that could erupt in war between his Soviet Union and the United States. In other words, Stalin feared U.S. intervention on the Korean Peninsula regardless of Acheson’s 1950 and even rejected a formal defensive alliance with DRPK in 1949.

Acheson himself didn’t see the speech as a “green light” to communist attacks on ROK, but regardless of his intent, rhetorically his speech did anything but convey a clear American commitment to ROK’s security or that the U.S. was prepared to counter DPRK, Soviet, or Chinese actions towards ROK. The incompetence here mirrored the same incompetence of the U.S. occupation of southern Korea, and the communists wouldn’t have been irrational to interpret the speech as conceding Korea if it came to a war. Despite a general picture from the West of Stalin being hell-bent on world domination, then, it was a cautious Stalin who refrained from taking that speech as a “green light.” Quite strangely, an incorrect report in The New York Times actually convinced DPRK that South Korea was within the U.S. military protection guarantee.

By the middle of 1949, both the Soviets and the DPRK were apprehensive of the military buildup in the south and an American-supported invasion of the north from there, but Stalin was firmly against Kim’s plan to invade the south. Mao and the Chinese were more generally supportive but repeatedly stressed that the timing was too early, especially as they were still fighting their civil war, though they did pledge to come to Kim’s aid if he needed help; in other words, the Chinese wouldn’t be there from the beginning, but if things went badly enough, they would intervene on Kim’s behalf. Kim’s overtures to Mao made Stalin more nervous about the outbreak of war, and just before the Americans withdrew from the south, he resolved on a policy of supporting Kim enough to discourage an attack from the south but not enough to encourage Kim to attack from the north. So it was that over and over and over again, Stalin told Kim an emphatic “no” when it came to invading the south. And when DPRK forces initiated clashes with ROK forces along the border late in the year, Stalin was furious. At the same time, Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China as he was routing Nationalist Chinese forces from most of China and taking over the country. This made Stalin even more cautious, as he wanted to assess the situation with a newer, additional center of communist gravity in Mao’s China. Thus, as 1950 dawned with Mao’s Chinese Communists firmly in control of mainland China, Stalin took a more passive approach to Korea. Hardly a fool, Stalin would have realized how China had long regarded Korea as under its influence, and either may not have wanted to alienate the only other major Communist power in the area by asserting too much of a role in Korea or may have hoped, nervous of an eventual conflict anyway, that the Chinese would intervene to the degree that they would prevent the need for a massive Soviet intervention to support DPRK. Whatever Stalin’s calculation in this regard, Kim engaged in a policy that still defines North Korean policy today: playing Soviets/Russians against the Chinese to try and get more out of each.

Of course, the Nationalists being driven from mainland China raised alarm bells in the minds of American planners. And they had reason to be alarmed: where the Soviets quickly installed Kim Il-sung as a leader in the local, dominant communist party, the Americans dithered, stumbled, and nurtured instability and division in the South. There was so much unrest and brutal fighting among factions in the south even before 1950 that research indicates between 100,000 200,000 people were killed in political violence by either ROK forces or U.S. occupation forces in the years before the war, and once war broke out, a further 300,000 were killed or “disappeared” at the hands of the ROK government in just the first few months of the conflict. Much as was the case with South Vietnam years later, in South Korea the U.S. was supporting a government that was highly oppressive to its own people and hardly worth fighting for, a tragic situation that was far less forgiving in the Vietnamese case.

In the months after Acheson’s speech, Stalin would make preparations for war alongside DPRK, in particular sending specialists, advisors, and technical assistance without actually endorsing war or invasion as a course of action, further reflecting his caution. He would also continue to demonstrate concerns about possible American intervention in the following months. And yet, he also became more comfortable with the idea of a northern invasion of the south after the victory of Mao in mainland China and his agreeing to a new treaty with the Soviets. Stalin also felt more secure as the Soviet Union had only just recently conducted its first successful nuclear weapons test, ending the American monopoly on that technology and creating a nuclear club of two. Stalin’s fear that American and even Japanese troops would invade the Soviet Union, after all these considerations, must have seemed much less of a possibility, yet even when Stalin finally approved in April Kim’s request to be able to invade the south that summer, he did so only on the condition that Mao also approved the plan, which Mao later did, though reluctantly.  Furthermore, Stalin had only approved a limited offensive, only reluctantly assenting to a full-scale invasion mere days before the planned invasion and the start of the war amid reports of a buildup of South Korean forces on the border, in part because the thinking was that if the North won a quick war, it would keep the U.S. out, but that a long war would draw the U.S. into the conflict and a stronger offensive was more likely to achieve a quicker victory.

In the end, it was Stalin’s fear that the U.S. would support a South Korean struggle against North Korea that held back his approval of Kim’s desired invasion for so long, and his fear that the U.S. would eventually support a South Korean takeover of North Korea that led to his to the same invasion and its expansion.

The Terrible Cost of War

It turns out Stalin’s concerns about U.S. interference had been correct: when DPRK forces overran Seoul, ROK’s capital, just days after the invasion and continued pushing South Korean forces south, the U.S., mustering the support of United Nations (the USSR was boycotting it at the time because the UN would not seat Mao’s representative in China’s seat), deployed to fight alongside ROK against the DPRK invasion, but even so, they kept losing ground and were in danger of being annihilated at the bottom edge of the Korean Peninsula; the U.S. then launched a counterattack that involved an amphibious landing behind North Korean lines, and in the ensuing counterattack, the mainly-U.S.-and-South Korean- forces pushed North Korean forces all the way to the Chinese border in October, which only invited a massive Chinese counterattack that, by the middle of 1951, had resulted in a stalemate back along the 38th parallel.

TES.com

It is important to note that both the U.S. and China only directly intervened when the situation was dire for each of their clients.

Gamma-Keystone via Getty

The war was terrible for Koreans. Atrocities were common on both sides, American forces included. About three million Koreans died, one in ten people on the Korean Peninsula, but far more died in the north, where 12-15 percent of the whole population died. The U.S. ran a brutal air war against North Korea, one which resulted in probably the most utter and complete destruction of any single nation’s infrastructure, cities, towns, and villages since the times of the great Mongol massacres and perhaps, arguably, of any period in history. In the early months of the war, the North Koreans were essentially defenseless against U.S. air attacks (as were many of the South Korean civilians unlucky enough to be mixed in with occupying North Korean forces). And yet, there was a degree of American restraint in the bombings as U.S President Harry Truman did not want to provoke a wider ground war with Soviet or Chinese forces, which had not entered the conflict; this relative restraint vanished after Chinese ground forces entered the war. In fact, more bombs were dropped by the United States during the Korean War than Americans dropped in the entire Pacific War during WWII, including nearly twice as many tons of napalm, which only during the Korean War had reached a level of high appreciation on the part of senior U.S. military planners, setting the stage for its far greater future use in Vietnam.

Targets even included livestock and farming essentials, and the population that survived was driven down to underground facilities. By the fall of 1952, bombing had been so successful that virtually no targets remained. Eventually, targeting expanded to include major dams, with catastrophic results for the population. By the end of the war, nearly every man-made structure in North Korea had been destroyed by U.S. bombing raids, and, apparently, “only two modern buildings remained standing in Pyongyang” when the fighting stopped; this level of destruction was well understood by those involved at the time.

The war dragged on until July, 1953 (and, had it not been for Stalin’s death in March 1953, it might have dragged on longer, but the Soviets who took over after Stalin died had no desire to continue supporting the war effort in Korea), resulting in a cease-fire—not a peace treaty—which has been in place to this day, signed between U.S.-led UN forces, North Korean forces, and Chinese forces; conspicuously not among the parties that signed the treaty were the South Korean forces. Thus, the agreement was more of a cessation of war between various military forces than anything resembling a political agreement representing any kind of deeper understanding.

A Scarred Nation

From a psychological standpoint, this destruction understandably was something that shaped North Korean culture, mentalities, and worldviews into one of anxiety and fear when it came to America and the outside world in general, and even though North Korea was remarkably rebuilt rapidly and impressively during one of the few true brotherly and inspiring moments of the international socialist movement, with generous aid and on-the-ground assistance coming from the world’s other socialist countries, the sense of vulnerability and fear engendered by the U.S. bombing campaign is still a hallmark of the North Korea’s collective mentality to this day; indeed, hatred of America runs deep in today’s DPRK.

And though North Korea received substantive help from China, the Soviet Union, and other socialist countries, it never allowed itself to be controlled by any of these other powers or to become a pawn. And Kim would not forget that at the beginning of the war, support from both China and Russia came reluctantly. Kim would forge North Korea into a nation that would plot its own path its own way, accepting help while never submitting to foreign control or domination at the hands of far larger powers that had sought, for centuries, to exert their influence and domination over the Korean Peninsula.

While North Korea led South Korea in terms of per capita GNP as late as 1973, today democratic South Korea’s economy dwarfs North Korea’s, whose per capita GDP was less than 4.5% of South Korea’s in 2016 even though North Korea’s population is just under half of South Korea’s; furthermore, even today North Korea is facing mass starvation and may very well be the most oppressive, horrible nations in which to live in the entire world, where anyone can end up imprisoned in Soviet-style gulag labor camps or worse. Photos from space of North Korea at night show a country with virtually no electrical power, making it easy to mistake it for the black of the ocean, a jungle, or a desert uninhabited by humans. And Christopher Hitchens is hardly the only person to remark that the North Korean state has perpetuated—what must be regarded for all intents and purposes—a state religion centered around of the Kim family, nationalism, and Stalinist communism. He also poignantly noted the sad state of the North Korean people: hostages of the Kim “crime family”-sponsored high-stakes blackmail scheme, run against the rest of collective civilization:

Another version of our complicity with the Dear Leader is to be found with his oppression and starvation of his “own” people. It is felt that we cannot just watch them die, so we send food aid in return for an ever-receding prospect of good behavior in respect of the Dear Leader’s nuclear program. The ratchet effect is all one way: Nuclear tests become ever more flagrant and the emaciation of the North Korean people ever more pitiful. We have unwittingly become members of the guard force that patrols the concentration camp that is the northern half of the peninsula.

NASA/ISS

All-in-all, North Koreas’s past history has been a nightmare, one that extends into the present and will certainly extend into the future for at least the foreseeable future.

Old Grudges, New Weapons

Thus, in many ways, the shadow of the bitter, bloody rivalries of the late-nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth-century that consumed East Asia in war through 1953 cast a long shadow over the politics and current crises in the region, especially the North Korean conundrum. It was perhaps fitting that Kim the First, in the weeks before his death in 1994 and after such a long career defined by conflict, desired to improve relations with South Korea. While he had seen and suffered much through occupation, exile, revolution, resistance, and war, the same cannot be said of his disturbingly odd son and successor, Kim Jong-il, or his son and North Korea’s current leader, the deceptively-rotundly-jolly-appearing Kim Jong-un. 

After Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994, Kim Jong-il did not take long converting to reality his father’s long-held dream of turning DPRK into a nuclear-weapons power (American leaders throughout the Korean War had hinted at potential nuclear weapons use against North Korea and, bluff or not, these threats had an effect, one that was lasting). In particular, George W. Bush’s first State of the Union (the “axis of evil”) speech in 2002, seems to have really struck fear into the heart of the Kim Jong-il and his regime, pushing them to think then more than ever that the possession of a nuclear weapon would be their only true safeguard against a U.S. attack. Not long after the speech, North Korea removed International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors from its territory and in January, 2003—just months before Bush invaded Iraq and with a clear U.S. military buildup occurring on Iraq’s borders—withdrew from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), giving signals as clear as any that it was working on building nuclear bombs, the first of which it finally tested on October 8th, 2006, despite severe warnings from the U.S. and the international community. Since that initial test, five more nuclear tests have been conducted by DPRK, with the largest bomb by far the one that was tested just last month, in early September, and four of which have been conducted by Kim Jong-un, who took over when his father, Kim Jong-il, died late in 2011.

 CNN/CNS/NTI

Hand-in-hand with these efforts were efforts to increase North Korea’s missile capability, and the implication was lost on no one: the North Koreans were going to make sure it could hit the U.S. with nuclear missiles as the ultimate deterrent to any military action that the U.S. could take against them. As with the nuclear tests, it is under Kim Jong-Un that the most missile tests have been conducted and the most progress in the technology and capability reached: by 2015 not even four full years into his reign, Kim Jong-Un had tested more strategic missiles than his grandfather (15) and his father (16) had combined in the 28 years of their strategic missile tests; through today, Kim Jong-un has conducted 85 total missile tests including a record 24 in 2016 and another 22 so far this year since President Trump’s inauguration, with North Korea being on pace in 2017 to break the previous 2016 record. 2017 saw the DPRK’s first tests of missiles that could strike the U.S. (the 50 U.S. states, anyway), including, pointedly, a test on July 4th—not coincidentally America’s Independence Day—of North Korea’s first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the Hwasong-14, the first missile which could which could strike the 48-contiguous U.S. states, including the cities of Los Angeles, Chicago, and perhaps even New York. Thus, it’s not only the rhetoric between the unstable Kim and the unstable Trump that has been heating upsince Trump became president. And with a long history of DPRK/ROK border-area incidents (any of which could have quickly escalated an always tense situation into nuclear war), with Kim Jong-un increasingly willing to violently gamble with provocative and violent border actions, and with Trump personally calling for an end to diplomacy, the likelihood of war erupting on the Korean Peninsula is higher today than any time in decades, a time when one misunderstanding can spiral out of control before there is any chance of stopping war.

*****

Reuters/Kevin Lamarque; Reuters/KCNA

Some key points need to be made here, taking all this into account:

1.)   China is no silver bullet to solving the North Korea problem, and it does not have a magic wand with which it can control Kim Jong-un or his regime

China probably finds North Korea as frustrating as the United States, probably even more so. DPRK’s extreme self-reliance (juche) was also at the core of Kim Il-sung’s governing ethos: no matter what help he was able to gain from the Soviet Union, Communist China, and other communist states, Kim was careful to limit the influence of any state on North Korea as much as possible, warily trusting the Chinese, Russians, or anyone. His children are most certainly carrying on this tradition. The ability of any outside power to force major changes in North Korean behavior peacefully should, at best, be regarded as limited. Thus, Trump’s constant assertions that China can “solve the North Korean problem” are more fantasy than reality.

2.)   China is definitely not looking to have history repeat itself

China’s current leadership will most certainly not want to repeat the mistakes or results of the Qing Dynasty. China enjoyed a centuries-long relationship with a subservient Korea under undisputed Chinese hegemony until Western powers weakened China to the point where Japan felt comfortable enough to challenge China’s sphere of influence in Korea starting in 1876 and then totally pushing China out in a war with China that left Japan in 1895 occupying the status in relation to Korea that China had occupied for hundreds of years, but with even more direct control and influence. This gave Japan a foothold on continental Asia from which to expand aggressively against China in a devastating war that began in 1931 and merged into WWII, a conflict in which only the Soviet Union more death and devastation absolutely than China. China then lost Taiwan because of U.S. support for the Nationalists who fled the Chinese mainland in the face of victorious Chinese Communists during 1949 in the closing chapter of the Chinese Civil War, and then had to accept a Korean Peninsula partitioned into two less than a decade later, where China only retained major influence over North Korea (and only after tremendous sacrifice) and the United States had a clearly dominant position in South Korea when the ceasefire of 1953 came into place. With its long-view of history, China would see any Western military action in North Korea as a disaster, a lost to its prestige and a stage-setting for further aggression and weakening of China, as was the case far too many times for China’s liking between 1876-1953. It certainly does not help that the U.S. is so strongly allied with Japan, the perpetrator of such much aggression against China from the late nineteenth-century through WWII.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, two of the major neighbors sharing Iraq’s borders—Iran and Syria—did not share the aims of the United States in Iraq and actively worked against the U.S. succeeding in these aims. If the U.S. attacks North Korea without the support of China and/or Russia (hell, even U.S. ally South Korea is warning the U.S. not to strike North Korea), this dramatically reduces that the outcome in the long-running will resemble what American leaders hope it will. Even this year, Chinese trade with North Korea increased dramatically in the first half of 2017, while Russia is actively undermining anti-North Korean sanctions. If these two major UN-veto wielding powers work to undermine U.S. actions or any arrangements the U.S. would now take/make in regard to North Korea, the success of those U.S. moves would very much be in doubt.

3.)   North Korea is probably less responsive to international pressure than any other nation on Earth

As already mentioned, DPRK embodies an extreme form of self-reliance () that is deep-seated, meaning it has been and is prepared to go it alone with little or no help from the outside world. Its leadership uses the humanitarian concerns others have for the welfare of its own people to gain concessions from those and uses the threat of war and chaos to get what it needs from a nervous China and others eager to not rock the boat. Its regime cares not about the welfare of its own people, only its own survival, and has glorified itself and brainwashed its own isolated people from near-birth to hate America to such a degree that many will genuinely gladly sacrifice themselves in to preserve a leadership that treats them as mere resources to be utilized. At best, North Korea will respond far less than other countries to conventional methods of exerting pressure, at worst, not at all in a helpful way. This makes dealing with the nation as an adversary miserable, forcing foreign leaders to choose between risky and ineffective diplomacy and catastrophic war. 

North Korea’s entire history has been defined by its resistance to foreign domination (whether imperialism or colonialism) and it has only bent to foreign powers when forced and after great cost and sacrifice; as of now, there is a long way to go before Kim and North Korea will simply bow to the Trump Administration’s demands.

This means there is little room for incompetence or error, two things at which the Trump Administration unfortunately excels. As of now, it is incredulously and unjustifiably undermining the very Iran nuclear agreement (against which there is no logical argument, as I have noted) reached between Iran, the U.S., and other the major world powers only a few years ago, destroying America’s own credibility as a nuclear negotiator at the precise moment when it needs to convince North Korea that the U.S. is a credible negotiating partner, destroying most of whatever hope exists that North Korea would trust any new nuclear agreement the U.S. would offer or abide by it if an agreement were to be made.

4.)   A terrible status quo is not always the worst option

The status quo may seem bad, but as many people who understand the current standoff have warned, open war against North Korea—which has the world’s fourth-largest military—would be an unimaginable horror compared to any recent conflict, a bloodbath of a scale not seen anywhere in decades that would kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions in just days or weeks and would likely see Seoul, South Korea’s capital and the world’s fourth-largest city, obliterated… And that doesn’t even get into the fact that South Korea is currently the world’s 11th-largest economy and, of course, this does not even get into potential damage to Japan, China, Russia, or other nations that may be drawn into the conflict.

And oh, we haven’t even mentioned the use of nuclear weapons. We have never seen a military attempt by a foreign nation to disarm the nuclear capabilities of a nuclear-weapons power. Let’s hope we never do.

****

When it comes to North Korea, the history is a nightmare, the present is a nightmare, and the future is a nightmare, but even that does not mean that the nightmare cannot be mitigated, its worst outcomes prevented, and improvements made. President Trump and anyone now advising him that doesn’t consider the above history and points will be doing Americans and Koreans both an unforgivable disservice. Terrifyingly, at this point, the fate of millions of people in one of the world’s worst historical flashpoints rests with the decisions of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. If anyone is comforted by that thought, that, too, is a nightmare. 

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See author’s Amazon eBooks here!

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). 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!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse January 27, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter: @bfry1981) January 27th, 2017; original interview conducted December 24th-26th, 2017; here is the English version of the interview published by ISNA on January 24th, and here is the Farsi (Persian) version

Carolyn Kaster/AP

Iranian Student News Agency (interviewer: Atefeh Moradi): The US election has passed, but we can truly see the polarized atmosphere in American society; how do you anticipate the political and social situation after 20 Jan.?

Brian Frydenborg: To be honest, it will be pretty awful. 53.9% of voters chose a candidate other than Trump, including 48.2% for Secretary Clinton, to Trump’s 46.1% (f this seems strange, just look up Electoral College on the Internet, and you will see that American elections are based on voting majorities divided into specific regions, not an absolute national majority). Yet Trump and his party will control the White House and both houses of Congress (with a large majority in the House and a small majority in the Senate), as well as the federal judiciary once Trump starts making judicial appointments and getting them confirmed, including filling that all-important vacant Supreme Court seat. For at least the next two years and likely even a longer period, this means almost 54% of Americans who voted will have no real power to check President Trump and his Republican Party from enacting an agenda they very forcefully do not support.

The one real exception to this is the filibuster, a Senate rule that, on most issues, allows the minority to prevent passage of something that cannot get at least 60 of 100 senators to support it; however, each new Congress can make its own rules, and Republicans will have the power to get rid of the filibuster if they choose to do so, which would become increasingly likely if Democrats use it block Trump’s and the Republicans’ agenda. If this happens, the Democrats lose their one way to check Trump independent of any help from Republicans, and, thus, will be powerless if Republicans stay united. Yes, in some ways, the Republican Party has not been this divided since the 1960s, but if one looks closer, this is not the case: while conservative public intellectuals and publications, many former Republicans officials (including both living former Republican presidents), and numbers of important major Republican political donors and fundraisers either privately or publicly oppose Trump, this is a tiny elite within the scope of the party as a whole; only a handful of senators and a small portion of Republican representatives in Congress consistently and publicly opposed Trump; nearly the entire Republican membership of Congress either supported Trump or dared not opposed him, and with the megaphone of the presidency on top of his Twitter-following of nearly 18 million people, Trump will be seeking to loudly intimidate any opposition, whether within his own party or not, and those within his own party will be highly vulnerable to this pressure as Trump can easily use it to rouse his followers. The political stalemate of the last six years will end as one party, led by Trump more than anyone else, will control the highest levels of the entire federal government.

What this means is that the nearly-54% will certainly see many of their hopes dashed and their fears realized, in particular women and minorities like African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans who have been subject to abuse of power by the private sector and the government at the local, state, and federal level. A Trump Administration seems poised to either stop actively protecting these groups from abuses with any vigor at the least, or to actively undermine some of the protections and gains they have enjoyed in civil rights that have been enacted in recent years. Either way, racial, ethnic, and religious tensions that have been simmering and occasionally exploding into riots and violent attacks over the past few years in America are likely to get dramatically worse under Trump and serious civil unrest is a real possibility; this will especially be the case if Trump keeps acting the way he has been, which is to say, in ways that do nothing to assure groups fearful of a Trump presidency that they will be respected and have their needs and concerns addressed seriously.

ISNA:Some analysts believe Trump campaign’s rhetoric is not the cornerstone of his policies, what would be your stance toward this?

BF: I would call this out as wishful thinking. While Trump’s stated positions have shifted so many times it’s been easy to lose count, his rhetoric and his style have stayed fairly consistent, and the overall content of his rhetoric makes it clear that many of his harsher policies are going to be pursued with vigor; any doubt about this should have been erased by his cabinet picks announced thus far. Even if he ends up enacting a milder form of some of what he has discussed, such policies will still be game-changers and move the country sharply to the right policy-wise. But as a practical matter, his supporters—and, within the Republican Party’s group of elected officials, a strong core of the Republican House members—will insist that he carries out his promises, and Trump, ever so needful of admiration and validation, won’t want to disappoint his biggest fans. So his constituents and counterparts in Congress will make it hard for him to backtrack, even if he wants to, which on most issues he probably does not. 

ISNA: In regard with Trump’s cabinet nominees, can you anticipate the upcoming Washington policies?

BF: The best sign that Trump might move into a “governing mode” and power down his “campaign mode” would have been putting moderate people who could unite the country into key positions of power, most notably selecting either Mitt Romney or David Petraeus as Secretary of State. By picking big-oil CEO Rex Tillerson (a Putin ally) as Secretary of State, but also along with virtually all of his other choices, Trump made it clear he has no intention of generally pursuing a more moderate course. Instead, he has assembled the most extreme and most right-wing cabinet and White House in American presidential history. A simple look at his choices and their records make this beyond dispute, so there should be no confusion as to what to expect from them. In several agencies—the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, the Department of Labor, and the Environmental Protection Agency—Trump even appointed people who don’t believe in the agencies core missions or are downright hostile to them. Others, like Dr. Ben Carson for the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Nikki Haley for Ambassador to the United Nations, are supremely unqualified; still others like Trump’s National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and Ambassador to Israel David Friedman are outright extremists. And those who will be running the economy hail from the billionaire class. So those who are saying “Let’s wait and see…” are deluding themselves if they mean in any way to imply that a moderate course is a possibility and that moderates and liberals should not jump to conclusions: Trump’s behavior, actions, and selections are sending a clear message that would be foolish not to acknowledge.

ISNA: The US nuclear suitcase is in Trump’s hands now, do you think there should be any doubt about it?

BF: Let’s put it this way: should we think Trump would use nuclear weapons for fun or just on a whim? No. But the man’s character and temperament are so vastly different from every single president before him, and unsuited to the responsibility of the decision to use or not use nuclear weapons, that if a crisis with a major power like China erupted, I would be worried to have Trump as a Commander in Chief. If one recalls the Cuban Missile Crisis, WWIII and nuclear war were avoided because the cooler heads of both Kennedy and Khrushchev prevailed; the only way the phrase “cooler head” and the word “Trump” can fit into the same sentence is with satire. So if a truly grave situation did emerge, yes, we should be worried that Trump would be more likely to both threaten and use nuclear weapons than any previous American president in a similar situation. As it is, Trump is already calling for America to expand its nuclear arsenal, and the last thing that is good for the world now is a new nuclear arms race.  

This, in particular, concerns Iran, and Iran is in a tough position. Should Iran resume uranium enrichment because Trump follows through on his pledge to end the nuclear agreement from the U.S. side between the great powers and Iran, this would likely cause two things to occur: 1.) an attempt by Saudi Arabia to develop a nuclear program of its own, and perhaps Turkey, maybe even others, and 2.) an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities that would likely be supported or joined by a Trump Administration, sparking a wider war in the Middle East, likely between the U.S. and Sunni-led powers on one side and Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon in one form or another on the other. Yemen and Bahrain could easily become battlegrounds, and there is reason to consider as a serious possibility Russia joining or at least supporting the Shiite side, as Russia now already has something of an alliance with Iran, Hezbollah, and the Syrian Government through Syria’s Civil War.

ISNA: Trump repeatedly said that he is not for JCPOA [the Iran nuclear deal], although EU senior officials say it is beyond Trump’s authority to make any changes to this agreement; what would be your explanation on this issue?

BF: Trump can definitely end U.S. participation in the agreement, and can get Congress reapply the sanctions that were removed as part of it (these are separate from the current sanctions regarding military and terrorism issues). Would it be fair if Trump broke the agreement with Iran? No. Would it be understandable, even justified, for Iran to resume uranium enrichment under those circumstances? Of course. Yet sometimes, what you have the right and ability to do isn’t always the right choice, and the question Iran’s leaders will have to really ask themselves is this: is it really in Iranian interests to do so? Because if it does, the possibility of an Israeli strike—however unjustified or justified, leaving that question out it—supported or even joined by the U.S. becomes highly likely, and that is a situation that will be no good for Iran and Shiites all around the Middle East, especially those who are living under oppressive Sunni governments, or for the Middle East in general, not good at all. It will result in large losses of life and perhaps catastrophic economic and physical destruction.

Sometimes, leadership is about swallowing pride and being able to absorb verbal and diplomatic abuse (in this case, coming from a Trump Administration) than it is about confrontation and conflict, even if one feels one’s cause is just. Peace is its own reward and there are a number of outcomes that can be good for Iran that do not involve uranium enrichment. For one thing, after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and watching the Arab Spring churn largely into chaos, destruction, and death, there is virtually no appetite in the U.S. for a war that would involve overthrowing Iran’s government and occupying Iran with American troops; thus, should Iran seek nuclear weapons capability as a way to prevent a U.S. invasion and the overthrow of Iran’s own government, it is trying to prevent something that in all likelihood will not be happening, yet the pursuit of such a goal would be ruinous for Iran, as plenty of military options for the Israel and the U.S. exist, with their superior air forces, that do not involve an invasion or overthrowing the Iranian government.

For another thing, if Trump cancels the agreement and Iran does not resume enrichment, the moral high ground on this issue (apart from other considerations) will be incredibly strong for Iran, and the pressure on Trump and the U.S. from the rest of the world powers will be considerable, so great that the pressure the U.S. faces could be severe and beyond verbal, and if Trump initiates major trade wars with countries like China and Mexico, sanctions against the U.S. for violating the agreement would be even greater possibility that they would otherwise, though not necessarily likely. If Iran can resist the temptation and behave more responsibly than American leadership, the support from Europe, Russia, and China would be that much greater. And, ultimately, those nations are doing far more business with Iran than the U.S. In the end, the temptation to resume enrichment would be great, and nobody likes to undergo that level of pressure, but the longer-term interests of Iran, and the lives of the Iranian people, will be much better served by not pursuing such a course. If Trump behaves poorly and Iran conducts itself with restraint, the stature of Iran in worldwide diplomatic circles will only increase, with a deeper level of respect than it currently enjoys. It Iran tried to match Trump taunt for taunt, insult for insult, threat for threat—as some of his former Republican rivals tried to do—Iran will only be seen as more like Trump than as conducting itself in a more dignified manner, and Trump’s Republican rivals show there is no out-Trumping Trump: if there is one thing the Republican primaries taught us, it is that Trump always wins when his opponents sink to his level. Finally, Iran can know that many American people will appreciate this restraint, and should politics shift and Democrats make a comeback, new people who noted Iran’s praise-worthy restraint would be empowered by such restraint to improve U.S.-Iranian relations and support Iran should it pursue policies that defuse tensions and further peace.

ISNA: And finally, do you believe amid tensions which still are in the two countries’ relationship, especially regarding US sanctions and Iran’s nuclear program, and that so far have not vanished as was predicted after JCPOA, that it would be possible that Iran and US could be better friends rather than enemies?

BF: Well, the relevant nuclear-related sanctions have been removed by the Obama Administration; other sanctions related to other matters are separate issues. But to whether Iran and the U.S. make better friends than enemies, of course we make better friends. It just becomes much harder with Trump and the Republican Party running America’s foreign policy, and especially if the sanctions that have been removed by Obama are reimposed by Trump. Clinton would have been tough, but fair, with Iran: she would have honored the JCPOA, and have used that a basis to work for breakthroughs with Iran on Syria, Iraq, Israel, and other regional issues; such work might have led to the lifting of other non-nuclear sanctions. I have always believed that Iran and the U.S. have plenty of issues with which they can find enthusiastic agreement. And I think it’s overdue for a grand ayatollah to come to Washington and for a president to go to Tehran.

And yet, the biggest obstacle to having the JCPOA become a springboard for further cooperation thus far has been Syria. I’ve personally been disappointed in Iran’s actions when it comes to Syria. As old as the concept and word “terrorism” has been around, it has been used by oppressive leaders as an excuse to crush opposition and impose iron-fisted rule. This can be the case if there is no actual terrorism or, in the case of Syria, if there is very real terrorism, even the worst in the world. Iran has good reason to fear Sunni extremist terrorism from the likes of ISIS and al-Qaeda, but one can stand against terrorism while also condemning the slaughter of Syria’s people on a massive scale by the Assad government. I understand and respect that Assad is an Alawite and that Alawites are religious cousins of Iran’s Shiites, but history will judge Iran for its support of Assad and Russia’s assault on large segments of Syria’s civilian population, not just terrorists. Even with ISIS in charge of Mosul, with the Iraqi Army having the U.S. as an ally and behaving in a relatively restrained way towards civilians, look at how much worse the civilian killings and refugee situation is for Aleppo with the Syrian forces’ assault backed by Russia (it is interesting that Iran has advisors, forces, and/or militias involved in both operations, and can easily tell the differences in the conduct and brutality of the operations for themselves even if it does not acknowledge these differences publicly). In particular, I was saddened that Iran did not forcefully condemn Assad’s relatively larger-scale use of chemical weapons against his own people back in the fall of 2013, because I know how horribly Iranians and suffered when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons in an even more massive way against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war, with the support and cover-up of the Reagan Administration, one of America’s most shameful acts.

Thus, I was hoping that Iran could be the conscience of the Assad regime since it is clear that Assad and Putin have almost none when it comes to Syria’s people. Imagine if Iran was seen not only to be a protector of Shiites, but also of Sunnis in Syria? I still believe that Iran can act within Syria as a force to reduce the brutality and killing of the civil war, something very clearly in line with more mainstream Islamic teachings since the time of the Prophet Muhammed himself, who during war generally urged humane treatment over brutality (after all, the very first verse of the Quran refers to Allah by the title of “the Merciful,”) and to act to push against Assad’s government’s and Russia’s military’s acts of indiscriminate killing.  

If Iran were to ensure that Assad, if(?)/when(?) victorious, shows mercy and takes great care to protect civilians, Iran can play the most constructive role of any power in Syria given the present realities, eclipsing Russia, Turkey, the Gulf, and the West (including the U.S.) in helping to make a humanitarian difference and saves lives. It is beneath the dignity of Iran to be an accomplice in the abuses of Assad against his own people, and Iran can be more than just a no-questions-asked ally like Russia, which is even taking part in the mass killings with its air force and heavy weapons. While Iran’s own government has its issues with human rights, it has never done anything to its own people that rises to Assad’s level of brutality, even in the suppressions that followed the end of the 1979 Iranian Revolution; during the run-up the Revolution, the Shah, too, did not even come close to Assad’s current levels of mass murder. 

Part of the spirit of the Iranian Revolution was originally one of standing up to oppression; for Iran to be true to itself and its ideals, it must work to help alleviate the suffering of Syria’s people, not just Alawite, but Sunnis, too, Kurds, and all of Syria’s people, especially to protect civilians at the mercy of Assad’s government and Russia’s air force who have been shown no mercy or next to none. With its troops on the ground and its close ally Hezbollah heavily involved in fighting in Syria on Assad’s behalf, and with Assad’s own official forces so heavily depleted, Iran is in the best position to do something about human rights and saving lives in Syria. If it does so clearly, visibly, and verifiably under international observers, it will win hearts and minds all over the West and the Sunni world, in addition to the Shiite world. 

If it helps Assad kill genocidal or near-genocidal-numbers of Syrians and turns a blind eye to this reality, it will be behaving just like Russia is now and like Saddam Hussein behaved in Iraq, and far crueler than the Shah. I believe Iran can be better than this, and if that happens, maybe not under Trump, but eventually the American government will show substantive appreciation for such actions of protection and mercy, along with the rest of the world community. But right now, with the world horrified not just by ISIS (and rightfully so) but also by the Assad government’s actions in Syria and especially Aleppo (and rightfully so), Iran is associated with this killing in Syria and it makes it harder for the West to proceed on negotiating with Iran when it comes to other issues, negotiations that may lead to the removal of non-nuclear sanctions. In fact, Iran turning a blind eye to mass killing in Syria makes it that much harder for other regional partners to trust it in working to find common ground on and resolutions to other important Middle Eastern issues.

Any who doubt that Iran and the U.S. can find common ground should look only to the crisis with former-Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki from 2014, when the Obama Administration, Iran, Iraq’s Shiite political establishment, and Shiite religious leaders in both Iran and Iraq came together to insist the divisive Maliki step aside to give new, less divisive leadership a chance, giving eventual rise to the far more accommodating team of Dr. Haider al-Abadi (more on that in my article here). Iraqi, Iranian, and American interests are all better-off as a result, and especially the Iraqi people, thus proving American-Iranian cooperation can bring about positive change to the region. 

Ironically, the Trump Administration will be far less concerned about human rights than other recent American administrations and is seeking to come together with Russia, which makes Iran’s respect for human rights all the more important when it comes to Syria. I can say one thing: to be seen coming together with Putin and Trump in working against human rights and ganging up against Sunnis will not raise Iran’s standing globally, nor will it make things better for the people of the Middle East, whether they are Shiite, Sunni, or of other faiths; the last thing that is in Iran’s and the region’s interests is a worsening of the Sunni-Shiite conflict already playing out across the region. With the rise of Trump, Iran has a unique chance to be a champion of human rights, peace, and mercy in a region where now even fewer powers are acting towards those ends. I hope Iran’s leaders and people together see that this is a great opportunity for them, even in spite of the many challenges, some unfair, Iran may face in choosing such a course. But the right course is often not the easiest, as the lives of the Prophet Muhammad and the major Shiite Imams Ali and Hussain, so revered by Iranians, amply demonstrate.

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 October 29, 2016 

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

Michael Conroy/AP, Cliff Owen/AP

AMMAN — James Comey, the FBI, and the media have failed to be fair to Hillary Clinton and to the country and its politics with what amounts to a ridiculous decision to pour gasoline onto a fire that may not even have any wood left burning, and we have a news media that is generally unable to note this when it does its reporting on the subject.

Another Dreadful News Media Fail

Friday it was revealed that e-mails of Huma Abedin—Clinton’s longtime right-hand woman—were found on a laptop of her disgraced separated husband Anthony Wiener in the course of an FBI investigation into this sexual outreach to a 15-year-old girl: FBI Director James Comey that day revealed he had learned a day earlier of “the existence of emails pertinent to the investigation” of Clinton’s e-mails and her server in a short letter of three small paragraphs that he sent to the relevant committee leaders in Congress, 11 days before Election Day.

The New York Times utilized one of its rarer BIG fonts for the headline of its story on this, which was the first headline on its website when it broke yesterday and for much of today (succeeded by related articles). So this means it’s “really important.” Yet, from said article:

Mr. Comey’s letter said that the F.B.I. would review the emails to determine if they improperly contained classified information, which is tightly controlled by the government. Senior law enforcement officials said that it was unclear if any of the emails were from Mrs. Clinton’s private server. And while Mr. Comey said in his letter that the emails “appear to be pertinent,” the F.B.I. had not yet examined them.

But that doesn’t stop the drama queens in the media and in the Republican Party from making as much out of this as possible to either bring in viewers/readers or hurt Clinton politically (or both). Supposedly biased-for-Clinton outlets like The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC all led with this as THE major story; Trump and Republicans exuded glee and relished the chance to go on offense on this familiar ground once again. Thankfully, Newsweek today leads with a sensible take that cuts right to the chase, starting with the article’s first paragraph:

The disclosure by the Federal Bureau of Investigation late on Friday, October 28 that it had discovered potential new evidence in its inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s handling of her personal email when she was Secretary of State has virtually nothing to do with any actions taken by the Democratic nominee, according to government records and an official with knowledge of the investigation, who spoke to Newsweek on condition of anonymity.

The revelation that the FBI has discovered additional emails convulsed the political world, and led to widespread (and erroneous) claims and speculation…

It then continues:

The truth is much less explosive. There is no indication the emails in question were withheld by Clinton during the investigation, the law enforcement official told Newsweek, nor does the discovery suggest she did anything illegal. Also, none of the emails were to or from Clinton, the official said*. Moreover, despite the widespread claims in the media that this development had prompted the FBI to “reopen” of the case, it did not; such investigations are never actually closed, and it is common for law enforcement to discover new information that needs to be examined.

*(Another leak confirmed this to The Los Angeles Times, but a leak to The Washington Post contradicts this and another in The New York Times leaves it an open question, highlighting why it is imperative more information come out ASAP directly through official FBI channels to clear up any confusion)

A Dud of a Bombshell

Newsweek here is more the exception. Its article goes to explain how Abedin had four e-mail accounts: one official account at state.gov that contained the vast majority of e-mails relevant to the FBI Clinton investigation; a second clintonemail.com one she used for assisting Clinton with issues related to Clinton’s private life; a third Yahoo one (presumably Abedin’s personal account?); and a fourth linked to her husband’s e-mail, which she used in support of his work as a congressman. Abedin occasionally used the second of third accounts to print material Clinton needed to have when it was not practical or possible to use her state.gov account. Having seized Weiner’s devices that he shared with Abedin, in all likelihood, the FBI will have probably only have come across her e-mails from that fourth account linked to her husband, and if that is the case, the overwhelmingly likely situation is that only a small portion or even none of these e-mails are going to be relevant to the FBI investigation. If there are any other e-mails related to the case, it is probable that many or all are duplicates of previously reviewed material because Abedin would send the material to be printed from her state.gov account to her other accounts, because they would have been captured in the sweeps of the state.gov accounts and Clinton’s personal server, or because of everyone else’s accounts having Abedin’s e-mails they sent to or received from her preserved on their ends. I would be shocked if anything particularly shocking occurs, and the worst that is likely to happen is that some e-mails which contained information that was classified at the time but had absolutely no classified markings in their subject lines or in them are found and that a few may even be new material, virtually certainly nothing that would have endangered American lives or national security. And officials are unsure if or how many of these e-mails may be duplicates of previously reviewed material.

So this story is a big fat nothing.

Like a teenage boy who just can’t control his hormones, the chance to lead with Weiner’s sex scandals being tied to the Clinton e-mail server scandal was just too great to pass up, despite the fact that there is no indication or reason to believe anything significant will come out of this given how mundane the vast majority of the e-mails reviewed earlier by investigators turned out to be.

Comey Crashes the Election Party

But the real problem here is in Director Comey’s choice to publicly release what he did when did.

Now, before I continue, I want to stress that I still believe Comey is a straight shooter and public servant of honesty and integrity; that doesn’t mean he is infallible, and I have already pointed out Comey was wrong in characterizing Clinton and her team as “extremely careless” in the handling of classified information, mainly because of three things: issues of overclassifcation and differences on what is classified between agencies, because only one e-mail chain out of many thousands was actually classified at the time and had any proper classification markings—a few small “(c)”s in the body, with none of the other proper, required markings in the headers or subject line to give any context to the “(c)” markings—and because Comey’s viewpoint as an FBI man failed to give proper weight to the unique challenges of a global and very fluid State Department and the distinct culture it has in terms of handling classified information as a result of all that and why this unique approach is necessary. Still, I think it is beyond question that overall, Comey oversaw a fair and thorough investigation of Clinton’s e-mails and server and that his decision not to prosecute her was the only rational or fair decision in the eyes of law.

But his releasing this information at this time is a colossal mistake on Comey’s part. In his letter, he wrote that “the FBI cannot yet assess whether or not this material may be significant.” If there is any significance to these newly discovered e-mails, then the American people deserve to know with all possible speed and before the election. But throwing a monkey wrench into this election 11 days before Election Day when it is entirely possible that there is both nothing new and nothing incriminating, when it is known that Clinton herself was not involved in any active way—sending, receiving, or otherwise—with any of these e-mails found on Weiner’s devices, when the FBI has not even begun reviewing these e-mails, creates the appearance of impropriety and wrongdoing when there is zero evidence that these e-mails are indicative of that.

In fact, it is therefore actually misleading.

The FBI needs to prioritize this as much as is humanly possible without setting back any cases where lives are at risk; the review should be round-the-clock and nonstop so the public can get as much information about this as possible before the election, and Clinton herself has called for all the information to be released as soon as possible, the opposite behavior of someone trying to hide something. And this review should have been happening and ideally completed before anything was said publicly but also before the election. 

Because nobody knows what’s in these e-mails, the benefit of the doubt is warranted that until something incriminating is found, the privacy and good public standing of Clinton are also considerations that should outweigh such a hypothetical, speculative statement. And to release no information about how many e-mails are being reviewed in relation to Clinton, to leave that wide open for speculation, is also irresponsible and unfair to Clinton. There is a reason why it is standard procedure to not comment on an ongoing investigation: any partial release of information that does not provide the whole story in context risks prejudicing the public against someone in a way not merited by the full facts and risks hurting that person’s public standing, and that person is entitled in our system to the presumption of innocence; in other words, law enforcement, including the FBI, must take a “do no harm” approach to a person in an investigation until they are certain there is something incriminating or damaging, especially since many in the public are apt to assume guilt when they hear the FBI is investigating anyone in the first place.

The simple fact is that this is damaging to Clinton and yet there may be nothing improper in any of these just-discovered set of e-mails; we can’t know and we shouldn’t be given something so vague and unspecific just days before an election when anything can make a huge difference. If there was some sort of major discovery with evidence of something incriminating, even at this late stage in the election a public update from Comey would be justified and proper, but what has been discovered now is neither major nor incriminating nor even anything that constitutes hard evidence.

Once Comey has actual specific information to report—how many e-mails were classified or not—then it is fair to begin discussing with the public. But now he has done a great disservice to Clinton, the electoral process, and the American people. It may well be that Team Clinton deserves additional scrutiny because of what’s in these e-mails, but right now we have no idea and as such she does not at this point in time—this crucial point in time—deserve additional scrutiny. I do not think Comey intended this as a political move to harm Clinton, and I think he was just doing his job in the way he thought best. But he is 100% wrong here, and he has failed to take into account the realities of politics, the media, and voter psychology even if he thought he was. Some may say that his job is to ignore such things, but you cannot do something like this that damages a person and candidate just days before an election when there is not yet anything incriminating or any evidence of wrongdoing with what you are discussing.

And unlike the last time he issued a public statement on the investigation, after Clinton was interviewed, this time a number of his peers who aren’t engaged in current politicking—former federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials—are condemning his decision to release this information and to release it so close to the election, something generally unheard of in presidential elections; furthermore, this was a decision he was pressured not to make by both Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates because it violated longtime Justice Department and FBI rules that barred officials from commenting on politically sensitive investigations within 60 days of an election.

Conclusion: Another Precedent Shattered in a Year of Precedent-Shattering

In the end, Comey’s decision lacks moral, ethical, and practical grounds for being carried out and, as polls have already been tightening whereas before Clinton’s leads seemed safe, he may have done this country immense damage by helping to elect the worst ever major party candidate in American history and helping Republicans in down-ballot races. He may have also damaged the FBI as an institution. In all likelihood, the FBI will not finish its review in time before the election and this may be the last update the public has before then. Whatever happens, it’s going to be a tense few days between now and the election, that’s for sure, far tenser than it would have been without Comey’s monumental and ill-timed blunder.

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

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

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!Share this post:

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 31, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 31st, 2016

Barcroft Media; AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File

Among all the problems the Republican Party is causing today, there is a new blunder that truly stands in its own category…

The Zika virus.

Yes, we truly can blame the Republican Party for the fact that there is a growing Zika threat in America, at least for the degree to which it will be a threat.  It was entirely possibly to plan ahead and mitigate whatever damage Zika would have done, but the Republican Party failed on this front, and it is important to understand why because this illustrates the modern Republican Party’s philosophy on government and illustrates it well.  In fact, Republicans’ handling of Zika is a sad yet clear reminder of how unfit to govern the GOP was even before that asteroid that is Donald Trump hit it, and that it was not a serious political party when it came to policy for some time before The Donald’s rise.

To truly understand the magnitude of the error here, we must start at the beginning.

From Uganda to Florida: The Strange, Surprising Odyssey of Zika 

The Zika virus was discovered in 1947 in the Zika forest of Uganda, a disease related to West Nile virus, dengue, and yellow fever.  The first case in humans was not detected until 1952, but it was not linked to illness in people until 1964, when a scientist studying the virus came down with a rash.  From its discovery until 2007, no outbreaks of Zika were detected by public health officials, only 14 confirmed cases in humans were detected, and the virus was thought to only to be “rare” and exhibit “mild symptoms,” even as mosquitoes carrying Zika were found in new parts of Africa and also Asia. However, the WHO considers the possibility that Zika’s similarities to dengue and chikungunya may have contributed to its lack of diagnosis. 

In 2007, though, Zika burst is way into medical headlines with an outbreak on the island of Yap, part of the Caroline Islands of the Federated States of Micronesia.  The small island nation—whose population was less than 7,400 as of its 2000 census—ended up with 185 suspected cases of Zika virus (49 confirmed, 59 probable), a figure arrived at from just completing surveys of 173 out of the island’s 1,276 households; from this information, researchers were able to estimate that 73% of the entire Island’s population 3 years of age or older were infected with Zika, with 919 of those falling ill, or 18% of the infected; none of those who became ill experienced serious symptoms or conditions.  Most common among the reported symptoms were rashes and fevers, followed by joint pain/inflammation and conjunctivitis.  Researchers were unable to determine a clear path as to how Zika emerged in this remote Pacific island.

The following year, a researcher in Senegal contracted the virus there, came back to the U.S., and sexually transmitted the virus to his wife; it could be the first example of a generally insect-transmitted disease being passed on through sexual intercourse (something which we now know is a feature of Zika).

Zika roared back into the headlines again in 2013 with a series outbreaks in the Pacific in 2013-2014.  The most serious outbreak occurred in French Polynesia, where as many as two-thirds of its 270,000 residents were estimated to have been infected (with 8,750 specific cases suspected, 341 actually confirmed).  Over 31,000 people sought treatment, and this outbreak came with a series of far more severe symptoms and conditions than previous outbreaks, including immune system problems.  Especially alarming were 8 confirmed cases of microcephaly: pregnant women developing fetuses with abnormally small heads, leading to a whole range of possible issues with mental development (5 of the fetuses were aborted, 3 were birthed), and researchers estimated that 1% of women infected with Zika who were pregnant and in their first trimester would be at risk of developing fetuses with microcephaly; this may seem low, but it is actually relatively high (all this information came from a retroactive study that only came out in mid-March 2016, a response to the WHO’s calling the suspected links between Zika and neurological disorders a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on February 1st, 2016; now, it also seems Zika can lead to other problems for babies’ brains, including hearing loss).

The Zika virus in French Polynesia also seemed to lead to dramatically higher incidents of Guillain-Barré syndrome, a condition in which the immune system attacks the nervous system and can lead to paralysis and even death, a conclusion supported by a study released late February in 2016, also in response to the WHO. 

The origin of the French Polynesia outbreak remains unknown, but it seems to have been the one to spread Zika to other places in the Pacific, including Chile’s Easter Island, and Zika probably even spread to other Pacific locales without their populations’ or medical experts’ awareness.

Thus, a disease that had been known for well over half-a-century in parts of Africa and Asia that had never been associated with any serious illness all of a sudden capable of leading to paralysis, severe birth defects, even death.

Fast forward to early March, 2015, when Brazil informs the WHO that a strange new disease is spreading; from February through April, about 7,000 people report infection, but most of them only experience mild symptoms, mainly a rash.  From 425 blood samples, tests are conducted to determine what the infection is, with a number of diseases not being confirmed present in any of the tests and only dengue coming up, present in just 13% of the samples.

Going back, only a few weeks after Brazil’s 2014 World Cup, much smaller numbers of patients had been coming in with rashes, fevers, joint pain, and other mild symptoms. 

The disease kept spreading throughout the end of 2015 and beginning of 2016, but kept eluding diagnosis.

Then in May, Brazil was finally able to confirm that the mystery illness was caused by the Zika virus, transmitted by local mosquitoes.  In response, the WHO declared a Zika alert.  But local Brazilian officials seemed relieved it was Zika; the available studies on it at the time suggested that it was only a mild disease, not as bad as other regularly occurring diseases in Brazil, with studies confirming links to more serious complications during the French Polynesia outbreak not coming out until later, in 2016.  It seems that the virus was brought to Brazil in a way where it became established locally by either the 2014 World Cup or an international boat race that occurred a few weeks later.

But the virus can also spread easily from travelers spreading the disease on their own, without mosquitoes; New York City’s first case predated Brazil’s outbreak, and was detected in December 2013 in a man who had just traveled extensively in Latin-America and the Asia-Pacific region.

The relief in Brazil at the diagnosis of Zika quickly disappeared just weeks later when cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome shot up sharply, the sense of dread only worsening when microcephaly also later began showing up in abnormally large numbers.  As of August 17th, Brazil has had 1,845 reported cases of microcephaly and/or other infant neurological complications from, or likely from, Zika infections, with 2,957 cases still being investigated.  And not only has Zika spread all over Central and South America and the Caribbean, but locally-transmitted Zika cases have just begun happening in the continental United States, in the Miami, Florida area.  It is expected to spread locally (i.e., through local mosquito populations) elsewhere in the U.S., especially the mosquito-rich American southeast and Gulf Coast; Texas, for example, has already had 108 travel-related cases but not locally-transmitted ones so far, but the state’s response to a potential outbreak has been lacking; in some cases, prescriptions from doctors are even required for the appropriate mosquito repellent.

But what makes this situation far worse is that most people won’t be showing any symptoms even after they have been infected with the virus (but can still transmit the disease through sexual contact!), meaning many travelers, including those returning from the just-concluded Rio Olympics, will be carrying the disease with them around the world without knowing it, including in the U.S.  Furthermore, as in Brazil, it will be many months before babies will be born with or fetuses clearly exhibit microcephaly. 

There have been confirmed cases of travel-related Zika in every U.S. state, though so far, only Florida has developed locally transmitted (mosquito) cases.  But for Zika to be established locally, it wouldn’t take much: there are two types of mosquitoes known to be able to transmit Zika in the U.S., and they live in most of the East Coast, most of the Midwest, the Southeast, and much of the Southwest; global warming has helped expand the reach of these mosquitoes, and they would just need to bite someone infected with Zika from abroad to spread it to other people.  Additionally, a very small percentage of the time (a bit more than one-third of 1%) at least one of the two mosquito species’ mothers pass Zika to their eggs (which are “impervious” to pesticide) and therefore pass it on to new generations of mosquitoes, making containment even more difficult; it may seem like a small percentage, but when you think about how many mosquitoes there are in any given area, it is enough to make an impact.

Zika & Congressional Republicans in 2016: A Timeline & Microcosm of GOP’s Reckless Irresponsibility & Inability to Govern

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images: CDC Director discusses poor response to Zika

Yet the U.S. should hardly be caught flat-footed at this moment in time, even if that seems to be exactly what is happening: back in January of this year, about half a year before the first local/mosquito U.S. transmissions in Florida at the end of July, both the WHO (January 25th) and CDC warned (January 28th) that Zika, already “explosively” spreading in South America, was “likely” to spread to the U.S., and they were hardly alone in sounding the alarm that the U.S. was at risk.  And on February 1st, the WHO labeled Zika’s suspected links with neurological disorders a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.

Thankfully, after a February 5th request from Senate Democrats that President Obama forcefully address the threat of Zika, Obama acted swiftly, barely more than a week after the CDC warning, requesting nearly $2 billion in funds to help prevent and fight off a U.S. Zika outbreak (February 8th).  The funding would have included boosts to mosquito control programs, vaccine research, and educational efforts.

But not even two weeks later, leading Republicans in the House of Representatives rejected the president’s request (February 18th).  Enter politics: those leading House Republicans felt that existing money set aside for the State Department and for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to deal with an earlier Ebola scare should have been allocated to deal with Zika, and rejected the call for new funding.  The White House maintained that it would not support sabotaging efforts to keep Americans and others safe from Ebola, one of the world’s worst infectious diseases.  Even a compromise measure that would have seen about $1 billion in emergency Zika funding approved fell by the wayside because of the politics of Republican objections to the Iran nuclear deal and Republican infighting. Many (and important) Republicans in the Senate followed their House colleagues in questioning and resisting Obama’s request.

Eventually, in the face of Republican intransigence, the White House reluctantly felt compelled to use $589 million already set aside for other emergency preparedness programs (April 6th): $510 million from ongoing Ebola programs (including those run by USAID in Africa) and $79 million from other programs, including ones that strategically stockpiles vaccines and other supplies in case of serious outbreaks, a move that has various local jurisdictions worried about their abilities to meet other threats now.  The gutting of the Ebola programs could see their funding run out in October, which is when the funding Obama redirected to deal with Zika could also run out.

Republicans seemed awfully ready to dismiss such concerns of national and international public health, though the White House stressed that new funding was still then necessary.  In contrast, many Republicans at first wanted to avoid appropriating any new emergency funds and wanted the White House to appropriate (and later, keep appropriating) money from other emergency funds until a new discussion about new non-emergency standard funding can come about when decisions are made about how to fund the government for FY2017, which should begin being funded around October 1st, provided there is not a repeat of brinksmanship about a shutdown.

In essence, the Republicans were procedurally trying to treat Zika as if it were anything but an emergency in order to save money, oppose president Obama, and score political points on various fronts: some wanted to demand cuts in other areas in return, others did not want to see any spending bill passed whatsoever in a heated election year; things are particularly difficult in the House, where every Republican and Democrat is up for reelection this fall, and in which getting agreement just among GOP members is notoriously difficult (just ask former Speaker John Boehner or current Speaker Paul Ryan).

Even as Republicans in Congress delayed and obstructed, the WHO announced “a strong scientific consensus” that Zika was the cause of the more severe conditions it had been suspected of causing (March 31st), and CDC officials confirmed the suspicion that Zika was definitely a causeof birth defects, namely severe microcephaly (April 13th): “Never before in history has there been a situation where a bite from a mosquito can result in a devastating malformation,” noted the CDC Director Thomas R. Frieden.

In the second half of May, House Republicans finally passed a $622 million Zika bill (May 18th), far less than Obama had asked far (about one-third, to be more precise).  It was a bill that was only intended to provide funding for not even half a year and that took even more funding—over $352 million—away from Ebola programs and also took $270 million from HHS administrative funds.  For the Director of the CDC (who quipped: “It’s just not enough”) and other experts, such funding falls far short of what is necessary, limits and impairs effective responses, and is risky in that it jeopardizes preparedness for other emergencies. 

The White House threatened to veto the legislation; however, relative to the position of some Republicans that the funding for Zika could wait until the next fiscal year, this move, sadly, marked a sort of “progress.”  But Obama said he would veto the measure as grossly insufficient, a view shared even by Obama opponent and Sen. (and former presidential candidate) Marco Rubio, Florida’s lone Republican in the Senate (it probably helps that Florida is particularly vulnerable to Zika).

The Senate itself passed (May 19th) a measure that allocated $1.1 billion in new funding for Zika, nearly twice as much what the House approved; though it received much support from Senate Democrats, it was part of a huge spending bill, one that also faces a White House veto, but for reasons unrelated to Zika: included were provisions limiting the power of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and barring the president from closing the Guantánamo Bay military prison facility or from authorizing new facilities to house the prisoners now held there anywhere back in the U.S.Such is the way standard and ongoing political fights between the White House and Republicans come to affect pressing action on emergencies like the Zika virus.

Such is the way standard and ongoing political fights between the White House and Republicans come to affect pressing action on emergencies like the Zika virus.

Efforts to reconcile the House and Senate legislation ran into further political speed bumps in the weeks after their passings: Republicans in the House thought removing environmental protections against some pesticides was an appropriate measure to pass (May 24th), which earned a response from the White House which excoriated the move: “Rebranding legislation that removes important Clean Water Act protections for public health and water quality is not an appropriate avenue for addressing the serious threat to the nation that the Zika virus poses,” noting that exceptions already exist for emergencies like this one and that this is part of a larger, preexisting GOP agenda to loosen environmental restrictions on pesticides.  Republicans are also fighting against any additional abortion or contraceptive methods being used in response to sexually-transmissible Zika, with some preferring abstinence-only educational approaches: the Zika bill passed by the House did not even provide money for facilities that might use contraceptive methods to help fight the sexual spread of Zika. 

Things would only get worse: during the reconciliation process to merge the House and Senate bills into something final, amid the height of partisan rancor over gun control after this summer’s Orlando terrorist mass shooting at a gay nightclub and during a Democratic sit-in on that very issue of gun-control, Republicans saw to it that a provision was removed (June 23rd, around 3AM) that would have banned and prevented federal funding for official large flyings of “Confederate” rebel flags in federal cemeteries, itself a product of a contentious fight over the rebel Civil War flag that took place after the terrorist shooting of African-Americans in Charleston last summer.  Additionally, the final bill: cut $540 million in funding for Obamacare/ACA, did not provide any funding for contraceptive prevention providers (including, of course, any funds for Planned Parenthood) for this STD, and took an additional $107 million away from Ebola programs and another $100 million from administrative funding for HHS, with $750 million in total cuts/reallocations offsetting the $1.1 billion in Zika funding, funding which would sustain efforts to fight the disease through September 2017.  Unsurprisingly, Senate Democrats blocked the bill in a procedural vote on June 28th, having felt that by agreeing to an amount that was $800 million less than what the Obama Administration wanted was compromise enough, and that the cheap political ploys, especially blocking the funding of preventive contraceptive measures for the rapidly spreading STD that is Zika—a move that especially leaves poor women vulnerable—went too far.

So, too, did the White House, which said it would veto the legislation over the controversial provisions.

In fact, Obama noted (July 1st) that had funding already been approved, it is likely that a functional Zika vaccine would already be close to on its way; the president noted the delay in funding and the efforts to score cheap, often unrelated, political points in trying to deal with this emergency have prevented this from being the case and this unacceptable situation poses a serious—and seriously avoidable and unnecessary—national health risk: “It’s been politics as usual rather than responding to a very serious health request,” he said.

Even as new Congressional testimony by experts offered dire warnings on Zika (July 13th), the very next day (July 14th), Congress adjourned for its nearly two-month summer recess after failing again to bridge the divide: Republicans still decided it was better to use the vital, pressing funding for fighting Zika as a poker chip in a card game involving Obamacare, government spending, birth control, pesticides, even the “Confederate” flag rather than treat it as its own issue and its own end; after Republicans rejected an attempt by the Democrats to go back to the bipartisan $1.1 billion clean bill they had passed May 19th without the controversial political gimmicks—with GOP Senate leaders saying they had to accept the House bill as is because of procedure (a procedure the Senate Republican leadership had pursued without including Democrats in the process)—Democrats again blocked the new $1.1 billion measure with the controversial, sometimes counterproductive measures.  Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, who would be announced as Hillary Clinton’s VP pick over a week later, was at the hearing the day before and expressed what many are feeling: “This is why people hate Congress…This is why people hate Washington.”  At the same hearing, CDC Director Frieden somberly added that “This is no way to fight epidemics.”

Thus, Congress went on vacation during the peak of the threat of Zika spreading in the U.S. and over five months after Obama first asked for funding to fight Zika without providing funding to fight Zika.  The fight over Zika will resume again once Congress is back in session, in the fall, nearly seven months after the president first laid out his request.

And it was only a few weeks after Congress went on recess when news broke on July 29ththat Zika had been spread through local/mosquito transmission in Florida, the first/local mosquito transmissions in the continental U.S; the virus continues to spread in the state.

In response to the local transmissions in Florida, congressional Democrats urged Republican congressional leaders to call Congress back to session in order to pass a Zika bill (July 31st).  They repeated this call on August 4th.  Republican leaders, however, choose not to reconvene Congress.

On August 9th, the first Zika-related death of an infant in the U.S., one born with microcephaly in Texas, is announced.

On August 11th, Sec. Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the head of HHS, announced that her department’s money to fight ZIka—taken earlier by the Obama Administration from money set aside for the important Ebola and other emergency programs—would run out by the end of August.  In order to prevent a stoppage of the work to develop a critically important Zika vaccine, which had just begun clinical trials on people, she announced that she was taking $81 million away from other noteworthy programs: $34 million from programs at the National Institutes of Health for researching treatment of cancer, diabetes, and other diseases; $19 million from a program that provides heating oil for low-income families; $4 million to help substance abuse, among others.  On this day also, Democrats again call for Republican leaders in Congress to end the recess to pass a Zika bill.  This still has not happened.

On August 12th, the U.S. declares a public health emergency in Puerto Rico, where at that time well over 10,000 confirmed cases of Zika had occurred, nearly 10% of those with pregnant women.

On August 30th, the CDC noted that it would have no more funds to send to states if new outbreaks occurred.

And, oh, there could be another self-inflicted government shutdown this fall, further complicating health agencies’ abilities to combat Zika as chaos would envelop the funding and budgeting process.

Republicans Chose Politics Over Protecting Americans

Obama has for months repeatedly pleaded with Congressional Republicans to put politics aside in dealing with a potential Zika epidemic, but his efforts to publicly pressure Republicans, as is often the case, thus far have very little to show for them.  He is exercising his constitutional duty to protect the American people, but Congress is failing to do its constitutional to pass laws to do the same.

Let’s be clear about how absolutely miserably the Republican congressional delegation is failing to do its basic duties, is failing the American people: given the following choice, Republicans chose all the wrong ones:

• xA.) Respond by fully funding Obama’s request to protect Americans from Zika without taking money from other important emergency response programs
• ✓B.) Nickel-and-dime the president on this request and argue over funding levels for a pressing medical emergency when the funding request is relatively very small compared to general congressional spending levels
• ✓C.) Fund Obama’s request by taking money out of the ongoing emergency response to the deadly, horrific Ebola virus
• ✓D.) Pass a Zika bill that does not allow for federal support of contraception programs in trying to fight a virus that is sexually transmitted
• ✓E.) Use Obama’s request to continue the irrational, misleading fight over Planned Parenthood and contraception in general
• ✓F.) Use Obama’s request as a political excuse to defund Obamacare
• ✓G.) Use Obama’s request as a political excuse to loosen general long-term regulations on pesticides that can harm the American people even though exceptions for dealing with emergencies like Zika already exist
• ✓H.) Use Obama’s request as a political excuse to fight for federally funded public displays of the “Confederate” rebel flag, inarguably a symbol of white supremacy
• ✓I.) Blame Obama for not funding a Zika response because he doesn’t give in to outrageous political brinksmanship, à la the shutdown fights
• ✓J.) Keep refusing to fund the emergency response on terms acceptable (or sensible) to the Obama Administration and Democrats in order to force Obama to take money away from programs Republicans don’t like
• ✓K.) Don’t give Obama what he wants because it’s Obama asking for something and giving it to him is a “win” for Obama and Democrats during an election year, or during anything

Without question, Republicans very much did not choose A.), definitely chose B.) through I.), and arguably but quite likely chose J.) and K.). 

And all this regarding a public health emergency that could threaten thousands of American babies with lifelong mental defects and others with other conditions.  And Democrats are 100% right to oppose B.) through H.): to legitimize such political malpractice and allow such tawdry, cheap games to be played with a public health emergency is not a precedent that should be legitimized or tolerated in any way, at any time.  Zika is a serious public health emergency that deserves to be treated as an end in and of itself, not to be used as a political football to be kicked around in the process of arguing over unrelated issues. With the fight over Medicaid expansion and the 9/11 first-responders bill, we already saw that the GOP was more than willing to play politics with the health and lives of Americans, and now we have yet another example of such behavior.

The True Republican Party: Disgraceful Long Before Trump & Not to Be Trusted Either with Power or to Keep Americans Safe

Getty: GOP Leaders Speaker Paul Ryan & Majority Leader Mitch McConnell

Ladies and gentlemen, this choice calculus is today’s Republican Party.  And the thing is, none of this has to do with Trump: this is the Republican Party’s style, its governing ethos, its modus operandi, its political philosophy.  And this is nothing new: this is how this disgrace of a political party has operated for much of Obama’s time in the White House, for years now.  The stupidity, recklessness, and political gamesmanship with which the Republican Party approaches matters of life and death, of public health, of emergency concern are not in dispute and are made quite clear with the GOP’s behavior regarding the Zika emergency response.  In fact, the Republicans’ actions on Zika are a perfect microcosm of what the Republican Party is and is not: it is a farce and, as I noted last fall, is not a serious party deserving of our respect, let alone our vote. 

And, again, for all those who are trying to pin the failure of the Republican Party as a party on Trump, as if somehow the GOP is ok and respectable as long as Trump is removed from the picture, the Zika crisis makes it clear Trump is just one symptom of the disease that is the Republican Party itself.

Without a doubt, then, the Zika example is clear proof that the Republican Party is a disgrace and is not fit for or even capable of governing, with or without Trump.  It seems that Trump will lose (though who really knows?!), but Americans need to remember what the real Republican Party is, and not let it get away with deflecting blame away from the party itself onto Trump.  Who knows how many cases of Zika, present and future, could have been prevented—how many fewer babies with lifelong damage to their brains there would be, how many fewer mothers would be literally worried sick, how many deaths could have been prevented—if Republicans responded quickly and sensibly in February to Obama’s Zika request.

That request was made February 8th.  Tomorrow is September 1st.  How much longer will this continue?  How much longer will voters tolerate it? As far back as January, experts have been warning that the Gulf Coast, with its hot and humid climate, large mosquito populations, and large segments of populations living in poverty, was very vulnerable to Zika.  Many of these locations are in Republican congressional districts; will voters hold their representatives accountable this fall, as Zika spreads and most of these Republicans fail(ed) to protect their people from a fast-spreading disease that can cause serious complications, especially to the unborn?  Shame on the Republican Party.  But for people, especially in Zika-vulnerable places, who voted and vote for congressmen that played, play, and will play politics with Zika?  Shame on you, too.  And shame on America for having this be our response to such a major public health crisis.

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!

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

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)

(Russian/Русский перевод) Author’s note: the odyssey of “Nastya Rybka”—real name Anastasia Vashukevich—has only recently become even more complex with her deportation from Thailand and rough apprehension, detention, and shady release by authorities in Russia at the apparent behest of Russian billionaire oligarch and close Putin ally Oleg Deripaska, who clearly felt threatened enough by her to take drastic action to silence her. That it was also recently revealed that Manafort shared internal polling data during the 2016 campaign (i.e., collusion) with Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime Manafort partner with clear ties to Russian intelligence and who was acting as a go-between for Manafort and Deripaska, only adds to the importance of this saga withing the Trump-Russia saga.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse February 19, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) Updated April 26, 2022, to use the more sensitive term “sex-worker;” UPDATE: Instagram bowed to Kremlin pressure and removed the content in question

Support Brian and his work by donating here.

AMMAN—While I am proud of the following analysis, I want to point out that the brave Russian dissident, Alexey Navalny, deserve the real credit: he is placing his career as an activist and would-be politician, his family, his freedom, and his very health and life at risk in exposing the blatant, sordid truth about Putin and his henchmen and, in this case, their ties to Trump.

Navalny, who was trying to run against Putin for the presidency but whom Russian authorities have barred from competing in the election and have charged with bogus crimes, has been famous for some time for creating incredibly sharp YouTube videos exposing the corruption of top Russian officials à la Bill Browder (English/Russian Русский) of Magntisky Act fame.

One of Navalny’s latest videos was sparked by a group of apparent call girls who descended upon his office and tried to manufacture controversy for Navalny; this effort backfired as one of the young women, a sex-worker who calls herself “Nastya Rybka,” was easily identifiable from social media, and the much of the rest of the information presented in this video was from her online posts and a book she wrote. Navalny was able to put together what seems to be incontrovertible proof from public data and the verifiable information provided by “Rybka” to place her, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and a special guest on a yacht in Scandinavian waters in August of 2016.

If Deripaska’s name sounds familiar, it is because he is at the center of a good chunk of the intrigue surrounding Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. He is a fabulously wealthy Russian billionaire, an aluminum magnate and close Putin ally who has his own history with organized crime that has prevented him from getting a U.S. visa (even with 1996 Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole lobbying on his behalf). Deripaska partnered for years with Paul Manafort, Trump’s Campaign Chairman when Trump as a candidate closed out the Republican primaries and accepted the nomination at the Republican National Convention, and Rick Gates, a longtime aide to Manafort, on a number of shady multimillion-dollar shadow deals. One scheme involved a failed effort at trying to bend the tiny Balkan nation of Montenegro to Moscow’s will (interesting in light of an apparent recent Russian-backed failed coup attempt there late in 2016).

Another one of their projects involved Deripaska paying Manafort millions for promoting Putin’s and Russia’s interests, and a third, which Rick Gates joined, involved laundering millions for then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his inner circle, who were living astoundingly exorbitant lifestyles with the funds. That third caper eventually left Manafort and Gates in a messy financial dispute with Deripaska in the Cayman Islands, and after NBC News revealed the existence of a previously unknown $26 million loan with which Deripaska has graced Manafort, the level of publicly known business dealings between the two men rose to some $60 million. So one could say that Manafort, and to a lesser extent Gates, owed Derispaska bigtime after their joint work helping Putin and Yanukovych.

The pro-Russian Yanukovych was then-outgoing-Ukrainian (also pro-Russian) President Leonid Kuchma’s chosen successor back in 2004, and Kuchma tried to rig the election in Yanukovych’s favor, sparking Ukraine’s Orange Revolution that ended up seeing more pro-Western, more anti-Russian leaders come to power. After this, it would be the task of Manafort (with the help of Gates) to restore Yanukovych’s image and electoral prospects. Yanukovych was essentially Putin’s stooge in a dramatic stage play that eventually helped to subvert Ukraine to the Kremlin’s will, increasing the power of Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party—the Party of Regions—and finally seeing Yanukovych emerge as the victor in the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election. This remarkable comeback was accomplished with a massive political and lobbying effort—run by Manafort with Gates’s help—on behalf of Yanukovych and his Party of Regions (and its successor)—conducted side-by-side with an even more massive alleged money laundering scheme worth billions involving Ukrainian-Russian gas deals and the Russian mafia. Manafort is alleged to have played key roles in this operation, too, working with oligarchs and the Russian mafia to launder money through sham New York real estate deals. The proceeds of this overall scam allegedly went to fund Yanukovych and his political party and to bribe and control other Ukrainian politicians in order to bring them along to the Russian way of thinking at a time when the U.S. was working hard to strengthen its relations with Ukraine, meaning Manafort and Gates were acting against U.S. interests. This work of theirs continued until just before they ended upon Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. They have now both been indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in part because of money laundering related to this work in Ukraine. 

In putting the pieces together, Navalny was able to show that Deripaska was in close consultation on Russian policy with that special guest on his yacht: one of Russia’s deputy prime ministers, Sergei Prikhodko, a rare longtime survivor in Russia’s top leadership (one of the only major players from the days of Boris Yeltsin, Putin’s predecessor, to still be in place) who has a tremendous amount influence over Russian foreign policy, even greater than Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, according to Navalny. 

Navalny was able to piece all this together because that particularly entrepreneurial Russian escort, who claims to be Deripaska’s mistress, captured pictures and videos of the two Russian giants talking over such matters on board Deripaska’s yacht, enjoying a holiday in Scandinavian waters with the company of young escorts. In one of “Rybka’s” videos, Deripaska and Prikhodko and were discussing that favorite Russian punching bag, Victoria Nuland, a prominent former U.S. State Department official known for fighting against Russian geopolitical schemes, and the intrepid escort notes that they talked about many other political issues. She alleges in her book that Prikhodko (named only as “Papa” in the book) engaged in aggressive sexual harassment against her and others, and that Deripaska (given the moniker “Ruslan”) did not lift a finger to stop it, the only person to which the billionaire gave that kind of deference. 

Manafort reached out to Deripaska on July 7th, 2016, when he was still Trump’s Campaign Chairman, offering to brief him on Trump’s presidential campaign, presumably because of Deripaska’s closeness to Putin and senior Russian government officials. Deripaska’s yacht trip with Prikhodko began on August 6th, less than a month after Manafort offered to brief Deripaska. 

This is direct evidence that Deripaska was in contact with senior Russia government officials, discussing policy, at roughly the same time that Manafort was reaching out to him, and makes an even more compelling argument that Deripaska is still acting as an intermediary for the Kremlin and that Manafort’s relationship with Deripaska is one that could have compromised national security and American interests. 

Russia is already trying to block Navalny’s video in Russia and Deripaska is threatening to sue media outlets that report on it, and in an attack on Navalny in response to his video, Prikhodko referred to Deripaska as “my friend,” hardly denying their closeness.

Correction appended: this article originally misstated that Manafort’s home was raided by the FBI July 26th, 2016, but it was actually 2017.

See related article: Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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!