You don’t have to change the vote to hack the election. What they did is plenty enough. They took the data they needed and used it to suppress the Clinton vote. They cheated to win without changing the vote numbers directly. That’s what’s in the indictment. And what else is out there, we don’t know yet. But we do know via this indictment that a US Congressional candidate is in this mix.
More to come.
Susan B Glasser/New Yorker:
Thanks to Robert Mueller, Trump and Putin Now Have a Summit Agenda
Rosenstein dropped another astonishing revelation into his press conference: President Trump had been aware all along about the charges against Russian actors, and had been briefed on them by the Justice Department even before he left for Europe. “The President is fully aware of the department’s actions today,” Rosenstein told reporters as he announced the indictments, which lay out in methodical detail the ways in which agents of the Russian government systematically worked to infiltrate the Democrats’ 2016 campaign with the apparent goal of helping Trump win the American Presidency.
Trump knew the indictment was coming when he bragged about what an easy meeting he would have with Putin. He knew it was coming when he once again attacked the investigation by his own government as “rigged.” And he knew it was coming when he rambled on about an agenda for the Helsinki summit that would cover just about everything but the Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. Talk about brazen.
And by the way, everyone expects Americans to be the next indictment targets. Roger Stone? More?
Robert Kagan/WaPo:
Things will not be okay
Human beings often choose self-delusion over painful reality, and so in the days and weeks to come, we will hear reassurances that the NATO alliance is in good shape. After all, there have been spats in the past — over the Suez crisis in 1956, Vietnam in the 1960s and ’70s, missile deployment in the Reagan years and, of course, Iraq. American presidents have been complaining about shortfalls in European defense spending for decades. President Trump is not wrong to criticize Germany’s pipeline deal with Russia. As for this week’s fractious summit, we are urged to focus on the substance, not the rhetoric. U.S. forces in Europe have been beefed up in recent years, and new plans are in place to resist Russian aggression. On the ground, the alliance still functions.
All true, but unfortunately beside the point. Small troop deployments and incremental defense increases don’t mean much when the foundations of the alliance are crumbling — as they are and have been for some time.
WaPo:
Trump’s tough words for Merkel and May raise questions about his relationships with female leaders
Trump’s tense relationship with Merkel and May is rooted in real policy disagreements on issues such as trade, defense spending and immigration, U.S. and European officials said.
But other analysts noted that the two female leaders had been less willing than others, such as French President Emmanuel Macron or Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, to cater to his ego. “I think it is much more about their approach to him,” said Danielle Pletka, the vice president for foreign policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Both of them have been confrontational toward him, and that’s not a good way to manage Donald Trump in my opinion.”
Then there was a third explanation touted by several European diplomats over the past week: their gender. Trump has been particularly quick to praise self-styled strongmen, from North Korea leader Kim Jong Un to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who he is slated to meet Monday in Helsinki.
“Everyone noted that Trump has been particularly harsh to the two female world leaders,” said one European official.
Well, duh.
Financial Times:
Tower of secrets: the Russian money behind a Donald Trump skyscraper
Please use the sharing tools found via the email icon at the top of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach ofFT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
https://www.ft.com/trumptoronto
The Financial Times has been investigating the money behind Trump Toronto for 10 months. Legal documents, signed statements and two dozen interviews with people with knowledge of the project and the money that flowed through it reveal that the venture connects the US president with a shadowy post-Soviet world where politics and personal enrichment merge.
William Davies/New York Times:
Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Rise of Radical Incompetence
Like America’s president, Brexiteers resent the very idea of governing as complex and based in facts.
Like so many political metaphors, the distinction between “hard” and “soft” is misleading. Any Brexiteer wanting to perform machismo will reach for the “hard” option. But as has become increasingly plain over the past two years, and especially over recent weeks, nobody has any idea what “hard” Brexit actually means in policy terms. It is not so much hard as abstract. “Soft” Brexit might sound weak or halfhearted, but it is also the only policy proposal that might actually work.
What appear on the surface to be policy disputes over Britain’s relationship with Brussels are actually fundamental conflicts regarding the very nature of political power. In this, the arguments underway inside Britain’s Conservative Party speak of a deeper rift within liberal democracies today, which shows no sign of healing. In conceptual terms, this is a conflict between those who are sympathetic to government and those striving to reassert sovereignty.
When we speak of government, we refer to the various technical and bureaucratic means by which policies and plans are delivered. Government involves officials, data-gathering, regulating and evaluating. As a governmental issue, Brexit involves prosaic problems such as how to get trucks through ports. Sovereignty, on the other hand, is always an abstract notion of where power ultimately lies, albeit an abstraction that modern states depend on if they’re to command obedience. As a sovereignissue, Brexit involves bravado appeals to “the people” and “the nation.” These are two incommensurable ideas of what power consists of, although any effective state must have both at its disposal.
And we have our own abstract fight:
Click the first tweet or read it all here.
Brookings:
Trump owns a shrinking Republican party
Nonetheless, it is clear that Republican House candidates are not running away from their president.
On the other side of the coin, however, is evidence of overall erosion in the brands of both political parties. As the following graph of Gallup polls indicates, both political parties find themselves less popular now than they did in 2004 with a substantial rise in those who identify as independents. For the Democrats, party identification peaked in Obama’s first term and then dropped in his second term. For Republicans, party identification took a sharp drop at the end of George W. Bush’s second term and never really recovered. The trend seems to have taken another drop after Trump’s election.
Paul Waldman/WaPo:
What the Jim Jordan scandal tells us about GOP morality
Today, when allegations of this sort surface against a Democrat, the first impulse of those in the Democratic Party is to assume that the victims are probably telling the truth and ask whether the member should resign. That wasn’t always their response in the past, but now it is. The first impulse of Republicans when such a scandal touches their own, on the other hand, is to defend the member no matter what the facts suggest and charge that it’s a liberal conspiracy.
That may be partly because they all pledged their loyalty to a president who is on tape bragging about his ability to commit sexual assault with impunity (“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”), and who was credibly accused of sexual misconduct by a dozen women. Whatever the reasons, they haven’t caught up to the morality of the 21st century.
National Review:
According to political experts, Virginia can be considered either the northernmost southern state or the southernmost northern state. Recent Democratic successes and shifting demographics seem to favor the latter view. The main areas of recent population growth have been Democratic areas — Northern Virginia, just outside the District of Columbia; the capital, Richmond; and Henrico County in the Richmond suburbs. Meanwhile, the population has declined in the southwest and in Hampton Roads, the former a Republican stronghold and the latter a battleground. From 2000 to 2010, Virginia’s Hispanic population, which tends to support Democrats, increased by 92 percent, with two-thirds of that growth concentrated in Northern Virginia.
One experienced Republican activist argues that “Virginia is more like a purple state with a roller-coaster pattern than it is a red state turning blue.” But Mike Murphy, a longtime GOP political consultant, says: “The state is turning blue, and the Republicans are responding to that by turning crazy. That is a cycle that will electorally wipe out the party, at least at the state level.”