The New York Times: The Surprising Place Mueller Found Resistance to Trump

The strongest pushback against President Trump came instead from a source never contemplated by the founders: his own branch of the government. The F.B.I. and the intelligence agencies opened their investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election even before Mr. Trump took the oath of office. The president thought that he could quash this inquiry by dismissing James Comey, the F.B.I. director, but as the president’s strategist Steve Bannon reportedly cautioned, “you can’t fire the F.B.I.” Mr. Trump’s appointee as deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, initiated the special counsel inquiry and appointed Mr. Mueller to lead it, while Attorney General Jeff Sessions — an early Trump backer — refused to “unrecuse” himself from the Russia investigation.

Even more surprising, resistance arose from key White House personnel. In June 2017, when Mr. Trump tried to remove Mr. Mueller, the White House counsel Donald McGahn refused to carry out the directive. The next month, when Trump tried to get Mr. Sessions to limit the special counsel’s jurisdiction, the White House deputy chief of staff, Rick Dearborn, declined to relay the order to the attorney general. Later in July 2017, when Mr. Trump told White House chief of staff Reince Priebus to demand Mr. Sessions’s resignation, Mr. Priebus refused. Mr. McGahn also disobeyed the president’s early 2018 directive to create a false paper trail obscuring an earlier effort by Mr. Trump to have the special counsel fired.

The resistance to the president from within the executive branch is not a new phenomenon. Clashes between the president and cabinet officials date back to George Washington’s conflicts with his first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson. President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, routinely disobeyed his boss’s instructions on matters ranging from press contacts to arms control talks. What makes the pushback to President Trump unique is that it has trumpeted its existence in the open.

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The Atlantic: Trump’s Evangelical Allies Really Didn’t Like Jeff Sessions

American Christian leaders did not like former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who resigned the day after the midterm elections at the president’s request. Not just progressive Christians who abhor the Trump administration: Many of President Donald Trump’s staunch evangelical allies, along with more moderate conservative leaders, also found Sessions lacking in his role. This is curious, because Sessions is himself a conservative Christian who promoted a religious-right brand of politics. And he spent much of his time in office supporting conservative religious causes. [...]

Johnnie Moore, the advisory council’s de facto spokesman and a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, told me there was “widespread dissatisfaction across the board from the conservative, evangelical elements of Trump’s base who believed Sessions to be weak and ineffective.” Notably, Moore added, Sessions alienated the “more moderate end of [Trump’s] evangelical base, who were dissatisfied with some of his enforcement actions, his visceral opposition to criminal-justice reform, and the tactics he supported for handling illegal immigration.”

Other Trump advisers had different reasons for their disapproval. He was seen as an obstacle to one of the main goals of the evangelical advisory group: instituting prison reform. And immigration, in particular, made Sessions unpopular among many conservative Christian groups. Sessions invoked the ire of a number of pastors, progressive and conservative alike, when he quoted the Bible to justify his department’s policy of separating families and children at the border.

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The Atlantic: What Sessions’s Resignation Means for Robert Mueller

Legal experts and political strategists who have either worked directly with the president or observed his behavior from afar attributed Trump’s reluctance to fire Sessions to two major considerations: fears in the White House that the move would cost the president support among GOP voters and members of Congress, who generally like and support Sessions, and the risk of provoking further allegations of obstruction of justice—both of which could deepen the challenges already facing the administration.

Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, told me that Trump’s decision to oust Sessions and replace him with Whitaker probably wouldn’t be considered an obstructive act in and of itself. But it could add to the “totality of the circumstances” surrounding a series of moves Trump has taken to try to stymie the Russia investigation since early last year, Honig said, including his firing of former FBI Director James Comey and his attacks on Sessions.[...]

Whitaker will be the acting attorney general until a permanent replacement is nominated, Trump tweeted on Wednesday, and he’ll be overseeing the Mueller investigation directly in his new post. While he has touted Mueller’s character—“There is no honest person that sits in the world of politics, in the world of law, that can find anything wrong with Bob Mueller,” he told CNN last year—he seems to have already formed an opinion on the probe itself. In a tweet, Whitaker said an article that characterized Mueller’s investigators as a “lynch mob” was a “must read,” and he told CNN that if Sessions were fired, his replacement could “reduce” Mueller’s budget in such a way that it would grind his investigation almost to a halt. He also shared an article on Twitter that explored the process by which Trump could fire Mueller, said in a radio interview that “there is no criminal obstruction-of-justice charge to be had” against Trump, and defended the Trump campaign’s decision to meet with Russian nationals to obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton—a meeting Mueller has been closely examining.“You would always take the meeting,” Whitaker told CNN last year. “You certainly want to have any advantage, any legal advantage you can.” Whitaker is also friendly with Sam Clovis—a key grand-jury witness in the Mueller probe—and chaired his state-treasurer campaign in 2014.[...]

Trump’s move could still backfire. Without the administration’s protection, Sessions may now find himself both more vulnerable and more inclined to cooperate with Mueller, who has been investigating a period last summer when Trump privately discussed firing Sessions and attacked him in a series of tweets. At one point, the FBI opened an investigation into whether Sessions perjured himself in congressional testimony when he said he had no contact with Russians during the campaign.“It’s possible that Sessions will now be either angry or, at a minimum, no longer feel any need to curry favor with the president,” Kris said. Sessions’s conversations during the campaign with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and the Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos have been closely scrutinized by the special counsel, moreover, and Sessions’s campaign-era interactions with Trump would not be covered by executive privilege, Kris noted.

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Vox: The Bible says to welcome immigrants. So why don’t white evangelicals?

In the wake of that violence, it’s worth asking a wider point: How did white evangelicals come to so fully embrace the Trumpian rhetoric on immigration? How did a religious group whose foundational sacred text explicitly mandates care for the poor, the sick, and the stranger become a reliable anti-refugee, anti-immigrant voting bloc?

In January, a Washington Post/ABC poll found that a staggering 75 percent of white evangelicals in the US described “the federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants” as a positive thing, compared to just 46 percent of Americans overall. And according to a Pew Research Center poll in May, 68 percent of white evangelicals say that America has no responsibility to house refugees, a full 25 points over the national average.

White evangelicals are the only Christian group to express this level of hostility toward refugees. While just 25 percent of them say they think Americans should house refugees, white mainline Protestants, black Protestants, and Catholics all express support for refugees by between 43 and 65 points. Meanwhile, according to another July poll by the Public Religion Research Initiative (PRRI), more than half of white evangelicals report feeling concerned about America’s declining white population. [...]

Over the past few years, she’s noticed what she called “a very slow theological turn within the evangelical community to redefine what seemed like very basic ... verses about the care of the poor and caring for the outcast. On one hand, they might say, ‘Oh, you know, Jesus was born of a literal virgin’ ... but when it comes to these verses about the poor and about refugees, in particular, all of a sudden, literalism disappears.”

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The Atlantic: The Awkward Alliance Between Democrats and Jeff Sessions

Senate Democrats were aghast when Donald Trump, then the president-elect, named one of his staunchest campaign supporters to lead the Justice Department a few weeks after his surprise election victory. They viewed Sessions as a virulently anti-immigrant legislator with a racist past, and as a Trump loyalist who would do the president’s bidding as attorney general while blocking criminal-justice reform and taking a buzz saw to civil and voting rights. All but one Democrat—Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia—voted against Sessions’s confirmation. And Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts fought so strenuously to defeat him that Senate Republicans used an obscure parliamentary rule to silence her.

As attorney general, Sessions has confirmed many of Democrats’ worst fears when it comes to policy, and in the early months of the Trump administration, a number of them called on him to resign over one controversy or another. But after the president’s latest round of attacks on his attorney general, and new comments from Republicans suggesting that he might be fired, Democrats now find themselves in the uncomfortable position of wanting Sessions to stay for one simple reason: He’s one of the only people standing between Trump and an abrupt end to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian collusion and obstruction of justice. [...]

Senate Republicans have generally tried to protect their former colleague , warning Trump that it would be all but impossible to confirm a successor if Sessions was fired. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley even said at one point in 2017 that he would have no time to hold confirmation hearings on a replacement. But in recent days, that wall of support appears to have weakened a bit.[...]

Jeffries acknowledged that the calculus might change if Democrats win at least the House majority in November, giving them more power to protect Mueller on their own and making Sessions expendable. Winning the Senate would mean they could block confirmation of a new attorney general without help from Republicans.

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Vox: Jeff Sessions announces a religious liberty task force to combat “dangerous” secularism

The task force will be spearheaded by Associate Attorney General Jesse Panuccio and Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy Beth Williams. The Advocate reports that in 2010, Panuccio, as an attorney, defended supporters of Proposition 8, a 2008 ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage in California for nearly five years. More specific details of the task force’s structure and organization have not yet been announced.

Sessions painted a nightmarish portrait of what he described as a lack of religious liberty protections plaguing American society. “We have gotten to the point,” he said, “where courts have held that morality cannot be a basis for law, where ministers are fearful to affirm, as they understand it, holy writ from the pulpit, and where one group can actively target religious groups by labeling them a ‘hate group’ on the basis of their sincerely held religious beliefs.” [...]

He’s advocating for the kind of Christian nationalism — blending patriotism and evangelical Christianity — that the administration has consistently used to legitimize its aims and shore up its evangelical base. [...]

Sessions’s vision of religious liberty as, fundamentally, active and interventionist government support of religious identity seems to be in line with his wider political philosophy. Last month, for example, Sessions used the Bible verse Romans 13 to justify separating migrant families at the US-Mexico border. He used it on the grounds that the verse — part of a letter written by St. Paul urging an early Christian Roman community not to participate in a political uprising — legitimized absolute submission to government authority.

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FiveThirtyEight: GOP Criticism Of Trump Is All Talk — But It Still Matters

Political scientists have done a great deal of research to figure out how much the president’s words matter — if they matter at all. Here’s what’s generally agreed upon: Presidential communication matters in a number of important ways. It can shape what issues citizens think about in the first place, how the public views the particular meaning or context of a major event, and provide important cues to partisans about where the party stands on a given issue.

Trump is facing a different dynamic than other presidents, though: He’s regularly contradicted by members of his own party on Capitol Hill. Take the president’s downplaying of Russian interference in the 2016 election. It will be harder for Trump to convince even most Republicans of these arguments as long as senators from his own party, like South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, keep saying there was interference. Indeed, a (small) majority of Republicans believe the U.S. intelligence agencies’ finding that Russia interfered.  [...]

On paper, Trump, particularly on foreign policy, can still largely ignore Congress and implement his agenda if he chooses. But in reality, he keeps backtracking. Take his interest in implementing a more pro-Russia foreign policy. We think the criticism from congressional Republicans is a big part of that hesitancy on Trump’s part. The verbal opposition from fellow Republicans tends to lead to an escalation of opposition against Trump. Criticism by fellow Republicans frees the press, always leery of appearing too liberal, to attack controversial Trump initiatives more directly. That bipartisan and media opposition helps move the public in these instances to oppose what Trump is doing. Facing such opposition, the president often retreats. [...]

When the White House said last week that it was considering allowing the Russian government to interrogate Michael McFaul, who was the U.S. ambassador to Russia under Obama, the Senate passed a 98-0 nonbinding resolution condemning the idea, which the administration had by then disavowed.

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The Atlantic: Religious Leaders Condemn Family Separations—but Not Necessarily Trump

But the volume of the criticism can also be deceiving. Many of the groups that have been most vocal against the border policy are already outspoken Trump skeptics. Among the ranks of Trump’s closest allies—including those who advise him on conservative religious voters—the condemnation has been more tempered. Some even see hypocrisy in this latest round of media attention to the border, pointing to Obama-era policies, which also jeopardized the welfare of children. [...]

Of all the comments made against the administration’s “zero-tolerance policy” in the last week, Graham’s have been the most surprising. The preacher’s son has recently been on a tour across America encouraging evangelicals to turn out and vote, and his comments on and off the stage are often highly supportive of the president and Republican policy priorities. Outright criticism of a Trump administration policy is unusual for Graham. But his recent comments arguably were more nuanced than that: He also said the president isn’t responsible for the situation at the border. On social media, he reaffirmed his opposition to family separations, but also noted that “many in the media want to portray this as @POTUS’s fault, but this predates him by decades.” He objects to the way the situation at the border has been politicized, he added: “It’s even more disgraceful to see that our political leaders won’t work together in a bipartisan effort to solve this. Some just want to use the situation for their own political gain.”

A number of other religious leaders close to Trump’s inner circle have echoed Graham’s caution. Jentezen Franklin, a mega-church pastor from Gainesville, Georgia, who serves on Trump’s evangelical advisory board, told me in an interview that Trump “really does want to do the right thing for these families and these children.” He condemned Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s use of the Scripture to justify family separations—“I don’t believe the Bible is on his side,” he said—but expressed frustration with criticism of the president. “I think it’s disingenuous to just attack President Trump when he didn’t create the problem,” Franklin said. “He didn’t start the problem. But he’s willing to fix the problem permanently if Congress will just do their job.”

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The Guardian: Trump is creating his American caliphate, and democracy has no defence

To those of us who grew up in the Arab world, where Islam is often invoked by “secular” regimes in order to stem political opposition, and who are accustomed to this charade of piety, there is something chilling yet comforting in observing the authoritarian evolution of the Trump administration. There is a reason why some of those regimes will not do away with blasphemy laws, so handy are they in purging political opponents. It is chilling to see religion used this way in a supposedly sophisticated, liberal democracy, and in particular this element of it, which reduces politics to mere compliance. But it is comforting, in a macabre way, to have it proved that nowhere in the world have humans evolved beyond instrumentalising religion to justify tyranny. The most bewildering thing about US dictator creep isn’t that it’s happening: it’s that it is happening with such predictability.

The terror of the Trump doctrine is not in its innovation but in its imitation. The last few months are a testament to the fact that history is not past, that the passage of time does not necessarily imply progress. The words Sessions quoted were used in the 1840s and 50s to justify slavery. When abolitionists argued that slavery was cruel, and that separating families was a violation of religious ethics, they were met with the argument of religious compliance with the law. John Fea, a history professor at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, told the Washington Post: “Whenever Romans 13 was used in the 18th and 19th century – and Sessions seems to be doing the same thing, so in this sense there is some continuity – it’s a way of manipulating the scriptures to justify your own political agenda.”

The invocation of piety is also familiarly threadbare when the behaviour of this holy sovereign, allegedly with God’s will vested in him, is taken into account. Trump is a man mired in allegations of infidelity committed across the course of his three marriages. His church attendance was summed up in his statement that he had “never asked God for forgiveness”, and he referred to communion as “my little wine” and “my little cracker”. Yet he received 80% of the white evangelical vote. Of his unlikely Christian support base, Amy Sullivan, in the New York Times, says: “Decades of fearmongering about Democrats and religious liberals have worked. 80% of white evangelicals would vote against Jesus Christ himself if he ran as a Democrat.”

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Vox: Jeff Sessions could be expelled from the Methodist Church over migrant policies

More than 600 Methodist clergy and church members are bringing formal church charges against Attorney General Jeff Sessions, invoking a rarely used church procedure to condemn the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their families at the US-Mexico border. [...]

“I really never would have thought I’d be working on charges against anybody in the Methodist connection, much less a lay person,” Pastor David Wright, who organized the effort to charge Sessions, told the United Methodist Church’s news service (UMNS). He expressed hope that the charges would prompt Sessions to reconsider his views. “I hope his pastor can have a good conversation with him and come to a good resolution that helps him reclaim his values that many of us feel he’s violated as a Methodist,” he said. [...]

David F. Watson, a professor of New Testament studies at United Theological Seminary, told Religion News Service that in the past, charges have typically been brought only against clergy who perform same-sex marriages, a hot-button issue that continues to divide the Methodist Church. (Currently, both same-sex marriage and LGBTQ ordination are officially prohibited by the UMC handbook, but a proposed plan would delegate authority to make decisions about celebrating LGBTQ weddings or ordinations to the church level.)  [...]

The UMC is just one of many Christian religious organizations that have taken action to condemn Trump’s migrant policy, particularly in the wake of the White House’s assertion Thursday that it is acting “biblically.” Last week, the evangelical Southern Baptist Convention unanimously passed a resolution affirming the dignity of immigrants and condemning nativism. Attendees at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops likewise slammed Trump’s migrant policy. Even Franklin Graham, the son of the late evangelical preacher Billy Graham, and a longtime Trump ally, spoke out against the policy, although he did not criticize Trump by name.

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The Atlantic: Why Trump Hasn’t Fired Sessions (APR 13, 2018 )

The president has fired or forced out upwards of 20 cabinet officials and top aides, so why does the man he has most-often criticized still have a job? And what would happen if he were fired, which Trump has reportedly been mulling this week? Legal experts and political strategists who have either worked directly with the president or observed his behavior from afar attribute Trump’s reluctance to fire Sessions to two major considerations: Fears in the White House that the move would cost the president support among GOP voters and members of Congress, who generally like and support Sessions, and the risk of provoking further allegations of obstruction of justice—both of which could deepen the challenges already facing the administration. [...]

Some legal experts disagree, arguing that, depending on Trump’s motives, such a dismissal could actually constitute obstruction. “The issue would be whether the president had a corrupt purpose—that is, a desire to cover up his own wrongdoing—when he fired Sessions,” Louis Seidman, a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown, said. Seidman acknowledged the debate among legal scholars about whether a sitting president can be charged as such for performing acts that are otherwise within their constitutional powers. But he said he believes Trump could be charged with obstruction because “obstruction of justice, by its nature, is inconsistent with the president’s constitutional authority to take care that the laws are faithfully executed.” Jens David Ohlin, a professor at Cornell Law School who specializes in criminal law, said he believed that firing Sessions “would immediately provoke a political crisis for Trump and would accelerate impeachment talk—because the firing would be a major obstruction of justice, this one even larger than the Comey firing.” And despite its skepticism of the legal merits, it’s clear that the White House is taking the political consequences of the charge seriously. Roger Stone, a long-time informal adviser to Trump, said the president’s advisors “have convinced him he will be impeached if he does” fire Sessions. [...]

The former campaign adviser raised this as an issue, too, noting that the Senate Judiciary Committee has warned Trump that it won’t hold confirmation hearings for a new attorney general if Sessions is dismissed (and leading Senate Republicans said last summer that recess appointments were not an option). But that was then, and this is now, said the person familiar with the president’s thinking. “If you had asked me six months ago what the consequences would be if Trump fired Sessions or Rosenstein, I would have said: ‘He would be impeached and Republicans would be leading the way.’ Now, I’m not so sure.” This person, who is a Republican, pointed to what he saw as the GOP’s reluctance to hold Trump accountable for actions ranging from firing former FBI Director James Comey to failing to adequately address allegations that he had his lawyer pay hush money to a porn star. “If Trump makes the political calculation that he can weather the storm of firing these guys, whether it’s Sessions or Rosenstein, and shutting down the investigation, he’ll do it,” this person said.

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The Atlantic: Ukraine’s Successful Courtship of Trump

Trump has said repeatedly that “no one is tougher on Russia” than him. But his critics have accused him of challenging Putin only superficially. Shortly after the Trump administration expelled 60 Russian diplomats in March—48 of whom were actually intelligence officers, according to a State Department spokesperson—the State Department acknowledged that the Kremlin would be allowed to refill the vacated positions. The Treasury Department recently sanctioned more than three dozen Russian oligarchs, officials, and entities who “profit” from Russia’s “malign activity” and “corrupt system.” But many of the sanctioned oligarchs had four months’ notice to move their money, thanks to a list of Russia’s wealthiest individuals released by the Treasury in January. That money might already be back in Russia. “As they say, ‘a barking dog cannot hinder a caravan’s journey,’” Putin told Russia’s TASS news agency at the time. He mocked his own absence from the list. When UN Ambassador Nikki Haley announced new sanctions against Russia over its support for embattled Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, she was contradicted by the White House hours later. [...]

Trump, ever transactional, also wanted to make sure he was not giving away something for nothing. The U.S. official said it was emphasized to the president that this would be a sale, not a gift, and Poroshenko won favor with Trump by facilitating an $80 million coal deal—the first between the U.S. and Ukraine—that was politically expedient for both leaders. In February, Ukrainian Railways signed a $1 billion locomotive deal with GE Transportation. Trump had promised during the campaign to revitalize the U.S. rail industry. “The Trump administration is very much focused on jobs creation,” said Daniel Vajdich, the president of the strategic advisory firm Yorktown Solutions. “So, naturally, Ukraine has thought about its ability to help create jobs for Americans in the context of creating leverage by feeding into Trump’s policy desires.” A Ukrainian-American lobbyist who spoke to me on condition of anonymity put it more bluntly: “Poroshenko has become a hostage of Trump,” he told me. [...]

In the months following the weapons sale, Poroshenko ordered Ukraine’s top anti-corruption prosecutor tasked with probing corruption under former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to stop cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s work in Ukraine and ties to Russia, according to two sources familiar with the request. The New York Times first reported on that order on Wednesday, indicating that Kiev had blocked the Manafort investigations just as the Trump administration was finalizing the weapons deal in an attempt to stay on Trump’s good side. Trump, according to the U.S. official, saw Manafort’s legal problems as a function of Yanukovych’s regime rather than a reflection of Poroshenko’s.

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FiveThirtyEight: Which Power Centers In The Trump Administration Still Have Power?

But recent developments suggest the power couple is running low on wattage. Two White House aides who were close to the pair resigned. (Hicks and Kushner press aide Josh Raffel). Kushner’s access to classified information has been curtailed. And Ivanka Trump’s proposal to create a national paid leave program for new parents has stalled. Whether they keep working at the White House or opt at some point to return to New York, “Javanka” is having fairly limited influence in Trump’s Washington. [...]

Still, much of Trump’s national security agenda is little different from the perspective of Arizona Sen. John McCain, long a leader in the Republican Party on defense issues. Trump, who suggested during the campaign that the U.S. military was too involved in conflicts abroad, has increased the number of troops in Afghanistan and kept up the U.S. policy of using drones to target terrorists abroad. Aside from his bombastic rhetoric and his policy on Russia, much of Trump’s approach is fairly normal for a Republican on national security issues. [...]

And second, the number of departures from the administration should not obscure a broader story of policy stability. Cohn is leaving, and he was perhaps the administration’s most important figure on economic policy. But the dominant figures on other issues remain, including Mattis (national security), Miller (immigration), Pence (abortion and priorities of social conservatives), Pruitt (the environment) and Sessions (criminal justice). Trump may seem erratic. But generally, his policy preferences — perhaps shaped by these powerful advisers — are somewhat predictable.

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The Atlantic: The American far-right is crashing after its Trump victory high

Within the White House, the far right has been practically decimated. With Steve Bannon’s departure, and recent excommunication, the Breitbart faction has become marginalized. Clowns like “Dr” Sebastian Gorka have been kicked out, while others, including his wife, Katharine Gorka, work under the shadow of being purged, too. The attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has fallen out of Trump’s favor, but remains influential within the Department of Justice and a continuing threat to the rights and protections of minorities. [...]

Outside the White House, the situation of the far-right movement is not much better. The extreme right, hiding behind the term “alt-right”, of racists like David Duke and Richard Spencer has expressed great political ambitions, but has been unable to bring together more than 100 people since the deadly demonstration in Charlottesville in August. They remain an online troll army, which mainly survives because of the disproportionate attention of the (mostly liberal) media. They have no political relevance outside of their violent potential. [...]

Within the Republican party, longstanding radical right politicians like Dana Rohrabacher of California and Steve King of Iowa might have become even more open about their nativism and support for Vladimir Putin, but they remain fairly marginal within both Congress and the White House. At the same time, at the local and state level, many establishment Republicans now run radical right campaigns, hoping to profit from the illustrious Trump effect, but it is doubtful they will actually vote as radical rightists (if they get elected). And even if they do, it is doubtful it will be enough for the still radicalizing base, who in 2016 considered former “Tea Party warriors” as “establishment Republicans”.

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FiveThirtyEight: The Identity Politics Of The Trump Administration

The administration is not proposing less intervention from the federal government, which is the typical Republican approach, but rather it is seeking to wield federal power, just as Obama did. But whereas Obama’s policies focused on protecting African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, people who are gay or transgender, and other groups that most Americans view as marginalized, Trump and his team are focusing on defending different groups: Christians, police officers, victims of crimes by undocumented immigrants, and people who fear Latino immigrants are taking their jobs or redefining U.S. culture, among others. [...]

The Department of Justice, and law-enforcement agencies generally, have broad discretion in terms of what crimes to prioritize, what kinds of punishment to pursue and how they operate. Both Obama and Trump have used that authority — or, in Trump’s case, pledged to use that authority — to focus resources on the issues they and their voters care about most. And Trump, like Obama, is trying to push local law-enforcement agencies to emphasize those same priorities. [...]

In political terms, Obama was shifting law-enforcement practices in ways that would particularly benefit African-Americans and Latinos, two blocs that largely backed him in 2008 and 2012. Trump is shifting practices to favor five other groups: legal U.S. residents who might be the victims of violent attacks by undocumented immigrants; legal residents who might lose out on jobs or face lowered wages due to competition from undocumented immigrants; Americans who believe that allowing undocumented people to come and stay is a sign of disorder; police officers; and border-enforcement personnel. Trump, of course, won overwhelming support among voters concerned about illegal immigration in both the 2016 primaries and the general election, and he was endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police and by unions that include members of the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement service. [...]

But the Trump administration, despite its generally get-tough posture, does have a soft spot for one group that has technically violated the law: those addicted to opioids. At the launch of the president’s task force on opioid abuse in March, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is leading the task force, likened drug addiction to cancer, heart disease and diabetes, saying addiction is a disease that people should not be ashamed to talk about. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, the states facing the highest rates of death from drug overdoses are West Virginia, New Hampshire, Kentucky and Ohio. Three of those states — Kentucky, New Hampshire and West Virginia — have smaller black and Latino populations than the national average. The opioid problem has hit heavily white areas of America, and some experts say that explains why it has not led to the type of tough-on-crime policies that came amid the crack epidemic in black areas in the 1980s and 1990s.

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Al Jazeera: Taking a step against US impunity in Guantanamo

Djamel Ameziane was detained without charges for eleven years at Guantanamo. During this time, he faced prolonged incommunicado detention, multiple forms of torture, and never received a judicial determination regarding the legality of his detention. Although the government first approved him for transfer from Guantanamo in 2008, he was detained for another five years before ultimately being repatriated to Algeria, where he feared persecution. Since then, he has worked to rebuild his life while facing health problems, financial difficulties, and the stigma of Guantanamo. [...]

During the course of his campaign, the current United States President Donald Trump repeatedly stated his desire to not only keep Guantanamo open, but expand it. Since his inauguration, there have been numerous worrying developments. In January, a leaked draft of an executive order outlined plans to revive CIA black sites, halt transfers from Guantanamo, and send new detainees to the facility. In March, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions characterised the facility as "a perfectly acceptable place". He later visited Guantanamo in July, in what was widely perceived as a gesture of support. Lastly, reports have emerged of planned new construction at the military base that would increase its detention capacity.

Adding to these concerning political developments, the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act provide broad civil and criminal immunity to those responsible for the human rights violations at Guantanamo. In the face of these legal and political impediments to recourse at the national level, Djamel and his representatives hope the Commission will act.

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Vox: The new war on drugs

It’s something Bevin had long pledged. In 2016, Bevin set up a panel to study criminal justice reform. In an op-ed for the Washington Times that year, Bevin touted legislation that lets some former inmates expunge their records. “The practice of ‘lock ‘em up and throw away the key’ in our criminal justice system is an approach whose shot at effectiveness has run its course,” he wrote. “This misguided mantra propelled the United States’ prison population to unprecedented heights, far outpacing the rest of the world in per capita incarcerations.” [...]

Kentucky’s story, however, isn’t atypical. There has been much discussion of criminal justice reform in the past several years. And there has been a lot of talk about treating the opioid epidemic — the deadliest overdose crisis in US history — as a public health, not criminal justice, issue, unlike past drug crises. The cliché about the crisis, said by both Democrats and Republicans, is that “we can’t arrest our way out of the problem.”

Yet the rhetoric doesn’t tell the whole story. In my own investigation, I found at least 13 states, including Kentucky, that passed laws in recent years that stiffened penalties for opioids painkillers, heroin, or fentanyl — largely in response to the epidemic. In sharp contrast to all the talk about criminal justice reform and public health, these laws risk sending even low-level, nonviolent drug offenders — many of whom are addicted to drugs and need help for that addiction — to prison for years or decades. [...]

But as the opioid epidemic continues to kill tens of thousands of people in the US each year, many state lawmakers have gone back to the old criminal justice playbook to fight the crisis — even as the empirical evidence remains clear that tougher prison sentences are not an effective means to stopping the epidemic. The new laws are just one example. Several states have also dusted off old laws to lock up more opioid users and dealers. [...]

This is happening at the federal level under President Donald Trump. In 2014, the Obama administration told prosecutors to avoid charges for low-level drug offenders that could trigger lengthy mandatory minimums. But the Trump administration, under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has rescinded those instructions — letting prosecutors pursue the most stringent penalties even against low-level, nonviolent drug offenders.

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Vox: Everything you were afraid to ask about white nationalism’s new place in American politics

At a time when unabashed racists are elated at the possibility that the president-elect will take action to create the “white country” of their fantasies, and people who share their policy views but have no hate group affiliation are being empowered, the current battle of words is an important one. Fueling it is the risk that the wrong language choices could cloud Americans’ understanding of what’s actually happening. Complicating things is the sobering reality that the threats nonwhite people face don’t change depending on what we call the people responsible for them. [...]

But there was a twist: Bannon insisted he was not a white nationalist but rather an “economic nationalist.” Trump went even further, telling the New York Times that Bannon was neither racist nor “alt-right.”

Another tug of war over labels followed when Spencer made it known that he wasn’t fond of the terms “racist,” “Nazi,” and “white supremacist” being applied to him. Instead, Spencer, who led the “Hail Trump!” Nazi salute and heads a group that promotes “America for white people,” told the Washington Post he prefers to be called an “identitarian” — a reference to a movement that has more momentum in Europe but all the same associations with racism and xenophobia. [...]

Bjork-James’s concern about the term “alt-right” is based on similar thinking: It creates the risk that more white people may become radicalized by the group. “If we help to normalize these ideas as just part of the political spectrum, then it can make it seem less radical than they are and less connected to racial violence — because if people espouse racist ideas and racial rhetoric, there’s always some kind of a correlation to racist violence,” she said. “And if we don’t describe them for what they are, we’re kind of giving other white people a path to think these are legitimate ideas and a chance that more white people will become radicalized in adopting these ideas.” [...]

The New York Times’s Amanda Taub pointed out a similar distinction, explaining that what makes the alt-right different from white nationalism is that many of its members’ first priorities and entrees into the group aren’t related to race. “The alt-right is ideologically broader than white nationalism — it also includes neoreactionaries, monarchists, and meme-loving internet trolls,” she wrote.

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Salon: America is suffering from a plague of deadly, unaccountable and racist police violence

In the year since Sterling and Castile’s deaths sparked Black Lives Matter protests across the country and a national conversation on police violence and racism, 1,006 more civilians have met similar fates at the hands of police officers. A national election ended with Donald Trump, whose campaign largely centered around fear-mongering and promises to restore law and order, being elected the country’s 45th president. Jeff Sessions, who was once denied a federal judgeship because he was deemed too racist, became the head of the Department of Justice. [...]

Baton Rouge officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II were the two officers who confronted Alton Sterling outside a convenience store. A federal investigation into the incident found that the entire confrontation lasted a mere 90 seconds, in which the officers wrestled Sterling to the ground, tased him and then shot him a total of six times. The Justice Department announced in May that it would not be pursuing any charges against Salamoni and Lake, who are currently on paid leave. An investigation by the Louisiana attorney general’s office is looking into whether the two officers, who are both white, should be charged on state laws. [...]

However, these Blue Lives Matter bills are unnecessary and redundant, as all 50 states already have statutes that automatically increase penalties for violent attacks against law enforcement, according to the Anti-Defamation League. These statutes do not require prosecutors to prove motive. Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told the Huffington Post that murdering a police officer could likely mean a death sentence in some states. [...]

A number of bills have also gained traction in several states criminalizing protests and imposing harsher punishments on protesters. Seventeen states are currently considering this type of legislation, according to the database project Our States. In North Dakota, which saw large waves of protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline last year, a bill was recently passed and signed making protest penalties a class B felony if 100 or more people are involved, and carrying a maximum prison sentence of 10 years. Another bill that was passed imposes penalties on protesters who wear masks, as Occupy demonstrators often do.

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