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“Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.”
“A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”
– Alexander Pope
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Collusion Conclusion: Attorney General William Barr released his much-anticipated summary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Sunday. In his four-page summary Barr wrote that Mueller did not find that Donald Trump’s campaign or associates conspired with Russia; the evidence was “not sufficient” to support a prosecution of the President for obstruction of justice; and Mueller’s team has no plans to issue any new indictments. It should be noted that Mueller did not make the decision himself on whether to prosecute the President on obstruction; the attorney general and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made the determination that the evidence was “not sufficient.”
Trump went beyond the conclusions of Barr’s letter and said the findings exonerated him completely. “This was an illegal takedown that failed and hopefully somebody’s going to be looking at the other side,” Trump said. After nearly two years of being under the cloud of the Russia investigation, Trump’s presidency is no longer directly under threat from the special counsel probe. He can now focus on his 2020 reelection campaign, although he still faces the specter of more legal and congressional action from the other investigations that remain ongoing. And others remind us that the controversy over the Mueller report could obscure something inherently more dangerous— the basic issues of Trump’s competence and character. (NYT, CNN, Guardian)
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Every Country a Spy: In late 2017 a top adviser to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman contacted a secret, private Israeli company offering technology developed by former intelligence officers. The technology was to be used as part of the crown prince’s extensive surveillance efforts to track down Saudi dissidents around the world. One of those individuals tracked down, then murdered, was journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The fact that the Saudi government relied on a firm from Israel, an adversary for decades, illustrates the new age of digital warfare, where sophisticated surveillance is increasingly available on the private market, no rules apply, and for a price, internet mercenaries will do battle for authoritarian governments. Even the smallest countries can buy digital espionage services that allow them to perform high-level operations like electronic eavesdropping or influence campaigns that once were only within the purview of major powers like Russia or the US. (NYT)
Campaign Pilot Season Premiere: An ultra-long-shot candidate in Sunday’s Ukrainian presidential race turned his campaign into something akin to “The Bachelor.” A webcast production starring the former environmental minister and current presidential candidate Ihor Shevchenko asks: “Do you want to become the wife of a president?” Shevchenko, a boyish-looking 48-year-old with a law degree from the University of Minnesota, plans to choose a spouse from among about 300 women who submitted applications online. The entire process is being filmed and edited into 12-minute segments. The candidate posted a trailer on Facebook and YouTube. His political team plans to air the first full episodes this weekend and continue past Sunday’s election. (WaPo)
What To Expect When You’re Expecting The Worst: With 93 percent of the ballots counted in Sunday’s election in Thailand, the pro-military Palang Pracharat party, which is seeking to keep junta chief Prayuth Chan-ocha in power, was leading the populist Pheu Thai party of exiled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whose loyalists have won every election since 2001, by 7.59 million to 7.12 million votes. It was the country’s first poll since a 2014 army coup, and stunningly sad for many voters who had hoped that the poll would loosen the grip on power that traditional elites and the military have held in a country that has one of the highest measures of inequality in the world. The Election Commission chairman said unofficial results would be announced on Monday afternoon. (Reuters)
Additional World News
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Interpreting Interpol’s Involvements:The portrait Hollywood paints of Interpol, the international police cooperation organization based in Lyon, France, is something akin to a global version of the FBI or Scotland Yard. In fact, Interpol has no authority to investigate crimes or make arrests. It is simply a clearinghouse for police information, a digital bulletin board for crime-fighting officers to share information. Interpol’s charter forbids it to intervene in activities of a political, military, religious or racial nature. But after the September 11, 2001 attacks on America, Interpol secretary general, Ronald Noble, who happened to be the first American in the job, envisioned an ambitious new role for the agency which soon proved problematic.
A crucial component of what Interpol does is issue “red notices,” a kind of warrant police officers in one country can use to ask their foreign counterparts to arrest a suspect. Noble changed the more deliberate way a request for a red notice was being reviewed and handled. He introduced a digital initiative called I-24/7 that allowed countries to use Interpol databases around the clock, and then launched a program called I-link which allowed governments to disseminate red notices almost instantaneously. Soon issuing red notices became Interpol’s highest priority; by 2004 the practice had jumped 40 percent. But the agency’s internal audit department was seeing an increasing number of complaints from people who said they were being targeted for purely political purposes.
Before long top officials were being urgently warned that the organization was vulnerable to political meddling and needed to slow down. Nevertheless, Interpol kept issuing too many red notices, too quickly, with too little oversight. Agency leaders did not recognize the world had entered an era in which strongmen and autocrats like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan were wielding increasing power over international institutions. The rules intended to protect refugees and asylum-seekers went unheeded as often vague and unsubstantiated red notices were being used by despots and human rights violators to snag dissidents and defectors.
In 2014 a new secretary general made reform an immediate priority. Some complained it was too little too late. In 2018 Interpol’s Chinese president was arrested on corruption charges during a trip to his home country, and a Russian security official became the leading candidate to replace him. This so alarmed American and European officials that they campaigned for another candidate, and in November 2018 Kim-Jong-yang of South Korea was elected to replace the former president. It was seen as a diplomatic victory for the Trump administration.
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Kentucky Fried Photo Op: Americans have Dwight Eisenhower to thank for starting the obsession with what candidates consume on the campaign trail. His 1956 reelection campaign began with a photo of him chugging a bottle of Coca-Cola at his farm in Gettysburg. Ever since candidates have tried to look like they eat like a regular person, with seriously questionable results. Gerald Ford once ate a tamale that was still in its husk, John Kerry ordered some kind of real fancy cheese on his downhome Philly cheese steak, and at various points Sarah Palin, John Kasich, Bill de Blasio and Donald Trump all ate pizza with a knife and fork. Cory Booker’s solved the problem—he’s a vegan. (Guardian)
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LAST MORSELS
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“Perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of current America is the attempt to reduce life to buying and selling. Life is not love unless love is sex and bought and sold. Life is not knowledge save knowledge of technique, of science for destruction. Life is not beauty except beauty for sale. Life is not art unless its price is high and it is sold for profit. All life is production for profit, and for what is profit but for buying and selling again?” – W.E.B. Du Bois
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