RSN: FOCUS: Susan B. Glasser | The Trump Presidency Is Still an Active Crime Scene

 

 

17 October 21

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FOCUS: Susan B. Glasser | The Trump Presidency Is Still an Active Crime Scene
Susan B. Glasser, The New Yorker
Glasser writes: "There were so many books seeking to explain Trump and his times that the book critic of the Washington Post wrote his own book about all of the books."

It’s hard to consign the Trump years to the history books when we remain in the middle of the crisis that it sparked.

Every Administration produces a shelf full of memoirs, of the score-settling variety and otherwise. The first known White House chronicle by someone other than a President came from Paul Jennings, an enslaved person whose memoir of President James Madison’s White House was published in 1865. In modern times, Bill Clinton’s two terms gave us Robert Reich’s “Locked in the Cabinet,” perhaps the best recent exposé of that most feckless of Washington jobs, and George Stephanopoulos’s “All Too Human,” a memorable account of a political wunderkind that was honest—too honest, at times, to suit his patron—about what it was really like backstage at the Clinton White House. George W. Bush’s Presidency, with its momentous years of war and terrorism, produced memoirs, many of them quite good, from multiple deputy speechwriters, a deputy national-security adviser, a deputy director of the Office of Public Liaison, and even a deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. President Obama’s White House stenographer wrote a memoir, as did his photographer, his deputy White House chief of staff, his campaign strategists, a deputy national-security adviser, a deputy speechwriter, and even one of the junior press wranglers whose job it was to oversee the White House press pool.

There’s a few golden nuggets to be mined even from the most unreadable, obscure, and self-serving of such memoirs. Even before it ended, the Trump Administration produced a remarkable number of these accounts, as wave after wave of fired press secretaries, ousted Cabinet officials, and disgruntled former aides signed lucrative book deals. There were so many books seeking to explain Trump and his times that the book critic of the Washington Post wrote his own book about all of the books. Trump’s fired executive assistant—ousted because she claimed, at a boozy dinner with reporters, that the President had said nasty things about his daughter Tiffany—wrote a book. Trump’s first two press secretaries wrote books. First Lady Melania Trump’s former best friend wrote a book. Trump’s third national-security adviser, John Bolton, wrote an explosive book with direct-from-the-Situation-Room allegations of Presidential malfeasance that might have turned the tide in Trump’s first impeachment trial had Bolton actually testified in it. And none of those even covered the epic, Presidency-ending year of 2020.

Dozens of books have now been published or are in the works which address the COVID pandemic, the 2020 Presidential election, and the violent final days of Trump’s tenure. The history of the Trump Presidency that I am writing with my husband, Peter Baker, of the Times, already has eighty-nine books in its bibliography; many are excellent reported works by journalists, in addition to the first-person recollections, such as they are, by those who worked with and for Trump. This month, Stephanie Grisham became the third former Trump Administration press secretary to publish her account. Grisham, who has the distinction of being the only White House press secretary never to actually hold a press briefing, has written a tell-all that includes such details as the President calling her from Air Force One to discuss his genitalia. Still to come are promised memoirs by former Vice-President Mike Pence, former Attorney General William Barr, and the former White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway, among others. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is writing an account of his Middle East peacemaking efforts. A book from the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, “The Chief’s Chief,” is due out in December; Trump promoted it the other day as “an incredible Christmas present” that will explain how his Administration “did things that no other administration even thought they could do.”

Trump, of course, meant this as a bragging point, not as an ironic commentary on all the norm-busting and lawbreaking that occurred during his four years in office. “Remember,” he said in the statement, “there has never been an administration like ours.” In that, he’s right. The rapidly accumulating pile of books on the history of the Trump Administration is different in a crucial respect: they are not helping to explain the past so much as they are attempting to explain a present and very much ongoing crisis. Meadows, for example, is a crucial witness in the investigation by the House select committee into the events of January 6th. The panel subpoenaed him and several other Trump advisers to give testimony and hand over documents, with a deadline of Thursday. Not one has done so, setting the stage for a new and potentially protracted series of court battles. The panel announced on Thursday that it will seek to hold Steve Bannon, Trump’s fired White House strategist (the two later reconciled), in criminal contempt; it said that it is still negotiating with Meadows and the former Pentagon official Kash Patel. How many months or years will we have to wait to find out what they and others knew, and did, as a pro-Trump mob tried to stop Congress from certifying Trump’s defeat?

The bottom line is that the story of the Trump Presidency still has important unanswered questions that the forthcoming pile of books cannot answer. And they have an urgency about them that unanswered questions about past Administrations usually don’t, given the ongoing threat to our democracy: Trump is not only preparing to run again but is determined to mold the G.O.P. into a single-issue Party, the ideology of which consists solely of disputing the legitimacy of the election that turned him out of office. The Trump Presidency is not yet, alas, simply a matter for booksellers and book writers; it’s an active crime scene.

Several of the more interesting new books come from participants in one of Congress’s earlier efforts to investigate and hold Trump accountable—his first impeachment, in 2019, for withholding several hundred million dollars in security assistance to Ukraine to force its President to conduct politically motivated investigations of Joe Biden and the 2016 election. Two of the trial’s witnesses, Alexander Vindman and Fiona Hill, recently released memoirs that cover their roles in Trump’s National Security Council—which led them to unexpected public fame, given that Trump tried to stop their testimony. Hill’s book, “There Is Nothing for You Here,” is one of the most compelling to emerge from inside the Trump White House. She observes, at first hand, how Trump’s “autocrat envy” led not only to open admiration of anti-democratic figures such as Vladimir Putin and Victor Orbán but to Trump’s adoption of their anti-democratic agenda inside America.

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and the lead impeachment manager, Adam Schiff, released his contribution to the Trump bookshelf this week, “Midnight in Washington,” the title of which comes from one of the many eloquent speeches that Schiff made during the first impeachment trial. In the proceedings, he presciently warned that a failure to convict and remove Trump from office would result in even worse abuses. His book ends with a new warning embedded in the subtitle: “How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could.” The Washington Post, in its review, called it a “500-page closing statement on an era that has not yet closed.”

Schiff’s book is a valuable part of the historical record in part because it details how Democrats pursued impeachment—why they ruled out a broader set of charges, for example, and how they had to quickly investigate the Ukraine matter on their own, something that traditionally would have been handled by an independent prosecutor. But the main takeaway from the book, and the entire experience of the past few years, is that Congress, with one chamber controlled by Democrats and the other by Republicans who were unified in Trump’s defense, is not set up to investigate a rogue President like Trump—a disconcerting fact, considering the challenges still posed by the ongoing Trump crisis.

Throughout his Presidency, Trump and his aides flouted congressional subpoenas and demands for information; he is once again instructing them to do so with the January 6th investigation, even though he is out of office and it is unclear if any executive privilege would still apply. Schiff, a former federal prosecutor, is now a member of the January 6th select committee. The test, once again, he told me, is whether and how Congress can find a way of “enforcing the rule of law” and its own subpoenas. It is a great crisis, he said, if “a coequal branch of government cannot get the information it needs, both to legislate and to keep an Administration from becoming corrupt.” This is no wonky procedural matter but a test of American democracy’s ability to self-correct. The true history of the Trump Administration can’t be written without it.

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RSN: FOCUS: Bess Levin | Biden Announces He'll Be Exposing Trump's Traitorous Ass

 

 

11 October 21

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FOCUS: Bess Levin | Biden Announces He'll Be Exposing Trump's Traitorous Ass
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "The new president laughs in the face of the old president's 'executive privilege.'"

The new president laughs in the face of the old president’s “executive privilege.”

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, Donald Trump really, really doesn’t want people to find out what exactly he was up to on January 6, 2021, probably because it makes him look really, really bad. We know he feels this way because he’s responded to the House select committee’s investigation into the events of the day like a caged feral pigeon—frantically flapping his wings, shitting everywhere; because his lawyer has instructed at least four of his lackeys to obstruct justice; and because he’s insisted that any and all documents detailing what he was doing before, during, and after the Capitol attack must remain under lock and key. In a letter sent to the National Archives on Friday, Trump wrote that the records sought by the committee contain information shielded by “executive and other privileges, including but not limited to the presidential communications, deliberative process, and attorney-client privileges,” adding that he would assert the same privilege in the case of any future requests.

Only, as Trump may or may not know, he’s no longer president, and therefore he has no executive privilege to assert. Instead, there’s a new president in the White House, and that guy? Says the documents are going to Congress!

Per The Washington Post:

President [Joe] Biden rejected former president Donald Trump’s request to block documents from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the White House said on Friday, likely setting up a legal and political battle. Trump has claimed executive privilege in seeking to evade the committee’s demands for details about Trump and his aides’ activities during the Jan. 6 attack. But in the letter to the National Archives and Records Administration, the White House said Biden “determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States.”

At a White House briefing, press secretary Jen Psaki said the Biden decision reflected the gravity of the attack. “The president’s dedicated to ensuring that something like that could never happen again, which is why the administration is cooperating with ongoing investigations,” Psaki said. “The president has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not warranted for the first set of documents from the Trump White House that have been provided to us by the National Archives.”

Biden’s decision came after Trump told four former advisers, according to Politico, not to comply with congressional subpoenas, and former White House strategist Stephen Bannon told the committee he won’t be responding to its requests for documents. According to the Post, former chief of staff Mark Meadows and national security aide Kash Patel are said to be “engaging with the committee,” despite President Trump’s demands. “While Mr. Meadows and Mr. Patel are, so far, engaging with the Select Committee, Mr. Bannon has indicated that he will try to hide behind vague references to privileges of the former President,” the committee’s leaders said in a statement released Friday. The committee added that it is considering holding Bannon in criminal contempt. (For his part, Bannon knows a little something about running afoul of the law. In August 2020, he was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering for allegedly scamming thousands of border-wall donors. He pleaded not guilty and, naturally, was pardoned by Trump before going to trial. Separately, in November 2020, Bannon was permanently kicked off of Twitter after suggesting Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray should be beheaded.)

Biden’s decision triggers at least a 30-day window for Trump to challenge the call in court before the documents are released, which he no doubt will. On the Hill, members of the committee investigating the insurrection have pledged to take a hard line with anyone refusing to cooperate with the probe. “This is a matter of the utmost seriousness, and we need to consider the full panoply of enforcement sanctions available to us,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin. “And that means criminal contempt citations, civil contempt citations and the use of Congress’s own inherent contempt powers.”

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Protesters marched in an Indigenous Peoples Day rally in Boston on Oct. 10, 2020, as part of a demonstration to change Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples' Day. Boston made that change last week. (photo: Erin Clark/Boston Globe/Getty Images)

Goodbye, Columbus? Here's What Indigenous Peoples' Day Means to Native Americans
Emma Bowman, NPR
Bowman writes: "This year marks the first time a U.S. president has officially recognized Indigenous Peoples' Day."

This year marks the first time a U.S. president has officially recognized Indigenous Peoples' Day.

President Biden issued a proclamation on Friday to observe this Oct. 11 as a day to honor Native Americans, their resilience and their contributions to American society throughout history, even as they faced assimilation, discrimination and genocide spanning generations. The move shifts focus from Columbus Day, the federal holiday celebrating Christopher Columbus, which shares the same date as Indigenous Peoples' Day this year.

Dylan Baca, a 19-year-old Arizonan who was instrumental in helping broker the proclamation, is overwhelmed by the gravity of Biden's action.

"I still don't think I've fully absorbed what that has meant," he said. "This is a profound thing the president has done, and it's going to mean a lot to so many people."

Four years ago, the Native leader started an organization alongside Arizona state Sen. Jamescita Peshlakai, Indigenous Peoples' Initiative, with a similar mission: to tell a more positive and more accurate tale of Native Americans by replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples' Day.

What is Indigenous Peoples' Day?

Indigenous Peoples' Day advocates say the recognition helps correct a "whitewashed" American history that has glorified Europeans like Italian explorer Christopher Columbus who have committed violence against Indigenous communities. Native Americans have long criticized the inaccuracies and harmful narratives of Columbus' legacy that credited him with his "discovery" of the Americas when Indigenous people were there first.

"It is difficult to grapple with the complete accomplishments of individuals and also the costs of what those accomplishments came at," said Mandy Van Heuvelen, the cultural interpreter coordinator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.

There are no set rules on how one should appreciate the day, said Van Heuvelen, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe from South Dakota. It's all about reflection, recognition, celebration and an education.

"It can be a day of reflection of our history in the United States, the role Native people have played in it, the impacts that history has had on native people and communities, and also a day to gain some understanding of the diversity of Indigenous peoples," she said.

The idea was first proposed by Indigenous peoples at a United Nations conference in 1977 held to address discrimination against Natives, as NPR has reported. But South Dakota became the first state to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples day in 1989, officially celebrating it the following year.

Biden's proclamation signifies a formal adoption of a day that a growing number of states and cities have come to acknowledge. Last week, Boston joined Arizona, Oregon, Texas, Louisiana, Washington, D.C., and several other states in dedicating a second Monday in October to Indigenous Peoples' Day. Native Americans have borne the brunt of the work to make that happen.

Many state and local governments have gone a step further. More than a dozen states and well over 100 cities celebrate the day, with many of them having altogether dropped the holiday honoring Columbus to replace it with Indigenous Peoples' Day.

What might seem to some like a simple name change can lead to real social progress for Indigenous Americans, said Van Heuvelen.

"What these changes accomplish, piece by piece, is visibility for Native people in the United States," she said. "Until Native people are or are fully seen in our society and in everyday life, we can't accomplish those bigger changes. As long as Native people remain invisible, it's much more easier for people to look past those real issues and those real concerns within those communities."

What about Columbus Day?

Columbus Day remains a federal holiday that gives federal government employees the day off from work.

The day was first founded as a way to appreciate the mistreatment of Italian Americans, and Congress eventually made it a federal holiday in 1934.

"Italian American culture is important, and I think there are other times and places to recognize that. But I think it's also important to also recognize the history of Columbus Day itself," said Baca. "Should we recognize a man whose labors killed children, killed women and decimated the Native American population here? I don't think that is something that we want to be honored."

Monday marks Oregon's first statewide recognition of Indigenous Peoples' Day, in place of Columbus Day, after its legislature passed a bill brought by its Indigenous lawmakers. Rep. Tawna Sanchez, one of those lawmakers, says the movement to recognize the day is an ideal time to capitalize on the momentum of political recognition.

"I don't know that we'll ever get to a place where people have their land back or have the recognition of who they are, to the degree that we that we need to or should. But the fact that people are paying attention at this very moment — that's important, because we will have a greater opportunity to educate people and help them understand why we are where we are right now," she said.

"History is always written by the conqueror," said Sanchez. "How do we actually tell the truth about what happened and where we sit this very moment? How do we go forward from here?"

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