David Corn's Blog, page 19

A New Rudy Scandal: FBI Agent Says Giuliani Was Co-opted by Russian Intelligence

It was big news when Rudy Giuliani, once hailed as America’s Mayor, was indicted last month by a district attorney in Atlanta for allegedly being part of a criminal enterprise led by Donald Trump that sought to overturn the 2020 election results. Giuliani was back in headlines this week when he lost a defamation suit filed against him by two Georgia election workers whom he had falsely accused of ballot stuffing. Giuliani’s apparent impoverishment, caused by his massive legal bills, and even his alleged drinking have been fodder for reporters. But another major Giuliani development has drawn less attention: An FBI whistleblower filed a statement asserting that Giuliani “may have been compromised” by Russian intelligence while working as a lawyer and adviser to Trump during the 2020 campaign.

That contention is among a host of explosive assertions from Johnathan Buma, an FBI agent who also says that an investigation involving Giuliani’s activities was stymied within the bureau. 

In July, Buma sent the Senate Judiciary Committee a 22-page statement full of eye-popping allegations, and the document leaked and was first reported last month by Insider (after a conservative blogger had posted it online). According to Buma’s account, Giuliani was used as an asset by a Ukrainian oligarch tied to Russian intelligence and other Russian operatives for a disinformation operation that aimed to discredit Joe Biden and boost Trump in the 2020 presidential race. Moreover, Buma says he was the target of retaliation within the bureau for digging into this.

The FBI declined to comment on Buma’s claims.

Buma’s revelations may only be the start. A source familiar with his work tells Mother Jones that other potential FBI whistleblowers who participated in the investigation involving Giuliani have consulted the same lawyer as Buma and might meet with congressional investigators in coming weeks. That attorney, Scott Horton, declined to comment.

Giuliani faces a heap of legal and financial problems, including those felony charges in Georgia. He is also an uncharged co-conspirator in the federal case in which Trump was indicted for his efforts to retain power after losing the 2020 election. He has been sued by a former assistant for rape. And apparently Trump has not helped the supposedly broke Giuliani cover his legal bills, though the former president did agree to headline a fundraiser for Giuliani.

Still, Buma’s statement suggests that Giuliani has been lucky to avoid deeper trouble over his attempt during the 2020 race to deploy made-in-Ukraine disinformation to sully Joe Biden. 

It is widely known that Giuliani tried mightily to unearth and disseminate dirt on Biden in Ukraine—particularly regarding the unfounded allegation that as vice president Biden squashed an investigation of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company for which his son Hunter was a director. This smear campaign led to Trump’s first impeachment and resulted in a federal investigation into whether Giuliani violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Prosecutors ended that probe last year.

But Buma’s allegations that FBI and Justice Department officials blocked his efforts to investigate these Giuliani activities and the work of suspected Russian agents who may have influenced the former New York City mayor could spark a new dust-up on Capitol Hill. As Republicans keep trying to gin up a controversy over the Bidens, Burisma, and other matters, Buma’s statement reinforces the case that this supposed Biden-Ukraine scandal was egged on or orchestrated by Russian intelligence. And it contradicts the narrative pushed by Trump and his defenders that the FBI and Justice Department have been in cahoots with Democrats.

Giuliani’s role in Trump’s coup attempt and his string of public humiliations may overshadow the Ukrainian chapter in Giuliani’s downfall. But, according to Buma and various US intelligence findings, Giuliani apparently was a dupe—a useful idiot—for suspected Russian operatives and propagandists. And the bureau, Buma says, investigated this—until it didn’t.

Buma’s statement highlights Giuliani’s relationship with Pavel Fuks, a wealthy Ukrainian developer, who in 2017 hired Giuliani and paid him $300,000. Fuks once told the New York Times that he had retained Giuliani to lobby in the United States for the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, where Fuks then lived. Giuliani has denied that he was paid to lobby for Kharkiv, insisting he only provided advice regarding security to the city. And Fuks has changed his tune. Through a spokesperson, he told Mother Jones that Giuliani’s work was limited to advising the city.

In his statement, Buma says that the FBI assessed Fuks to be a “co-opted asset” of Russian intelligence services, meaning a person who Russian intelligence used to advance its goals. Buma’s complaint does not name a specific Russian intelligence agency, but a person who spoke to agents involved in this investigation says that the FBI believes Fuks worked for the FSB, the successor to KGB. All this raises the possibility that Giuliani, a former Republican presidential candidate who became a close adviser to Trump, received a large payment directly from a Russian asset.

Buma alleges that Fuks has carried out various tasks for Russian spies, including laundering money for them. Fuks also reportedly paid locals to spray-paint swastikas around Kharkiv in the weeks before Russia’s invasion. Buma says Fuks did so to bolster Vladmir Putin’s claim that the invasion aimed to achieve the “de-Nazification of Ukraine.”

Fuks denies these claims. “Mr. Fuks has never cooperated with Russian intelligence,” his spokesperson says.

Buma maintains that his investigative work led to Customs and Border Patrol in 2017 revoking Fuks visa for travel to the United States and that the FBI assessed that Fuks constituted “a national security threat,” a finding that caused Fuks to be placed on an organized crime watch list. Buma also says that he sent the Treasury Department a recommendation that the United States sanction Fuks. To date, the US government has not done so.

Ukraine has sanctioned Fuks, and it is reportedly investigating him for fraud and tax evasion. Fuks now lives in London, according to recent media reports. 

In his statement, Buma says that he developed suspicions that Giuliani, through his relationship with Fuks, was “compromised by the RIS,” meaning the Russian Intelligence Services. That is a striking claim—an allegation that Russian spies may have obtained influence over a top adviser to the US president.

It’s a new piece of information to add to a pile of public indications that Giuliani left himself wide open to manipulation by Russian agents, while he was dredging Ukraine in search of derogatory information about Hunter and Joe Biden.

Giuliani has previously asserted that his work for Fuks ended before he joined Trump’s legal team in April 2018. And Fuks’ spokesperson also says that Fuks’ dealings with Giuliani finished in 2018. But Buma suggests that Fuks may have maintained an indirect connection to Giuliani by hiring in 2019 Andriy Telizhenko, a former low-level Ukrainian diplomatic official, to mount a public relations effort for him in the United States. Buma says that a source told him that Fuks retained Telizhenko to help him “establish contacts with US politicians.” Telizhenko went on to work with Giuliani, feeding him information on the Bidens.

Telizhenko, in a recent interview with Mother Jones, maintained that his work for Fuks and his contacts with Giuliani were unrelated. 

But Telizhenko’s interactions with Giuliani raise serious questions about whether this Trump adviser, wittingly or not, played. a part in a covert Russian operation to discredit Biden. In 2021, the Treasury Department sanctioned Telizhenko for promoting Russian “disinformation narratives that U.S. government officials have engaged in corrupt dealings in Ukraine.” Telizhenko denies advancing disinformation or aiding Russia. He says the sanctions resulted from an FBI informant making false claims about him.

Giuliani’s efforts in Ukraine placed him in contact with several Ukrainians since sanctioned for allegedly assisting Russian disinformation efforts. The most prominent was Andriy Derkach, the son of a former KGB officer and then a Ukrainian legislator, who supplied Giuliani with unsubstantiated information about the Bidens’ supposed activities in Ukraine. After making a trip to Ukraine in the summer of 2020, Giuliani told the Washington Post that he kept in touch with Derkach  and called him “very helpful.”

Trump’s Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach in 2020, calling him an “active Russian agent for over a decade.” In March 2021, a declassified report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that Putin in 2020 signed off on a Russian intelligence effort to use proxies to feed prominent US individuals “influence narratives” aimed at hurting Biden’s campaign and helping Trump. The report cited Derkach, asserting that Putin “had purview” over his activities. Though the report did not name him, Giuliani was obviously one of the Americans the ODNI believed had been manipulated by the Russians. Last year, federal prosecutors hit Derkach with criminal charges for his alleged attempts to evade sanctions.

In his statement, Buma says he investigated Giuliani’s use of “funds he collected from political influencers to travel and conduct a series of interviews with former Ukrainian officials”—a reference to Giuliani’s campaign to gather opposition research on the Bidens. But he adds that “Giuliani was himself never considered a subject” of that part of his probe, which focused on “foreign organized crime figures and intelligence service assets or agents who chose to deal with him.”

Giuliani has admitted to meeting Ukrainians subsequently cited by the US government as Russian operatives. But he has defended his actions by arguing he had to deal with questionable people to seek information on what he has referred to as alleged Biden crimes. (No evidence has surfaced to prove Biden acted improperly in Ukraine to help his son.) 

Buma reveals in his statement that he also probed whether Russian operatives or assets were involved in a 2020 Giuliani effort to make a film about Hunter Biden’s business activities in Ukraine and elsewhere. As Mother Jones reported, the GOP activists behind this venture noted in legal documents that they were considering seeking foreign financing for the film. The anti-Biden film was to include commentary from Konstantin Kulyk, a former Ukrainian prosecutor who Treasury sanctioned in 2021 for working with Derkach to spread “fraudulent and unsubstantiated allegations” about Biden. That is, this project was to feature information from sources who the US government later deemed were connected to a disinformation campaign linked to Russian intelligence. 

Giuliani played a key role in trying to line up investors for the movie. His lawyer, Robert Costello, denied that Giuliani solicited money from foreign investors. The investors Giuliani did help find were two brothers, David and Kable Munger, who own a large blueberry producing company in California and have donated generously to GOP candidates. The movie never came close to being made, and people involved in the endeavor told Mother Jones the project was disorganized and incompetently managed.

The Mungers recently sued two GOP activists involved in producing the film, Tim Yale and George Dickson, along with a company they formed. Giuliani was not named as a defendant in the suit. The Mungers say that Giuliani helped persuade them to invest $1 million by saying that they would receive a share of the film’s profits. The brothers also claim that Yale and Dickson told them the movie would be “more profitable than Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.” Giuliani, Dickson, and Yale also said, according to the Mungers’ lawsuit, that they possessed “smoking guns” revealing Joe Biden was corrupt.

Giuliani and his colleagues possessed no such material. The Mungers allege that Dickson and Yale stole their investment. In a text message to Mother Jones, Yale insisted that the lawsuit is “total hogwash.” He declined to comment further. Dickson did not respond to requests for comment.

Giuliani, according to the lawsuit, was paid $300,000 for his participation in the film project. A lawyer and a spokesperson for Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment.

Buma’s disclosures spell new trouble for Giuliani. They further implicate him in a covert Russian operation to tilt the 2020 election toward Trump. They also raise the possibility that Giuliani was protected by FBI officials. (After the 2016 election, the Justice Department investigated whether Giuliani had improper contacts with FBI agents during that race regarding the bureau’s investigation of Hillary Clinton, and it found no evidence Giuliani had been leaked information.) Buma’s statement offers an investigative roadmap for inquiries that could soil Giuliani’s already tarnished reputation. But the down-and-out Giuliani may get lucky: With all the controversy and scandal swirling about him, there just may not be much room in the Giuliani coverage for the allegation that he was a puppet for Putin.

Donald Trump, Mob Boss—Then and Now

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Please check it out.

In yet another historic indictment, Donald Trump was charged by an Atlanta prosecutor with essentially being a mob boss.

With this expansive set of charges that accuses Trump and 18 others of mounting a wide-ranging and illegal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election—emphasizing actions taken to fraudulently reverse the results in Georgia—Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis declared Trump the head of a “criminal enterprise.” The first of 41 counts in the indictment alleges Trump and his co-conspirators violated the state’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a law that has been used by local and federal prosecutors—including defendant Rudy Giuliani, when he was a US attorney in the 1980s—to pursue Mafia chieftains who were often able to insulate themselves from the criminal deeds of their henchmen. Given Trump’s past ties with mobsters—a significant piece of his biography that has often been overlooked—the use of RICO has an especially sharp resonance.

When Trump ran for president in 2016, I was one of the few reporters who examined his shady record of organized crime connections—particularly his history of making false or contradictory statements about these relations. As I noted then, “when asked about his links to the mob, Trump has repeatedly made false comments and has contradicted himself—to such a degree it seems he has flat-out lied about these relationships, even when he was under oath.” I detailed several of these instances—which have even greater relevance now that Trump is the lead defendant in a RICO case. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane.

* In 2007, Trump sued journalist Tim O’Brien for libel—asking for $5 billion in damages—after O’Brien in his book TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald reported that Trump was no billionaire and only worth between $100 million and $250 million. That book referenced an already established fact: that in the early 1980s Trump began his casino empire in Atlantic City, New Jersey, by leasing property owned by Kenneth Shapiro and Daniel Sullivan. Shapiro, O’Brien wrote, was a “street-level gangster with close ties to the Philadelphia mob,” and Sullivan was a “Mafia associate, FBI informant and labor negotiator.” (Trump also had obtained Sullivan’s assistance when he had trouble with undocumented Polish workers who were demolishing the Bonwit Teller building in Manhattan to make way for Trump Tower.)

During a deposition for that libel case—which Trump would lose—Trump was asked, “Have you ever before associated with individuals you knew were associated with organized crime?” Trump, who was testifying under oath, answered, “Not that I know of.” Yet when O’Brien had interviewed Trump two years earlier, Trump had told the journalist that he believed that Sullivan was mobbed up and “the guy that killed Jimmy Hoffa.” He also described Shapiro as a “mob guy.”

Moreover, after New Jersey regulators in 1982 granted Trump a casino license, they compelled him to buy the property that he had leased from Shapiro and Sullivan because of their backgrounds. Shapiro later told a federal grand jury that he had illegally funneled thousands of dollars to the Atlantic City mayor on Trump’s behalf—a charge Trump denied. So though Trump was well aware that Sullivan and Shapiro were mobbed up, in that 2007 deposition he stated he had never associated with persons with such ties.

* In 1999, when Trump was considering running for president as the candidate of the Reform Party, he was interviewed on Meet the Press by Tim Russert, who asked Trump about his “relations with members of organized crime.” Trump denied having any such connections. He neglected to mention that he got his start in Atlantic City via that business deal with Shapiro and Sullivan. Nor did he refer to working with a cement company owned by Mafia captains and with a mob-linked union official when he was building Trump Tower. Yet eight months earlier—when Trump was not making moves to run for president—he acknowledged that he had done business with organized crime figures. Talking to the Associated Press, Trump remarked, “Usually, I build buildings. I have to deal with the unions, the mob, some of the roughest men you’ve ever seen in your life.”

* Trump also denied interacting with Robert LiButti, a famous horse breeder and high-stakes gambler with ties to infamous Mafia boss John Gotti. In 1991, the Philadelphia Inquirer asked Trump about his connection to LiButti. At the time, New Jersey regulators were investigating allegations that the Trump Plaza casino had repeatedly removed women and Black people from craps tables after LiButti griped about their presence while playing. “I have heard he is a high roller, but if he was standing here in front of me, I wouldn’t know what he looked like,” Trump told the newspaper. And when Yahoo News in 2016 asked Trump about this 1991 investigation, which resulted in a $200,000 fine, Trump answered, “During the years I very successfully ran the casino business, I knew many high rollers. I assume Mr. LiButti was one of them, but I don’t recognize the name.”

Edith Creamer, LiButti’s daughter, had a different take. She told Yahoo News that Trump’s account was false and that he and her father knew each well. “He’s a liar,” Creamer said. “Of course he knew him. I flew in the [Trump] helicopter with [Trump’s then-wife] Ivana and the kids. My dad flew it up and down [to Atlantic City]. My 35th birthday party was at the Plaza and Donald was there. After the party, we went on his boat, his big yacht. I like Trump, but it pisses me off that he denies knowing my father. That hurts me.”

The Yahoo News story by Michael Isikoff (my occasional co-author) also reported that a 1991 book written by John O’Donnell, the former president of the Trump Plaza casino, recounted a 1988 meeting between Trump and LiButti aboard Trump’s private helicopter. On this flight, according to O’Donnell, Trump discussed buying a racehorse for $500,000 from LiButti. Isikoff also obtained the transcript of a wiretapped meeting in 1990 between LiButti and a top Trump executive in which LiButti made numerous references to his conversations with Trump and described an occasion when Trump personally handed him a check after he lost $350,000 at the craps table. (It was supposedly a gift to keep LiButti happy so he would continue gambling at the Trump Plaza.)

To Yahoo News, Trump claimed he did not even recognize LiButti’s name. Yet a few months later he told the Wall Street Journal, “LiButti was a high-roller in Atlantic City. I found him to be a nice guy. But I had nothing to do with him.”

All these episodes establish a pattern: Trump associated with mobsters and lied about these relationships. Yet Trump’s links to criminals never became an issue during the 2016 campaign or subsequently. (No coincidence, Trump’s longtime attorney and mentor, Roy Cohn, who died in 1986, was also a lawyer for such mobsters as Fat Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti.) Yes, the United States was led for four years by a failed casino owner with ties to organized crime. And Trump’s criminality in office was hardly shocking, as he often behaved like a Mafiosa (Nice little country you got there, President Zelenskyy. You want more weapons from us? Well, I’m gonna need you to do us this little favor.) Now Trump has been indicted the way a mob boss gets nabbed. There is no telling how this case—or Trump’s other criminal prosecutions—will play out. But this much is clear: Willis has delivered one of the most poetic indictments in American history.

The New Trump Indictment Will Supercharge His War on American Democracy

Even after all these years of Donald Trump’s extremist attacks on American democracy and decency itself, the four-count criminal indictment handed down by a federal grand jury on Tuesday that accused the former president of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results still is a shocking development. It would be quite the capstone to the Trump era. Yet despite these criminal charges, the Trump era is not yet over. There are motions and presumably trials (in this case and others) to come, as well as the entire 2024 election. Trump has not left the building. And whatever happens in the various courtrooms, a key question remains: Will this latest—and most serious—indictment of Trump do anything to break his hold on the paranoid and irrational imagination of tens of millions of Americans?

Of all the Trump indictments—which also cover his payment of hush money to a porn star to cover up an alleged extramarital affair and his alleged theft of classified documents—this new set of charges addresses the most fundamental threat he has posed on American democracy. He falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him. He schemed to overturn legitimate vote counts. And he riled up his followers to such an extent that thousands stormed the Capitol and violently tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power—a bedrock principle of American society.

But this alleged crime was not Trump’s doing alone. He had millions of accomplices: all those Americans who bought his bogus claims about the election.

Trump was only able to promote the biggest con of his career because there was an audience of Republican voters who believed his bunk. The GOP establishment did not oppose Trump’s disinformation operation—his assertions that he had actually won the election and his many unsubstantiated allegations of fraud—because it feared the party’s base. After the 2020 election, as Trump poisoned the national discourse with his conspiracy theories, Republican leaders did not counter his lies out of fear of alienating Trump’s voters. This afforded Trump the political space to mount assorted and overlapping plots to retain power. With this indictment, special counsel Jack Smith alleges these actions were crimes. And when those allegedly illegal schemes failed, Trump’s cultish loyalists provided the shock troops for the January 6 insurrectionist riot that nearly prevented the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. 

This historic indictment is a healthy sign that conspiracies to overturn elections or mount coups will not be tolerated. Better late than never, these charges deliver a powerful message: the man in charge of safeguarding the Constitution criminally tried to sabotage it. There perhaps is no better summation of Trump’s presidency. Yet, ultimately, Trump is not the main danger. He may be brought to justice via this prosecution. But that act alone won’t protect the constitutional order. 

Trump will turn this indictment, as he has done so with his previous indictments, into yet more proof that he is the target of a corrupt and nefarious cabal aiming to destroy the country. The Deep State, Democrats, the media, antifa, communists, Black radicals, and pedophiles—they are, in his BS narrative, arrayed against him and against real Americans. In Trump’s telling, the only way to thwart these evildoers was to declare the election rigged and foment the paranoia and outrage that led to the seditious January 6 attack on the US Capitol. 

Trump had no evidence of this diabolical election-stealing plot; he had no rational argument. His claims were debunked again and again. (His own consigliere, Rudy Giuliani, has admitted to making false allegations of election theft.) Nevertheless, millions of Americans accepted this false reality—and still do. They have been under a Trump trance, transfixed by his lies and false statements and impervious to actual facts. This latest indictment will confirm their irrational beliefs. 

A recent poll found that zero percent—yes, zero percent—of MAGA Republicans think that Trump has committed serious federal crimes. Only 2 percent of his loyalists concede that he did “something wrong” regarding the handling of classified documents. More than 9 out of 10 of these people said Republicans must stand behind Trump in the face of the investigations. And three quarters of all likely Republicans voters said Trump, following the 2020 elections, was legitimately contesting the results. (That number went up to 83 percent for Republicans who are heavy viewers of Fox News.)  

One survey after another shows that Republicans and conservatives are trapped in the muck of Trump conspiracism. Half of Republicans say that Trump did not keep classified documents at Mar-a-Lago—a sign of willful blindness. Eighteen million Americans believe the use of force to restore Trump to the White House would be justified—an uptick of about 50 percent over the past few months. About 90 percent of Trump’s most radical supporters see the federal government as run by a supposed Deep State full of immoral schemers. Twelve percent of Americans agreed with this statement: “A secret group of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is ruling the US government.” (A survey conducted last year found that half of Republicans and more than half of Trump 2020 voters believed prominent Democrats were involved in secret pedophilia rings.) A separate poll notes that two-thirds of Republicans still believe Trump’s bogus and debunked claim that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election by fraud.

Trump has encouraged and exploited all this crap. He would be nowhere if there was not a market for his outrageous and baseless lies. Millions of Americans who are mired in this lunacy aided and abetted Trump’s assault on the republic. When Richard Nixon was exposed as a crook—and named an unindicted co-conspirator—his support among Republican voters and officeholders sharply eroded. Those Americans eventually accepted the investigations of Nixon’s criminality and the prosecutions of his henchmen as legitimate enterprises and turned (somewhat gradually) against him. 

Not this time. As news of the latest indictment hit, Trump’s campaign released a statement declaring the “persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes.” It added, “These un-American witch hunts will fail and President Trump will be re-elected to the White House so he can save our Country from the abuse, incompetence, and corruption that is running through the veins of our Country at levels never seen before.” His people will absorb and embrace this hyperbolic, hate-mongering, demagogic junk. These Americans are threats to the American project. 

Once upon a time, criminal indictments would stop a political campaign dead in its tracks. Not anymore. The Trump crusade is chugging ahead, as this narcissistic, grievance-stirring wannabe-autocrat strives to return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and implement his out-in-the-open plan to transform the federal government into an authoritarian regime. And millions will cheer him on, perhaps even more loudly after he has become the first former president (and current presidential candidate) to be criminally charged as a domestic enemy of the US Constitution. The Trump spell will not be broken. The wheels of justice, which grind exceedingly slow but exceedingly fine, are (finally!) addressing Trump’s alleged crimes. But it will take more than justice to defeat Trumpism. 

“Oppenheimer”: A Masterpiece Missing a Piece

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Please check it out.

With Oppenheimer, director Christopher Nolan has created one of the best movies in film history, despite its flaws. His study of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who led the project to develop a weapon that could annihilate the entirety of human civilization, is a fascinating exploration of a man who changed everything and who, quite rightly, had trouble adjusting to the new reality he created for the world and for himself. And with this flick, Nolan compels us to ponder a fact of life that haunted Oppenheimer after Trinity, the first successful test of an atomic bomb, held in the desert near the secret town that served as the headquarters of the Manhattan Project: We are doomed unless we find a way to limit the destructive power he helped to unleash.

Nolan interweaves, as you would expect, multiple narratives that crisscross time. There’s the hush-hush Oppenheimer-guided rush during World War II to build the A-bomb before the Nazis could unlock the immense power of enriched uranium. There’s the postwar, McCarthyistic investigation of Oppenheimer in 1954 that focused on his prewar associations with commies, his liberal views, and his opposition to pursuing the hydrogen bomb. And there’s the tale of Lewis Strauss, a chair of the Atomic Energy Commission and Oppenheimer foe, who President Dwight Eisenhower nominates as commerce secretary and whose 1959 confirmation hearings are shaped by his personal vendetta against Oppenheimer. With a dazzling pace, the movie skips back and forth between these chronologies, treating them, in Nolanesque fashion, as different dimensions.

The movie is based on the excellent Pulitzer Prize–winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. (Connection declared: Bird has been a friend for four decades, and eons ago we shared an apartment in New York City.) It’s been a while since I’ve read the book. Consequently, I cannot say what details are dead-on accurate and which derive from dramatic license. Yet Bird and Sherwin offered Nolan plenty of clay to carve into a masterpiece, including the psychological burden Oppenheimer bore for placing human existence on a short fuse and the perfidious crusade mounted by conniving Cold Warriors against a scientist and public intellectual who (after enabling the initial use of nuclear weapons) advocated international cooperation (even with Moscow!) to stop the advance of this weaponry.

Cillian Murphy is captivating as Oppenheimer, oozing angst and moral ambiguity (including in his personal life), as he literally carries the weight of the world on his shoulders. It’s a stunning performance. The movie is him—though the rest of the star-studded cast (Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Kenneth Branagh, Emily Blunt, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, and everyone else) carry their parts well, as to not let Murphy completely run away with the movie. The directing, editing, sound editing, cinematography (those New Mexican landscapes!), set designs, special effects, and every other component are exquisite.

Yet there are flaws. The narrative structure of Oppenheimer is too tightly tethered to Strauss’ confirmation hearing. This does afford Nolan the opportunity to set up a diabolical villain. After all, Oppenheimer cannot be the bad guy—not as the lead character in a three-hour film. Still, the Strauss plot seems forced. And in a few spots Nolan gets too artsy, such as when he depicts Oppenheimer naked as he sits for an interview with the board trying to yank away his security clearance. But none of this detracts from the film’s ambition and brilliance.

Oppenheimer covers a key and still debated matter: Should the United States have dropped these bombs on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, killing 100,000 to 200,000 people, most civilians? (We don’t have exact numbers for the death count.) The film portrays the actions of conscientious scientists developing the bomb who ardently opposed its use. (Oppenheimer was not part of the group.) And in one scene, Truman administration officials discuss the decision to bomb Hiroshima. Maybe there ought to be a demonstration first that might compel the Japanese to surrender? (But what if that bomb were a dud?) Maybe the population of the target city should be warned? (That would give the Japanese a chance at stopping the plane carrying the bomb.) Of course, imagine all the American lives lost if the US military were forced to invade Japan to end the war.

But Nolan’s rendering of the debate is too constrained. As my friend Greg Mitchell, a journalist and author who has written extensively on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, notes, Oppenheimer leaves out key historical facts that raise questions about the necessity of deploying the atomic bomb to end the war—and the necessity of dropping the second one on Nagasaki. “Many historians today believe that if Truman had waited just three days after Hiroshima for the Soviets to enter the war as the US insisted,” he points out, “the Japanese would likely have surrendered in about the same time frame.” Mitchell also observes that there is no mention in the film that 85 percent of the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilians.

One scene that addresses this Big Question highlights the arbitrary nature of warfare and underscores the immorality of bombing civilian sites. As Oppenheimer and government officials discuss the possible target cities in Japan for the first A-bomb, Secretary of War Henry Stimson strikes Kyoto from the list. He explains that it is an important cultural center for Japan and that he and his wife honeymooned there.

So Hiroshima it is—and here’s where the film hits a serious problem. After the bombing, Oppenheimer presents us no images of the devastation. Neither does it put on screen what was wrought at Nagasaki a few days later. We see the troops, scientists, and workers at Los Alamos celebrate the “success” at Hiroshima. But nada for the tragedy on the other side of the Pacific. My hunch is that Nolan and his team thought long and hard about this decision. Did they believe that gruesome footage would stand as too much of an indictment of Oppenheimer and undercut the audience’s sympathy for him? Might it be too overwhelming for multiplex-goers? But this move is reminiscent of the actions that Hollywood and the US government took decades ago to suppress the most shocking images of Hiroshima. (Mitchell detailed this in a recent documentary called Atomic Cover-Up.) The absence of the Japanese dead in Oppenheimer reinforces their position as the Other.

After the blast at Hiroshima, Oppenheimer addresses applauding and cheering scientists at Los Alamos, and as he speaks, for a moment, he imagines incinerated bodies before him in the auditorium. Later, he attends a presentation where slides are shown of the horrors found in the carnage—such as bodies with clothes burnt into what was once skin. But we in the audience are spared these grisly sights. We only see the dread in Murphy’s eyes. This is a painful moment, but it is not the same as being exposed to what Oppenheimer is viewing. This close-up shot focuses not on the abomination at Hiroshima and Nagasaki but on what it means for Oppenheimer.

The point of Nolan’s enthralling movie—to be damn scared of nuclear weapons today—is important. We do not talk enough about this ever-present threat to humanity and the dire need for more arms control and a path to nuclear disarmament. Oppenheimer does raise other issues, most notably the moral responsibility of scientists who pursue world-changing technology, a relevant matter these days as we enter the era of AI. But Message No. 1 is that Oppenheimer’s work put us on a path to self-extinction. That’s how Nolan’s Oppenheimer, who throughout the movie has visions of nuclear apocalypse, views his much-hailed accomplishment.

Decades ago, I was a founding editor of Nuclear Times, a publication that covered arms control topics at a time when the nuclear freeze movement was calling for a sharp reduction in nuclear forces. (Mitchell was the editor.) During my two-year stint there, I frequently experienced nightmares that included nuclear explosions. It was not easy to contemplate this stuff on a daily basis. And I burnt out on the issue. (These days I sympathize with climate scientists and journalists.)

I know how tough it is to focus attention on this weighty matter. I salute Nolan for applying his star power and massive talents to this noble endeavor. It’s been years since a major cultural work forced us to confront this profound existential challenge. Oppenheimer’s dread should be all of ours. Would showing the Japanese victims—what we all could become—have been too much? It certainly would have honored them. And it would have reminded us that, as potential casualties in a nuclear conflagration, we have more in common with these hundreds of thousands of incinerated and radiated human beings than we do with the man who put us all at risk.

No Labels Says It’s Not a Political Party. But It’s Setting Up State Parties.

No Labels, the self-professed centrist group that is preparing to possibly run its own presidential candidate in 2024, says it is not a political party. That means it does not have to reveal the donors that have pumped tens of millions of dollars in recent years into its coffers. Parties must disclose their funders; nonprofit outfits, as No Labels claims to be, do not. But in several states, No Labels has established an affiliate that explicitly declares it is a political party, and some of these groups, particularly the party it set up in Florida, have deep Republican roots.

No Labels’ plan to gain ballot access in states across the nation so it can place on the 2024 ballot a supposed “unity” ticket including a Democrat and a Republican has unnerved Democratic and Never-Trump Republican strategists. They cite polls to contend that such a move would likely draw more votes from President Joe Biden than Donald Trump, assuming these current front-runners end up being the nominees. No Labels’ officials, including co-chair Joe Lieberman, the former senator and vice-presidential candidate who switched from Democrat to independent, insist they will not proceed with a candidate who would be a spoiler. But the outfit’s refusal to disclose its donors and media reports revealing that significant funders of the group include Republican fat-cats have fueled the suspicions among professional Democrats and anti-Trump operatives that No Labels may be pursuing a secret agenda to aid Trump or the GOP. This week it released what is essentially its policy platform—a mish-mosh of middle-of-the-road prescriptions and vague notions. (It urged “a sustainable abortion compromise most Americans can live with”—without defining what that would be.)

The group’s activity in Florida will likely not reassure those Democratic and Never-Trump No Labels critics. 

In September, the No Labels Party of Florida registered with the state’s elections division as a political party. Two months later, it received its first donation: $35,000 from No Labels Ballot Access, an outfit formerly known as Insurance Policy for America, which was created by No Labels and initially seeded with $2.4 million in dark money—meaning funds from sources No Labels won’t identify. (Last month, Mother Jones published a list of 36 donors to Insurance Policy for America that included major GOP funders and a few Democratic donors.) The only contact information on the No Labels Party of Florida website is a P.O. box in Winter Park, Florida, and an email address for the main No Labels office, which is in Washington, DC. 

Two of the three officers of the No Labels Party of Florida have extensive GOP connections. Its chair is Kathleen Shanahan, the CEO of an electrical construction firm. She has a long history of working for prominent Republicans. As her online biography puts it, “Her positions in federal and state public policy include serving as Chief of Staff for Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Chief of Staff to Vice President-elect Dick Cheney, Deputy Secretary of the California Trade and Commerce Agency, Special Assistant to then Vice President George Bush, and Staff Assistant on President Reagan’s National Security Council.”

Allan Keen, a real estate developer, is the party’s treasurer and secretary. He donated $135,000 to Donald Trump’s campaign efforts in 2020. In the 2022 election, Keen contributed $140,000 to Republican outfits looking to elect GOP Senators. Previously, he financially backed the presidential campaigns of George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. He also made contributions to Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat-turned-independent, and Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat who No Labels supporters have mentioned as the group’s possible 2024 candidate. Manchin, who has refused to say whether he would accept a No Labels nomination, was scheduled to co-host with former GOP Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman a No Labels event on Monday in New Hampshire to unveil the group’s new policy platform. 

The other officer of the No Labels Party of Florida is Harold Mills, the CEO of a firm that invests in the technology and services industries. He donated several thousand dollars to Joe Biden in 2020.

Mills tells Mother Jones that he is currently “evaluating my role” with the No Labels Party of Florida. He notes that he signed up as vice-chair 18 months ago because “as a political moderate” he had been a supporter of No Labels’ efforts to encourage bipartisan legislation. But now, he adds, he wants to “understand their current process…as we get into the other part of the strategy”—that is, the 2024 campaign. 

Mills says that it may well seem that the leadership of No Labels Party of Florida is weighted toward Republicans but that his fellow officers tend to be “moderate” in their policy positions.

Shanahan and Keen did not reply to multiple requests for comment.

The incorporation paperwork the party submitted to the Florida division of elections cites Nick Connors, the director of ballot access for No Labels, as a point of contact. His email address is an account at No Labels.

Connors has a lengthy pedigree in Republican politics. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was the director of ballot access and delegate operations for Sen. Lindsey Graham’s doomed presidential bid in 2016, operations manager at the GOP convention that year, and associate director of Trump’s inauguration. In 2018, he was communications director for Greg Orman, who unsuccessfully ran as an independent for Kansas governor. 

Connors is no longer a pro-Trump Republican. In 2020, he wrote an article for the Bulwark slamming Graham for becoming “one of the most fawning Trump sycophants in the entire GOP herd.” In 2021, during the second Trump impeachment, he penned a piece that criticized Senate Republicans for failing to “put their country before their own political aspirations and vote to convict the former president.” In 2022, Connors ran for the Republican senatorial nomination in Connecticut but didn’t make it on the ballot. 

On a candidate’s survey, he described himself as a strong fiscal conservative and noted, “In 2017, Mr. Connors stopped working for Washington insiders to focus on helping conservative independent candidates and political reform organizations. One major factor for breaking with the elitists in Washington was his experience seeing how the US political system has been manipulated by career-politicians and lobbyists to reward Washington insiders while marginalizing and ignoring the American people.” Connors’ championing of conservative candidates is out of sync with No Labels’ assertion that it promotes moderate candidates, not conservatives or liberals. 

Connors is listed as the chair of the No Labels Party of Alaska, the principle organizer of the No Labels Party of Oregon, and the “proponent” of the No Labels Party of Colorado, which is co-chaired by two Republicans. No Labels has also been recognized as a party in Arizona and has qualified as a party in Maine. It is also registered as a party in North Carolina. The statement of organization the North Carolina party filed last year with the state’s board of elections lists as its phone number one used by Connors. 

Connors did not return multiple requests for comment. Maryanne Martini, the communications deputy for No Labels, also did not reply to a request for comment. 

Ryan Clancy, the chief strategist for No Labels, recently insisted that No Labels is not a political party. And as the New Yorker reported last month, No Labels “maintains that it is a nonprofit social-welfare organization, not a political party.” Yet the group’s outposts in states explicitly identify as political parties. 

This month, former House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt, who is now a lobbyist, created an organization to oppose No Labels’ third-party presidential effort. According to the Washington Post, polling conducted by this new outfit matches what polling for No Labels has shown: a third-party candidate would pull more from Biden than Trump.

No Labels officials argue, though, that once a third-party candidate is named, that person’s support would likely grow and allow him or her to be competitive with the Democratic and Republican nominees. Democratic strategists scoff at that analysis. No Labels’ leaders repeatedly say that they won’t mount an effort that will tilt the election toward Trump and that they will only proceed with a bipartisan ticket if polling indicates it can actually win. But with No Labels hiding its donors and denying it is a political party as it sets up state parties, its detractors certainly have reason to be wary of such pronouncements.

George Santos Cashed In Big With Followers of Indicted Chinese Billionaire Miles Guo

When George Santos, the indicted but still-in-office Republican congressman from Queens, New York, recently filed the campaign finance report for his reelection effort, there was something unusual about it: Of about 50 total contributors, the document listed about three dozen contributors spread across the country who mostly have Chinese names and who had each maxed out to Santos by donating $3,300, the legal maximum for the primary election. Together, this group pumped roughly $130,000 into Santos’ political bank account. This was hardly a coincidence. This band of financial backers appear to include supporters of Miles Guo, the exiled Chinese billionaire and Steve Bannon associate who was arrested in March for allegedly running a $1 billion fraud scheme.

This roster of donors represents almost all of the money Santos pulled in in the second quarter of this year. 

One of these maxed-out contributors is Rona Starks (also known as Rong Liang Starks), who lives in Sugar Land, Texas. According to an associate of Starks, she has been a big fan of Guo and his crusade against the Chinese government, and that prompted her to write a check for $3,300 to Santos, who has stridently defended Guo. She declined to speak to Mother Jones. Xuehong Zhang, another Santos donor who sent him $3,300 and who is a masseuse in Plano, Texas, told the New York Times, “I see him want to take down CCP [the Chinese Communist Party]. I  just want to take down CCP.”

Guo, who fled China in 2014 to avoid fraud charges there, has branded himself a foe of the Chinese Communist Party, and he has amassed a loyal following of supporters in the Chinese diaspora in the United States and abroad. In March, the Justice Department charged Guo with deploying a series of fraudulent business schemes to fleece his fans out of more than $1 billion. Federal prosecutors alleged Guo used investors’ funds to pay for mansions and fancy cars, $36,000 mattresses, and a $27 million yacht. He has been indicted for wire fraud, securities fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering. Guo claims the feds are after him at the behest of the Chinese government to silence him.

Santos, a politician with few allies, has played to Guo’s crowd.

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On May 5, he showed up at a $26.5 million mansion in Mahwah, New Jersey, which the Justice Department has alleged Guo purchased with funds from his billion-dollar scam. Santos was there to take part in a live-stream interview conducted by two top Guo aides that aired on Gettr, a right-leaning social media application over which Guo has exercised control.

During the interview, Santos pledged to fight to ensure that “Miles Guo is free and given an opportunity to a trial.” Guo has been imprisoned without bail since his March 15 arrest. Santos tacitly backed Guo supporters’ conspiratorial contention that the Justice Department is targeting Guo to kowtow to the Chinese Communist Party.

It was two weeks after Santos appeared on the pro-Guo livestream that these large contributions started to pour into Santos’ campaign. A source who was previously a Guo supporter shared with Mother Jones a Google document that was set up for Guo backers so they could register their donations to Santos. The top of the document read in Chinese, “This form is for comrades who have donated to Santos to register their donation information.”

For several years, Guo has overseen chapters around the world, organized mostly on Discord, the social media application, that are akin to fan clubs. Guo has used these groups, which he calls “farms,” to raise money for nonprofits he controls and to drum up investments for business ventures he launched. That includes several schemes that the Justice Department allege were fraudulent. The form for Santos donors asked them to include their name, the “farm” with which they are affiliated, and the amount they donated. The document asks for an image showing proof of a donation.

On Santos’ campaign finance report, several of the contributions on this list are attributed to college students. Past investigations of Santos’ campaign finances—including those conducted by Mother Jones—have uncovered contributors whose identities could not be confirmed and donors who said they did not make contributions to Santos. 

After receiving these contributions, Santos went beyond legitimizing Guo’s claims on the livestream. He delivered a speech on the House floor in which he exclaimed, “The charges against Miles Guo are simply part of an organizing campaign of political persecution brought against him by the CCP.” He then introduced a bill he called the “Guo Act,” which is premised on the unsubstantiated notion that China is corruptly influencing US courts to advance its interests. The bill would require federal judges and senior federal prosecutors to submit financial disclosures supposedly aimed at assessing whether they have received payments by foreign governments. The bill is not going anywhere.

Santos raised more than $133,000 between March and June of this year. His current fundraising numbers—although not particularly impressive when compared to un-indicted congressional candidates—have improved since the first quarter of 2023, when his campaign reported refunding more money than it received. The campaign used most of the recent donations to pay Santos $85,000 to cover one of the personal loans Santos had made to his 2022 campaign. That means that money that seems to have come from these contributors ended up in Santos’ own pocket. 

Santos’ office did not respond to a request for comment. 

Santos still has not repaid $530,000 of personal loans, according to the filing. The source of the money for these loans remain unexplained. According to the recent filings, Santos’ campaign spent effectively nothing on activities that would help him get reelected. The largest campaign expense aside from the loan repayment was $3,500 for compliance consulting.

Santos was indicted in May on 13 counts of wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds and making false statements to the House of Representatives. He has pleaded not guilty.

Top Democratic-Run Firms Won’t Discuss Their Work for No Labels

Is No Labels becoming radioactive within the Democratic establishment?

Two prominent, Washington, DC-based consulting firms that are run by Democrats and that have done significant work in recent years for the self-professed centrist outfit will now not discuss their relationship with the group or say whether they are still on the No Labels payroll.

No Labels has increasingly come under fire from Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans for its plan to possibly run a third-party candidate in 2024. The organization, which claims to be a foe of extremism on the left and on the right, is currently spending millions of dollars to obtain ballot access in states across the country. Democratic strategists and anti-Trump Republican operatives have concluded that its effort could siphon more votes from President Joe Biden than Donald Trump, the leading candidates, respectively, in the Democratic and GOP presidential nomination contests. And they have begun to brainstorm how to thwart a potential No Labels ticket.

Meanwhile, No Labels, a nonprofit, refuses to disclose the source of its funding, though media reports have identified several major donors with GOP ties. Mother Jones recently published a list of 36 funders underwriting its 2024 efforts that tilted toward the right but that did include several Democratic contributors. No Labels’ lack of transparency regarding its funding has bolstered the speculation it is pursuing a strategy that could help Republicans.

In recent years, the group, which has supported Democratic and Republican members of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus in the House, has been assisted by consulting firms operated by Democrats. Its 2021 tax return, the most recent publicly available, noted that during that year—in which No Labels raised $11.4 million—it paid Rational 360, a strategic communications firm, $946,000 for consulting work, and Winning Connections, a company specializing in grassroots mobilization, $196,00 for advocacy efforts. It’s not clear whether any of this activity was related to No Labels’ 2024 project. Both companies are led by prominent Democrats.

The CEO and managing director of Rational 360 is Patrick Dorton. According to his company biography, he was a special assistant to Bill Clinton and communications director for the White House National Economic Council. He also served in the 1990s as a  press secretary for a Democratic House member and two Democratic senators, as well as a deputy press secretary for the Democratic National Committee. After his stint in politics and government, he became director of media relations at Arthur Andersen during the accounting firm’s 2002 collapse, which occurred due to its role in the Enron and Worldcom financial scandals. 

Brian Kaminski, a managing director and co-founder of Rational 360, notes in his company bio that before he joined the firm he “gained communications experience on Capitol Hill in the Office of [Democratic] Senator Barbara Mikulski, in the Office of the First Lady, and at the Democratic National Committee. He also worked in the private sector for Accenture, Ltd.” Melissa Green, a managing director and senior counsel for the company, was an aide in the Clinton White House and began her career at the political consulting firm of prominent Democrats James Carville and Paul Begala. Joe Lockhart, another managing director, was a press secretary for President Clinton. 

Winning Connections is run by John Jameson, who founded the firm in 1996, and, according to its website, “built it into the nation’s premier direct voter contact firm for interest groups, associations, and Democratic candidates.” It has worked for the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, dozens of Democratic gubernatorial, mayoral, Senate, and House candidates, several state Democratic parties, and an assortment of progressive groups, including Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and Everytown for Gun Safety. Mark Schauer, its vice president, is a former Democratic House member from Michigan. Its chief operating officer, Gloria Totten, is a former political director of the National Abortion Rights Action League (now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America). 

Mother Jones repeatedly contacted Rational 360 and Winning Connections to inquire about their work for No Labels and to ask whether these firms are still involved with No Labels. Neither organization responded.

A source familiar with Rational 360’s operations did note that the company provided services of some kind to No Labels last year. No Labels began its effort to acquire state ballot lines for a possible 2024 candidate at least as early as December 2021, according to its tax returns.

No Labels sells itself as a bipartisan outfit with prominent supporters who hail from both parties, including former Sen. Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat who switched to independent, and former Gov. Pat McGrory, a North Carolina Republican. The group was started by Nancy Jacobson, a onetime fundraiser for the Democratic Party. The politician most mentioned as a possible No Labels presidential nominee in 2024 is Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who has contemplated leaving the party. Manchin has not indicated whether he would mount a White House bid on the No Labels line. So far No Labels has gotten onto the ballot in four states: Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, and Oregon.

Ryan Clancy, the chief political strategist for No Labels, also has deep Democratic roots. His online biography notes that he was a speechwriter for Biden, during Biden’s stint as vice president, and for Gary Locke, a commerce secretary in the Obama-Biden administration. It also says he has developed “corporate narratives and executive positioning plans for Fortune 500 companies.” According to No Labels’ tax returns, Clancy’s consulting firm was paid $300,000 in 2021 and in 2020. In 2019, the company earned $253,750 from No Labels. 

Clancy was also paid $130,000 in 2021 by The New Center, a foundation tied to No Labels that was also started by Jacobson. (It used to be called the No Labels Foundation.) The president of The New Center, which promotes itself as a bipartisan think tank, is Mark Penn, the onetime Democratic consultant and former Clinton political adviser who distanced himself from the Democratic Party. Penn, who is married to Jacobson, occasionally met with Trump in the White House. No Labels says that Penn is not involved with the group. But the organization has hired HarrisX to conduct polls, and Penn oversees that firm’s corporate parent. In 2021, No Labels paid HarrisX $428,000.

Mother Jones sent Clancy a list of questions regarding his work for No Labels and the group’s relationships with Rational 360 and Winning Connections. He did not respond. 

Maryanne Martini, the deputy of communications for No Labels, did not respond to a request for comment. 

No Labels’ preparations to mount a third-party ticket in 2024 has unnerved Democrats far more than Republicans. Dave Williams, the GOP chair in Colorado, where No Labels has secured a place on the 2024 ballot, recently said he had no worries about a No Labels candidate and suggested such a candidate would hurt the Democratic ticket more than the Republican. Both of the No Labels state co-chairs in Colorado are Republicans; one donated $4,000 to far-right GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert in her recent campaigns.

With all the sharp criticism No Labels has recently drawn from professional Democrats, it’s not surprising that firms tied to the Democratic world would not want attention for their work for No Labels. Their reticence is another reminder that though No Labels claims its intentions are honorable and that it is not pursuing a covert pro-Trump or pro-GOP agenda, it is a dark-money outfit seeking to intervene in American politics without transparency or accountability. 

Why Has Joe Biden Just Rewarded a Guy Who Supported Murderous War Criminals?

Why the hell did President Joe Biden nominate a one-time protector of war criminals to a top administration post?

On the Monday before July 4—a black hole day for news—the White House let drop the word that it was appointing Elliott Abrams to the bipartisan US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. The commission’s job is to oversee US government information programs designed to convey American diplomacy to the world. It keeps an eye on the US Agency for Global Media, which manages the Voice of America and similar programs. The commission essentially helps the United States present its idea of itself to the rest of the planet.

This is a task for which Abrams is distinctly unsuited.

Long a stalwart in neoconservative circles, Abrams was one of the many cheerleaders in the early 2000s for the disastrous Iraq War. A decade earlier, in 1991, as a player in the Iran–Contra affair, he pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress about the Reagan White House’s secret operation to arm the Nicaraguan Contras. In short: As a top State Department official, he engaged in a cover-up to hide the arguably illegal operation overseen by Oliver North. 

But Abrams most odious (known) action occurred several years previously. As a top Reagan official, he dismissed reports that the US-trained-and-equipped military had massacred 1,000 civilians—including many women and children—in the Salvadoran town of El Mozote in December 1981. This was the largest mass killing in recent Latin American history. But Abrams wanted to protect the Salvadoran army, which the Reagan administration was showering with guns and money, despite its well-established record of human rights abuses. Abrams trash-talked American journalists who reported on the massacre and claimed the horrific reports were “implausible.” He praised the military unit that conducted this awful action. He suppressed the truth to assist killers.

The Iraq War, Iran-contra, covering up mass murder—Abrams represents the worst of American foreign policy over the past four decades. 

The US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy can only have four of its seven members come from the same political party. That means Biden must appoint several non-Democrats. But why go with an apologist for war criminals? 

In December 2002, when President George W. Bush appointed Abrams to a senior White House post, I raised a similar point in a piece that detailed his most notorious misdeeds. It is stunning to me that I must revive that article because of a White House personnel action:

“How would you feel if your wife and children were brutally raped before being hacked to death by soldiers during a military massacre of 800 civilians, and then two governments tried to cover up the killings?” It’s a question that won’t be asked of Elliott Abrams at a Senate confirmation hearing because George W. Bush, according to press reports, may appoint Abrams to a National Security Council staff position that (conveniently!) does not require Senate approval. Moreover, this query is one of a host of rude, but warranted, questions that could be lobbed at Abrams, the Iran/contra player who was an assistant secretary of state during the Reagan years and a shaper of that Administration’s controversial—and deadly—policies on Latin America and human rights. His designated spot in the new regime: NSC’s senior director for democracy, human rights and international operations. (At press time, the White House and Abrams were neither confirming nor denying his return to government.)

Bush the Second has tapped a number of Reagan/Bush alums who were involved in Iran/contra business for plum jobs: Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, Otto Reich and John Negroponte. But Abrams’s appointment—should it come to pass—would mark the most generous of rehabilitations. Not only did Abrams plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of lying to Congress about the Reagan Administration’s contra program, he was also one of the fiercest ideological pugilists of the 1980s, a bad-boy diplomat wildly out of sync with Bush’s gonna-change-the-tone rhetoric. Abrams, a Democrat turned Republican who married into the cranky Podhoretz neocon clan, billed himself as a “gladiator” for the Reagan Doctrine in Central America—which entailed assisting thuggish regimes and militaries in order to thwart leftist movements and dismissing the human rights violations of Washington’s cold war partners.

One Abrams specialty was massacre denial. During a Nightline appearance in 1985, he was asked about reports that the US-funded Salvadoran military had slaughtered civilians at two sites the previous summer. Abrams maintained that no such events had occurred. And had the US Embassy and the State Department conducted an investigation? “My memory,” he said, “is that we did, but I don’t want to swear to it, because I’d have to go back and look at the cables.” But there had been no State Department inquiry; Abrams, in his lawyerly fashion, was being disingenuous. Three years earlier, when two American journalists reported that an elite, US-trained military unit had massacred hundreds of villagers in El Mozote, Abrams told Congress that the story was commie propaganda, as he fought for more US aid to El Salvador’s military. The massacre, as has since been confirmed, was real. And in 1993 after a UN truth commission, which examined 22,000 atrocities that occurred during the twelve-year civil war in El Salvador, attributed 85 percent of the abuses to the Reagan-assisted right-wing military and its death-squad allies, Abrams declared, “The Administration’s record on El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement.” Tell that to the survivors of El Mozote.

But it wasn’t his lies about mass murder that got Abrams into trouble. After a contra resupply plane was shot down in 1986, Abrams, one of the coordinators of Reagan’s pro-contra policy (along with the NSC’s Oliver North and the CIA’s Alan Fiers), appeared several times before Congressional committees and withheld information on the Administration’s connection to the secret and private contra-support network. He also hid from Congress the fact that he had flown to London (using the name “Mr. Kenilworth”) to solicit a $10 million contribution for the contras from the Sultan of Brunei. At a subsequent closed-door hearing, Democratic Senator Thomas Eagleton blasted Abrams for having misled legislators, noting that Abrams’s misrepresentations could lead to “slammer time.” Abrams disagreed, saying, “You’ve heard my testimony.” Eagleton cut in: “I’ve heard it, and I want to puke.” On another occasion, Republican Senator Dave Durenberger complained, “I wouldn’t trust Elliott any further than I could throw Ollie North.” Even after Abrams copped a plea with Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, he refused to concede that he’d done anything untoward. Abrams’s Foggy Bottom services were not retained by the First Bush, but he did include Abrams in his lame-duck pardons of several Iran/contra wrongdoers.

Abrams was as nasty a policy warrior as Washington had seen in decades. He called foes “vipers.” He said that lawmakers who blocked contra aid would have “blood on their hands”–while he defended US support for a human-rights-abusing government in Guatemala. When Oliver North was campaigning for the Senate in 1994 and was accused of having ignored contra ties to drug dealers, Abrams backed North and claimed “all of us who ran that program…were absolutely dedicated to keeping it completely clean and free of any involvement by drug traffickers.” Yet in 1998 the CIA’s own inspector general issued a thick report noting that the Reagan Administration had collaborated with suspected drug traffickers while managing the secret contra war.

The machinations behind this latest and inexplicable Abrams nomination have not yet become public. It could well be that Republicans were allowed to pick a Republican nominee for the commission. But Abrams’ ignoble past is no secret. Certainly, Biden is old enough and sharp enough to remember his transgressions. Yet his White House is handing a plum job and responsibility for overseeing US public diplomacy to a guy who promoted a catastrophic war, who misled Congress, and who lied and wheedled to aid and protect murderous human-rights abusers. As far as I can see, Abrams has not apologized for any of this. 

The White House did not respond to a request for an explanation. 

In 1989, Adm. William Crowe Jr. said of Abrams, “This snake’s hard to kill.” Little did he know that 34 years later, Abrams would still be slithering into the US government. Republicans and neocons have been trying to rehabilitate Abrams for years. Now the Biden administration has enabled the rewarding of a scoundrel who empowered war criminals and tarnished America’s image at home and overseas. Abrams epitomizes US skullduggery, hubris, and deception. He is not a role model for effective and values-driven public diplomacy. He has been its enemy. 

UPDATE: After this story was published, a White House spokesperson responded, “President Biden announced his intent to nominate several individuals to serve as Republican members of boards and commissions that are required, by statute or longstanding practice, to include bipartisan membership. It’s standard for Republican leadership to put nominees forward for these boards and commissions, along with President Biden’s own nominees.” That is, it’s standard operating procedure for a White House to accept the opposition party’s recommendations for such posts. That means Republican congressional leaders—the White House did not say who—are responsible for Abrams being handed a spot on the commission. No surprise there, and perhaps a bitter pill for the White House to swallow. 

For July 4th, Let’s Celebrate Great American Patriots: Government Bureaucrats

Editor’s note: The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Please check it out.

This Fourth of July, I’d like to salute some of the greatest patriots in the land: government bureaucrats.

I live in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, where tens of thousands of federal civil service workers toil and reside. They are my neighbors. They are my fellow commuters. These are Americans who devote themselves to protecting us. They strive to make our food, drugs, cars, airplanes, financial institutions, and workplaces safe. They endeavor to keep our air and water clean and protect our national lands. They fund and manage research to combat diseases and extend our knowledge of the universe. They assist our veterans. They help our farmers. They manage programs essential for the well-being of our elderly and low-income citizens. They represent us overseas and conduct humanitarian missions. And they do so much more.

It’s a pity they are often denigrated and derided as pencil-pushing, inside-the-Beltway ne’er-do-wells staffing Kafkaesque bureaucracies that spend much and do little. Many could be pulling in higher salaries in the private sector. But they want to help. They want to contribute to the greater good. True, far from all the actions of federal agencies are commendable. Departments and offices can be captured by special interests or guided by bad policies. But by and large, the Americans drawn to government work want to make our nation and our world a better place. That’s what I call patriotism.

I know smart and talented people who have spent much, if not all, of their adult lives employed at the EPA, the Labor Department, the Justice Department, the National Institutes of Health, the State Department, and other agencies where they put in long hours developing or implementing policies that will improve the lives of thousands (or millions) of Americans and others around the planet. These are admirable men and women in noble careers. And when you think of Washington as home to perhaps hundreds of thousands of such people, the city can seem a bit wondrous.

As we fire up the barbecue, wave flags at parades, and down another beer to celebrate the birth of our fragile republic, let’s hail the USA-loving civil servants who keep the ship of state moving forward. Particularly since they are in the crosshairs of the Trumpist right.

For years, the leading strategists of Trumpism have been plotting how to gain control of the federal workforce. Steve Bannon and others have declared war on what they call the “administrative state,” which in their minds includes and extends beyond the nefarious “Deep State” cabal that is always conspiring against Trump. They believe that Trump did not achieve many of his policy aims because the federal agencies were staffed with career professionals who thwarted his plans. Actually, Trump rarely turned his impulsive and vague policy aims into particular proposals. Remember Infrastructure Week—which did not happen? Or his purported but never-released health care plan that would provide Americans cheaper and better medical care? (Spoiler: He had no such plan.)

Nevertheless, his henchmen have cooked up a scheme to target federal civil service workers should Trump be restored to the White House. Call it the Schedule F Plot. It sounds wonky but it could dramatically change the government—and the nation.

“If you take how it’s written at face value, [this executive order] has the potential to turn every government employee into a political appointee, who can be hired and fired at the whim of a political appointee or even the president.”

At the end of Trump’s presidency, he signed an executive order that created a category of federal worker called Schedule F that covered possibly thousands of policy-related positions throughout the various agencies. Any employee assigned to Schedule F could lose civil service protections and be easily fired by the White House. At the time, University of Colorado, Boulder, professor Roger Pielke Jr. told Axios, “If you take how it’s written at face value, [this executive order] has the potential to turn every government employee into a political appointee, who can be hired and fired at the whim of a political appointee or even the president.”

The point was to allow Trump and his minions in the agencies to shit-can career professionals devoted to expertise-based policy—that is, employees serving the public interest instead of Trump’s political and personal interests. But with his stint in the White House at its end, Trump never had the chance to put this authority to use, and President Joe Biden rescinded the order. But had Trump possessed this power at the height of the Covid pandemic, he could have fired scientists and public health experts within the federal government who were warning of the crisis at the same time he was determined to dismiss its significance. And he could have disappeared all sorts of mid-level professionals in the national security agencies whom he believed were Deep Statists pursuing him or his lieutenants.

Out of office, Trump has not given up on the idea of turning the executive branch into his personal fiefdom. At a rally last year, he declared, “We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States.” Think of this: Every executive branch employee? There are more than 2.1. million civilian service workers (not counting about half a million postal workers).

A president generally has a say in the hiring and firing of about 4,000 federal officials deemed “political appointees” in agencies and departments throughout the federal government. But the career folks are beyond a president’s reach. A revived Schedule F order could place up to 50,000 federal employees under the direct control of a president. (Here’s a good explanation of this plan.)

Forcing tens of thousands of government workers to be White House loyalists—who could lose their jobs and livelihoods at the snap of a president’s fingers—is the move of an authoritarian. We have seen Gov. Ron DeSantis take steps like this in Florida, as he has enacted legislation to seize control of public universities and colleges. (See Pema Levy’s comprehensive account of DeSantis’ efforts to create an autocracy in the Sunshine State.) Presumably, he, too, would attempt to turn the executive branch into his own duchy, if given the chance.

Trump thunders that he loves the United States. Then again, he refers to the January 6 rioters as “patriots.” But—no surprise—he has no greater love than his love for himself. And the power he lusts for is the power of an autocrat. If he ever regains the keys to the Oval Office, his goal would be to turn the federal workforce into a cadre of zombie Trump troops. Many of the people who now hold these jobs represent the best and brightest of our nation. They deserve our gratitude and, with authoritarian candidates angling for the White House, our protection.

No Labels Exposed: Here’s a List of Donors Funding Its Effort To Disrupt the 2024 Race

No Labels, the political outfit preparing to run a “unity” ticket in 2024 that Democratic strategists and Never-Trump Republican operatives fear will siphon votes from President Joe Biden, is what’s known as a dark-money group. Unlike political parties, political action committees, and House, Senate, and presidential candidates, it is not required to reveal who is funding it. And No Labels, which says it intends to raise $70 million to possibly place a third-party candidate on the presidential ballot next year, refuses to disclose who is financing this project. But Mother Jones has obtained a list of 36 wealthy contributors and corporate high-rollers who last year wrote big checks to support No Labels’ effort to win 2024 ballot lines in states across the nation. This roster includes past and present chief executives of major companies, including Loews Corporation (a vast conglomerate), Fluor (an engineering and construction giant), Abry Partners (a private equity firm), SailPoint (a tech firm), and Fortress Investment Group.

Among the No Labels backers are donors who contributed millions of dollars to Republican causes, such as past GOP presidential candidates and super-PACS connected to Republican congressional leadership, and several who have poured money into the Democratic presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. One donor provided a big chunk of political cash to Donald Trump. Generally, these No Labels supporters, who mostly made contributions of $5,600 to its 2024 project, appear to favor conservative candidates, though many have played both sides of the aisle, financing Republican and Democratic politicians. 

Notable within this group is Michael Smith, the billionaire founder of natural gas behemoth Freeport LNG. He has donated more than $5.5 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, a super-PAC tied to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. Smith also backed Virginia GOP governor Glenn Youngkin and a slew of Republican senators. He has donated—albeit smaller amounts—to several moderate Democrats, such as  Montana’s Jon Tester and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin. Meanwhile, Smith’s wife, Iris Smith, another contributor to this No Labels project, has been a major donor to Democratic causes. In 2020, she gave more than $500,000 to Biden’s presidential victory fund—a joint fundraising committee that split the money between Biden’s campaign and other Democratic party groups. In the weeks before she made this donation, she wrote checks to the reelection campaigns for GOP Sens. David Perdue and Thom Tillis. She has also contributed to McConnell and Republican Sen. Tom Cotton. 

The Smiths did not respond to a request for comment. 

A stalwart Republican donor on the list is Tom McInerney, a private-equity investor, who has regularly donated to the Republican National Committee and GOP-linked super-PACs. This year, he has contributed nearly $100,000 to the RNC and over $200,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee. He has sent six-figure contributions to fundraising committees organized by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy ($250,000 in 2021) and by former speaker Paul Ryan ($244,000 in 2017). He has been a financial backer of McCain, Mitt Romney, and Jeb Bush. He recently donated to Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who is running for the GOP presidential nomination.

McInerney did not reply to a request for comment.

Three donors on the list contributed to Trump, but only one, Allan Keen, a successful Florida real estate developer, gave a hefty amount. In the run-up to the 2020 election, Keen donated $135,000 to Trump Victory, a joint-fundraising committee that supported Trump’s reelection. Previously, Keen financially backed the presidential campaigns of George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, McCain, and Romney. More recently, he has donated to Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who left the Democratic Party in December and became an independent.

At least 16 of the these 36 donors have graced Sinema with money.

Keen could not be reached for comment.

Some of these donors have supported No Labels in the past. Peter Resnick, an investor from Connecticut, gave No Labels Action, a super-PAC, $93,000 in 2018. That year, the No Labels super-PAC supported a bipartisan slate of Democratic and Republican congressional candidates. Resnick has also backed the presidential campaigns of Obama and Biden. Last fall, he made large donations to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Resnick did not respond to a request for comment.

Thomas “Mack” McLarty III, who was President Bill Clinton’s first White House chief of staff, donated $1,000 to the No Labels 2024 initiative. Alfred Spector, a noted computer scientist who was once vice president of research at Google and then a top executive at Two Sigma Investments, a tech-oriented hedge fund, contributed $2,000. Martha Ehmann Conte, a San Francisco-based investor and philanthropist who co-founded WomenRun, which identifies and supports “center-right Republican women to run for federal elected office,” gave $5,600. Dennis Blair, a former US director of national intelligence and a No Labels board member, kicked in $5,600.

The path to locating the federal filing that included this list of donors is convoluted, but it illustrates how dark-money groups operate.

As a nonprofit, No Labels must file tax returns that are public. The most recent return publicly available covers 2021. That year, No Labels raked in $11.3 million from unidentified patrons. The document reports that $2.4 million—a whopping 21 percent of all the money that came in—was given as a grant to a group called Insurance Policy for America, Inc., which was incorporated in Delaware on December 20, 2021 and located at the same Washington, DC, address as No Labels.

In a filing submitted to the IRS, IPFA noted that its president, treasurer, and secretary was Jerald Howe Jr., a top executive at Leidos, a defense, aviation, information technology, and biomedical firm (formerly known as Science Applications International Corporation). Howe is a co-founder and treasurer of No Labels. 

No Labels sent IPFA the $2.4 million three days after IPFA was set up. 

IPFA, according to reports it filed with the IRS, did not raise or spend any money for the first seven months of 2022. Then it became active. In August, it raised nearly $200,000 from these three dozen supporters, and it spent $173,000 in August and September. A report it submitted last month to the IRS detailed the donations and the expenditures. 

Nearly all of the money spent by IPFA went to Capitol Advisors, an Alexandria, Virginia-based consulting firm run by Michael Arno, a veteran consultant with expertise in ballot initiatives and state petition drives. He tells Mother Jones his main task was “to get No Labels ballot access” in states across the nation. The money paid to Capitol Advisors, according to Arno, included covering the costs of the petition work done in various states. In the last three months of 2022, Insurance Policy for America paid Capitol Advisors $1.1 million. It also paid Blitz Canvassing, a Colorado-based firm, $107,000 to help it obtain a No Labels line on the ballot in the Rocky Mountain state.

Arno notes that he stopped working for No Labels in April and signed a nondisclosure agreement with the group. “It was a lot of work. I’m getting older, and it was time to pass the torch,” the 67-year-old Arno explains. He says he helped No Labels seek ballot lines in about 10 states. So far, No Labels has gotten onto the ballot in four states: Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, and Oregon.

A strategist familiar with No Labels’ operations says they do not know why No Labels spun off IPFA to collect these donations and spend money on its ballot-access operation. According to Delaware corporate records, IPFA changed its name to No Labels Ballot Access on July 19, 2022, but it continued to file reports to the IRS under the name Insurance Policy for America. 

On Tuesday, a Mother Jones reporter contacted Ryan Clancy, the lead strategist for No Labels, and left him a voicemail message requesting to speak to him about the group’s tax return. Clancy replied by email requesting a query be sent to him via an email and noted, “I will look into [it].” The reporter followed up with emails listing questions about the creation of Insurance Policy for America, the transfer of $2.4 million to IPFA, the use of IPFA for No Labels’ 2024 project, and the donations to IPFA. Clancy did not respond.

Maryanne Martini, communications deputy for No Labels, and Nancy Jacobson, the president and CEO of No Labels, did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Howe.

No Labels is continuing to organize petition drives to win lines on the 2024 state ballots. “We’re going for as many states as we can across the country,” Clancy recently told NPR. The group says its aim is to run a ticket comprised of a Democrat and a Republican, if the public sours on the available choices (such as Biden and Trump). Its top officials have issued conflicting statements about what would trigger the organization to proceed with its own nominee.

The most discussed potential candidate for No Labels has been Manchin, who has declined to say whether he would participate in this effort. Poll data suggesting a No Labels campaign would hurt Biden more than Trump—as well as the conservative bent of the few previously known funders of the group, such as billionaire Harlan Crow, the billionaire benefactor of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a collector of Nazi memorabilia—has prompted Democratic strategists to speculate that this endeavor is a not-too-secret project to elect Trump or another Republican. Prominent Democratic operatives and Never-Trump Republicans recently met privately in Washington, DC, to discuss how best to counter a No Labels presidential campaign. 

No Labels insists its work addresses the concerns of voters who have become disillusioned with modern American politics and the partisanship of each side. Yet it sticks with the cynical and common tricks of the trade and eschews transparency and accountability, cloaking the moneybags who underwrite its operation. The list of donors found in the IPFA filing covers only a modest fraction of the money that has so far flowed into this No Labels venture; it is a small slice of the $70 million the group is aiming to collect for its 2024 plan.

The lion’s share of the money that has moved in and out of IPFA has not been disclosed in its filings with the IRS, and there is no telling whether the listed donors are representative of the organization’s overall sources of financing. Most of the funding for No Labels’ 2024 project remains secret, as this group that claims to be addressing popular disenchantment continues to use the same-old tactics of big-money politics and keeps the voters in the dark.