Chris Hedges's Blog, page 118

In Chicago, Trump Calls the City an Embarrassment to the U.S.

CHICAGO — Visiting Chicago for the first time as president, Donald Trump disparaged the city Monday as a haven for criminals that is “embarrassing to us as a nation.” The city’s top cop sat out Trump’s speech to protest the president’s immigration policies and frequently divisive rhetoric.

“There is one person who is not here today,” Trump told a friendly audience at a conference of police chiefs. “Where is he? I want to talk to him. In fact, more than anyone else, this person should be here because maybe he could learn something, and that’s the superintendent of the Chicago Police, Eddie Johnson.”

Johnson’s decision to boycott the event angered the city’s chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, which said in a Facebook post that “such a gesture would be an insult to both President Trump and the office of the presidency itself and would be a mark of disgrace upon the city throughout the entire nation, including Mayor Lori Lightfoot.”

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But the Democratic mayor and Illinois’ Democratic governor stood in solidarity with Johnson, who announced days before the International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference that he would not attend.

“This is the land of Lincoln and when you come to the state of Illinois you should respect all the people who live here in the state of Illinois,” said Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

Lightfoot also refused to meet with Trump, and said on Twitter that she supports Johnson.

“It’s no surprise that @realDonaldTrump brought his insulting, ignorant buffoonery to Chicago,” the mayor tweeted. “Luckily, in this city, we know the truth and we will not let anyone — no matter how high the office — denigrate who we are as a people or our status as a welcoming city.”

“Rather than belittle Chicago’s communities with hateful and dishonest rhetoric, he needs to go back to D.C. and face his fate,” Lightfoot said, apparently referring to the House impeachment inquiry against the president.

Trump has frequently criticized Chicago for its crime problems and status as a sanctuary city, one of scores of cities around the country that refuse to work with federal authorities to round up people who are living in the U.S. illegally.

At a news conference later Monday, Johnson said Trump had ignored a “double digit” reduction in violent crime in the city over the past three years.

Trump has long held up the nation’s third-largest city as the poster child of urban violence and dysfunctional Democratic politics.

At one point in the address, Trump turned his daily complaint about the impeachment inquiry into a swipe at “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett, who authorities say fabricated a claim about being attacked by Trump supporters in Chicago earlier this year.

“You have the case of this wise guy Jessie Smollett … and he said MAGA country did it,” Trump said, using the acronym for his “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan. “It’s a real big scam, just like the impeachment of your president is a scam.”

The FOP Lodge 7, which represents rank-and-file Chicago police officers, announced that it had cast a vote of no confidence in Johnson. The union’s president, Kevin Graham, was first to greet Trump on the tarmac of O’Hare International Airport, after he landed in the city.

In the speech, Trump rattled off Chicago crime statistics and claimed that Johnson puts the needs of people living in the U.S. illegally above those of law-abiding residents of Chicago. “Those are his values and frankly those values to me are a disgrace,” Trump said. “I want Eddie Johnson to change his values and to change them fast.”

During the conference, Trump signed an executive order creating a presidential commission on law enforcement to study issues like substance abuse, homelessness and mental illness. The president also announced that the Justice Department will begin a “surge” to crack down on violent crime in the United States, targeting gang members and drug traffickers in high-crime areas.

Johnson, meanwhile, is under internal investigation after he was found sleeping in a city-owned vehicle earlier this month. Lightfoot said Johnson, who called for the investigation, told her he had “a couple of drinks with dinner” before he fell asleep at a stop sign while driving home. Johnson blamed the episode on a change in his blood pressure medication.

While in Chicago, Trump headlined a campaign luncheon at his hotel in the city, raising approximately $4 million for a joint fundraising committee benefiting Trump’s reelection effort and the Republican National Committee, according to the GOP.

Thousands of demonstrators rallied outside the hotel, waving colorful signs that said “Impeach Trump Now” and “Quid Pro Quo Trump Must Go.” They also shouted chants such as “Lock him up” and “Trump must go.”

Some said they came to protest out of a fear for the country they have never felt before.

“It will take decades to put things back in place,” said Caroline Mooney, a 61-year-old marketing analyst from the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park.

“If something doesn’t happen next November, we may not recover,” said her friend Steve Schaibley, who drove 2-1/2 hours from Livingston County.

The gathering was mostly peaceful. But two people were taken into custody after apparently attacking a man waving a Trump flag. The Trump supporter was bloodied but did not appear to have been seriously injured.

___

Associated Press writers Darlene Superville in Washington and Michael Balsamo in Chicago contributed to this report.

In California, the Rich Are Buying Their Own Firefighters

“This is serious …. but this is only the beginning. This is only a taste of the horror and the terror that will occur in [the coming] decades,” former California Gov. Jerry Brown told Politico Monday, of the fires that continue to engulf both northern and southern areas of the state. Brown recently inaugurated a new University of California, Berkeley, think tank focused on tackling climate change, in partnership with Tsinghua University in China.

So far this fire season, 180,000 people have been ordered to evacuate Sonoma County, in Northern California’s wine country. Five hundred acres burned Monday morning in Los Angeles, which closed public schools. UCLA and Santa Monica College also closed.

Two million were without power this weekend in Northern California, according to Politico, thanks to preemptive action from Pacific Gas and Election to prevent another giant wildfire like the one caused by its own wires last year. That wasn’t enough to stop the growth of the Kincade Fire, now nearly twice the size of San Francisco, according to The New York Times, which reports that the fire was only 5% contained Monday morning.

Still, the experiences of living though these fires varies widely. Gov. Brown and his family are among the luckier ones in California. “We’re off the grid. We have solar collectors and lithium-ion batteries, so we’re set,’’ he told Politico, adding, “We have a well. We collect rainwater and put it into the underground cistern.”

And, as Ethan Varian wrote in an earlier Times story: “You can now add firefighting to the list of the ways that the wealthy are different from the rest of the world.”

Varian writes about private companies, which, in addition to having contracts with federal agencies, help individual homeowners, homeowner’s associations or other neighborhood groups battle fires.

These services differ from those provided by insurance companies like Chubb or Safeco, which focus on preventative measures—installing sprinkler systems, spraying on fire blocking gels and employing other mitigation techniques.

Mt. Adams Wildfire, for example, a company near Sacramento, will actually put out fires. Its services, owner Don Holter told The New York Times, are advertised mostly by word of mouth; “It’s not who you are, it’s who you know,” he said. The cost? Up to $3,000 per day.

Security firms like Covered 6, which has a contract with Hidden Hills, Calif., whose residents include numerous celebrities, including the Kardashians, are also adding firefighting services to their offerings. During the Woolsey Fire in 2018, TMZ reported that Kim Kardashian West and Kanye West hired private firefighters to preserve their Hidden Hills home.

California firefighters, The Los Angeles Times reported in 2018, are frustrated by private companies. Ventura County Fire Capt. Brian McGrath told the paper that private crews don’t coordinate with local fire departments, often doing more harm than good.

Meanwhile, other residents are left to determine how to manage the increasing risks to their homes and livelihoods as PG&E continues to enforce blackouts and struggles to protect the same wires that triggered blazes like the Camp Fire, which destroyed 13,000 homes last year.

Unfortunately for residents, according to Politico, “PG&E said this month it would take a decade for the utility ensure that its wires are fireproof, until which [time] residents may be forced to face continued blackouts during dry, windy conditions such as those experienced this month.”

Who Deserves to Be Called a Progressive?

It’s no secret that Democrats today like to call themselves progressive. Even Joe Biden, among the most conservative candidates in the 2020 primary, has claimed, without a trace of irony, that he owns “the most progressive record of anybody running.” Since 2016, the term has only gained currency; after all, who wants to be seen as an impediment to progress? Yet Biden’s idea of what constitutes progress bears little relation to the ideas of Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

A battle is being waged in the Democratic Party about what kind of progress we hope to achieve, and a simple question has determined the sides: Who will challenge entrenched wealth and power and who will not?

The most recent Democratic primary debate helped clarify the divide. Responding to a question about a proposed wealth tax on billionaires, former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who voted as a centrist during his time in the House, criticized Warren for embracing a policy he described as “pitting some part of the country against the other.” According to O’Rourke, Warren’s (and presumably Sanders’) proposed taxes are designed to punish the successful rather than lift up the rest of the country. Adopting a similar line of attack, Sen. Amy Klobuchar offered a “reality check” to her Senate colleagues, declaring that “no one on this stage wants to protect billionaires — not even the billionaire wants to protect billionaires.”

“We just have different approaches,” Klobuchar insisted. “Your idea is not the only idea.”

Refrains like these are all too familiar. Moderates frequently claim that both sides fight for the same progressive ideals, that no Democrats want to protect billionaires (or corporations), and that every candidate has the same goals, whether it is universal health care, affordable education or reducing inequality. What separates them, they argue, is their approach toward achieving these goals. Progressives are idealistic, while centrists are pragmatic; the former have it in for the rich, while the latter don’t want to lower anybody’s standard of living. Biden affirmed as much at a fundraiser in New York City in June when he told a throng of wealthy donors that “nobody has to be punished.”

“It’s all within our wheelhouse,” said the frontrunner, promising that “nothing would fundamentally change,” while telling donors that they knew in their gut what needed to be done to help the country move forward.

Biden, like other moderate Democrats, has faith in the powerful to do what’s right — if not for moral reasons, then at least for pragmatic reasons. He believes that we can solve the major problems of our time without addressing the root causes of these problems and that lifting up working people doesn’t require any kind of fundamental change in power relations or the structure of our economy. Billionaires, in other words, can continue to flourish and grow their wealth indefinitely as we also address social and economic problems like income and wealth inequality, stagnating wages, the decline of unions, and so on. CEOs do not have to take a pay cut, the reasoning goes, for workers to receive better wages.

Of course, this notion contradicts the economic reality of the past 40 years, as a recent report on the pay disparity between CEOs and workers demonstrates. According to the report from the Institute for Policy Studies, among S&P 500 firms, almost 80% paid their CEO more than 100 times their median worker pay in 2018, while some of the biggest corporations pay their chief executives more than 1,000 times as much as the average employee. Fifty years ago, by comparison, CEOs typically earned about 40 to 50 times as much as the average employee. To address this huge gap, the study’s authors recommend tax penalties on companies with extreme CEO-worker pay ratios, however this would likely be seen as too “punitive” for moderate Democrats, who don’t believe in “punishing” corporate executives or billionaires (a far cry from someone like Sanders, who has openly declared that “billionaires should not exist.”)

Apologists for the extreme concentration of wealth like to remind everyone how much good certain philanthropic billionaires have done for the world. The fabulously wealthy don’t just create jobs and fund innovation, they maintain; these benefactors also donate millions, even billions, to noble causes that help save and improve countless lives. Yet as journalist Anand Giridharadas points out in his book, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” the logic behind this worldview is profoundly conservative, paternalistic and anti-democratic:

In an age defined by a chasm between those who have power and those who don’t, elites have spread the idea that people must be helped, but only in market-friendly ways that do not upset fundamental power equations,” writes Giridharadas. “The society should be changed in ways that do not change the underlying economic system that has allowed the winners to win and fostered many of the problems they seek to solve.”

What Giridharadas calls “MarketWorld” is a milieu that consists of “enlightened businesspeople and their collaborators in the worlds of charity, academia, media, government, and think tanks.” MarketWorld elites and ideologues, Giridharadas tells us, promote the idea that social change and progress should be pursued “principally through the free market and voluntary action, not public life and the law and the reform of the systems that people share in common; that it should be supervised by the winners of capitalism and their allies, and not be antagonistic to their needs; and that the biggest beneficiaries of the status quo should play a leading role in the status quo’s reform.”

The most important point here is that the solutions should not be antagonistic to the needs and interests of the winners, who should also be the ones leading the effort to reform the system. This deeply conservative and elitist attitude not only assumes that we can fix the system without really changing it, but that progress is ultimately made by the “winners,” and that the losers should be grateful to their brilliant and benevolent overlords. It is the kind of attitude espoused by Bill Gates’ favorite author, cognitive psychologist (and MarketWorld Thought Leader) Steven Pinker, who defends the status quo in his work “Enlightenment Now,” arguing the economic and political system we currently have is already terrifically progressive, engendering unprecedented innovation that benefits all. Critics of capitalism who call themselves “progressive” and complain about the status quo, Pinker asserts, are in fact disgruntled “progressophobes” who refuse to accept the great achievements of modernity.

Touting progress to defend the status quo is hardly a new strategy. As Albert Camus once observed, “progress” can be paradoxically used to justify conservatism. “A draft drawn on confidence in the future, it allows the master to have a clear conscience,” wrote the philosopher. “The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.”

Moderate Democrats offer a conservative vision of progress, while “progressives” offer a more radical and democratic version. Recent reports of Pete Buttigieg’s bromance with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who apparently recommended several staffers to Buttigieg’s campaign, reveals that the mayor from Indiana, who is positioning himself as the fresh-faced centrist alternative to Biden, is committed to the same elite and technocratic vision as the former vice president.

During his comeback speech on Saturday in Queens, Sanders made it clear that he has a different view, telling the massive crowd of supporters that those who benefit the most from the status quo will fiercely resist real change. “The question we’ve got to answer,” Sanders said, is “are we prepared to stand up to them and transform this country?”

As more Democratic politicians have come to call themselves progressive, the term, which implies a deep commitment to progress, has lost some of its meaning. All of the candidates in the Democratic primaries claim to fight for progress, but the real question that needs to be asked is what kind of progress they’re actually fighting for.

Robert Reich: Trump’s Theft Is Impeachable on Its Own

Trump reversed his decision to host next June’s G-7 meeting of heads of state at Trump National Doral Miami because, he said, it would have been an impeachable offense and a violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause.

No, that’s not the reason he gave. He said he reversed himself because of “Media & Democat Crazed and Irrational hostility.”

In reality, Trump has been funneling government dollars into his own pockets ever since he was elected. The Doral deal was just too much even for his Republican enablers to stomach.

Since he’s been president, Trump has spent almost a third of his time at one or another of his resorts or commercial properties – costing taxpayers a bundle but giving those resorts incomparable publicity.

One of his golf resorts, Turnberry in Scotland, has gotten business from U.S. Air Force crews overnighting while their planes were refueled. In September, Vice President Pence stayed there for two nights at a cost to American taxpayers of nearly $600,000 in ground transportation fees alone.

Foreign governments seeking to curry his favor routinely check their officials and lobbyists into the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s oceanfront resort in Palm Beach, charges its foreign government visitors up to five hundred and fifty dollars a night for their rooms, according to ProPublica.

How does he get away with this?

Presidents of the United States are exempt from the federal conflict-of-interest statutes – a glaring omission that was never a problem before Trumpexploited this loophole. To make matters worse, Trump has refused to put his assets into a blind trust, so he knows exactly how much he gains from these transactions.

Theoretically, the public is protected from Trump’s moneymaking by the Constitution, which strictly limits the “emoluments” – that is, a payment of money or anything else of value – a president can receive.

Article II, Section 1 says a president receives a salary while in office but “shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States.” Trump violates this clause every time taxpayer money finds its way into his pockets.

And then there’s Article I, Section 9, which states that no federal officeholder can receive any “Emolument” from any foreign state. Trump violates this clause whenever he makes money from a foreign government.

History shows that the reason the Framers of the Constitution included these provisions wasn’t just to prevent a president from being bribed. It was also to prevent the appearance of bribes, and thereby maintain public trust in the presidency.

The appearance if not reality of bribery continues to haunt  Trump. For example, when he decided to withdraw U.S. troops from the Turkish-Syrian border – a move that has led to the slaughter of Kurds, and opened the way for a resurgence of ISIS – it was far from clear whether he had in mind the interest of the United States or his own business interests. Trump Towers in Istanbul Turkey is his largest European property.

Clearly, Trump continues to violate the Constitution’s emoluments clauses. So how to hold him accountable? Three ways.

The first is through the federal courts. A lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Maryland and the District of Columbia accuses Trump of violating the Constitution by holding a financial interest in the Washington hotel.

Another brought be several plaintiffs allege that Trump’s businesses pose unfair competition.

A third lawsuit by 215 Democratic members of Congress seeks “the opportunity to cast a binding vote” on the issue, since the Constitution requires the president to obtain “the consent of Congress” before accepting any emolument.

But all these cases are moving through the courts at a slow pace—probably too slowly to stop Trump from lining his pockets this term of office.

The second way to hold Trump accountable is through impeachment, which has already begun in the House.

Trump’s violation of the emoluments clause should be added to the likely grounds for impeachment already being investigated – seeking the help of a foreign power in an election, and obstruction of justice.

The third and most important way to hold Trump accountable occurs November 3, 2020.

That’s when the American public can stop Trump from making money off his presidency by voting him out of office.

White House Official Defies Impeachment Subpoena, Deepening Standoff

WASHINGTON — A former national security official defied a House subpoena Monday, escalating a standoff between Congress and the White House over who will testify in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump.

Charles Kupperman, who was a deputy to former national security adviser John Bolton, failed to show up for a scheduled closed-door deposition after asking a federal court in Washington to rule on whether he was legally required to appear. In a statement, Kupperman said he was awaiting “judicial clarity.”

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff said Kupperman’s suit has “no basis in law” and speculated that the White House didn’t want him to testify because his testimony could be incriminating. Democrats are investigating Trump’s pressure on the Ukrainian government to pursue politically motivated investigations as the administration was also withholding military aid to the country.

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“If this witness had something to say that would be helpful to the White House they would’ve wanted him to come and testify,” Schiff told reporters. “They plainly don’t.”

Schiff said the three committees leading the impeachment inquiry will move forward, with or without testimony from Kupperman and other witnesses. Democrats have indicated that they are likely to use no-show witnesses to write an article of impeachment against Trump for obstruction of justice, rather than launching potentially lengthy court battles to obtain testimony.

“We are not willing to allow the White House to engage us in a lengthy game of rope a dope in the courts, so we will move forward,” Schiff said.

Schiff said over the weekend that he wants Bolton to testify, though that has not yet been scheduled. He told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that Bolton, who according to other witnesses had concerns about the Ukraine policy, “has very relevant information.” But he predicted that the White House, which has vowed to obstruct the investigation, would fight a Bolton appearance.

After hearing from a series of State Department officials, the three committees leading the impeachment investigation are turning their focus to the White House. Lawmakers say they are hoping to get more answers about what aides close to Trump knew about his orders on Ukraine policy.

“They’re in the White House, so they’re much closer to where the policymaking supposedly was supposed to happen with regard to the Ukraine, and they can really shine a light on whether it was happening properly or not,” said Illinois Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democratic member of the House intelligence panel.

Several of the State Department officials have already told lawmakers of their concerns as Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, took charge of Ukrainian policy and as Trump pushed out the U.S. ambassador there.

William Taylor, the current top diplomat in Ukraine, testified last week that he was told aid to the country would be withheld until the country conducted investigations into Democrat Joe Biden and his family and into Ukraine’s involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Democrats also want to hear from two current national security White House staffers, Alexander Vindman and Tim Morrison, who are scheduled to appear this week. It is unclear if they will do so following Kupperman’s defiance of a subpoena.

In Kupperman’s lawsuit, he asked a judge to decide whether he should accede to House demands for his testimony or to assert “immunity from congressional process” as directed by Trump. He said he “cannot satisfy the competing demands of both the legislative and executive branches,” and without the court’s help, he said, he would have to make the decision himself — one that could “inflict grave constitutional injury” on either Congress or the presidency.

“Given the issue of separation of powers in this matter, it would be reasonable and appropriate to expect that all parties would want judicial clarity,” Kupperman said in a statement.

The court had yet to rule by Monday morning, and his lawyer said in a letter that he was waiting for a judge to step in before committing to testify.

The three chairmen of the House committees overseeing the inquiry told Kupperman’s lawyers in a letter over the weekend that the suit was without merit and appeared to be coordinated with the White House. They called it “an obvious and desperate tactic by the President to delay and obstruct the lawful constitutional functions of Congress and conceal evidence about his conduct from the impeachment inquiry.”

Kupperman’s attorney, Charles Cooper, wrote in a letter it was not his client who was challenging Congress’ constitutional claims.

“It is President Trump, and every president before him for at least the last half century, who have asserted testimonial immunity to their closest confidential advisers,” Cooper wrote. “If your clients’ position on the merits of this issue is correct, it will prevail in court, and Dr. Kupperman, I assure you again, will comply with the court’s judgment.”

Investors Return to Saudi Arabia as Lucrative Oil IPO Looms

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Lured by a long-looming stock offering of Saudi Arabia’s massive state-run oil company, investors and business leaders have returned to the kingdom’s capital for an investment forum that was overshadowed last year by the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Yet drawing big names to the Future Investment Initiative alone does not mean Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s dream of having Saudi Aramco offer a sliver of itself at a $2 trillion valuation will become a reality.

King Salman’s son needs to raise $100 billion required to fund his ambitious development plans for a kingdom desperate to offer jobs to its 34 million people as unemployment remains above 10%.

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Stagnant global energy prices and a Sept. 14 attack on the heart of Aramco already spooked some. One ratings company downgraded the oil giant. Meanwhile, questions persist over how the initial public offering will be handled even as Saudi Aramco offers sweeteners and promises of an estimated $75 billion dividend next year.

“Tepid oil prices, the fraught politics of the Middle East and the demonization of fossil fuel producers in response to climate change fears have all made the initial public offering a mission impossible,” wrote Roberto Sifon-Arevalo of the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s.

The Future Investment Initiative, which begins on Tuesday, will draw 6,000 people and international firms to Riyadh for a forum that’s the brainchild of the 34-year-old Prince Mohammed. Already, the forum announced Dow Chemicals, HSBC, Samsung and other global firms will be partners to the event.

It again will be held in part at Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which served as a detention facility during a 2017 purge targeting businessmen, princes and others. Described at the time as an anti-corruption campaign, the arrests targeted wealthy potential challengers to the prince and cemented his grip on power amid allegations of torture denied by the kingdom. Authorities later said it saw the government recoup over $100 billion.

However, there will be big names not taking part. Among them is Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon and the owner of the Post, who had been in negotiations to open data centers in the kingdom before the killing and dismemberment of Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, the Post reported Monday.

Khashoggi’s death cast a pall over last year’s forum, which saw Prince Mohammed give a fiery speech in which he described the killing as “a heinous act that is unjustifiable.” However, U.S. officials and a recent United Nations’ special rapporteur report suspect Prince Mohammed had a role in the slaying as members of the team of assassins sent to kill Khashoggi had links to the prince.

“It inconceivable that an operation of this scale could be implemented without the crown prince being aware, at a minimum, that some sort of mission of a criminal nature, directed at Mr. Khashoggi, was being launched,” the U.N. report read.

Investors appear poised to move beyond the columnist’s killing for one major reason: The long-discussed initial public offering of Saudi Aramco. The firm, formally known as the Saudi Arabian Oil Co., was founded in 1933 with America’s Standard Oil. By 1980, the kingdom owned 100% of the firm, which runs like a Western-style firm and refers to the government as its sole “shareholder” in its corporate documents.

The Aramco IPO has been pitched by Prince Mohammed since 2016 as a means to generate cash to fund development in the kingdom. Aramco’s scale remains impressive, able to pump 10 million barrels of crude oil a day, some 10% of daily global oil demand. In its first-ever half-year results, it reported income of $46.8 billion. Yet analysts say a $2 trillion valuation — Apple and Microsoft separately for instance are $1 trillion — may be a stretch.

Yet questions remain about Saudi Aramco, such as the health and the size of its oil reserves, something held as a state secret by the kingdom.

“Publicly traded oil companies faced financial disclosure regulations that required them to make information about the size and the health of their oil reserves public,” wrote Aramco expert Ellen R. Wald in her recent book “Saudi, Inc.” ”Saudi Aramco had no such requirement and released only the information it chose.”

The global business press also frantically following each step of the IPO has raised repeated questions over its constant delays. It appears like the kingdom is preparing to offer a first part of the IPO on the local Tadawul stock exchange. The firm’s ties to the kingdom also have raised questions about whether it would take the risk of listing in the West, where it could be targeted by lawsuits.

Saudi Aramco has sought to assure investors. A presentation posted to Aramco’s website this month announced the intent to offer a $75 billion dividend for investors in 2020. That’s the payment per share that a corporation distributes to its stockholders as their return on the money they have invested in its stock.

It also pledged that some 2020 through 2024, any year with a dividend under $75 billion would see “non-government shareholders” prioritized to get paid.

But beyond the stocks, worries persist that Saudi Arabia could be hit by another attack like the one Sept. 14, which the U.S. blames on Iran. Iran denies it launched the cruise missiles and drones used in the attack. Yemen’s Houthi rebels claimed responsibility, but analysts say the weapons used wouldn’t have the range to reach their targets.

Yet worries about the firm are nothing new. Even as far back as 1953, when Aramco still was held by American oil firms, then-U.S. Ambassador Raymond Hare linked the company’s success to the kingdom’s own.

“A strong Aramco meant a strong Saudi Arabia and a weakened Aramco a weakened Saudi Arabia,” he once told the kingdom’s first ruler.

Trump Will Live to Regret Sending Troops to Saudi Arabia

This piece originally appeared on AntiWar.com.

What is Trump really up to? It’s almost unknowable. At the same time that the president was pulling (some) troops out of Northeast Syria, giving an antiwar speech, and then sending other troops back into Syria to “secure the oil,” he also quietly sent another 1800 service members into Saudi Arabia. What little Trump did say about it consisted of a peculiar defense of his actions. Faced with the obvious question from a reporter: “Mr. President, why are you sending more troops to Saudi Arabia when you just said it’s a mistake to be in the Middle East?” Trump argued that there was no contradiction in his policy because, well, the Saudis “buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of merchandise from us,” and have “agreed to pay us for everything we’re doing to help them.” It seems the U.S. military is going full mercenary in the Gulf.

While I’ve noted that Trump’s recent antiwar remarks were profound – though largely unfulfilled – these words will amount to nothing if followed by a military buildup in Saudi Arabia that leads to a new, far more bloody and destabilizing, war with Iran. Nothing would please the “three Bs” – Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, and former National Security Adviser John Bolton – more than a US military strike on the Islamic Republic, cost and consequences be damned.

It’s just that an Iran war isn’t the only risk associated with basing majority-Christian, foreign American troops in the land of Islam’s two holiest cities. And a brief historical review of US presence in Saudi Arabia demonstrates quite clearly the potential transnational terrorist “blowback” of Washington’s basing decisions. In fact, Trump’s latest deployment constitutes at least the third time the US military has been stationed on the Arabian peninsula. It’s rarely ended well, and, in a paradox stranger than fiction, often linked Washington and Riyadh’s dollars with the Bin Laden family. It’s almost enough to make one understand the propensity of some Americans to buy into some degree of 9/11 “truth.”

The strange saga began in the 1930s when a US oil conglomerate, Aramco, built a settlement at Dhahran in the desert near the little town of Khobar. Local workers did the construction, including a rather talented Yemeni bricklayer named Mohamed Bin Laden. Though illiterate and with only one eye, he and his brother then started their own construction company: Mohamed and Abdullah, Sons of Awadh bin Laden.” When, in 1945, the US military decided to lease a sizable air base at Dhahran, the Bin Laden brothers got the contract. The firm made a fortune on the American taxpayers’ dime. After that, the Bin Laden’s became the builders of choice for the spendthrift Saudi royal family, by then flush with oil profits.

Nonetheless, the devoutly Muslim Saudi people were horrified by the Western presence and the king ended the first US military lease in 1962. Still, the Bin Laden company continued to do business with the American government and corporate entities, so much so, in fact, that it retained an agent in New York City. After the elder Bin Laden died in 1967, his sons took over the family business. One, Osama, had a particular knack for construction.

He was also devoutly religious, and, despite his family business’ close connections with the Americans, virulently opposed to foreign intervention in the Greater Middle East. So, with tons of his firm’s heavy construction equipment in tow, he headed off to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen against the Soviet Army occupation of that country. Though he and his fellow Arab volunteers played only a small role in the Soviet’s eventual defeat, Osama Bin Laden dug tunnels, built roads, and crafted a genuine mountain base for his fighters in Afghanistan. He even named his new organization to direct the jihad Al Qaeda, or “the base,” and learned a life-altering lesson from the Soviet war. As he reflected, “The myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims.”

Thus, when Saddam Hussein’s massive Iraqi Army swallowed up Kuwait and threatened the Saudi Kingdom in 1990, Bin Laden thought he could recruit a new mujahideen army and single-handedly defeat the invaders. He offered his services to the king, but was rebuked, in favor of an invitation to the US military to instead defend Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden never forgave the king or the American “occupiers” of his holy homeland. The American troopers flooded into a reopened base at Dhahran, the Iraqis were swiftly defeated by the US military coalition, Bin Laden later declared war on the United States, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Terror attacks on the Khobar Towers Air Force barracks, two US African embassies, and the Navy’s USS Cole followed, and then New York and Washington were struck in the worst terrorist incident in American History. Bin Laden got the war he sought, lured the US military into countless quagmires in the Mideast and, despite his eventual death at the hands of American Navy SEALs, succeeded beyond probably even his wildest imagination.

All that brief history ought to remind American policymakers and people alike of the inherent dangers of military basing in Saudi Arabia in this, the third, such instance. Washington, as has been proven time and again since the end of the Second World War, reaps what it sows across the world. So, when Trump’s latest addition to the tragic US history of building bases and stationing troops on the Arabian Peninsula backfires, when a new Bin Laden of sorts takes the war to a major American city, I’ll be one of the few voices saying I told you so…

Trump Faces Jeers, Calls for Impeachment at World Series

President Donald Trump was greeted with loud and sustained boos, a large “Impeach Trump” banner, and chants of “Lock Him Up!” Sunday night as he attended Game 5 of the World Series in Washington, D.C.

Trump’s presence at the game alongside First Lady Melania Trump, White House aides, and a group of Republican lawmakers was announced on the park’s public address system after the third inning.

The crowd’s reaction was immediate and overwhelming as the stadium’s scoreboard panned to Trump, seated in a luxury suite along the third base line:

Trump booed pic.twitter.com/9yFGKYjkga

— Jesse Yomtov (@JesseYomtov) October 28, 2019

Look how Trump’s face changes when he realizes an entire stadium is booing him pic.twitter.com/E46rzbzmbl

— Arlen Parsa (@arlenparsa) October 28, 2019

President Trump was booed loudly by the fans at Nats Park when he was shown on the big screen.

Then came a loud chant: “Lock him up.” @wusa9 pic.twitter.com/LBbgSAHd6k

— Adam Longo (@adamlongoTV) October 28, 2019

Baseball fans also expressed support for the president’s impeachment by unfurling a large “Impeach Trump” banner and holding “Veterans for Impeachment” signs behind home plate:

So this just happened in the middle of the nats game. @Nationals pic.twitter.com/4MOij35smB

— Malz Agner (@malz_agner) October 28, 2019

WOW

Right behind home plate #VeteransforImpeachment signs appear for Trump to see on the jumbotron #WorldSeries #NeedToImpeach pic.twitter.com/r6vib5joW3

— CPD Action (@CPDAction) October 28, 2019

Peter Dreier, the E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and founding chair of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College, pointed out in Common Dreams Saturday that “Trump prefers to appear before crowds of loyal followers” and “his few appearances outside the White House have been highly orchestrated affairs where the audiences are vetted by the president’s operatives.”

Presidents often throw out the ceremonial first pitch at regular season baseball games and the World Series, but, as Dreier noted, Trump has repeatedly declined to do so. “Trump was no doubt worried that… he’d be greeted with a deafening chorus of boos as soon as he stepped on the mound at Nationals Park,” wrote Dreier.

As the Washington Post reported, “chef and humanitarian José Andrés, who has faced off with Trump in court over scuttled plans to build a restaurant in the Trump International Hotel and has criticized many of Trump’s policies,” threw the ceremonial first pitch Sunday night.

Slate‘s Matthew Dessem wrote late Sunday that “after years of horrifying footage of people wildly cheering Trump’s deranged rambling at his rallies, it’s reassuring—restorative, even!—to know that the rest of the country hasn’t forgotten how to greet tyrants.”

Saying Goodbye to Sam

When I returned to the United States after two decades overseas covering wars and other conflicts as a reporter, I searched out Samuel Hynes at Princeton. Sam, who had been a Marine Corps pilot in World War II, had taught literature at the university and was one of the most important contemporary writers on war. He grasped that war is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers and Marines and others by politicians and of idealists by cynics.

We ended up living on the same street and became close friends. We were orphaned by our experiences in war and by our grounding, in the electronic age, in the world of print—two prisms through which we interpreted reality. We spoke in a shorthand filled with literary references and with a visceral understanding of the capacity for human depravity and violence. In war, Sam wrote, “we learn that elements of our nature as human beings we thought were immutable can be diminished or destroyed, and that the human heart may be colder and crueler than our experience has shown us.” Even humor is different, he noted, “because it is full of death.”

In his books, Sam, who died at 95 earlier this month, chronicled the culture of war and its effects on young men who went in search of adventure and glory in the military and came home maimed and disillusioned. His works included “The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War,” “A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture,” “The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War,” “On War and Writing,” “The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s” and a memoir of his time as a combat pilot in the South Pacific, “Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator.”

Sam’s books soar to poetic heights. He was a gifted and lyrical writer. He studied with Robert Penn Warren at the University of Minnesota and Lionel Trilling at Columbia University, where he got his doctorate. He was friends with W.H. Auden, his favorite poet, as well as with Ezra Pound. As a boy he watched his political hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, pass by in a motorcade. He grew up in poverty in Minneapolis during the Great Depression and was never totally at ease among the East Coast elites. He was acutely aware of the danger of despotism arising from the decay of American society. He gave me the book “Defying Hitler” by Sebastian Haffner a few years ago, telling me it was the best window on where the United States was headed. Haffner blamed the rise of fascism on “the atmosphere, the general mood, the tug of the masses, which produced unimagined emotions in those who surrendered themselves (even seven-year-old boys), and left those who stayed aloof suffocating in a vacuum of arid emptiness and isolation.”

Sam’s house was filled with books, as is mine. He took great solace in knowing his library would end up in the hands of his grandson Alex Preston, a novelist and literary critic. “And your books?” he asked of me a few days before he died. “What will happen to them?”

Our experiences of war were different. Sam loved flying. He had, as his wife, Liz, said, “a good war.” But he also understood, as he wrote, that a “good” war “is not a matter of morality after all; perhaps it’s only a matter of space, and freedom, and the right machine.” He was recalled to the Marine Corps in 1952 during the Korean War and would have gone to Korea if he had not had two small daughters. Instead he stayed in the United States and trained fighter pilots for the Marines, sometimes unnervingly turning off the lights on his plane and darting in and out of cloud cover to act as an enemy fighter that the other pilots had to locate and destroy.

I, however, was broken by war. I remain plagued by nightmares, trauma and memories. Once Sam and I were walking down our street and an F-16 fighter jet streaked overhead. I have been bombed by fighter jets. I involuntarily winced, but Sam said, “That always makes me proud.”

No doubt our wartime experiences contributed to our politics. Sam was a New Deal Democrat. He believed in the promise of America. I spent years chronicling the atrocities and crimes of the American Empire in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa and had grown to despise the architects of imperialism who dominate the two ruling political parties and the capitalists, war industry executives and racists behind them. Sam was as ferociously stubborn as I am. When our conversations dealt with race, capitalism and empire, it was as if FDR had invited the Wobblies to lunch. But then, neither of us relenting, we would go back to literature—William Shakespeare, much of which he could quote from memory, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, whose novel “Middlemarch” he considered a masterpiece, Rebecca West, William Butler Yeats or Auden. I failed, although I tried repeatedly, to convince him that “Moby-Dick” was the greatest American novel. He never succeeded in getting me to read Anthony Trollope. He was engrossed in a book by the British novelist Penelope Lively in the days before his death. He asked his grandson Sam Preston to read Yeats’ poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” an evocation of loss and death, at his funeral service. The third stanza reads:

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

He despaired of his physical decline, especially given an athletic prowess that kept him riding his bicycle and playing tennis into his late 80s. One recent afternoon, though he had to grip my arm as we slowly made our way around the block, he recited for me from memory the conclusion of Samuel Beckett’s novel “The Unnamable”:

… you must go on, that’s all I know, they’re going to stop, I know that well, I can feel it, they’re going to abandon me, it will be the silence, for a moment, a good few moments, or it will be mine, the lasting one, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

As he lay dying, he grasped my hand and said, “We will always be friends.” He paused. “You know what I mean.”

His writing was a savage assault on the myth of war. His book “The Auden Generation” was important to him because it chronicled a time “when artists and intellectuals were anti-war.” He may have been a former Marine Corps major with a Distinguished Flying Cross who carried out 78 combat missions in a torpedo bombing squadron in the Caroline Islands and Okinawa, but his literary hero, Auden, was a pacifist.

“In matters of war, cautionary literature and the evidence of experience do not change many minds or alter many romantic expectations,” Sam wrote. “Every new generation will respond anew to war’s great seduction—not to the uniforms and the parades but to the chance to be where the danger is, where men are fighting. War brings to any society its electric, exhilarating atmosphere, and young men rush to join in it, however grim the stories of war they have read and accepted as truth. Every generation, it seems, must learn its own lessons from its own war, because every war is different and is fought by different ignorant young men.”

Combat, he knew, creates an unbridgeable gulf between those who have been to war and those at home who spout wartime slogans and believe in national virtues that the battlefield has exposed as lies.

“War turns landscape into anti-landscape, and everything in that landscape into grotesque, broken, useless rubbish—including human limbs,” he wrote in “The Soldiers’ Tale,” a book I read while covering the war in Bosnia. “Reading soldiers’ accounts of Shiloh or Waterloo, Ladysmith or the Argonne or Huế, we see with estranged eyes. These lives are nothing like ours, and these places are like nothing we could possibly find in our familiar civilian world. War, we see, is not a place we could travel to.”

“The Soldiers’ Tale” is a brilliant chronicle of the luring of naive young men yearning for adventure into the maw of violence, and the callous indifference of a military machine and a state that grind them up. Echoing Primo Levi’s warning about “the annihilation of the humanity in men, before the other dying happens,” Sam decried the abstract hatred that “made a people forget their humanity in war, make their enemy inhuman.” He castigated the official lies told to wage wars and the deceptions of mass culture used to ennoble war. He saw war as “an activity in which men become the food of predatory animals, in which rats and cats and pigs eat people, even people eat people. In war every kind of monstrosity is possible.” He understood that the Holocaust was so dangerous because it was not unique. “Human beings have always destroyed other human beings for ethnic, ideological, and religious reasons (and out of pure sadism too). The history of the world since the Holocaust has proven that point over and over; in Cambodia, Uganda, Bosnia, Rwanda. Murder is human.”

“Poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and evil,” Auden wrote. That was Sam’s mission: extending our knowledge of good and evil. He condemned what Auden called

The romantic lie in the brain

Of the sensual man-in-the-street,

And the lie of Authority

Whose buildings grope the sky:

There is no such thing as the State

And no one exists alone;

Hunger allows no choice

To the citizen or the police,

We must love one another or die.

Sam, who lost his wife in 2008, spent his evenings reading. I would return home late at night from New York and see the comforting glow of his reading lamp through his living room window. I would ring his doorbell the next day. He would come down the stairs from his study, where in the months before his death he was writing a book, titled “Older Than Lear,” on his electric typewriter. We would plunge once again into the world of books, what the poet John Keats called “the realms of gold.”

Sam’s reading lamp is now dark, his house empty, his last book unfinished.

Life is a voyage, a discovery, including the discovery of death. It is about seeking truth, but also about experiencing wonder and awe, the capacity to love. The most fortunate of us make this voyage with someone with whom we share an intellectual and emotional affinity. Suffering and danger, as J. Glenn Gray, another great writer on war, wrote, does not create friendship. It creates its opposite, comradeship. Friends are not comrades. They do not revel in death and self-sacrifice the way comrades do. Friendship—and most of us, if we are honest, must admit we have only one or two real friends and some of us have none—is about descending to depths beyond articulation, gaining through the insights of the friend greater self-awareness and self-possession. The death of a friend is bitter and painful because it leaves us more alone, more diminished. We lose a part of ourselves. Friendship is the most potent antidote to the trauma of war. “Its true domain is peace,” Gray wrote of friendship, “only peace.”

A Veteran Reporter Helped Giuliani’s Associates Launch the Ukraine Conspiracy

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Last March, a veteran Washington reporter taped an interview with a Ukrainian prosecutor that sparked a disinformation campaign alleging Joe Biden pressured Ukrainians into removing a prosecutor investigating a company because of its ties to the former vice president’s son. The interview and subsequent columns, conducted and written by a writer for The Hill newspaper, John Solomon, were the starting gun that eventually set off the impeachment inquiry into the president.

Watching from the control booth of The Hill’s TV studio was Lev Parnas, who helped arrange the interview.

Parnas and his partner Igor Fruman were working with the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to promote a story that it was Democrats and not Republicans who colluded with a foreign power in the 2016 election. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan indicted the duo this month on allegations that they illegally funneled foreign money into U.S. political campaigns.

Interviews and company records obtained by ProPublica show Parnas worked closely with Solomon to facilitate his reporting, including helping with translation and interviews. Solomon also shared files he obtained related to the Biden allegations with Parnas, according to a person familiar with the exchange. And the two men shared yet another only recently revealed connection: Solomon’s personal lawyers connected the journalist to Parnas and later hired the Florida businessman as a translator in their representation of a Ukrainian oligarch.

Solomon’s interview and columns were widely amplified. Giuliani praised them, and Trump said he deserved a Pulitzer Prize. Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Lou Dobbs trumpeted them. They later become a key point in the CIA whistleblower complaint that set the impeachment inquiry in motion.

Parnas’ unusual and extensive involvement in the production of the stories has not been previously reported.

Solomon, 52, told ProPublica his reporting was accurate and defended his sourcing, saying, “No one knew there was anything wrong with Lev Parnas at the time.”

“Everybody who approaches me has an angle,” he said. “My mother has an angle when she calls me.” A lawyer for Parnas, who along with Fruman has pleaded not guilty, didn’t return requests for comment.

More than a year before his Ukraine columns published, The Hill had serious concerns about Solomon’s credibility and conflicts of interest. Hill staffers began raising alarms, including the paper’s publisher at the time, who warned in an internal memo that Solomon was engaged in “reputation killing stuff” by mixing business with journalism.

In response, The Hill’s management took steps to limit Solomon’s reporting — rebranding him as an opinion writer — but did not prevent him from writing his Ukraine series.

“Nothing I did would have put The Hill’s reputation at risk,” Solomon said.

Solomon came to The Hill, which specializes in inside-the-Beltway news, in July 2017 after a decades long career that included stretches at The Associated Press, The Washington Post and The Washington Times. His work has earned accolades, including a series examining what the FBI knew ahead of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He is now a contributor to Fox News.

Brought in as an executive vice president overseeing a new digital video enterprise now known as Hill.TV, Solomon continued to operate as a journalist, publishing news articles in the paper, while also playing a role on The Hill’s business side. That began to trouble colleagues within months of his hiring, according to internal memos and interviews with current and former staffers.

In late October 2017, The Hill published a story on the decisive role of Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, in the upcoming vote on the Trump administration’s tax bill. The article, authored by two journalists who reported to Solomon, included a quote from the executive director of Job Creators Network, a conservative group that claimed the bill would help small-business owners in Maine.

Soon after, Johanna Derlega, then The Hill’s publisher, wrote two memos to the company’s president, Richard Beckman, worrying that Solomon was tearing down the traditional wall separating the business side and the news coverage. She noted that Solomon had negotiated a nearly $160,000 advertising deal with Job Creators Network, targeting business owners in Maine. Solomon then had a quote from that group’s director inserted in the story.

Solomon “pops by the advertising bullpen almost daily to discuss big deals he’s about to close,” Derlega wrote, adding, “If a media reporter gets ahold of this story, it could destroy us.”

“While I highlight this one example, John has been given the freedom, and possibly financial upside, to work with advertisers while clearly sitting within editorial,” Derlega wrote.

Six months later, in April 2018, Derlega was forced out of The Hill. The Hill’s owner, president and top editors haven’t responded to detailed questions about Derlega’s memos and Solomon’s tenure at the paper. A spokesman for the advertiser, Job Creators Network, didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

In interviews with ProPublica this week, Solomon repeatedly declined to discuss his activities on The Hill’s business side, saying, “I just simply can’t talk about anything business related with The Hill.”

A month later, the paper’s editor in chief, Bob Cusack, emailed staff that “effective immediately” Solomon would no longer publish stories under the banner of news but instead would be an “opinion contributor.”

From this new perch, Solomon broke in early spring what seemed to be an explosive piece of news: claims by Yuriy Lutsenko, then Ukraine’s top prosecutor, that a U.S. diplomat, serving under President Barack Obama, presented him a list of people and groups he could not prosecute. Additionally, Lutsenko said that he was reviving a probe into the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings, seeking to determine whether Joe Biden, as vice president, interfered with the initial inquiry to protect his son Hunter, who sat on Burisma’s board.

Behind the scenes, Parnas had been central to connecting Solomon with Lutsenko. In a March 2019 email that included the businessman, the columnist wrote that he’d “just got word from Lev that the prosecutor general has agreed to do an interview tomorrow.”

Parnas watched Lutsenko’s interview live, inside the control room of The Hill’s TV studio. Solomon explained that he called in the businessman to act as a translator, but in the end his services were not needed.

Solomon recalls first encountering Parnas through Pete Sessions, the once-powerful Texas Republican member of Congress who is now in the middle of the Trump impeachment inquiry. Sessions accepted campaign donations from Parnas and Fruman, and had met with the two men as they sought to oust an American diplomat in Ukraine. Later, Sessions wrote a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, urging him to replace the envoy Marie Yovanovitch, who had been the subject of extensive criticism in the conservative media. She was later fired and is a key witness for House Democrats trying to impeach the president.

Sessions, who has denied knowledge of the campaign finance scheme laid out by prosecutors, told ProPublica that he has no connection to Solomon.

“I don’t know John,” he said.

Solomon says his personal attorneys, Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, a husband-and-wife legal team that regularly represents conservative luminaries, set up his first formal meeting with Parnas. He asserted that his editors “were aware” that he was seeking help from diGenova and Toensing on matters concerning Ukraine.

“I was doing that as an extra layer of protection,” Solomon said. “And so everything — everything — was above board. Everybody knew about it. I was just trying to be careful.” diGenova and Toensing did not respond to a request for comment.

As he compiled material for subsequent columns, Solomon and Parnas continued to work closely. In late March, less than a week after the first piece featuring Lutsenko appeared in The Hill, Solomon sent files via Dropbox to Parnas containing financial records purporting to be connected to Biden’s son. Around the same time, Solomon also sent Toensing and diGenova what appeared to be an advance copy of a Ukraine-related story. The Daily Beast reported that the email was included in a State Department Inspector General’s Office package of material turned over to lawmakers.

Solomon acknowledged that Parnas helped set up the Lutsenko interview, but he says he had originally requested it through official channels. Solomon maintains his relationship with the businessman was a typical one a reporter would have with a source. “Lev would call me,” he said, “and offer things he was hearing on the ground and I would look into some things.”

As Solomon’s relationship with Parnas developed, he learned over time that the businessman “was working for many people or several people in Ukraine,” including Giuliani and Solomon’s lawyers. Politico first reported Solomon’s lawyers also represented the Ukrainian oligarch. Giuliani hasn’t responded to messages seeking comment.

Solomon defended his work, including his reporting on the so-called do-not-prosecute list, which he said he went through “enormous efforts” to verify. “At the end of the day,” Solomon said. “it doesn’t matter what Lev Parnas did. It matters what I did.”

But a month after Lutsenko’s Hill TV appearance, the former Ukrainian prosecutor backed off of his allegations. He told a Ukrainian-language publication that he himself was the one who asked the U.S. ambassador for the list of supposedly untouchable figures. The State Department said there was never any list, calling it an “outright fabrication.” And Lutsenko told the Los Angeles Times last month that he saw no evidence of wrongdoing that would justify an investigation into Biden’s son’s business dealings in his country.

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