Chris Hedges's Blog, page 41

Trump Trial: Pointed Questioning With Bolton Book at the Center

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial shifted swiftly to pointed, back-and-forth questioning Wednesday as Republicans strained to contain the fallout over John Bolton’s forthcoming book, which threatens their hopes of ending the trial with a quick acquittal.

The day started simply enough. Three Republican senators asked Trump’s legal team: If there was more than one motive for Trump’s conduct in Ukraine, as he pushed for political investigations of Joe Biden, should the Senate still consider the Biden pressure an abuse of power?

White House lawyer Pat Philbin responded there’s nothing wrong with the president acting on a personal as well as national interest. He declared the charge against Trump “absurd.”

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Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer sparked lively debate asking whether the Senate could really render a fair verdict without calling Bolton or acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to testify.

“There’s no way to have a fair trial without witnesses,” responded Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democrat leading the prosecution for the House.

“Don’t wait for the book. Don’t wait ’til March 17, when it is in black and white to find out the answer to your question,” Schiff told the Senate.

That publication date is now in doubt. The White House on Wednesday released a letter to Bolton’s attorney objecting to “significant amounts of classified information” in the manuscript, including at the top secret level. Bolton and his attorney have insisted that the book does not contain any classified information.

The White House action could delay the book’s publication if Bolton, who resigned last September — Trump says he was fired — is forced to revise his draft.

Wednesday’s questions ping-ponged in a spirited hours-long debate, a last gasp at closing arguments from the House prosecutors and Trump’s defense ahead of critical voting this week.

Fielding the written questions, Chief Justice John Roberts asked them of Trump’s accusers and defenders.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell privately told senators he doesn’t yet have the votes to brush back Democratic demands for witnesses now that revelations from Bolton have roiled the trial.

Republican ideas for dealing with Bolton and his book were fizzling almost as soon as they arose — among them, a witness “swap” with Democrats or issuing a subpoena for Bolton’s manuscript.

GOP senators are sternly warned by party leaders that calling Bolton as a witness could entangle the trial in lengthy legal battles and delay Trump’s expected acquittal.

Philbin made exactly that case in his response to Democrats’ first question: “This institution will effectively be paralyzed for months on end,” he said.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Main tried to give fresh momentum to a one-for-one witness deal saying it’s “very important that there be fairness, that each side be able to select a witness or two.” But Democrats dismissed those offers, especially as Republicans want to draw Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, deeper into the proceedings.

“It’s irrelevant. It’s a distraction,” said Schumer.

Bolton writes in a forthcoming book that Trump told him he wanted to withhold military aid from Ukraine until it helped with investigations into Democratic rival Joe Biden. That assertion, if true, would undercut a key defense argument and go to the heart of one of the two articles of impeachment against the president.

“I think Bolton probably has something to offer us,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska. She met privately Wednesday with McConnell.

Trump disagreed in a tweet Wednesday in which he complained that Bolton, after he left the White House, “goes out and IMMEDIATELY writes a nasty & untrue book. All Classified National Security.”

The uncertainty about witnesses arises days before crucial votes on the issue. In a Senate split 53-47 in favor of Republicans, at least four GOP senators must join all Democrats to reach the 51 votes required to call witnesses, decide whom to call or do nearly anything else in the trial.

Collins, Murkowski and Utah Sen. Mitt Romney signaled an interest in calling Bolton or other witnesses and questions and answers at times appeared directed directly at them.

One Democrat, the centrist Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, said he wouldn’t have a problem hearing from Hunter Biden, who was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company, but doubted it will happen.

Most Republican senators don’t want to call Bolton and most Democrats would rather avoid dragging the Bidens further into the impeachment proceedings. The Bidens were a focus of defense arguments though no evidence of wrongdoing has emerged.

One person watching from the sidelines Wednesday was Lev Parnas, the indicted associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who arrived at the Capitol saying, “I want to testify.” Parnas, who has turned over evidence for the proceedings, cannot enter the Senate with his court-ordered electronic-tracking device.

Protesters swarmed the Capitol complex throughout the day, many demanding a fair trial.

The two days set aside for questions, Wednesday and Thursday, also allow each side more time to win over any undecided senators pondering the witness issue. In the meantime, all will have the opportunity to grill both the House Democrats prosecuting the case and the Republican president’s defense team.

Trump faces charges from Democrats that he abused his power like no other president, jeopardizing Ukraine and U.S.-Ukraine relations by using the military aid as leverage while the vulnerable ally battled Russia. The second article of impeachment says Trump then obstructed the House probe in a way that threatened the nation’s three-branch system of checks and balances.

Republican senators lobbed questions that furthered Trump’s team legal argument that the House presented a shoddy case and that the president’s actions are well within his rights and do not rise to impeachable offense.

Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz wanted to know, Does it matter if there was a quid pro quo?

Trump’s celebrity attorney Alan Dershowitz argued that every president believes his interest and the public interest combine, and such quid pro quo’s made in one’s political interest are not necessarily corrupt.

“It cannot be impeachable if it’s a mixed motive that combines personal interest and the public interest,” Dershowitz told them.

Schiff’s response mentioned one particular senator: He asked his audience to imagine what would have happened if then-President Barack Obama asked the Russians to dig up dirt on then-candidate Romney, the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee?

“All quid pro quos are fine?” Schiff asked. The next president, he said, “can ask for an investigation of you.”

Far from trying to overturn the 2016 election as Trump’s team argues, impeachment is needed to protect the 2020 election, Schiff argued.

The president’s legal team tried to lock up its case Tuesday. Trump attorney Jay Sekulow addressed the Bolton controversy head-on in closing arguments by dismissing the former national security adviser’s manuscript as “inadmissible.”

Democrats say Trump’s refusal to allow administration officials to testify only reinforces that the White House is hiding evidence. The White House has had Bolton’s manuscript for about a month, but its release caught senators off guard.

___

Associated Press writers Alan Fram, Mary Clare Jalonick, Andrew Taylor, Matthew Daly, Laurie Kellman and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.

The Davos Set’s Most Dangerous Delusion

Few thinkers are more deserving of criticism than Milton Friedman. Not only was he the late 20th century’s leading proponent of unfettered capitalism, he served as one of the intellectual fathers of the neoliberal ideology that has been so dominant (and destructive) over the past 50 years. It is no exaggeration to say that the Chicago School economist was one of the most—if not the most—influential ideologists of the past half-century, shaping economic policy in Washington and beyond while providing an effective intellectual apologia for capitalists, who seldom fail to put profit over people.

All of this makes it hard to defend Friedman in any way, and I have little desire to do so. The neoliberal prophet’s ideas and theories played an essential role in the right-wing economic project that took off during the Reagan and Thatcher era of the 1980s; today’s conservative and libertarian ideologues continue to cloak their pro-corporate agenda (deregulation, tax cuts, and so forth.) in the Friedmanite language of liberty. All this being said, however, it has been amusing in recent months to see the dead economist become something of a scapegoat for the very type of people who once used his work to defend their bad behavior from critics.

This phenomenon was evident last week at the World Economic Forum summit in Davos, Switzerland, where the world’s political and economic elite come together every year to pretend that they care more about the world than they care about making money. The theme of this year’s event was “stakeholder capitalism” and the role of business in society—or, officially, “Stakeholders for a Cohesive and Sustainable World.” Five months after the Business Roundtable released a memo on the “purpose of a corporation,” in which the group of America’s top CEOs advocated a form of stakeholder capitalism (as opposed to shareholder capitalism), much of the world’s economic elite are now ostensibly getting on board with this “new” model of capitalism.

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“I feel that everyone is conscious that the old idea of … maximizing profits, maximizing shareholder value, the old Milton Friedman concept, is now part of the past,” declared Maurice Levy, chair of ad agency conglomerate Publicis Groupe, at the forum. During that discussion, other top capitalists likewise rejected old Milton’s theory of shareholder primacy. “Capitalism as we have known it is dead,” pronounced Marc Benioff, billionaire founder of the Silicon Valley company Salesforce. “This obsession that we have with maximizing profits for shareholders alone has led to incredible inequality and a planetary emergency,” he continued, insisting that stakeholder capitalism has finally hit a “tipping point.”

So, 50 years after writing his article on the social responsibility (or lack thereof) of corporate America, Milton Friedman has become the whipping boy for wealthy billionaires and elite Davos regulars hoping to improve their image. It is certainly entertaining to watch Friedman get some of the ridicule he so richly deserves, of course, and it’s long overdue that his free-market fundamentalism be tossed into the dustbin of history. Yet at the same time, it is a stretch to say that the rise of “shareholder capitalism” over the past 50 years is the fault of some dead economist, no matter how influential.

The fact is that Friedman’s work—and that of other right-wing economists, such as F.A. Hayek—was a great apologia for corporate America, providing a moral defense of its unscrupulous and greedy behavior. Friedman’s justification of unfettered capitalism was based on his narrow (and entirely negative) definition of freedom, which was incredibly useful in the hands of such billionaire businessmen as the Koch brothers, who fought all forms of state economic intervention in the name of freedom. For all his ideological writings, however, much of what Friedman wrote was simply descriptive. For example, when he said that the role of the corporation is to make money for its shareholders, he was simply describing what capitalists have always done. Friedman’s essay on the corporate executive’s function didn’t really posit anything new; he was merely describing the logic of capitalism. The corporate executive, Friedman wrote, has “direct responsibility to his employers,” and his or her responsibility is to “conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to their basic rules of the society.”

One of the attendees of this year’s Davos conference, McKinsey & Company partner Kevin Sneader (who was in the news last year for falsely denying the firm’s role in advising U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement on its inhumane immigration policies), maintained that the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, “was very clear in saying that the responsibility of the businessperson was to give to the community and enrich everyone.”

While it’s true that Smith wasn’t a free-market fundamentalist, as portrayed by libertarian ideologues, there’s a difference between saying how things ought to be and how things are, and Smith was not naive about the businessperson’s motivations. In his own words, the author of “The Wealth of Nations” said that the “consideration of his own private profit is the sole motive which determines the owner of any capital to employ it either in agriculture, in manufacturers, or in some particular branch of the wholesale or retail trade.” The most useful employment of capital, Smith wrote, is the one that yields the capitalist the most profit, and this employment is “not always the most useful for society.”

We can find similar accounts of the capitalist in the writings of Karl Marx, who pointed to what he called the “coercive laws of competition,” which force capitalists to adopt the same methods and tactics as their competitors (or cease to be capitalists and go out of business). Profit is the single motivation for capitalists, and it is naive to think that they will put the interests of the community, their employees, their customers or the environment before their short-term profit (at least without being forced to do so).

The latest public embrace of “stakeholder capitalism” by America’s corporate elite is more of a PR stunt than anything else, and the co-opting of “progressive values” by Wall Street elites and corporate executives is little more than a desperate attempt to placate the growing anger and opposition to capitalism and the billionaire class (not just in the United States, but internationally). This cynical strategy was on full display when the CEO of Goldman Sachs, David Solomon, issued a statement from his Davos resort Thursday stating that the Wall Street firm—the biggest underwriter of initial public offerings in America—will no longer take public any companies with all-white and all-male boards of directors. “Starting on July 1st in the U.S. and Europe, we’re not going to take a company public unless there’s at least one diverse board candidate, with a focus on women,” he declared.

There is perhaps no better example than the above of what the great political theorist Nancy Fraser has termed “progressive neoliberalism”—which she defines as a strategic alliance between such emancipatory social movements as feminism, anti-racism and LGBTQ rights—with neoliberal forces that use “the charisma of their progressive allies to spread a veneer of emancipation over their own regressive project of massive upward redistribution.” The aim of progressive neoliberalism, Fraser remarks, is not to “abolish social hierarchy but to ‘diversify’ it, ‘empowering’ ‘talented’ women, people of color, and sexual minorities to rise to the top.”

An inherently class-specific ideal, this is designed to ensure that the so-called “deserving” individuals from underrepresented groups can attain “positions and pay on a par with straight White men of their own class.” This model of meritocratic neoliberalism is the opposite of radical, as it ultimately helps sustain the unjust system that keeps the great majority of people from all groups exploited and powerless.

In the end, individual capitalists may genuinely care about the environment, global poverty and inequality, or any of the other noble causes discussed at Davos, but they operate within an impersonal and amoral system that does not care about their personal conscience. (Plus, to succeed in this type of environment, the less empathy one has the better; a recent study found that as many as one in five business leaders may have psychopathic tendencies, compared with around 1% to 2% in the general population).

Milton Friedman was at least honest about the ruthless and cutthroat nature of capitalism, unlike Davos elites and a growing number of corporate leaders who promote the contradictory idea of a kind of compassionate capitalism. In truth, the only way to meet the enormous challenges and threats we face today is to look critically at the very system that engendered these problems in the first place. Not surprisingly, those who benefit most from this system are not prepared to do this.

10 Things Every American Needs to Know About Trump’s Impeachment

Don’t get bogged down by the marathon minute-by-minute coverage of the Senate impeachment trial stretching late into the night. Don’t get overwhelmed by all the complex procedural maneuvers aimed at securing a fair and open trial with witness testimony and new documents that Republicans want to prevent at all costs.

We must stay focused on the big picture.  Here are the 10 big things you need to understand about the Senate trial and the historic moment our country is in right now.

1. Trump’s attempt to get foreign powers to help him win the 2020 election is an impeachable offense. It’s precisely the sort of thing the Framers of the Constitution worried about when they created the impeachment clause. If presidents could seek foreign help winning elections, there would be no end of foreign intrusions into American sovereignty and democracy.

2. But under the impeachment clause of the Constitution, sixty-seven United States senators are needed to convict Trump. That means that even if every Democratic senator votes to oust him, twenty Republican senators would need to join them in order for Trump to be removed from office.

3. The odds that twenty Republican Senators will do so are exactly zero. Zilch.

4. That’s because there are not twenty Republican Senators with the courage and integrity to protect the Constitution and the nation from the most dangerous and demagogic president in history. Led by Midnight Mitch McConnell, Republican Senators are engaged in a concerted coverup of some of the most outrageous conduct ever committed by high-level government officials. Even so-called moderates like Susan Collins and Mitt Romney can’t be relied on to grow a spine and conduct a fair trial.

5. Why not? Because they want to keep their jobs, and they fear Trump’s sway over their voting base and his massive fundraising apparatus.

6. Trump’s overall job ratings have not changed a bit in the wake of his impeachment in the House, just as they have remained remarkably stable over the course of his presidency. In the most recent polls, 40 percent of Americans – including, importantly, 90 percent of Republican voters – approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, while 58 percent say they disapprove. These percentages are exactly the same as they were in September, before the House of Representatives launched its formal impeachment inquiry and voted to impeach Trump.

7. Why do 90 percent of Republican voters approve of Trump? Because he has convinced them he’s on their side and that he’s the victim of a plot orchestrated by the establishment and deep state bureaucrats to oust him.

8. How has he kept his base so dedicated? By lying constantly, casting the mainstream press as biased and untrustworthy, relying on Trump’s propaganda machine (also known as Fox News) and right-wing radio to trumpet his lies, using Twitter and Facebook to deliver those lies directly to his followers, and fomenting the “culture war” — employing deep divisions over race, guns, religion, and immigrants — to continuously feed his base.

9. Where’s the money coming from? From the American oligarchy – billionaires, CEOs, corporate executives, and the denizens of Wall Street – who are funding the Republican Party and bankrolling Trump and his propaganda machine. They’re doing this because they’re raking in billions thanks to the Trump-Republican tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. Trump is already promising them more if he gets a second term. “The attitude of the business community toward the Trump Administration appears quite positive,” said Stephen Schwarzman, who runs Blackstone, the world’s largest investment fund. “We are all adjusting to his abnormal behavior,” said former White House Communications Director and Trump ally-turned-enemy, Anthony Scaramucci. “The economic strength helps their cognitive dissonance.”

10. What can the rest of us do? Vote Trump out of office this November, and convince everyone you know to do so as well. It may seem daunting, but remember: We already beat the liar-in-chief by 2.8 million votes in 2016. And the 2018 elections had the highest turnout of any midterm election since 1914 – handing House Republicans their most resounding defeat in decades. People are outraged, mobilized, and ready to keep fighting. If we come together, we will prevail.

Brexit Deal Cleared by EU Parliament; U.K. Set to Leave Friday

BRUSSELS — The European Union grudgingly let go of the United Kingdom with a final vote Wednesday at the EU’s parliament that ended the Brexit divorce battle and set the scene for tough trade negotiations in the year ahead.

In an emotion-charged session at the session in Brussels, lawmakers from all 28 EU countries expressed their love and sadness, some, notably from Britain’s Brexit Party, their joy.

Some even cried and many held hands during a mournful rendition of the Auld Lang Syne farewell song that contrasted sharply with hard-headed exhortations that Britain won’t find it easy in the talks that will follow the country’s official departure on Friday.

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“We will always love you and we will never be far,” said EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

Britain will leave the EU after 47 years of membership. It is the first country to leave the EU and for many in Europe its official departure at 11 p.m. London time on Friday, Jan. 31 is a moment of enormous sadness and reduces the number in the bloc to 27.

With just two days to go until Brexit day, the legislature overwhelmingly approved Britain’s departure terms from the EU — 621 to 49 in favor of the Brexit deal that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson negotiated with the other 27 EU leaders in the fall of last year. The deal’s passage follows last week’s backing by the U.K.’s Parliament.

The parliament’s chief Brexit official, Guy Verhofstadt, said that “this vote is not an adieu,” adding that it is “only an au revoir.”

Though the deal on Britain’s divorce terms has been cleared, there are still huge uncertainties around the future. After Britain’s departure on Friday, a transition will begin during which the U.K. will remain within the EU’s economic arrangements until the end of the year though it won’t have a say in policy as it will not be a member of the EU anymore.

“That’s it. It’s all over,” said Nigel Farage, who has campaigned for Brexit for two decades. On departing the scene, the man who arguably did more than anyone else in the country’s decision to vote for Brexit in the June 2016 referendum, waved Britain’s Union Flag.

EU countries are preparing for the possibility that talks on a new trade deal with Britain could collapse by year’s end, and no-deal contingency planning for a chaotic end to the so-called transition period is necessary.

Britain is seeking to thrash out a comprehensive trade deal within 11 months.

That timetable is viewed as ambitious by many observers of trade discussions, which can often drag on for years.

“We will not yield to any pressure nor any haste,” French President Emmanuel Macron said. “The priority is to define, in the short, medium and long term the interests of the European Union and to preserve them.”

The EU has said such a timespan is far too short and fears remain that a chaotic exit, averted this week, might still happen at the end of the year if the transition ends without any agreement in place.

Von der Leyen did not let any fuzzy feeling of the historic moment impede her vision on a trade deal with a powerful nation that is pushing more America’s standards of unbridled free enterprise than the EU’s principle of cradle-to-grave social protection.

She said the precondition to granting the UK an advantageous entry into its single market of almost half a billion consumers is that “European and British businesses continue to compete on a level playing field.”

“We will certainly not expose our companies to unfair competition. And it’s very clear the trade-off is simple. The more united the United Kingdom does commit to uphold our standards for social protection and worker’s rights, our guarantees for the environment and other standards and rules ensuring fair competition, the closer and better the access to the single market.”

Sticking to EU standards however is anathema to the Brexiteers who wanted to be free from any constraints imposed by Brussels.

Leaked Report Shows United Nations Suffered Hack

GENEVA — Sophisticated hackers infiltrated U.N. offices in Geneva and Vienna last year in an apparent espionage operation, and their identity and the extent of the data they obtained is unknown.

An internal confidential document from the United Nations, leaked to The New Humanitarian and seen by The Associated Press, says dozens of servers were compromised including at the U.N. human rights office, which collects sensitive data and has often been a lightning rod of criticism from autocratic governments for exposing rights abuses.

Asked about the report, one U.N. official told the AP that the hack appeared “sophisticated” and that the extent of the damage remained unclear, especially in terms of personal, secret or compromising information that may have been stolen. The official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity to speak freely about the episode, said systems have since been reinforced.

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The skill level was so high it is possible a state-backed actor might have been behind it, the official said.

“It’s as if someone were walking in the sand, and swept up their tracks with a broom afterward,” the official said. “There’s not even a trace of a clean-up.”

The leaked Sept. 20 report says logs that would have betrayed the hackers’ activities inside the U.N. networks — what was accessed and what may have been siphoned out — were “cleared.” It also shows that among accounts known to have been accessed were those of domain administrators — who by default have master access to all user accounts in their purview.

“Sadly … still counting our casualties,” the report says.

Jake Williams, CEO of the cybersecurity firm Rendition Infosec and a former U.S. government hacker, said the fact that the hackers cleared the network logs indicates they were not top flight. The most skilled hackers — including U.S., Russian and Chinese agents — can cover their tracks by editing those logs instead of clearing them.

“The intrusion definitely looks like espionage,” said Williams, noting that the active directory component — where all users’ permissions are managed — from three different domains were compromised: those of United Nations offices in Geneva and Vienna and of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“This, coupled with the relatively small number of infected machines, is highly suggestive of espionage,” he said after viewing the report. “The attackers have a goal in mind and are deploying malware to machines that they believe serve some purpose for them.”

Any number of intelligence agencies from around the globe are likely interested in infiltrating the U.N., Williams said.

The hack was not severe at the U.N. human rights office, said its spokesman, Rupert Colville.

“We face daily attempts to get into our computer systems,” Colville said. “This time, they managed, but it did not get very far. Nothing confidential was compromised.”

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the attack “resulted in a compromise of core infrastructure components” and was “determined to be serious.” The earliest detected activity related to the intrusion occurred in July and it was detected in August, he said in response to emailed questions.

He said the world body does not have enough information to determine who might have been behind the incursion, but added “the methods and tools used in the attack indicate a high level of resource, capability and determination.

“The damage related to this specific attack has been contained, and additional mitigation measures implemented,” Dujarric wrote. “Nevertheless the threat of future attacks continues, and the United Nations Secretariat detects and responds to multiple attacks of various level of sophistication on a daily basis.”

The internal document from the U.N. Office of Information and Technology said 42 servers were “compromised” and another 25 were deemed “suspicious,” nearly all at the sprawling Geneva and Vienna offices. Three of the “compromised” servers belonged to Human Rights agency, which is located across town from the main U.N. office in Geneva, and two were used by the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe.

The report says a flaw in Microsoft’s SharePoint software was exploited by the hackers to infiltrate the networks but that the type of malware used was not known, nor had technicians identified the command and control servers on the internet used to exfiltrate information. Nor was it known what mechanism was used by the hackers to maintain their presence on the infiltrated networks.

Security researcher Matt Suiche, a French entrepreneur based in Dubai who founded the cybersecurity firm Comae Technologies, reviewed the report and said it appeared entry was gained through an anti-corruption tracker at the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime.

The report mentions a range of IP addresses in Romania that may have been used to stage the infiltration, and Williams said one is reported to have some neighbors with a history of hosting malware.

Technicians at the United Nations office in Geneva, the world body’s European hub, on at least two occasions worked through weekends in recent months to isolate the local U.N. data center from the internet, rewrite passwords and ensure the systems were clean. Twenty machines had to be rebuilt, the report says.

The hack comes amid rising concerns about computer or mobile phone vulnerabilities, both for large organizations like governments and the U.N. as well as for individuals and businesses.

Last week, U.N. human rights experts asked the U.S. government to investigate a suspected Saudi hack that may have siphoned data from the personal smartphone of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and owner of The Washington Post, in 2018. On Tuesday, The New York Times’s bureau chief in Beirut, Ben Hubbard, said technology researchers suspected an attempted intrusion into his phone around the same time.

The United Nations, and its human rights office, is particularly sensitive, and could be a tempting target. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, and her predecessors have called out, denounced and criticized alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity and less severe rights violations and abuses in places as diverse as Syria and Saudi Arabia.

Dozens of independent human rights experts who work with the U.N. human rights office have greater leeway — and fewer political and financial ties to the governments that fund the United Nations and make up its membership — to denounce alleged rights abuses.

Ian Richards, president of the Staff Council at the United Nations, expressed concern about the safety of U.N. networks.

“There’s a lot of our data that could have been hacked, and we don’t know what that data could be,” said Richards, whose group advocates for the welfare of employees of the world body.

Potentially affected, for example, are staff in the office of the special envoy for Syria carrying out sensitive investigations and human rights staffers interviewing witnesses.

“How much should U.N. staff trust the information infrastructure the U.N. is providing them?” Richards asked. “Or should they start putting their information elsewhere?”

___

Bajak, an AP technology writer, reported from Boston.

Trump’s Plan for Palestinians Is a Crime Against Humanity

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment. 

On Tuesday, an American president being impeached for abuse of power announced a historic plan for Israel-Palestine alongside an Israeli prime minister who was just indicted for bribery and corruption. (The Israeli parliament declined to grant Netanyahu immunity, and he withdrew the request, allowing the formal indictment to be filed.)

The plan was drafted by a team allegedly led by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who has no real government position and is a far right wing Israel nationalist, in consultation with the far right wing Likud government of Israel, headed by PM Binyamin Netanyahu. The Palestinians declined to be involved in what was obviously a crooked and fixed process that gave away their East Jerusalem to Netanyahu before it even got going.

Just as the Palestinian people were not consulted in 1917 when the British cabinet adopted the Balfour Declaration, designating geographical Palestine as a site for a “homeland” for the Jewish people, so the doomed-to-failure Trump plan also did not consult them about their own fate. It is no longer the age of Western Empires when pudgy men in pinstripe suits in the drawing rooms of London and Paris drew the borders of other people’s countries and dictated the forms of their political lives.

If you want to know what Iran is really about, it is mostly a protest against these imperial injustices. For that reason, the Trump Plan is a huge boon to Iran, since it makes transparent precisely the “global arrogance” of Washington that Iran is always going on about.

In turn, imperial practices were and are underpinned by a latent White Nationalism, such that they attempt to keep the brown and black people subordinate and to reserve wealth and privilege and global power to the “white” European and European-descent nations. Even though Jews in twentieth-century Europe and the United States were often seen as “not Aryans” and “not White,” nowadays the usefulness of Israel to imperial designs on the region has led to the Israelis being coded as “white” and the Palestinians as “brown.” If you want to understand how millions of people can daily be screwed over as the Palestinians are, it isn’t actually much more complicated than that.

About 5 million stateless Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation (the Palestinian West Bank) or under Israeli military siege (the Gaza Strip). Some 400,000 stateless Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are from families that were expelled from the British Mandate of Palestine by militant Zionist militias. Another 400,000 stateless Palestinians in Syria are from families expelled from the British Mandate of Palestine by Zionist militias. About 40,000 stateless Palestinians in Jordan are from families . . . you get the picture. That is, About 6 million stateless Palestinians are being kept without basic human rights by Israel’s refusal to allow them to return to their homes and by Israel’s refusal to allow the Palestinians to establish a genuine state to which the refugees could return.

Although the Trump Plan uses the diction of allowing a Palestinian “state,” the entity proposed does not have control over its borders or airspace or coastal waters and cannot make treaties with other states or go to the United Nations over continued Israeli violations of international law. In other words it is not a state at all. It is a Bantustan of the sort the Apartheid South African government created as a way of unloading its African population so that they could be stripped of South African citizenship.

This map is verrrrry generously shaded to give appearance of contiguity.

100% final map will appear closer to archipelago map on the right. pic.twitter.com/pLcaWak4R2

— Ben Silverstein (@bensilverstein) January 28, 2020

Palestine president Mahmoud Abbas is said to have reacted to the Plan’s unveiling by calling Trump a “dog, the son of a dog.”

The Trump Plan is full of measures that constitute War Crimes in international law, and a systematic pattern of War Crimes is categorized as a Crime against Humanity. The latter term is the one appropriate to the Trump Plan. Here are the War Crimes the Plan proposes

1. Israel has flooded 400,000 of its citizens into the Occupied Palestinian West Bank, where they have stolen Palestinian land and built squatter-only settlements on it, where Palestinians are not allowed to live. These Israeli squatters are often armed and some of them routinely stage attacks on Palestinian villages or commit sabotage against Palestinian orchards and agriculture.

This squatting on Palestinian land contravenes the Fourth Geneva Accord of 1949 on Occupied Territories, which forbids transferring populations from the Occupying Power into the occupied lands.

“The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

This rule was to prevent the repetition of the war crimes committed by Nazi Germany, which occupied other lands and sent Germans in to settle them.

The Trump plan rewards Israel’s illegal activities, saying “Approximately 97% of Israelis in the West Bank will be incorporated into contiguous Israeli territory.”

2. The Trump Plan allows Israel to annex about a third of the Occupied West Bank, on which Israeli squatters have squatted. Annexation is an act of aggression, forbidden by international law. By the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel cannot actually deprive Occupied Palestinians of their land rights by simply declaring those lands “annexed.”

3. The Plan envisages depriving many Israeli citizens of Palestinian heritage of their Israeli citizenship, which amounts to denaturalization. Since they would be instead given “citizenship” in a “state” that no one will recognize and which is a Bantustan rather than a state, in which they will enjoy no actual rights over their own property because Israel won’t permit the Bantustan to so guarantee them, that would amount de facto to forcing these Israeli citizens into statelessness, which contravenes the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, signed by 75 member states.

4. The Plan envisages that the Palestinian Bantustan will be disarmed, which means that Palestinians will be deprived of the right of self-defense. The Right of Self-defense is recognized in Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter:

“Article 51. “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”

Palestine was in 2012 granted by the UN General Assembly non-member observer state status, like the Vatican, which puts it under the authority of the Charter.

5. The enclaves to which the Palestinians would be consigned give them no control over their lives, as B’Tselem pointed out. The Israeli human rights organization pointed out,

“With no territorial contiguity, Palestinians will not be able to exercise their right to self-determination and will continue to be completely dependent on Israel’s goodwill for their daily life, with no political rights and no way to influence their future. They will continue to be at the mercy of Israel’s draconian permit regime and need its consent for any construction or development. In this sense, not only does the plan fail to improve their predicament in any way, but, in fact, it leaves them worse off as it perpetuates the situation and gives it recognition.”

Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights puts the right to freedom of movement into treaty law: “(1) Everyone lawfully within the territory of a State shall, within that territory, have the right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose his residence.”

Actually a whole book could be written about all the ways the Trump Plan for the hapless Palestinians contravenes international law. Since the over-all rubric is Apartheid, and Apartheid is a War Crime in the Rome Statute that underpins the International Criminal Court, the whole plan is a series of War Crimes, which amount in the aggregate to a crime against humanity.

Trump: New Trade Deal With Canada, Mexico to Boost U.S. Growth

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed into law a major rewrite of the rules of trade with Canada and Mexico that he said replaces the “nightmare” of a Clinton-era agreement and will keep jobs, wealth and growth in America.

Trump made renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement a priority during his 2016 campaign, although trade experts say the impact of the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement will be modest.

“This is a cutting-edge, state-of-the-art agreement that protects, defends, and serves the great people of our country,” Trump said in an outdoor signing ceremony at the White House, where the invitation list included more than 70 Republican members of Congress but no Democratic legislators. “Together we are building a glorious future that is raised, grown, built and made right here in the glorious U.S.A.”

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Canada and Mexico already represent the top two export markets for U.S. goods. But the new pact, along with the signing of a “phase one” agreement with China, dials down trade tensions that contributed to slowing economic growth globally.

The leaders of the U.S., Canada and Mexico signed the deal in late 2018. Legislation implementing it received overwhelming, bipartisan support in Congress after several months of behind-the-scenes negotiations between Democratic lawmakers and the Trump administration.

Trump made a point of praising Republican legislators for their work in passing the deal but did not mention the role of Democrats, who said that even if they weren’t invited to the signing ceremony, their influence was being felt.

“What the president will be signing is quite different from what the president sent us,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “We were able to make vast improvements. If we weren’t, we would not have been able to pass the bill.”

Rep. Richard Neal, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said it only passed Congress because of how the Democrats forced changes in Trump’s original proposal. “They voted for it for one reason, is because of how we shaped and altered the president’s proposal,” said Neal, D-Mass.

NAFTA, which took effect in 1994 under President Bill Clinton, tore down trade barriers between the three North American countries and commerce between them surged. But Trump and other critics said NAFTA encouraged factories to leave the United States and relocate south of the border to take advantage of low-wage Mexican labor.

Trump threatened to leave NAFTA if he couldn’t get a better deal, creating uncertainty over regional trade.

His trade negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, pressed for a revamped pact designed to bring factory jobs back to the United States. The new agreement, for example, requires automakers to get 75% of their production content (up from 62.5% in NAFTA) from within North America to qualify for the pact’s duty-free benefits. That means more auto content would have to come from North America, not imported more cheaply from China and elsewhere.

At least 40% of vehicles would also have to originate in places where workers earn at least $16 an hour. That would benefit the United States and Canada — not Mexico, where auto assembly workers are paid a fraction of that amount.

The independent U.S. International Trade Commission last year calculated that the U.S.-Mexico-Canada deal would add 0.35%, or $68 billion, to economic growth and generate 176,000 jobs over six years — not much of a change for a $22 trillion economy with 152 million nonfarm jobs.

“It’s a blip,” said Syracuse University economist Mary Lovely, who studies trade. “The main thing is what it isn’t: It isn’t a continuation of uncertainty, and it isn’t a major disruption” to business.

Critics include environmental groups concerned that the agreement does not address global warming. Some conservatives say the agreement will make cars and other products more expensive for consumers.

The president wasn’t wasting any time highlighting the deal in battleground states that will determine who wins this year’s presidential election. He will travel Thursday to Michigan, where some of the state’s auto workers should benefit from a deal that encourages more manufacturing in the United States.

Trump wants to talk up a deal that about 4 in 5 Americans have heard little or nothing about. Indeed, while a third of the public approves of the deal and only 5% disapprove, a solid majority, 61%, have not formed an opinion, according to a recent poll conducted by Monmouth University.

_____

Associated Press writer Andrew Taylor and Deb Riechmann contributed to this report.

Paul Krugman: America Is at Risk of Becoming a One-Party Autocracy

This article originally appeared on Salon.

It is a great detriment to civil discourse that the divide between left and right in the United States is often depicted as being purely cultural — as if one’s politics were solely mediated by aesthetics, such as whether one prefers shooting guns or drinking lattes. This fabulist understanding of politics is harmful inasmuch as it masks the real social effects of the policy agendas pushed by left versus right. Seeing politics as aesthetic transforms what should be a quantitative debate — with statistics and numbers about taxation and public policy, questions of who benefits more or less from policy changes — and devolves it into a rhetorical debate over values.

This is especially bad for liberals because there is a lot of quantitative evidence that the right’s economic agenda is a dismal failure in terms of providing any real gains to the vast majority of the population. As most Salon readers are aware, economist, professor, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has spent much of his career doing precisely this: debunking the asserted merits of right-wing fiscal and economic policy through unemotional facts and statistics.

As Krugman’s quantitative analyses attest, the economic policies hawked by conservatives are a dismal failure by any measure, in any era. So why do right-wing policy ideas, like lowering taxes on the rich or keeping health care privatized, continue to be celebrated by conservatives? Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, has penned a new essay collection on that very theme. Titled “Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better America,” the book features over 400 pages of snappy essays that deflate just about every right-wing and neoliberal economic talking point — “zombies” that should have died long ago, as he says.

“While there is a philosophical case for a low-tax, minimal government society, modern conservatism relies less on philosophical persuasion than on the fact there are people who would gain a lot personally if we were to retrace our steps toward the Gilded Age,” Krugman writes in the book’s introduction. Moreover, he says, the malign influence of these few super-rich people is “propping up zombie ideas — ideas that should have been killed by contrary evidence, but instead keep shambling along, eating people’s brains.”

In interviewing Krugman about his book, I opted to go broad — as throughout the years there are few subject areas untouched by his pen. Hence, our interview touched on economic trends, global politics, and the relative popularity of an especially nerdy theory of economics. As always, this interview has been condensed and edited for print.

You were one of a few mainstream pundits who correctly foresaw the Great Recession as early as 2005. What do you make of the current economic situation? Why hasn’t a recession come yet, and are we overdue?

I don’t see any misalignment as obvious as the housing bubble; inequality and homelessness are bad things, but macroeconomics isn’t a morality play, and injustice doesn’t necessarily lead to recession.

The real secret of the current economy, as I see it, is deficit spending. The 2019 federal deficit was $300 billion higher than CBO [Congressional Budget Office] projected in 2017, before the Trump tax cuts. That’s a lot of stimulus, after years of austerity imposed by the GOP on Obama. It’s badly designed stimulus, but it’s still a lot of money.

Sooner or later something will go wrong, and the idea of Steve Mnuchin in charge of the response is pretty terrifying. But I can’t point to an immediate source of danger.

You write about Social Security, and that being a policy debate the left ultimately won. And yet, one zombie idea, which I still see bandied about, is the idea that social security “is bankrupt” or “will run out of money” by the time millennials like me retire. To me, the normalization of this notion has always seemed like a ploy by the rich to make it so that my generation doesn’t fight back when Congress slashes social security. What do you make of this sly rhetorical turn of phrase, that is, the notion that Social Security will “run out” of money?

It’s not all a conspiracy: right now Social Security is funded by a dedicated tax plus a trust fund accumulated out of past taxes. At some point, probably around 2035, the trust fund will be exhausted and revenues won’t be enough to pay full benefits. So that’s a real thing.

But there are various ways to deal with this; we could easily find new revenue sources to maintain and even expand benefits. So [Social Security] will face an action-forcing event, but that doesn’t mean it has to be slashed.

And I’ve never understood the logic of claims that to avoid the possibility of future benefit cuts, we need to move immediately to . . . cut future benefits. That’s where the ideology comes in. Claiming that Social Security faces a crisis demanding immediate action is very convenient for conservatives and centrists who want to sound tough-minded, but it’s nonsense.

You’ve been trying to debunk myths about debt spending being evil for decades, by my count. Though I know you identify as a Keynesian, I have watched with some curiosity the rise of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as a trend — for instance, when I lived in Oakland there was a meeting of MMT enthusiasts that happened outside of any university, which I find remarkable for economics. (Not that it’s boring, just that it’s not generally a hobbyist pursuit.) I am wondering if you feel enthused perhaps that so many young (and probably old) people have seen the light on government debt spending.

Actually, I’m not sure that [Modern Monetary Theory] really is different from Keynesian economics. Most of the time its devotees seem to be inventing new terminology to make arguments mainstream Keynesians already understood perfectly well. A lot of it, I suspect, involves imperfect understanding of what we already knew and personal self-promotion (Look at me! I’m a radical unorthodox thinker! Pay no attention to the fact that I’m substantively saying the same thing as Larry Summers!).

I am, however, gratified to see the debt obsession wane, although it probably matters more that people like [Larry] Summers or Olivier Blanchard are telling us not to worry than what alternative macro people argue.

This leads me to a follow-up question about debt. I’m curious if you’re familiar with David Graeber’s book “Debt,” which is sort of both a cultural history and an economic book about debt. Graeber writes of the historical idea of a debt jubilee, something that happens periodically, often in times of political uprisings. In the case of something like, say, student debt or medical debt, do you see as productive a discussion of a jubilee or mass forgiveness? Would anyone truly suffer if, say, the world were to forgive the debt of many of the third-world countries exploited by the IMF? Debt has been on my mind lately given both Sanders’ and Warren’s plans to forgive a lot of student debt.

I haven’t read Graeber. I am, however, all in favor of debt forgiveness when debt is a real ball-and-chain for the economy. Hey, we have Chapter 11 bankruptcies for corporations when they’re needed to avoid destructive liquidation, so why not for countries too?

But it’s usually something you want to do on a case-by-case basis. Argentina repudiated 70 percent of its debt in 2001, and the results were actually very good for a while. Greece eventually got a lot of debt forgiveness, and the misery there would have been much less if it had happened sooner.

I really don’t know enough about sub-Saharan Africa to know which countries are good candidates for debt relief, but I’m sure there are many.

The thing about student debt is that there was such widespread scamming that a case-by-case approach would be administratively overwhelming. So some kind of broad debt relief sounds good.

I noticed that your writing about different left-leaning states tend to vary in your proscription. You write very positively about Denmark, a social democracy, whereas you don’t have as many kind things to say about Venezuela, which you call a “corrupt petrostate.” Yet Venezuela’s political situation, like Bolivia’s and Cuba’s, is largely the result of operating under the constraints imposed by imperial powers like the U.S. that punish these countries for refusing to cede U.S. capital. On the other hand, Denmark’s high-functioning social welfare state is only possible due to its status as an imperial power in its own right within its situation in the EU. Do you think these subtleties, and these country’s relationship to imperialism, are worth explicating deeper for what they say about both capitalism’s ability to create or destroy leftist states — or perhaps disagree with this assessment?

I suspect the Danes would find it pretty funny to be described as an imperial state. What they are is a rich democracy that respects market forces without worshipping them; they operate a sort of tamed, bounded form of capitalism, and the result is a pretty decent society.

Venezuela isn’t anything like that. It wasn’t always that poor, but the wealth was based on oil, which had a corrupting effect. Before Chavez, they were ruled by a corrupt oligarchy; Chavez came to power for a reason, and the poor did at least get some of the spoils. But the new regime never evolved a sustainable economic model; it combined cronyism (with a different set of cronies) with an attempt to run a command-and-control economy it didn’t have remotely enough competence to operate.

Now, even poorer countries can do a lot to improve social justice. Costa Rica isn’t utopia, but it’s a lot more inclusive than most of Latin America. Taiwan has single-payer health care! The trouble is that social-democratic experiments in developing countries are all too often cut off by coups led by the old oligarchy; and yes, the U.S. has a lot to answer for in its role in backing these coups.

And when a reformist government does come into power, like the Kirchners in Argentina, it often finds it hard to get the balance right. Heterodox economics is sometimes exactly what you need, but you have to know when to stop.

So I don’t see this as a blanket problem with capitalism. Denmark looks capitalist to me, but it’s a kinder, gentler form. Rather than railing against the inherent evil of capitalism, we should be asking how to support countries that try to get the balance right.

Like most Salon readers (and like you) I am no fan of Trump. But also, I don’t see Trump, policy-wise, as particularly different than George W. Bush. Policy-wise, they both did the bidding of the prominent right-wing think tanks, both in foreign policy and economic policy. Sure, Trump is more of a narcissist and openly corrupt, but the results of their rule seem the same — and like most presidents, they are merely steering an imperialist ship that goes from country to country, extracting resources, and ousting redistributive political regimes in favor of any centrist or dictator who will kowtow to American interests. Do you truly see Trump as an aberration, as you’ve written?

I thought I made it clear that I don’t think of Trump as an aberration so much as a culmination. The GOP has achieved something impressive: each successive Republican president makes the preceding one look good by comparison. But yes, the Bush administration was rife with cronyism, tried to dismantle the social safety net, and lied us into war.

The thing about Trump is that we’ve now reached the point where our chances of ever exiting the nightmare are shrinking. There was a lot of vote-rigging, etc., under Bush, but we’re now within striking range of becoming a de facto one-party autocracy — someplace we’ve been heading at least since Newt Gingrich.

We may actually be lucky that Trump is so addled and undisciplined; if he had more self-control, the republic might be gone already.

The title (and theme) of the book, as you write, is this idea of “zombies” — intellectual or policy ideas that stick around not because they work, but because belief in them, and their being enacted in policy, benefits the very wealthy people who promote them directly and indirectly. I was wondering if this might be a sort of a smaller example of a larger idea, one that has existed for thousands of years in human history — specifically, what the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci called hegemony. In his writing, hegemony was the set of ruling-class beliefs and principles that had been normalized such that anyone who thought otherwise was met with ridicule.

I bring this up only because I found myself wondering, during the course of the book, if perhaps the “zombie” wasn’t merely this sort of libertarian free-market view on capitalism. Could it be that capitalism itself is a zombie? Indeed, the majority of my generation (millennials) prefer socialism to capitalism, as polls repeatedly bear out. Do you think that it may be a zombie too?

I guess the question is what we mean by capitalism. If we mean an economy where most (but not all) decisions about production and investment are made by profit-seeking firms, well, we haven’t really found an alternative that works.

But the idea that government can never do anything good IS a zombie. As I write in the book, there’s a range of things the government clearly does better than the private sector, like guaranteeing retirement and health care. Oh, and the Post Office is actually awesome.

What I take from the polling on socialism is that it’s a reaction to right-wing demonizing of every proposal to improve how we live. If you spend 40 years denouncing Social Security, Medicaid, food stamps, antitrust policy, etc as “socialism”; if you say that Denmark is socialist; well, eventually you get a lot of people who say they want socialism.

I suspect that if you asked about what we used to mean by socialism — government control of manufacturing, government-run retailing, and so on — you’d get a much less favorable response.

GOP Doesn’t Have Votes Yet to Block Bolton, McConnell Concedes

WASHINGTON — Republican leaders do not yet have the votes to block Democrats from summoning John Bolton or other witnesses at President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell conceded to fellow GOP senators late Tuesday. It could be a major hurdle for Trump’s hopes to end the trial with a quick acquittal.

McConnell gave the news to senators, according to a Republican familiar with a closed-door meeting of GOP senators and granted anonymity to discuss it.

McConnell convened the meeting shortly after Trump’s legal team made its closing arguments in the trial.

Democrats are demanding several witnesses, especially Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser who writes in a forthcoming book that Trump told him he wanted to withhold military aid from Ukraine until it helped with investigations into Democratic rival Joe Biden. That’s the crux of one major article of impeachment against the president.

There are still several days before any potential witness vote would be taken. A decision to call more witnesses would require 51 votes to pass. With a 53-47 majority, Republicans can only afford to lose three.

The news came as Trump’s legal team argued forcefully against the relevance of testimony from Bolton and concluded their defense as the Senate braced for debate on witnesses.

While scoffing at Bolton’s manuscript, Trump and the Republicans have strongly resisted summoning Bolton to testify in person about what he saw and heard as Trump’s top national security adviser.

Senate Republicans spent two days behind closed doors discussing ideas to satisfy those who want to hear more testimony without prolonging the proceedings — or jeopardizing the president’s expected acquittal.

Those lost steam, and Democrats showed no interest.

Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s top Democrat, called a proposal for senators to be shown the manuscript in private, keeping Bolton out of public testimony, “absurd.”

“We’re not bargaining with them. We want four witnesses, and four sets of documents, then the truth will come out,” Schumer said.

Senators are being warned that if they agree to call Bolton to testify or try to access his book manuscript, the White House will block him, beginning a weeks-long court battle over executive privilege and national security. That had seemed to leave the few senators, including Sen. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who have expressed a desire to hear new testimony without strong backing.

Also, other Republicans including Sen. Pat Toomey want reciprocity — bring in Bolton or another Democratic witness in exchange for one from the GOP side. Some Republicans want to hear from Biden and his son, who was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company when his father was vice president.

A day after the defense team largely brushed past Bolton, attorney Jay Sekulow addressed the controversy head-on by dismissing his manuscript — said to contradict a key defense argument about Trump’s dealings with Ukraine — as “inadmissible.”

“It is not a game of leaks and unsourced manuscripts,” Sekulow said.

The argument built on a separate one Monday night from Trump attorney Alan Dershowitz, who said that nothing in the manuscript — even if true — rises to the level of an impeachable offense. Sekulow also sought to undermine the credibility of Bolton’s book by noting that Attorney General William Barr has disputed comments attributed to him by Bolton.

The legal team also delved into areas that Democrats see as outside the scope of impeachment, chastising former FBI Director James Comey and seizing on surveillance errors the FBI has acknowledged making in its Russian election interference probe.

Trump’s attorneys argued that the Founding Fathers took care to make sure that impeachment was narrowly defined, with offenses clearly enumerated.

“The bar for impeachment cannot be set this low,” Sekulow said. “Danger. Danger. Danger. These articles must be rejected. The Constitution requires it. Justice demands it.”

Before consideration of witnesses, the case now moves toward written questions, with senators on both sides getting 16 hours to pose queries. By late in the week, they are expected to hold a vote on whether or not to hear from any witnesses.

“I don’t know that the manuscript would make any difference in the outcome of the trial,” said Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of GOP leadership. And some Republicans said they simply don’t trust Bolton’s word. Rand Paul of Kentucky called Bolton “disgruntled”’ and seeking to make money off his time at the White house.

John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, told an audience in Sarasota, Florida, that he believes Bolton.

White House officials privately acknowledge that they are essentially powerless to block the book’s publication, but could sue after the fact if they believe it violated the confidentiality agreement Bolton signed against disclosing classified information.

Trump is charged with abusing his presidential power by asking Ukraine’s leader to help investigate Biden at the same time his administration was withholding hundreds of millions of dollars in security aid. A second charge accuses Trump of obstructing Congress in its probe.

Trump and his lawyers have argued repeatedly that Democrats are using impeachment to try to undo the results of the last presidential election and drive Trump from office.

On Tuesday, as he was resting his case, Cipollone played video clips from House Democrats during the presidential impeachment of Bill Clinton — including several who are now managers of the Trump impeachment trial — in an attempt to depict them as hypocritical for sounding the alarm then about the partisan dangers of impeachment.

“What they are asking you do is to throw out a successful president on the eve of an election, with no basis, and in violation of the Constitution,” Cipollone said. “Why not trust the American people with this decision? Why tear up their ballots?”

Democrats, meanwhile, say Trump’s refusal to allow administration officials to testify only reinforces that the White House is hiding evidence. The White House has had Bolton’s manuscript for about a month, according to a letter from Bolton’s attorney.

No matter the vote on witness, acquittal still seems likely given that Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate and conviction would require a two-thirds majority.

According to data compiled by C-SPAN, the House managers used just under 22 of their 24 hours over three days, while the White House team used almost 12 hours, or half their time.

___

Associated Press writers Alan Fram, Mary Clare Jalonick, Andrew Taylor, Matthew Daly, Laurie Kellman and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.

Biden Won’t Say Whether Sanders Could Unify Democrats as Nominee

MUSCATINE, Iowa — Former Vice President Joe Biden wouldn’t say Tuesday whether he thinks Bernie Sanders could effectively unify the Democrats if the Vermont senator wins the party’s presidential nomination.

“We have to unite,” Biden told reporters in Muscatine, six days before the Iowa caucuses. “I’m not going make judgments now. I just think that it depends upon how we treat one another between now and the time we have a nominee.”

Biden has previously promised to support the Democratic nominee, regardless of who it is. At some stops along the campaign trail, Biden has pledged to “work like hell” to help any of his rivals defeat Trump. The Biden campaign said Tuesday afternoon that the former vice president would support the eventual nominee.

Yet tensions are rising between Biden and Sanders on the campaign trail. The two men reflect the larger ideological battle between a Democratic establishment in which Biden has spent his career and the progressive left that has surged in influence since Sanders’ failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.

The two have jousted over their records on Social Security, foreign policy and trade. Sanders recently apologized to Biden after one of the senator’s high-profile supporters penned a column asserting that Biden has a “corruption problem.” And Biden has ratcheted up his suggestions in recent days, without naming Sanders, that the party will lose big in November if it makes a sharp leftward turn.

Asked later Tuesday whether he can defeat Sanders, a democratic socialist elected in Vermont as an independent, Biden smiled, nodded and then boarded his campaign bus. Biden is in the middle of his final tour of the state before the Monday caucuses begin Democrats’ 2020 voting. Sanders is balancing his campaign with Trump’s Senate impeachment trial on Capitol Hill.

Polls ahead of the Iowa caucuses suggest Sanders and Biden are in a tight race with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana. Sanders has confidently predicted victory in Iowa and in the Feb. 11 New Hampshire primary that follows, telling his supporters that the party establishment is “nervous” about his strength. His advisers argue that such momentum would dent Biden’s long-standing advantage in most national polls of Democratic voters.

Biden’s advisers maintain that the state is a toss-up, and they’ve said for months that the former vice president doesn’t have to win in Iowa because he maintains a wide advantage among nonwhite voters who will have strong sway over states that vote after Iowa and New Hampshire.

Last week, Sanders’ 2016 rival for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, initially refused to say whether she would endorse the Vermont senator if he wins the 2020 nomination — “I’m not going to go there yet,” she said — and she offered a broad condemnation of his style of politics. Later, she walked back her comments, saying her No. 1 priority was “retiring Trump” and that “as I always have, I will do whatever I can to support our nominee.”

___

This story has been corrected to show that Biden was questioned on whether Sanders could unite the party as the nominee, not whether Biden would support Sanders if he’s the nominee.