Chris Hedges's Blog, page 546

New York Times Reporter Investigated for Relationship With Senate Aide

This month, the U.S. Department of Justice revealed it seized phone and email records from New York Times national security reporter Ali Watkins, after former Senate Intelligence Committee aide James Wolfe was charged with lying about his contacts with her and three other journalists. Now the rising star reporter is the subject of a Times investigation, after news broke of her three-year romantic relationship with Wolfe, who was also a source for her while she reported on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The relationship ended four months before Watkins started working for the Times. Nonetheless, the revelation raises tough questions about her previous reporting for big-name outlets, the ethics of reporter-source romantic relationships, the limits of access journalism and the importance of scoops, especially in a time of economic uncertainty for the news industry.

Initially, the situation seemed like a straightforward case of government overreach toward the press. As the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) writes, “Press freedom groups quickly decried the government’s actions, arguing that they ‘represent a fundamental threat to press freedom,’ in the words of the Committee to Protect Journalists.”

CJR maintains that “The focus on Watkins’ romantic entanglements has muddied the waters on what should be a clear case of government overreach” and cites her former employers’ reactions to the news as evidence.

Ryan Grim, now at The Intercept and formerly Watkins’ editor at The Huffington Post, told the Times, “What I see is the Trump administration seizing a reporter’s records and tricking the press into writing about her sex life. It’s appalling what the Trump administration is doing and I don’t think you should enable it.”

Jack Shafer of Politico, another former employer of Watson, echoed Grim, saying that while he believes reporters shouldn’t be in romantic relationships with sources, “based on what we know about her [Watkins’] case, she deserves a second chance. Given all the male reporters over the years who’ve escaped punishment for their sins of the flesh, it’s only fair.”

Still, because of the sensitivity of the information and the fact that Watkins may have been less than forthcoming about a potentially insurmountable conflict of interest, the news organization is “currently examining [Watkins’] work history and what influence the relationship may have had on her reporting,” according to Sunday’s report in The New York Times by Michael M. Grynbaum, Scott Shane and Emily Flitter.

Watkins, at 26, had already worked as a reporter for multiple national publications, including The Huffington Post, Politico, Buzzfeed and McClatchy, before landing at The New York Times. According to the Times, her relationship with Wolfe was a shock to many of her fellow journalists and played out “in the insular world of Washington, where young, ambitious journalists compete for scoops while navigating relationships with powerful, often older, sources.”

A staff writer position is an enviable one for any budding journalist, many of whom cobble together freelance and contract assignments to make ends meet as staff jobs disappear.

Watkins disclosed her relationship to her employers, but often, the Times says, with “varying degrees of detail—sometimes citing Mr. Wolfe’s name and position, and sometimes not—while asserting that she had not used him as a source during their relationship.”

The Times article says it was a “relationship with rules,” and Watkins told Wolfe “You are not my source” and often stopped him if he discussed government work with her.

However, Wolfe’s federal indictment suggests otherwise. As Erik Wemple writes in The Washington Post, “In December 2017, Wolfe sent a message to Watkins—identified in the document as “REPORTER #2”—saying, ‘I always tried to give you as much information that I could and to do the right thing with it so you could get that scoop before anyone else.’ ”

That message, Wemple continues, conflicts with what Watkins told The New York Times, that Wolfe never gave her classified information.

The Times, Wemple says, doesn’t forbid reporters to date sources, but, as stated in the employee handbook, requires employees to disclose relationships to “the standards editor, the associate managing editor for news administration or the deputy editorial page editor.”

“In some cases,” the handbook continues, “no further action may be needed. But in other instances, staff members may have to recuse themselves from certain coverage. And in still other cases, assignments may have to be modified or beats changed.”

Watkins’ focus on the Senate Intelligence Committee, as well as the amount and specificity of the information in her stories, became a concern to federal agencies.

The first of her scoops to catch the Department of Justice’s attention was a Huffington Post report that Trump campaign official Carter Page had met with a Russian spy in 2013. Watkins also reported the Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenaed Russia-related documents from former national security adviser Michael Flynn, in its work investigating former FBI Director James Comey’s firing, among other national security topics.

After the Page report, Watkins was invited on “The Rachel Maddow Show” to discuss what Maddow called a “jaw-dropping story.”

After breaking up with Wolfe, and while still covering the Senate Intelligence Committee at Politico, Watkins began dating another committee staff member. As the Times reports, “She told others that she had informed a Politico editor who did not object. But Mr. Dayspring, the Politico spokesman, said, ‘Politico editors were not made aware of this relationship.’ ”

Meanwhile, Watkins is on vacation. The Times declined to comment to its own reporters on any developments in the investigation.

Company spokeswoman Eileen Murphy, however, doubled down on the importance of press freedom: “The most important issue here remains the seizure of a journalist’s personal communications, which we condemn and believe all Americans should be deeply concerned about.”

Top Democrats Under Fire for Urging ‘Civility’ in Face of Trump Agenda

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) didn’t issue a single word of public criticism of their fellow Democrats for voting to deregulate Wall Street and hand President Donald Trump immense spying powers, but on Monday the Democratic Party heads lectured their colleagues and grassroots activists on the need for “civility” in the face of Trump’s vicious attacks on immigrant families, the poor, and the planet.

Drawing swift backlash from activists who led the opposition to Trump’s cruel family separation policy by greeting White House officials with protests inside restaurants and outside of their homes, Schumer claimed in a speech on the Senate floor on Monday that directly confronting members of the Trump administration over their hate-filled and destructive policies is “not American”—a clear rebuke to Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who called on Americans to publicly shame Cabinet officials.

“Schumer is being more critical of Maxine Waters than he’s ever been of ICE,” independent journalist Eoin Higgins observed.

“All of the liberal politicians and pundits who shouted ‘this is not normal’ for a year are now telling us to be civil to the people ripping apart families,” Margaret McLaughlin, a member of the Metro D.C. branch of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), added after Pelosi similarly rebuked Waters’ call for direct confrontation. “Y’all are fuckin’ hypocrites.”

The criticism of the Democratic leadership’s refusal to sufficiently meet the threat Trump poses to vulnerable communities continued to pile up on Monday, just 24 hours after White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant over her constant lies—and occasional Bible references—in defense of the president’s policies.

“Schumer and Pelosi have to go,” concluded writer Sean Collins.

Help me out here.

2,000 kids are still being held hostage to convince their parents to self-deport, assuming the Trump Admin can even locate them, right?

Why isn’t Chuck Schumer talking about that?

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) June 25, 2018

Seems to me that Democrats and their pundits should worry more about how to win in November than moaning about civility. Civility?! I swear before god every time I see shit like this I wanna yell YALL DO NOT WANT TO WIN.

— Alicia Garza (@aliciagarza) June 26, 2018

I’m always thrown by people who think bombs and war perfectly rational but disturbing a rich person’s evening beyond the pale. “civility” LOL but for whom?

— Sarah Jaffe (@sarahljaffe) June 25, 2018

We’re being held to a standard of civility when Donald Trump isn’t even being held to a standard of constitutionality.

Asymmetrical Political Warfare. If we play by their rules, we’ve already lost.

— Benjamin Dixon

Trump’s Brutality Is Part of Obama’s Legacy Now

On Oct. 14, 2011, an order by Barack Obama resulted in the murder of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a 16-year-old American boy. Obama had ordered the execution of the boy’s father, also an American citizen, allegedly a member of the al-Qaeda network, two weeks before. Abdulrahman hadn’t seen his father in more than two years; he’d traveled abroad to search for him. We blew the kid up in a restaurant. When confronted by reporters, Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, glibly justified the extrajudicial killing of an American child: He should have had “a more responsible father.” Today, Donald Trump and his sycophants contend that the children of undocumented immigrants are the victims of their parents’ irresponsible law-breaking.

Like most ex-presidents in the last half century, Obama slid out of the White House and into a well-paid semi-retirement of remunerative speaking engagements and ineffectual good works. His and Hillary Clinton’s mutual antipathy was evident throughout the 2016 campaign. After her humiliation at the hands of Trump, a vulgar, racist dummy who continually questioned Obama’s citizenship and who ran in no small part because of his own public humiliation by the then-president at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, Obama made a few desultory efforts to make nice with the new president-elect and then embraced the silence on current political affairs that is the decorous mark of modern post-presidencies. He emerged only last week, as word of the Trump administration’s vicious campaign to separate and imprison the children of migrants and asylum seekers in detention camps came to dominate national media coverage and caused real and widespread popular outrage.

“[T]o watch those families broken apart in real time puts to us a very simple question,” Obama wrote on his Facebook page. “Are we a nation that accepts the cruelty of ripping children from their parents’ arms, or are we a nation that values families, and works to keep them together? Do we look away, or do we choose to see something of ourselves and our children?”

There is some irony in hearing this from the same man who bragged, during the 2012 campaign, that he was “really good at killing people.” The claim was in reference to drone warfare, but Obama’s militarism was not confined to the occasional Hellfire missile, which the national security establishment and its media interlocutors treat as an antiseptic alternative to the messiness of conventional war. In 2011, in part due to the heavy lobbying of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the United States participated in a disastrous Euro-American campaign in Libya, destroying the government of Moammar Gadhafi, a leader who only a few years earlier had been feted for his active cooperation in national disarmament, and plunging Libya into the chaos of failed statehood, from which it has not recovered. Gadhafi was killed and possibly tortured to death. African migrants captured in Libya as they attempt to reach the Mediterranean and Europe have allegedly been sold—in open markets—as slaves.

In Syria, under Obama, the United States managed to support nearly every side in a multi-party civil war. By 2016, it was widely reported that militias armed by the Pentagon were openly battling militias armed by the CIA. The conflict has created one of the greatest refugee crises in modern history, as millions of people seek to escape a wrecked country and reach relative safety in Europe: men leaving wives and children; child siblings making deadly sea crossings without parents; a maze of fences, camps and varying levels of open hostility awaiting them no matter what routes they take. And we should not forget Yemen, where since 2015 the United States has supported and armed a Saudi campaign of terror bombing that has created a human-caused famine and cholera epidemic, the scale of which could come to rival the Great Famine in Ukraine.

Compared to the actual madman that is Trump, Obama was a humanist, but then again, so was Thomas More, and look at how many heretics he burned at the stake. Throughout his career, Obama made use of rhetorical appeals to a broad, shared humanity, to the values of empathy, fellow-feeling and tolerance. In practice, his presidency was less liberal rebirth than liberal retrenchment, and he worked to formalize the very systems of brutality that Donald Trump and his evil coterie wield to such terrifying effect.

I was at Kelly’s Bar & Lounge in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood when Obama was elected to his first term. The neighborhood had already begun to gentrify, although it would still be years before the $2,000-a-month apartments, restaurant valet signs, Pure Barre exercise studio and the Google flag flying over the old National Biscuit Co., where, during the St. Patrick’s Day Flood in 1936, my great-grandfather had worked for three straight days baking bread for the city. In the 1960s, an ill-conceived urban development plan hollowed out the neighborhood’s commercial core, and the city built a set of high-rise public housing complexes; the neighborhood developed a reputation for blight, which is to say that it became largely black.

The clientele at Kelly’s in 2008 was mostly white, comparatively well-to-do, liberal-ish. We could hear a dull roar from the neighborhood as the networks began to call the election, and then everyone went out into the street, residents and interlopers, and we all congratulated ourselves and each other, even those of us, like me, who stood far to the left of mainstream Democratic politics and viewed Obama’s occasionally high-flown rhetoric as decoration on an otherwise plain and tepid program of decidedly “centrist” reforms. America had soundly elected its first black president, and you can go to hell if that didn’t at least give you one night to smile and hope for the future.

His election came as a relief. I am not too cynical to say so. It is hard to recall now, in this hypersaturated Trump era, just how mad and untethered the Bush years were. By the time the 2008 race rolled around, Bush’s popularity was in irrevocable decline, his wars largely accepted as failures, the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina still top of mind. But for much of his presidency, a grim, jingoistic national unity prevailed. There were liberal blogs, and the ineffectual sarcasm of “The Daily Show,” but that was scant opposition, and even the vast antiwar marches in the run-up to the Iraq war swiftly melted away in favor of cable news’ music videos of “Shock & Awe” bombing.

The gaudy insanity of Trump’s campaign seems unprecedented until you look up photos of pasty Midwesterners in the middle of the ’04 Republican National Convention blinged out with patriotic swag and purple bandages as part of that season’s conspiracy theory—that John Kerry had faked a war injury to earn a decoration. Dick Cheney shot a man in the face and faced no consequences; his victim apologized to him! Guantanamo. Abu Ghraib. Heckuva job, Brownie. The financial crisis. It was relentless and mad-making.

Obama felt like a salve, if not a cure. He was reasoned and articulate. His abilities as a great American speechmaker were overrated, but he was still a talented orator. He’d prevailed in a primary race infected by the Clinton campaign’s scurrilous resort to innuendo about his race and origin, and he whipped John McCain, an aging and seemingly unbalanced senator who was and remains bizarrely beloved by American political journalists. It felt as if it might at least herald a reversion to the mean, a return to the smaller-bore politics of the 1990s; perhaps, due to the discrediting of market liberalism by the rapid succession of early-2000s corporate accounting scandals and the subprime collapse, there might even be a way to claw back some of the vicious attacks on the social welfare system by the neoliberal Clintonites of that decade. Perhaps we might successfully agitate for dismantling the poisonous security and intelligence apparatuses that metastasized under Bush and Cheney.

Instead, Obama largely set about organizing them. Obama would later be criticized, often from the left—I am guilty of it myself—for his seeming diffidence, and defended, often from the center-right that composes the majority of the Democratic Party, as having been almost entirely hamstrung by a Congress controlled by an insane and deeply racist GOP. Both the criticism and the defense give him too little credit as one of the great bureaucratic rationalizers of the modern era, taking the slapdash and ad hoc excesses of the prior decade and normalizing them. Obama’s infamous “look forward, not backward” dictum regarding any criminal prosecutions of Bush-era war criminals and finance-industry crooks was neither the feckless attitude of a weak leader nor the misguided ecumenicism of a would-be peacemaker in a partisan age; it was something more akin to the efficiency-minded corporate fixer who loves the product but wants to reorganize the back office.

Even before the 2010 midterms ushered in a powerfully intransigent Republican legislative majority, it was clear that Obama preferred executive management. He arrogated to himself all of the powers of prior presidents, including the even-more-unfettered war-making authority conferred upon George W. Bush by the machinations of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and the cooperation of a foolish and supine Congress. He took a special personal interest in drone warfare, putting himself in sole charge of the so-called disposition matrix—the infamous kill list—in an unsubtle signal that the president alone held this literal power of life and death. He made some conciliatory gestures toward immigrant communities, DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) most notably, but these were firmly undergirded by the guiding post-Third Way principles of the meritocratic, corporatist Democratic establishment: namely, that only the deserving are deserving.

He simultaneously and quietly organized ICE, a fascist reimagining of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (along with parts of the old Customs Service and Federal Protective Service) dreamed up during the creation of the equally spooky and Big-Brotherish Department of Homeland Security. He deported more people than any prior president.

Obama’s most famous public utterance may have been his declaration at the 2004 Democratic convention that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America.” He went on to ding “pundits” for dividing American into “red states” and “blue states.” In the intervening years, a popular map shading red-to-blue, demonstrating that the majority of the country’s land area is “purple,” has become popular among the sorts of people who believe in common-sense solutions and work for think tanks and op-ed pages. But the only real purple America is its imperial presidency, and if we are not simply to survive the present crisis and pray for another Obama-like figure to calmly restore order to agencies and policies that should not exist in the first place, then we must actually engage with his legacy, which despite a few admirable moments, largely consists of solidifying and centralizing the vast executive power he promptly handed over to Trump.

Apologists for the Obama administration will point out that he was in every way a better man and a better president, which is accidentally damning with faint praise. He was better and smarter, but he wasn’t wise, and he wasn’t humble. He believed in the power of the presidency, and we are living with the consequences.

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Court Upholds Trump Travel Ban, Rejects Discrimination Claim

WASHINGTON—A sharply divided Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from several mostly Muslim countries, rejecting a challenge that it discriminated against Muslims or exceeded his authority. A dissenting justice said the outcome was a historic mistake.

The 5-4 decision Tuesday is a big victory for Trump on an issue that is central to his presidency, and the court’s first substantive ruling on a Trump administration policy. The president quickly tweeted his reaction: “Wow!”

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion for the five conservative justices, including Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch.

Roberts wrote that presidents have substantial power to regulate immigration. He also rejected the challengers’ claim of anti-Muslim bias.

But he was careful not to endorse either Trump’s provocative statements about immigration in general or Muslims in particular, including Trump’s campaign pledge to keep Muslims from entering the country.

“We express no view on the soundness of the policy,” Roberts wrote.

The travel ban has been fully in place since December, when the justices put the brakes on lower court rulings that had ruled the policy out of bounds and blocked part of it from being enforced.

In a dissent she summarized in court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, “History will not look kindly on the court’s misguided decision today, nor should it.” Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan also dissented.

Sotomayor wrote that based on the evidence in the case, “a reasonable observer would conclude that the Proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus.” She said her colleagues in the majority arrived at the opposite result by “ignoring the facts, misconstruing our legal precedent and turning a blind eye to the pain and suffering the Proclamation inflicts upon countless families and individuals, many of whom are United States citizens.”

She likened the case to the discredited Korematsu V. U.S. decision that upheld the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Roberts responded in his opinion that “Korematsu has nothing to do with this case” and “was gravely wrong the day it was decided.”

The travel ban was among the court’s biggest cases this term and the latest in a string of 5-4 decisions in which the conservative side of the court, bolstered by the addition of Gorsuch last year, prevailed.

Gorsuch was nominated by Trump after Republicans in the Senate refused to grant a hearing to federal appeals Judge Merrick Garland, who was appointed by Barack Obama with more than 10 months remaining in Obama’s term.

The Trump policy applies to travelers from five countries with overwhelmingly Muslim populations—Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. It also affects two non-Muslim countries, blocking travelers from North Korea and some Venezuelan government officials and their families. A sixth majority Muslim country, Chad, was removed from the list in April after improving “its identity-management and information sharing practices,” Trump said in a proclamation.

The administration had pointed to the Chad decision to show that the restrictions are premised only on national security concerns.

The challengers, though, argued that the court could not just ignore all that has happened, beginning with Trump’s campaign tweets to prevent the entry of Muslims into the United States.

The travel ban has long been central to Trump’s presidency.

He proposed a broad, all-encompassing Muslim ban during the presidential campaign in 2015, drawing swift rebukes from Republicans as well as Democrats. And within a week of taking office, the first travel ban was announced with little notice, sparking chaos at airports and protests across the nation.

While the ban has changed shape since then, it has remained a key part of Trump’s “America First” vision, with the president believing that the restriction, taken in tandem with his promised wall at the southern border, would make the United States safer from potentially hostile foreigners.

In a statement he released Tuesday morning, Trump hailed the decision as “a moment of profound vindication” following “months of hysterical commentary from the media and Democratic politicians who refuse to do what it takes to secure our border and our country.”

Strongly disagreeing, Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota said, “This decision will someday serve as a marker of shame.” Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, and Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, who was born in Japan, both compared the ban and the ruling to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Critics of Trump’s ban had urged the justices to affirm the decisions in lower courts that generally concluded that the changes made to the travel policy did not erase the ban’s legal problems.

The current version dates from last September and it followed what the administration has called a thorough review by several federal agencies, although no such review has been shared with courts or the public.

Federal trial judges in Hawaii and Maryland had blocked the travel ban from taking effect, finding that the new version looked too much like its predecessors. Those rulings that were largely upheld by federal appeals courts in Richmond, Virginia and San Francisco.

But the Supreme Court came to a different conclusion Tuesday. The policy has “a legitimate grounding in national security concerns,” and it has several moderating features, including a waiver program that would allow some people from the affected countries to enter the U.S., Roberts said. The administration has said that 809 people have received waivers since the ban took full effect in December.

Roberts wrote that presidents have frequently used their power to talk to the nation “to espouse the principles of religious freedom and tolerance on which this Nation was founded.” But he added that presidents and the country have not always lived up “to those inspiring words.”

The challengers to the ban asserted that Trump’s statements crossed a constitutional line, Roberts said.

“But the issue before us is not whether to denounce the statements. It is instead the significance of those statements in reviewing a Presidential directive, neutral on its face, addressing a matter within the core of executive responsibility,” he said.

___

Associated Press writers Ashraf Khalil and Jonathan Lemire contributed to this report.

High Court Leaves Some Voting Rights Issues Unresolved

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court once again passed on the opportunity to make sweeping decisions on redistricting and voting rights cases. It rejected a challenge to current Texas congressional maps (Abbott v. Perez), which plaintiffs say discriminate against black and Latino voters, and it declined to rule on a North Carolina gerrymandering case, Rucho v. Common Cause, sending the issue back to a trial court in that state to determine whether the plaintiffs have standing.

“A narrow Supreme Court majority under Chief Justice John Roberts has failed to protect the voting rights of minority communities,” Karen Hobart, president of the watchdog group Common Cause, said of the latter case.

The developments came on the heels of similar moves by the high court in gerrymandering cases in Maryland and Wisconsin. As The Washington Post reported, the court in the earlier cases didn’t rule on the merits of the issue—whether the electoral maps in those two states were so partisan that they effectively disenfranchised voters from, in Maryland, the Republican Party and, in Wisconsin, the Democratic Party. “Instead, the Post writes, “the high court ruled on narrow, technical grounds that steered clear of the central issue, with the plaintiffs hoping to get the justices to rule on when and whether legislative districts become so skewed to favor one party that they violate voters’ constitutional rights.”

In North Carolina, the GOP-controlled state Legislature drew electoral maps in an attempt to protect Republican power in a battleground state that has a Democrat governor and attorney general. Ten of the state’s 13 congressional districts are led by Republicans.

North Carolina Republicans had done nothing to hide their intentions. As the Post writes, Rep. David Lewis, a Republican member of the General Assembly, said, “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”

Now the trial court will have to decide whether the plaintiffs have the legal standing to challenge Lewis’ plan.

Politico calls the Texas litigation “a more traditional redistricting case” in that it deals with racial rather than partisan discrimination.

The justices were split 5-4 along party lines over whether Texas’ electoral maps for both the state Senate and the state House violated the 1964 Voting Rights Act by discriminating against black and Latino voters.

In a majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the conservative justices decided, as Politico reported, that “lower courts went too far in concluding that maps adopted by Texas in 2013 were tainted by discrimination judges found in maps the state drew two years earlier.”

“When all the relevant evidence in the record is taken into account,” Alito wrote, “it is plainly insufficient to prove that the 2013 Legislature acted in bad faith and engaged in intentional discrimination.” He continued, “It was reasonable for the Legislature to think that approving the court-approved plans might at least reduce objections and thus simplify and expedite the conclusion of the litigation.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor did not believe the Texas Legislature had acted in good faith, writing that just because the interim maps drawn in 2012 addressed some discrimination issues, it didn’t mean that all of them had been solved. Nor did it mean, as Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, that the Legislature was “free to wholly disregard the significance of other evidence of discrimination that tainted its 2011 maps and were entrenched in the 2012 interim maps.”

In this session of the Supreme Court, now drawing to a close, the justices have decided to avoid a major decision on voting rights rather than send a clear message going into the 2018 midterm elections.

Insults and Rancor: Dems Risk Treading on Trump’s Home Field

NEW YORK — Political rancor over immigration boiled over into increasingly personal insults Monday, as President Trump took a harsh shot at a prominent congresswoman’s intellect and Democrats worried that some of their own anti-Trump rhetoric might play into his hands and backfire in November.

With language reaching belligerent levels seldom heard since the 2016 campaign, Republican tactics seemed aimed at least in part at activating loyal supporters for the midterm elections.

The issue of what passes for political civility in 2018 has been eagerly stoked by Trump, who has embraced the cultural battles playing out everywhere from restaurant tables to football fields to late-night comedy. And the ejection of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family from a Virginia restaurant over the weekend symbolizes the public anger that has tied Democrats in knots, leaving them torn as to how to respond to a president who defies the norms of his office.

Trump punched back sharply Monday after Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California told a crowd in her state over the weekend that “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd, and you push back on them!”

Trump, always eager for a foil, tweeted in retort: “Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has become, together with Nancy Pelosi, the Face of the Democrat Party. She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!”

Other Democrats quickly distanced themselves from Waters’ call to action, suggesting it could endanger Democrats’ chances in the midterms that could determine the next chapter of Trump’s presidency.

“In the crucial months ahead, we must strive to make America beautiful again,” tweeted House Minority Leader Pelosi. “Trump’s daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable. As we go forward, we must conduct elections in a way that achieves unity from sea to shining sea.”

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer said Monday from the Senate floor that “the best solution is to win elections. That is a far more productive way to channel the legitimate frustrations with this president’s policies than with harassing members of his administration.”

Trump welcomes the fight, from the depiction of his supporters in the short-lived “Roseanne” revival to NFL players kneeling for the national anthem, believing that us-vs.-them partisan issues fire up his base of supporters. With the Russia investigation swirling and Republicans facing an uncertain fate in November, he has further abandoned any unifying powers of his office, leaning hard into partisan warfare while adopting an aggrieved stance to dish out attacks that dominate the news and distract from scandals.

And while his rough rhetoric since his campaign has given license for some of his followers to engage in inflammatory acts, the anger on the left has sparked its own set of unruly images, further amplifying the political divisions in the nation’s civility war.

Sanders was shown the door at the Red Hen in Lexington, about three hours outside Washington, by the restaurant’s owner on Friday. The press secretary tweeted from her government Twitter account that she was asked “to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left. Her actions say far more about her than about me.” She used her press briefing on Monday, the first in a week, to declare that Americans are “allowed to disagree, but we should be able to do so freely and without fear of harm.”

The restaurant episode comes amid other acts of street protests against Trump aides and allies. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was hounded from a Mexican restaurant in Washington amid cries of “Shame!” last week. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi was heckled at a screening of a documentary about Mr. Rogers, the paragon of kindness and civility.

Many on the left cheered the efforts, citing the Trump administration’s policies toward immigrants as attacks on human rights that deserved the same sort of public displays of disobedience that defined the civil rights and gay rights movements.

But some Democrats worried that the protesters were going too far.

In a series of tweets, David Axelrod, the former chief strategist to President Barack Obama, warned that the push for public provocation was “a counterproductive gesture.” He wrote that he was “amazed and appalled” at liberals who cheered Sanders’ ejection, which he framed as “a triumph for @realDonaldTrump vision of America.”

Trump himself appeared to agree that the debate was to his advantage, retweeting a post from Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who wrote that “Trump haters still haven’t realized how much they help him with their condescension of those who either voted for him or don’t share their hatred of him. And how much they help him with their irrational hostility toward those who work for him.”

Sanders’ father used the moment to make a racially charged post, tweeting a photo of tattooed MS-13 gang members and suggesting that they were part of Pelosi’s campaign committee to take back the House. That tweet came amid a stretch of days when Trump used seemingly coded language — including “invaders” and “infests” — to describe the Latino migrants illegally crossing the border into the United States.

Trump, meanwhile, also targeted the Red Hen by using his 53-million-follower Twitter account as if he were posting a restaurant review on Yelp.

“The Red Hen Restaurant should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors and windows (badly needs a paint job) rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders,” he wrote. “I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!”

The restaurant’s most recent health inspection showed no violations and complimented the staff.

___

Associated Press writers Darlene Superville in Washington, Bill Barrow in Atlanta and Tom Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed reporting.

The Trump Administration Wants Nothing Less Than Palestine’s Destruction

Last month, as administration officials including Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner celebrated the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, Israeli forces gunned down 62 Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza and injured 1,700 more. According to Reuters, the wounded were “spilling out” of the rooms in the Gaza Strip’s 13 medical facilities.

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley subsequently hailed the Israeli government for exercising “restraint,” asking the U.N. Security Council, “Who among us would accept this type of activity on your border?” She would not listen to Palestine’s reply, exiting the room before its envoy could speak.

For Haaretz contributor Odeh Bisharat, Haley’s actions—like Ivanka and Jared’s before her—are part of a larger administration plot to complete the annihilation of the Palestinian people. Call it “the ultimate crime” or “the ultimate destruction.”

“The first blow was in 1948, when [they] were broken into four parts: those inside Israel, in the West Bank, in Gaza, and in refugee camps around the world,” Bisharat writes. “Now the mission is not just to smash them, but to grind the Palestinian people up finely, grain by grain, each individual separated from his brethren—the West Bank separately, Gaza separately, and then within the West Bank, Ramallah separately and Jenin separately, while abroad the Palestinians in Jordan will be separated from the Palestinians in Lebanon.”

While he acknowledges that there are leftists in Israel invested in a peaceful resolution of the decades-long conflict, Bisharat nonetheless lays the blame squarely on Zionist parties, 90 percent of which he estimates either actively support the brutality of Likud or are complicit through their silence.

“Indeed, once again the Israeli leadership is choosing the dark side, turning its back on the peoples of the region,” he continues. “In 1956 David Ben-Gurion hooked up with the dying empires of France and Britain against the Egyptians, whose leader dared to announce the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Later Israel upheld the Shah of Iran’s reign of terror against the Iranian people, a regime that led, because of its brutality, to an even more brutal regime.”

Israel’s current alliances bear the unmistakable rhyme of history, Bisharat argues. While Prince Mohammed bin Salman feints at a more modern, liberal Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he has executed a brutal crackdown on political dissent, purging rival powers, imprisoning women’s rights activists and denying his country’s role in promulgating Wahhabist violence. Both bin Salman and Egyptian dictator Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi are working hand in hand with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and they all have the backing of the Trump administration.

“It seems that the only stumbling blocks on the way to implementing this plan are the Palestinians, this time headed by the Palestinian leadership, and the progressive Arab and Jewish public in Israel, which includes many Zionists whose Zionism is different from that of [far-right Likudniks] Yair Lapid and Avi Gabbay,” Bisharat concludes. “And I promise you that in a few years’ time, the respected Prof. Shlomo Avineri will write that this time the Palestinians also missed an opportunity. The opportunity to be crushed.”

Read Bisharat’s column in its entirety at Haaretz.

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Fire-Prone Northern California Hit by Big Blazes

SAN FRANCISCO — Thousands were forced to flee their homes Monday as major wildfires encroached on a charred area of Northern California still recovering from severe blazes in recent years, sparking concern the state may be in for another destructive series of wildfires this summer.

Severe drought has already forced officials in several western states to close national parks as precautions against wildfires and issue warnings throughout the region to prepare for the worst.

In California, officials said unusually hot weather, high winds and highly flammable vegetation turned brittle by drought helped fuel the fires that began over the weekend, the same conditions that led to the state’s deadliest and most destructive fire year in 2017.

Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday declared a state of emergency in Lake County, where the biggest fire was raging about 120 miles (190 kilometers) north of San Francisco, a rural region particularly hard-hit by fires in recent years. The declaration will enable officials to receive more state resources to fight the fire and for recovery.

A forestry scientist says it’s difficult to forecast how severe California’s wildfires will be this year, but said the drought-dried vegetation throughout the state is a bad omen.

“You have a lot of grass and its dry and that’s cause for concern,” said Keith Gilless, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley’s department of environmental science.

Jim Steele, an elected supervisor, said the county is impoverished and its fire-fighting equipment antiquated. He also said the county has just a few roads into and out of the region, which can hinder response time.

Fire Battalion Chief Jonathan Cox said more than 230 firefighters were battling the Lake County fire in a rugged area that made it difficult to get equipment close the blaze.

Steele said the area has also been susceptible to fire for many decades because dense brush and trees in the sparsely populated area, but the severity of the latest blazes is unexpected.

“What’s happened with the more warming climate is we get low humidity and higher winds and then when we get a fire that’s worse than it’s been in those 50 years,” Steele said.

The fire that broke out Saturday evening has forced 3,000 residents from their homes and destroyed at least 22 buildings. It is the latest devastating blaze to rip through the isolated and impoverished county of just 65,000 people in the last few years.

In 2015, a series of fires destroyed 2,000 buildings and killed four people.

The following year, an arsonist started a fire that wiped out 300 buildings.

Last year, the county was among those ravaged by a string of fires that ripped through Northern California wine country.

“I think we’re all just so traumatized and overwhelmed with all these fires year after year, this whole community is at a breaking point,” said Terri Gonsalves, 55, who evacuated her home around midnight Sunday.

She put four goats into her truck after she looked out her back window and saw a big hill aflame. She is staying with her daughter in nearby Middletown, a small city where dozens of homes were destroyed in 2015. “When this stuff happens, we rally around each other.”

Authorities on Monday afternoon lifted evacuation orders in Tehama County, where two wildfires were burning. Multiple homes and businesses in the city of Red Bluff were destroyed.

A Red Bluff police officer helping residents evacuate lost his home, authorities said. Red Bluff Police Lt. Matt Hansen said people had donated about $10,000 in cash along with furniture and clothing to the family as they search for a rental home.

Residents also fled a wildfire in Shasta County.

No cause has been determined for any of the fires.

Last year, California’s costliest fires killed 44 people and tore through the state’s wine country in October, causing an estimated $10 billion in damage.

While the blazes were the first major ones of the season to hit California, others have raged throughout the west for weeks. Earlier this month, a Colorado wildfire forced residents of more than 2,000 homes to evacuate.

The last of the evacuees were allowed to return home last week after rain put a damper on the blaze although the fire has started to grow again as the weather has dried out.

The fire north of Durango was in the Four Corners Region where Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah meet — the epicenter of a large U.S. Southwest swath of exceptional drought, the worst category of drought.

Moderate to extreme drought conditions affect larger areas of those four states plus parts of Nevada, California, Oregon, Oklahoma and Texas, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

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Associated Press writers Eleni Gill and Janie Har contributed to this story from San Francisco.

Harley-Davidson, Stung by Tariffs, Shifts Some Production Overseas

MILWAUKEE—Harley-Davidson, up against spiraling costs from tariffs, will begin to shift the production of motorcycles headed for Europe from the U.S. to factories overseas.

The European Union on Friday began rolling out tariffs on American imports like bourbon, peanut butter and orange juice. The EU tariffs on $3.4 billion worth of U.S. products are retaliation for duties the Trump administration is imposing on European steel and aluminum.

President Trump has used Harley-Davidson as an example of a U.S. business that is being harmed by trade barriers. Yet Harley has warned consistently against tariffs, saying they would negatively impact sales.

Harley-Davidson Inc. sold almost 40,000 motorcycles in the European Union last year, generating revenue second only to the United States, according to the Milwaukee company.

The maker of the iconic American motorcycle said in a regulatory filing Monday that EU tariffs on its motorcycles exported from the U.S. jumped between 6 percent and 31 percent, which translates into an additional, incremental cost of about $2,200 per average motorcycle exported from the U.S. to the EU.

“Harley-Davidson maintains a strong commitment to U.S.-based manufacturing which is valued by riders globally,” the company said in prepared remarks. “Increasing international production to alleviate the EU tariff burden is not the company’s preference but represents the only sustainable option to make its motorcycles accessible to customers in the EU and maintain a viable business in Europe. Europe is a critical market for Harley-Davidson.”

Harley-Davidson will not raise its prices to avert “an immediate and lasting detrimental impact” on sales in Europe, it said. It will instead absorb a significant amount of the cost in the near term. It anticipates the cost for the rest of the year to be approximately $30 million to $45 million.

Harley-Davidson said that shifting targeted production from the U.S. to international facilities could take at least nine to 18 months to be completed.

The company is already struggling with falling sales. In January, it said it would consolidate its Kansas City, Missouri, plant into its York, Pennsylvania, facility. U.S. motorcycle sales peaked at more than 1.1 million in 2005 but then plummeted during the recession.

Asked about the Harley decision Monday, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker addressed the issue of tariffs in general but not specifically the situation faced by the company.

“The ultimate goal, if we could get there, is no tariffs or if anything few tariffs on anything,” said Walker, a Republican. “That’s what I’m going to push for, ways that we can get to a level playing field then we don’t have this tit for tat on any number of products out there.”

Increasing foreign investment in the United States, something Walker was in Washington advocating for at a U.S. Department of Commerce event last week, will also help reduce the trade imbalance and need for tariffs, he said.

More potential pitfalls for Harley-Davidson and other U.S. manufacturers could be on the way.

Last week, German automaker Daimler AG cut its 2018 earnings outlook, a change that it says is partly due to increased import tariffs for U.S. vehicles in China. Daimler produces vehicles in the U.S.

On Monday, the vice president of the European Union’s governing body said that Europe and China will form a group aimed at updating global trade rules to address technology policy, government subsidies and other emerging complaints in a bid to preserve support for international commerce.

European Commission Vice President Jyrki Katainen said unilateral action by U.S. President Donald Trump in disputes over steel, China’s technology policy and other issues highlighted the need to modernize the World Trade Organization to reflect developments in the world economy.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration plans to impose curbs on Chinese investment in American technology companies and high-tech exports to China.

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Associated Press writer Scott Bauer contributed to this story from Madison, Wisconsin.

In Medical Milestone, U.S. Approves Marijuana-Based Drug for Seizures

WASHINGTON—U.S. health regulators on Monday approved the first prescription drug made from marijuana, a milestone that could spur more research into a drug that remains illegal under federal law, despite growing legalization for recreational and medical use.

The Food and Drug Administration approved the medication, called Epidiolex, to treat two rare forms of epilepsy that begin in childhood. But it’s not quite medical marijuana.

The strawberry-flavored syrup is a purified form of a chemical ingredient found in the cannabis plant—but not the one that gets users high. It’s not yet clear why the ingredient, called cannabidiol, or CBD, reduces seizures in some people with epilepsy.

British drugmaker GW Pharmaceuticals studied the drug in more than 500 children and adults with hard-to-treat seizures, overcoming numerous legal hurdles that have long stymied research into cannabis.

FDA officials said the drug reduced seizures when combined with older epilepsy drugs.

The FDA has previously approved synthetic versions of another cannabis ingredient for medical use, including severe weight loss in patients with HIV.

Epidiolex is essentially a pharmaceutical-grade version CBD oil, which some parents already use to treat children with epilepsy. CBD is one of more than 100 chemicals found in marijuana. But it doesn’t contain THC, the ingredient that gives marijuana its mind-altering effect.

Physicians say it’s important to have a consistent, government-regulated version.

“I’m really happy we have a product that will be much cleaner and one that I know what it is,” said Ellaine Wirrell, director of the Mayo Clinic’s program for childhood epilepsy. “In the artisanal products, there’s often a huge variation in doses from bottle to bottle depending on where you get it.”

Side effects with the drug include diarrhea, vomiting, fatigue and sleep problems.

Several years ago, Allison Hendershot considered relocating her family to Colorado, one of the first states to legalize marijuana and home to a large network of CBD producers and providers. Her 13-year-old daughter, Molly, has suffered from severe seizures since she was 4 months old. But then Hendershot learned about a trial of Epidiolex at New York University.

“I preferred this to some of those other options because it’s is a commercial product that has gone through rigorous testing,” said Hendershot, who lives in Rochester, New York.

Since receiving Epidiolex, Hendershot says her daughter has been able to concentrate more and has had fewer “drop” seizures—in which her entire body goes limp and collapses.

CBD oil is currently sold online and in specialty shops across the U.S., though its legal status remains murky. Most producers say their oil is made from hemp, a plant in the cannabis family that contains little THC and can be legally farmed in a number of states for clothing, food and other uses.

The impact of Monday’s approval on these products is unclear.

The FDA has issued warnings to CBD producers that claimed their products could treat specific diseases, such as cancer or Alzheimer’s. Only products that have received formal FDA approval can make such claims, typically requiring clinical trials costing millions.

Most CBD producers sidestep the issue by making only broad claims about general health and well-being.

Industry supporters downplayed the impact of the FDA approval.

“I don’t know a mom or dad in their right mind who is going to change what’s already working,” said Heather Jackson, CEO of Realm of Caring, a charitable group affiliated with Colorado-based CW Hemp, one of nation’s largest CBD companies. “I really don’t think it’s going to affect us much.”

Jackson’s group estimates the typical family using CBD to treat childhood epilepsy spends about $1,800 per year on the substance.

A GW Pharmaceuticals spokeswoman said the company would not immediately announce a price for the drug, which it expects to launch in the fall. Wall Street analysts have previously predicted it could cost $25,000 per year, with annual sales eventually reaching $1 billion.

For their part, GW Pharmaceuticals executives say they are not trying to disrupt products already on the market. The company has pushed legislation in several states to make sure its drug can be legally sold and prescribed.

The FDA approval for Epidiolex is technically limited to patients with Dravet and Lennox-Gastaut syndromes, two rare forms of epilepsy for which there are few treatments. But doctors will have the option to prescribe it for other uses.

The new medication enters an increasingly complicated legal environment for marijuana.

Nine states and the District of Columbia have legalized marijuana for recreational use. Another 20 states allow medical marijuana, but the U.S. government continues to classify it as a controlled substance with no medical use, in the same category as heroin and LSD.

Despite increasing acceptance, there is little rigorous research on the benefits and harms of marijuana. Last year a government-commissioned group concluded that the lack of scientific information about marijuana and CBD poses a risk to public health.

Before sales of Epidiolex can begin, the Drug Enforcement Administration must formally reclassify CBD into a different category of drugs that have federal medical approval.

GW Pharmaceuticals makes the drug in the U.K. from cannabis plants that are specially bred to contain high levels of CBD. And the company plans to continue importing the medicine, bypassing onerous U.S. regulations on manufacturing restricted substances.

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The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.