Chris Hedges's Blog, page 55

The Washington Post Buried Bombshell Findings From Its Own Climate Poll

Late last year, The Washington Post reported a remarkable poll finding: Nearly half of American adults — 46 percent — believe the U.S. needs to “drastically reduce” fossil fuel use in the near future to address the climate crisis. Another 41 percent favor a more gradual reduction.

In short, almost 90 percent of us support transitioning off fossil fuels — including over half of Republicans, whose elected officials overwhelmingly support the industry.

This is remarkable. The U.S. is the world’s largest oil and gas producer, third largest coal producer, and the only country to leave the universally adopted Paris Climate Agreement. Yet nearly all of us want off these fuels.

You’d expect a media outlet to treat this as the immensely newsworthy (and headline-worthy) finding that it is — especially if that outlet commissioned the poll!

Yet The Washington Post buried these numbers in the 14th and 15th paragraphs of the story. Their headline? “Americans like Green New Deal’s goals, but they reject paying trillions to reach them.”

This assertion, while not outright false, is misleading.

The poll had a single vaguely worded question about the price tag for a national climate action plan, which asked whether respondents supported raising federal spending by unspecified “trillions.” Two-thirds of respondents said no.

Pollsters gave respondents no specifics on the amount of “trillions” we’re talking about, or how they would compare to the overall federal budget, huge existing line items like the military and fossil fuel subsidies, or the country’s GDP.

The poll didn’t ask respondents whether they would support such a spending increase if it were paid for entirely by revenue increases. But actually, they might.

The same poll found that more than two-thirds of Americans — 68 percent — support raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for climate action. Another 60 percent support raising taxes on fossil fuel burning companies “even if that may lead to increased electricity and transportation prices.”

The Post ignored both findings entirely in the article. A more accurate portrayal of the poll results might say that U.S. adults support paying for climate action by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy, but they don’t want to raise taxes for working people (for example, by raising gas taxes).

Why did the Post bury some of the most significant findings of their own poll? I won’t speculate too much — that’s for them to answer. But in establishment media, political biases that equate government spending with waste — while evading or ignoring issues of tax fairness — run deep.

A more objective — and hopeful — reading might emphasize that the vast majority of Americans support phasing out fossil fuels. Large majorities also support reaching 100 percent renewable electricity in 10 years (69 percent support) and a jobs guarantee with good wages for all workers (78 percent support).

Finally, two-thirds of respondents support increased spending on climate resilience for communities who are vulnerable to disasters. Two-thirds also support a government program for universal health care.

Polls aren’t always trustworthy. But as a snapshot, this one shows large majorities of Americans wanting serious governmental action on climate change that incorporates social justice and workers’ rights, paid for by progressive taxation. They also want more regulation of corporations, more government spending on community resilience, and public, universal health care.

This is great news for those of us who want a just transition from our extractive fossil-fuel driven economy to a safe, healthy future for all. The Washington Post may not think that’s important, but we do.

Baseball Severely Punishes 2 Top Astros in Sign-Stealing Scandal

HOUSTON — Astros manager AJ Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow were fired Monday after the pair were suspended by Major League Baseball for the team’s use of electronics for sign-stealing during Houston’s run to the 2017 World Series title and again in the 2018 season.

In U.S. sports’ largest scandal since the New England Patriots’ “Spygate,” Commissioner Rob Manfred announced the discipline Monday and strongly hinted that current Boston manager Alex Cora — the Astros bench coach in 2017 — will face equal or more severe punishment. Manfred said Cora developed the sign-stealing system used by the Astros. The Red Sox are under investigation for sign-stealing in Cora’s first season as manager in 2018, when Boston won the World Series.

Houston was fined $5 million, the maximum allowed under the Major League Constitution. The Astros will forfeit their next two first- and second-round amateur draft picks.

The investigation found that the Astros used the video feed from the center-field camera to see and decode the opposing catcher’s signs. Players banged on a trash can to signal to batters what was coming. Knowing what pitch is coming improves a batter’s odds of getting a hit.

Sign-stealing is a legal and time-honored part of baseball as long as it is done with the naked eye — say, by a baserunner standing on second. Using technology is prohibited.

Astros players disputed whether knowing the pitches seconds in advance helped batters. Houston had fewer wins at home than on the road, winning 94 home games and 110 on the road during the two seasons. There was no sign-stealing system on the road.

“While it is impossible to determine whether the conduct actually impacted the results on the field, the perception of some that it did causes significant harm to the game,” Manfred said.

Manfred, in his most significant action since becoming commissioner five years ago, said Hinch failed to stop the sign stealing and that Luhnow was responsible for the players’ conduct even though he made the dubious claim he was not aware. Manfred said owner Jim Crane was not informed.

An hour after MLB announced its decision, Crane opened a news conference by saying Hinch and Luhnow were fired.

“I have higher standards for the city and the franchise, and I’m going above and beyond, MLBs penalty,” he said. “We need to move forward with a clean slate.”

Houston was a big league-best 204-120 during the two years in question, winning its first title. Hinch, a 45-year-old former catcher with a degree from Stanford, was the most successful manager in the history of the Astros, who have won two of the last three AL pennants and came within one victory of another World Series title. Luhnow, 53, earned an MBA at Northwestern and fostered an analytic-based culture during eight seasons as Astros GM, but also a toxic one with high turnover.

“It is very clear to me that the culture of the baseball operations department, manifesting itself in the way its employees are treated, its relations with other clubs, and its relations with the media and external stakeholders, has been very problematic,” Manfred wrote in a nine-page statement. “At least in my view, the baseball operations department’s insular culture — one that valued and rewarded results over other considerations, combined with a staff of individuals who often lacked direction or sufficient oversight, led … finally, to an environment that allowed the conduct described in this report to have occurred.”

Crane, who hired Luhnow weeks after buying the Astros, denied a widespread problem, saying “I think there was some isolated situations.”

Hinch and Luhnow did not respond to phone messages and texts from The Associated Press.

Baseball’s response was far greater than that of the NFL to a similar infraction. New England coach Bill Belichick was fined $500,000 in 2007 and the Patriots were fined $250,000 for using video to capture an opponent’s signals. In the scandal known as Spygate, the Patriots also were stripped of a first-round draft choice. They were penalized again for $1 million eight years later for deflating footballs used in the AFC championship game. The NFL took away a first-round draft pick and suspended quarterback Tom Brady for four games.

Manfred said Hinch was aware of the system but did not tell Luhnow.

“As the person with responsibility for managing his players and coaches, there simply is no justification for Hinch’s failure to act,” Manfred said.

The GM told Major League Baseball he was unaware of the system, but Manfred held him accountable for the team’s actions.

“Although Luhnow denies having any awareness that his replay review room staff was decoding and transmitting signs, there is both documentary and testimonial evidence that indicates Luhnow had some knowledge of those efforts.”

Current New York Mets manager Carlos Beltrán, then a player with the Astros, was among the group involved. Manfred said no Astros players will be disciplined because he decided in September 2017 to hold a team’s manager and GM responsible.

“Virtually all of the Astros’ players had some involvement or knowledge of the scheme, and I am not in a position based on the investigative record to determine with any degree of certainty every player who should be held accountable.”

Baseball’s investigation began when former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers, now with Oakland, made the allegations in a report by The Athletic on Nov. 12.

Sign stealing has a long history in baseball — the New York Giants used a military field scope and buzzer during their 1951 tiebreaker playoff against the Brooklyn Dodgers. While decoding with the naked eye is allowed, MLB has enacted increasingly stringent prohibitions in recent years against the use of electronics to spy on opponents.

MLB’s Department of Investigations interviewed 27 witnesses, including 23 current and former Houston players, and reviews tens of thousands of emails, Slack communications, text messages, video clips and photographs.

Astros employees in the team’s video replay room started to decode signs using the center field camera at the start of the 2017 season. A player would act as a runner to bring the information to the dugout, where a runner on second would be signaled. The runner would decode the catcher’s sign and signal the batter. At times, an employee in the replay room would convey the information by text message to the watch or phone of a staff member in the dugout.

Cora began calling the replay room for the information early in the season. After a group of players that included Beltrán discussed how to improve the system about two months into the season, Cora arranged for a video monitor of the center field camera to be installed next to the dugout and players would communicate pitches by banging a bat or massage gun on a trash can. Two bangs usually were used for off-speed pitches and no sound for fastballs.

Manfred said the banging system was not used in 2018 but that signs were stolen by the replay room and communicated to the dugout during at least part of that season. There was no evidence signs were stolen during the 2018 playoffs.

The Mets and Beltrán declined to comment, spokesman Harold Kaufman said.

Also Monday, former Astros assistant GM Brandon Taubman was suspended through the World Series for his conduct during last year’s AL Championship Series, when his profane remarks directed at female reporters led to his firing by Houston, which at first denied the incident and later apologized.

Taubman can apply to Manfred for reinstatement after the World Series, and any future violations of Major League Rules would lead to a lifetime ban.

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Blum reported from New York.

 

CNN’s Sanders Hit Piece Is a Journalistic Outrage

CNN (1/13/20) has an anonymously sourced hit piece out today on Bernie Sanders, claiming that at a meeting in Elizabeth Warren’s home on December 18, 2018, he told her “a woman can’t win” the presidency.

The article, by CNN correspondent MJ Lee, is so journalistically shoddy that someone reading only the first few paragraphs would end up believing that it is a fact that the current top-polling candidate for the February 3 Iowa Caucus actually said that. Never is Sanders’ “quote” prefaced with the term “allegedly.”

None of the four anonymous staffers/friends making the charge of Sanders sexism were actually witnesses who were apparently in the room that day. Two, according to Lee, spoke to Warren “shortly after” that meeting. The other two “sources” were described only as people who “knew about the meeting.”

CNN (1/13/19) on Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren: Let’s you and him fight.

Sanders issued a blistering denial to CNN, saying, “It is ludicrous to believe that at the same meeting where Elizabeth Warren told me she was going to run for president, I would tell her that a woman couldn’t win.” He added:

It’s sad that, three weeks before the Iowa caucus and a year after that private conversation, staff who weren’t in the room are lying about what happened. What I did say that night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist and a liar who would weaponize whatever he could. Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course! After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016.

So far, Warren has not commented on the story, either to confirm or deny it.

The timing of this poorly sourced and poorly written story, appearing the day of a crucial candidates’ debate and days before the start of the actual primary season on a network that has been hostile to or dismissive of Sanders for years, is a journalistic outrage.

On its face, the claim allegedly made by Lee’s four anonymous sources makes no sense. Sanders is in fact on the record as far back as 1988, saying, “In my view, a woman could be elected president of the United States.” As Sanders points out in his debunking of CNN’s story, since then a woman has actually won the popular vote for the presidency;  Hillary Clinton, whom Sanders campaigned for, could have won the electoral college as well, if she hadn’t neglected campaigning in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

1988,@BernieSanders, backing Jackson:”The real issue is not whether you’re black or white, whether you’re a woman or a man *in my view, a woman could be elected POTUS* The real issue is are you on the side of workers & poor ppl, or are you on the side of big money &corporations?” pic.twitter.com/VHmfzvyJdy

— Every nimble plane is a policy failure. (@KindAndUnblind) January 13, 2020

Why were CNN’s sources allowed to makes such an explosive, far-fetched claim anonymously? Anonymity is most justifiably granted to protect sources from retaliation for revealing damaging information about their superiors; would Warren staffers (assuming they were the source) be fired for giving an accurate account of their candidate’s conversation? When corporate media withhold the names of sources to allow them to  without political consequences, that is an abuse of anonymous sourcing.

Sanders is clearly alarming powerful elements of America’s ruling elite: corporate executives who fear what is now being considered a possible Sanders presidency, and Democratic Party leaders who fear a Sanders presidential nomination will cut the party off from the river of cash it and its favored candidates have been collecting for decades from major industrial sectors, from Wall Street to Hollywood to the arms industry and the healthcare industrial complex. Not to mention the corporate media that are backed by ads from all these sectors.

This hit piece has the feel of the kind of attack that Sanders supporter Norman Solomon (Common Dreams, 12/27/19) warned of once Sanders’ polling began taking off and he could no longer be simply ignored.

Bernie Sanders Is Right About Biden’s Record on Social Security

In the 2000 presidential campaign, Al Gore was roundly mocked on “Saturday Night Live” and elsewhere for promising multiple times during a presidential debate that unlike his Republican opponent, he would fight to preserve Social Security by putting it in a “lockbox.” The mockery was for what pundits considered Gore’s condescending tone and puzzling repetition of the word lockbox, but he was tapping into a core truth: Americans, across all political parties, believe in protecting Social Security. According to a 2019 Pew Research survey, 74% of Americans say Social Security benefits “should not be reduced in any way.”

Twenty years later, Democratic presidential candidates are still touting their ability to protect the program, even arguing over who would do a better job.

In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper last week, Bernie Sanders attacked fellow candidate former Vice President Joe Biden for his record on Social Security, claiming Biden’s support for cutting the popular program makes him less electable. The Sanders campaign followed up the next day in an email newsletter to supporters that said, “In 2018, Biden lauded Paul Ryan for proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare.”

Biden’s campaign pushed back against the newsletter’s attacks, contending the comments were taken out of context. According to The Intercept’s Ryan Grim, however, Biden’s record on Social Security is far worse than one potentially misinterpreted remark. Indeed, as Grim lays out, Biden has been advocating for cuts to Social Security for roughly 40 years. In 1984, in the midst of President Reagan’s frenzy to cut the federal safety net, Biden worked with Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley calling “for a freeze on federal spending and insisted on including Social Security in that freeze,” which even the Reagan administration was against.

That plan was rejected, but Biden continued to make similar pushes for cuts over the years. This included in 1994, after Republicans won both chambers of Congress, when Biden joined his GOP colleagues in calling for freezing federal spending. Per Grim:

His general advocacy for budget austerity made him a leading combatant in the centrist-wing battle against the party’s retreating liberals in the 1980s and ’90s.

‘When I argued that we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well,’ [Biden] told the Senate in 1995. ‘I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans’ benefits. I meant every single solitary thing in the government. And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice, I tried it a third time, and I tried it a fourth time.’ (A freeze would have reduced the amount that would be paid out, cutting the program’s benefit.)

This approach was common for Democrats in the Clinton era, Grim notes, part of “the belief that old tax-and-spend liberals were out, and that a type of “New Democrat” was needed, one who understood the necessity of fiscal restraint.”

Grim also points out that Biden has admitted, during interviews, the dangers of his views within the Democratic Party. “One of the things my political advisers say to me, is, whoa, don’t touch that third rail,” Biden told the late Tim Russert, referring to Social Security, in an interview during the 2008 presidential primary.

According to his current campaign website, Biden now supports expanding Social Security. Andrew Bates, a spokesman for Biden, defended Biden’s record to The Intercept, saying: “As Bernie Sanders himself said in 2015 — after all of these quotes — ‘Joe Biden is a man who has devoted his entire life to public service and to the well-being of working families and the middle class.”

The Social Security program remains extremely popular. About 57% of American retirees told pollsters that Social Security benefits are a “major” source of their income, according to a 2019 Gallup poll. An analysis of 10 years of Gallup data reveals that number jumps to 78% for retirees making less than $30,000 per year, and 65% of those making from $30,000 to $50,000.

Read Grim’s full story here.

 

The Smoking Gun in the Soleimani Assassination

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment. 

The Trump administration’s claims that it assassinated Gen. Qassem Soleimani because he posed an imminent threat to American lives and was coming to Baghdad to launch an immediate attack on the U.S. embassy there have fallen apart. Commentators are suggesting that the “imminent threat” argument is the equivalent for the Trump administration of the “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) claim of the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Trump himself and figures in his administration such as Defense Secretary Mark Esper have repeatedly failed to provide any evidence of the imminence of any threat.

It is easy to demonize Soleimani in the U.S., since he certainly was an enemy of U.S. interests in the Middle East for much of his career. But he does not appear to have killed or had killed any Americans at all in the past decade, and from 2015 because of the UN Security Council nuclear deal with Iran, Soleimani was not an adversary of the US in recent years. In fact, he was often a de facto ally and the U.S. Air Force gave him air support at Tikrit and elsewhere in the campaign against ISIL (ISIS, Daesh). In fact, for a while there Soleimani was fighting ISIL and al-Qaeda-linked militias in Syria in tacit alliance with the Kurds supported by the United States at a time when Israel allied with an al-Qaeda affiliate in the Golan Heights.

Moreover, the entire narrative of the Trump administration was undermined by Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdelmahdi, who told Parliament on Jan. 5 when he asked its members to kick out the US military, that he had personally invited Soleimani to Baghdad as part of a back-channel set of negotiations between Saudi Arabia and Iran aimed at cooling down tensions between the two. Soleimani did not sneak into Iraq on a covert mission. He flew on a commercial jet and went through passport control with his diplomatic passport.

While an attempt was made to invade the U.S. embassy on the Wednesday before Soleimani’s arrival, that was done by members of the Iraqi militia, the Kata’ib Hizbullah, who were angry that on December 30, the Trump administration bombed its bases in northern Iraq and killed some two dozen of its fighters. Trump blamed Kata’ib Hizbullah for a rocket attack on a base at Kirkuk that killed an American contractor. It is murky in open, unclassified sources whether Kata’ib Hizbullah actually fired those rockets. Nor is there any evidence in open sources that Soleimani ordered the Iraqi militia to so act. U.S. intelligence may have signals intelligence to that effect, but since Soleimani is dead, they should share that at least with the Gang of Eight in Congress if they have it. For all we know, a foreign government hostile to the Iraqi Shiite militias and to Iran passed this allegation over to Trump as a false flag to manipulate him, and he swallowed the bait. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the Israelis would all have a motivation to behave this way and their close military and intelligence ties with Washington would make them credible if they wanted to run such a scam on the naive and gullible Trump.

Suspicions were raised when Trump refused to come beforehand to Congress for authorization to take dramatic action against Iran, an action that could easily have sparked a war. The “gang of eight” in Congress who are usually informed of such momentous plans. They would have included Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in the Senate, Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in the House of Representatives, and the ranking and minority leaders of the intelligence committees of the Senate and the House. Was it because the “intelligence” was so “razor thin” (as one leak put it) that no one would have bought it?

Then, as The Week pointed out, the New York Times reported that while CIA Director Gina Haspel had not taken a policy position on killing Soleimani, she had assessed for the administration that removing him would improve U.S. security while not incurring unbearable risks of reprisals from a weak Iran. Haspel had supported the torture of al-Qaeda prisoners and is known for being ruthless, so you’d expect an assessment like that from her. It isn’t, however, an argument that Soleimani posed an imminent threat, just that he was an able adversary whose removal from the board would benefit the US side in its attempt to strangle Iran.

Then there was the fiasco of the post-operation briefing of Congress by the Trump Pentagon on the killing of Soleimani, which actually enraged Republican Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who says he supports President Trump.

Lee called the briefing the worst he had seen in nine years in Congress and said it was “insulting” and “demeaning.” He and his colleagues were given no significant intelligence and were just told to salute and go along. He accused the executive of acting like a king and disregarding the prerogative of Congress to declare war.

Sunday, Rep. Justin Amash (I-Michigan), a Republican until Trumpism forced him out of the party, tweeted that “The administration didn’t present evidence to Congress regarding even one embassy. The four embassies claim seems to be totally made up. And they have never presented evidence of imminence—a necessary condition to act without congressional approval—with respect to any of this.”

Amash was reacting to an interview given on Sunday by Esper in which he admitted that he had not seen specific intelligence showing that Soleimani was imminently going to attack four U.S. embassies. This admission contradicted what Trump had just alleged, since Esper would certainly have seen the intelligence underpinning Trump’s allegation if it existed (which it obviously does not).

One of the ways the Bush administration pushed the supposed WMD threat from Iraq was that the third man in the Pentagon at the time, Doug Feith, set up and headed an ad hoc committee inside the Pentagon, the Office of Special Plans. Its task was to comb through raw intelligence and cherry-pick it for evidence of Iraqi nuclear, biological or chemical weapons programs. Feith even had people brief Congress off of these cherry-picked reports, undermining the CIA, in a way that was by statute actually illegal.

All kinds of wild reports come into the U.S. government, including UFO sightings. These are “raw intelligence” and are worthless in and of themselves. The people making the allegations might be drunks, or unbalanced, or working for a foreign government or for a set of conspirators. (Feith picked up raw “intelligence” from all four of these sorts of sources).

Only once highly trained, seasoned analysts comb through the raw intelligence and weed out what seems wacky or unfounded or uncorroborated do you start actually to have what you might call an intelligence assessment.

I think it is highly likely that the “intelligence” on which Trump, Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made their decision to off Soleimani was raw and cherry-picked, the product of the Trump equivalent of the Office of Special Plans.

It appears that Soleimani was actually coming to Iraq on a mission of negotiating less conflict with Saudi Arabia.

Queen Agrees to Let Harry and Meghan Move Part Time to Canada

SANDRINGHAM, England — Queen Elizabeth II agreed Monday to grant Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, their wish for a more independent life, allowing them to move part-time to Canada while remaining firmly in the House of Windsor.

The British monarch said in a statement that the summit of senior royals on Monday was “constructive,” and that it had been “agreed that there will be a period of transition” in which the Duke and Duchess of Sussex will spend time in Canada and the UK.

The summit at the queen’s Sandringham estate in eastern England marked the first face-to-face talks with Harry since he and Meghan unveiled the controversial plan to step back from their royal roles.

“My family and I are entirely supportive of Harry and Meghan’s desire to create a new life as a young family,” the queen said in a statement. “Although we would have preferred them to remain full-time working members of the Royal Family, we respect and understand their wish to live a more independent life as a family while remaining a valued part of my family.”

The meeting came after days of intense news coverage, in which supporters of the royal family’s feuding factions used the British media to paint conflicting pictures of who was to blame for the rift.

Buckingham Palace said “a range of possibilities” would be discussed, but the queen was determined to resolve the situation within “days, not weeks.” Buckingham Palace stressed, however, that “any decision will take time to be implemented.”

One of the more fraught questions that needs to be worked out is precisely what it means for a royal to be financially independent and what activities can be undertaken to make money. Other royals who have ventured into the world of commerce have found it complicated.

Prince Andrew, for example, has faced heated questions about his relationship with the late convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew, the queen’s second son, has relinquished royal duties and patronages after being accused by a woman who says she was an Epstein trafficking victim who slept with the prince.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex also face questions on paying for taxpayer-funded security. Home Secretary Priti Patel refused to comment, but said safety was a priority.

There were signs earlier in the day that the House of Windsor had moved to unite. Princes William and Harry issued a joint statement criticizing a newspaper article on the severe strain in their relationship, calling the story offensive and potentially harmful as they embark on talks regarding the future of the British monarchy.

Though the statement didn’t name the newspaper, the Times of London had a front-page story about the crisis in which a source alleged that Harry and Meghan had been pushed away by the “bullying attitude from” William. The joint statement insisted that the story was “false.”

“For brothers who care so deeply about the issues surrounding mental health, the use of inflammatory language in this way is offensive and potentially harmful,” the statement said.

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Follow full AP coverage at https://www.apnews.com/PrinceHarry

Calling Bernie Sanders Anti-Semitic Is Islamophobic

What follows is a conversation between professor Sahar Aziz and Shir Hever of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

BERNIE SANDERS: We must treat the Palestinian people as well with the respect and dignity that they deserve. What is going on in Gaza right now when youth unemployment is 70% or 80% is unsustainable.

SHIR HEVER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Shir Hever coming to you from Heidelberg, Germany.

In the last couple of weeks, articles appeared in The Examiner and The Federalist among others accusing Bernie Sander of anti-Semitism, and implying that he’s not fully a Jew, although he’s the son of two Holocaust survivors. This is not a unique event. It is part of a trend of weaponizing anti-Semitism accusations in order to attack people who criticize Israeli policy. After Trump said that in the US Jews don’t love Israel enough, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani said this about the Holocaust survivor George Soros: “Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is. I probably know more about… He doesn’t go to church. He doesn’t go to religion, synagogue. He doesn’t belong to a synagogue. He doesn’t support Israel, is an enemy of Israel. He has elected eight anarchist DA’s in the United States. He is a horrible human being.”

So a new article published in The New Arab argues that behind these accusations is a thinly veiled Islamophobia and xenophobia. The article is titled, Accusing Bernie Sanders of anti-Semitism is Nothing but Thinly Veiled Islamophobia. The author is Professor Sahar Aziz, who is joining us now. Professor Sahar Aziz teaches Law and Social Justice at the Rutgers Law School. She’s the Director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights. And her upcoming book is titled, Whosoever Sees an Evil: Muslim Americans’ Human Rights Advocacy, by Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. Thank you very much for joining us, Sahar.

SAHAR AZIZ: Thank you for inviting me.

SHIR HEVER: So Jewish activists have always been central to the human rights movement, including when it comes to Palestinian rights and for Muslim activists who are frequently accused of anti-Semitism, and this is not new. Joining forces with progressive Jewish groups and politicians is sometimes also a way to ensure their legitimacy. So do you think that the attacks on Jews who stand with Muslims actually aren’t intended to target those progressive Jews, but rather to isolate the Muslim activists?

SAHAR AZIZ: I think they’re aimed for both of them. What’s happened recently in the last 10, arguably 15 years, is a major transition in the Jewish American community, where you have a young generation coming of age that has realized that the United States policies on Israel is contradictory to their own Jewish values. And it has become more and more mainstreamed among these young Jewish American progressives who are also very sensitized to anti-black racism, anti-Latin X, xenophobia and Islamophobia. And so they’re starting to see the connections between all of these phobias against minority groups and what Israel is doing. And more importantly, the US’s complicity in Israeli state abuses of Palestinians. So, you have this convergence of Jewish American youth in particular, and then the rise and growth of Muslim American youth who are now coming of age and wanting to influence US foreign policy as well.

SHIR HEVER: So I want to get back to this point about all the phobias that you mentioned. I think that’s a very important issue. But first, can you identify where are these accusations of anti-Semitism coming from? Is this just a natural thing for right-wingers and racists to do when they want to hide their own racism as they come after immigrants and Muslims while pretending to be protecting Jews? Or is this actually a coordinated campaign to change the discourse on race and, if so, coordinated by whom?

SAHAR AZIZ: Well, there’s two objectives. The first objective is to quash the rise of Muslim American voices that are going to be more critical of US foreign policy in the Middle East, writ large, not just in Israel, primarily because these Muslim Americans who are over 70% immigrants or children of immigrants from Muslim majority countries have a much deeper understanding and personal connection to how US foreign policy harms people in those countries. Because they have families there, they may themselves have gone there frequently to travel, and their parents were often raised there. So as they come of age, as they accumulate wealth, as they run for political office, they are starting to have different perspectives or bring in different perspectives into US foreign policy.

And so that is starting to challenge what has otherwise been a monopoly over US foreign policy in the Middle East, particularly with the Arab Israeli conflict by Zionists who tend to be on the far right of the political spectrum. So now these far right Zionists are finding competition among Muslim Americans of various national origins. Some of them are African Americans, some of them are Pakistani American, Middle Eastern American, as well as these younger Jewish American progressives who are joining forces and saying what we’re doing in the Middle East, in Israel, as well as other Arab countries is not keeping America safe. It’s a violation of human rights. It’s a violation of our progressive values.

Now it’s much easier to accuse Muslims of anti-Semitism because part of the Islamophobic trope is that Muslims are inherently anti-Semitic. And that is a fallacy. And it is a product of these far right Zionist politics which use the trope that Muslims are inherently anti-Semitic, they all hate Jews, and therefore you shouldn’t listen to anything they say when it comes to Arab Israeli issues because they just want to annihilate all Jews, which is palpably false. And if you look before 1948 the Jews who were treated the most humanely were those that were in North Africa and the Middle East. Many of them fled to those areas from very violent, anti-Semitic aggression. So much of the conflict between Jews and Muslims in the region is really about the issue of statehood. It’s more of a political issue. It is not a religious conflict per se. So that’s one reason why it’s easier to accuse Muslims of being anti-Semitic.

But I think the other objective is to de legitimize people like Bernie Sanders, who represent the progressive Jewish American voice and who has a strong following among younger Jewish Americans in the United States. And so that is more about competition over who gets to control the narrative coming out of the media and who gets to control US foreign policy. But I think it’s much harder, in my opinion, to accuse Bernie Sanders of anti-Semitism in light of not only his identity, but the fact that he’s the son of Holocaust survivors than it is to accuse Rashida Tlaib, Linda Sarsour, Ilhan Omar, all of these notable women, Muslim Americans, who have been working with Bernie Sanders and many Jewish American progressive organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace. And so what they’re doing is they’re using that cover because they know that it’s more believable to the American public that Muslims are anti-Semitic.

SHIR HEVER: Well, you’ve actually already partially answered my next question, but I still want to get back to it specifically because of these three women that you mentioned. So the outright and the new wave of populous right wing, which is not just emerging in the United States but all over the world is really accumulating those phobias. It’s accumulating enemies. Populous right-wing leaders go after Muslim communities, after migrants, they go after black people, after Jews, after LGBTQ, after women rights and more.

Now the answer from the left is often called “intersectionality,” an alliance of minority groups against all forms of discrimination. And in the United States specifically, this movement is mainly led by Muslim leaders, and especially by Muslim women like the three women which Sanders is supporting: Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Linda Sarsour. So why do you think that Muslim women play such a major role in the movement? You already said something about Muslims who have a family experiences about the effects of US foreign policy in the countries from which they come. But that doesn’t explain why women are taking the center stage.

SAHAR AZIZ: It’s a great question. So I’ve written two pieces on this issue. One is called Coercive Assimilation: The Perils of Muslim Women’s Identity Performance in the Workplace. And the other one is called From the Oppressed to the Terrorist: Muslim Woman Caught in the crosshairs of Intersectionality, both of which are on my ssrn.com page. And in those articles, I explain how women, Muslim women–similar to African American women during the Civil Rights era–are in this paradox where on the one hand there are internal misogynistic practices within Muslim communities just as there are within any race or ethnic communities. But on the other hand, there has been a very systematic, structurally based attack on Muslim American communities, particularly since 9/11.

And so they’re finding themselves in this situation where they are at least internally having to stay silent in terms of dealing with their internal issues on gender and, on the other hand, having to protect the communities and stand by the communities in order to protect their own children, their own families, and their own husbands and fathers. And this is where gender comes in again. Most of us are familiar with the terrorist/other stereotype, or that Muslims are inherently violent and they’re terrorists. And that is the stereotype that has stuck and has become deeply entrenched. Now that stereotype is gendered as male, and that has paradoxically granted Muslim women more credibility in the public sphere and in the public discourse in the United States because it is not as common to call Muslim women terrorists. Now they may be accused of harboring terrorists, sympathizing with terrorists, but oftentimes there is another stereotype that’s Islamophobic, which is that Muslim women are oppressed by their male Muslim relatives, that Muslim women are meek.

So the liberal Islamophobic paradigm is to liberate Muslim women and give them a platform and give them a voice, because surely if we don’t give it to them, then they won’t have one because the stereotype is that their home communities are misogynistic. So I think that’s what explains in part how these women have been able to be at the forefront of combating Islamophobia because the liberals in particular have encouraged them to do so, have given them the space. And they have taken up the opportunity and proven, I think very clearly, that Muslim women are not oppressed as a group, that Islam is not misogynistic, they’re highly educated, they’re highly sophisticated, they’re highly articulate.

But I do think that oftentimes the reason why the public embraces them is because the public is anti-male Muslim more than it is anti-female Muslim. And it’s also very patronizing towards Muslim women. But that being said, I think it’s a fascinating phenomenon that they have been the ones that have also been attacked by people accusing Bernie Sanders and others of anti-Semitism, and many of those attacks are quite gendered. So they are attacks on them with slurs and a discourse that is very gendered, threatening them of rape, threatening them of murder, other types of physical threats, which I think is also because they see them as vulnerable women.

SHIR HEVER: Well, we’re definitely going to have to continue that conversation at an early opportunity, but for now we’re going to have to leave it there. Thank you very much, Sahar, for joining us.

SAHAR AZIZ: Thank you.

SHIR HEVER: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.

Corporate Democrats Desperately Want a Sanders-Warren Feud

Corporate Democrats got a jolt at the end of last week when the highly regarded Iowa Poll showed Bernie Sanders surging into first place among Iowans likely to vote in the state’s Feb. 3 caucuses. The other big change was a steep drop for the previous Iowa frontrunner, Pete Buttigieg, who — along with Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden — came in a few percent behind Sanders. The latest poll was bad news for corporate interests, but their prospects brightened a bit over the weekend when Politico reported: “The nonaggression pact between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is seriously fraying.”

The reason for that conclusion? While speaking with voters, some Sanders volunteers were using a script saying that Warren supporters “are highly educated, more affluent people who are going to show up and vote Democratic no matter what” and that “she’s bringing no new bases into the Democratic Party.”

At last, mainstream journalists could begin to report the kind of conflict that many had long been yearning for. As Politico mentioned in the same article, Sanders and Warren “have largely abstained from attacking one another despite regular prodding from reporters.”

That “regular prodding from reporters” should be understood in an ideological context. Overall, far-reaching progressive proposals like Medicare for All have received negative coverage from corporate media. Yet during debates, Sanders and Warren have been an effective tag team while defending such proposals. The media establishment would love to see Sanders and Warren clashing instead of cooperating.

For progressives, the need for a Sanders-Warren united front is crucial. Yes, there are some significant differences between the two candidates, especially on foreign policy (which is one of the reasons that I actively support Sanders). Those differences should be aired in the open, while maintaining a tactical alliance.

Sustaining progressive momentum for both Sanders and Warren is essential for preventing the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination from going to the likes of Biden or Buttigieg — a grim outcome that would certainly gratify the 44 billionaires and their spouses who’ve donated to Biden, the 40 billionaires and their spouses who’ve donated to Buttigieg, and the oligarchic interests they represent.

It would be a serious error for progressives to buy into corporate media portrayals of the Sanders and Warren campaigns as destined to play a traditional zero-sum political game. The chances are high that by the time the primaries end this spring, Sanders and Warren — as well as their supporters — will need to join forces so one of them can become the nominee at the Democratic National Convention in mid-July.

In the meantime, during the next few months, top corporate Democrats certainly hope to see a lot more headlines like one that greeted New York Times readers Monday morning: “Elizabeth Warren Says Bernie Sanders Sent Volunteers ‘Out to Trash Me’.”

(Sanders tried to defuse what he called a “media blow up” on Sunday, saying: “We have hundreds of employees. Elizabeth Warren has hundreds of employees. And people sometimes say things that they shouldn’t.” And: “Elizabeth Warren is a very good friend of mine. No one is going to trash Elizabeth Warren.”)

Keeping eyes on the prize this year will require a united front that can strengthen progressive forces, prevent any corporate Democrat from winning the party’s presidential nomination, and then go on to defeat Donald Trump

Booker Ends Presidential Bid After Polling, Money Struggles

DES MOINES, Iowa — Democrat Cory Booker dropped out of the presidential race Monday, ending a campaign whose message of unity and love failed to resonate in a political era marked by chaos and anxiety.

His departure now leaves a field that was once the most diverse in history with just one remaining African American candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.

Since launching his campaign last February, Booker, a U.S. senator from New Jersey, struggled to raise the type of money required to support a White House bid. He was at the back of the pack in most surveys and failed to meet the polling requirements needed to participate in Tuesday’s debate. Booker also missed last month’s debate and exits the race polling in low single digits in the early primary states and nationwide.

In an email to supporters, Booker said that he “got into this race to win” and that his failure to make the debates prevented him from raising raise the money required for victory.

“Our campaign has reached the point where we need more money to scale up and continue building a campaign that can win — money we don’t have, and money that is harder to raise because I won’t be on the next debate stage and because the urgent business of impeachment will rightly be keeping me in Washington,” he said.

Booker had warned that the looming impeachment trial of President Donald Trump would deal a “big, big blow” to his campaign by pulling him away from Iowa in the final weeks before the Feb. 3 Iowa caucuses. He hinted at the challenges facing his campaign last week in an interview on The Associated Press’ “Ground Game” podcast.

“If we can’t raise more money in this final stretch, we won’t be able to do the things that other campaigns with more money can do to show presence,” he said.

In his email to supporters, Booker pledged to do “everything in my power to elect the eventual Democratic nominee for president,” though his campaign says he has no immediate plans to endorse a candidate in the primary.

It’s a humbling finish for someone who was once lauded by Oprah Winfrey as the “rock star mayor” who helped lead the renewal of Newark, New Jersey. During his seven years in City Hall, Booker was known for his headline-grabbing feats of local do-goodery, including running into a burning building to save a woman, and his early fluency with social media, which brought him 1.4 million followers on Twitter when the platform was little used in politics. His rhetorical skills and Ivy League background often brought comparisons to President Barack Obama, and he’d been discussed as a potential presidential contender since his arrival in the Senate in 2013.

Now, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has mastered the art of the selfie on social media. Another former mayor, Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, is seen as the freshest face in the field. And Booker’s message of hope and love seemed to fall flat during an era characterized perhaps most strongly by Democratic fury over the actions of the Trump administration.

An early focus on building out a strong and seasoned campaign operation in Iowa and South Carolina may have hampered his campaign in the long run, as the resources he spent early on staff there left him working with a tight budget in the later stages of the primary, when many of his opponents were going on air with television ads. That meant that even later in the campaign, after he had collected some of the top endorsements in Iowa and visited South Carolina almost more than any other candidate, a significant portion of the electorate in both states either said they were unfamiliar with his campaign or viewed him unfavorably.

On the stump, Booker emphasized his Midwestern connections — often referencing the nearly 80 family members he has still living in Iowa when he campaigned there — and delivered an exhortation to voters to use “radical love” to overcome what he considered Trump’s hate. But he rarely drew a contrast with his opponents on the trail, even when asked directly, and even some of Booker’s supporters worried his message on Trump wasn’t sharp enough to go up against a Republican president known for dragging his opponents into the mud.

Booker struggled to land on a message that would resonate with voters. He’s long been seen as a progressive Democrat in the Senate, pushing for criminal justice reform and marijuana legalization. And on the campaign trail, he proposed establishing a $1,000 savings account for every child born in the U.S. to help close the racial wealth gap.

He was among the first candidates to release a gun control plan, and at the time it was the most ambitious in the field, as it included a gun licensing program that would have been seen as political suicide just a decade before. He also released an early criminal justice reform plan that focused heavily on addressing sentencing disparities for drug crimes.

But he also sought to frame himself as an uplifting, unifying figure who emphasized his bipartisan work record. That didn’t land in a Democratic primary that has often rewarded candidates who promised voters they were tough-minded fighters who could take on Trump.

Booker’s seat is up for a vote this year, and he will run for reelection to the Senate. A handful of candidates has launched campaigns for the seat, but Booker is expected to have an easy path to reelection.

Booker’s exit from the presidential race further narrows the once two dozen-strong field, which now stands at 12 candidates.

As Trial Nears, Trump Keeps Discredited Ukraine Theory Alive

The theory took root in vague form well before Donald Trump laid claim to the White House in 2016. The candidate’s close confidant tweeted about it. His campaign chairman apparently spoke about it with people close to him.

What if, the idea went, it was actually Ukraine — and not Russia — that was interfering in the 2016 election?

Never mind that the notion has since been amplified by the president of Russia, the country that U.S. intelligence agencies unequivocally blame for interfering in that year’s presidential race. Or that Trump’s hand-picked FBI director and other American officials have said there’s no information pointing to Ukraine interference. Or that 25 Russians stand charged in U.S. courts with hacking into Democratic emails and waging a covert social media campaign to sway American public opinion.

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The Ukraine theory lives on.

Now, Trump’s request for Ukraine to investigate the matter and a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, is at the heart of a congressional inquiry that produced Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives. A Senate trial is next.

The discredited theory, spread online by GOP allies in interviews and tweets, has been embraced by a president reluctant to acknowledge the reality of Russian election interference, and anxious to show he had reason to be suspicious of Ukraine as the U.S. withheld crucial military aid last year.

The effect: blurring the facts of the impeachment case for many Americans even before it reaches a trial that could begin with days.

Experts fear the strategy leaves the U.S. vulnerable to more misinformation campaigns in the 2020 election and signals to the Kremlin and other foreign actors that Americans are willing to cling to falsehoods.

A review by The Associated Press shows that the Ukraine conspiracy theory traces back to Trump’s 2016 campaign, was spread online and later advanced by Russian President Vladimir Putin weeks after his own country was blamed for election interference. Finally, some of America’s own elected leaders made it their truth.

“The ultimate victim is democracy, is the stability of our nation,” said Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert at the nonpartisan Wilson Center, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

THE SEEDS OF A CONSPIRACY THEORY

As U.S. authorities collected evidence in 2016 that Russia had hacked and stolen years of internal emails from the Democratic National Committee, Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who had cultivated extensive business contacts in Ukraine and worked for pro-Russia politicians there, was privately pointing to another culprit.

Manafort, now serving more than seven years in prison for tax fraud and other crimes, suggested then that the attack was probably executed by Ukrainians, according to FBI notes from an April 2018 interview with Rick Gates, Manafort’s former deputy. The idea parroted that of Konstantin Kilimnik, a Manafort business associate who U.S. authorities have assessed has ties to Russian intelligence — an accusation Kilimnik has denied.

Trump aide Michael Flynn, who later became Trump’s first national security adviser, was also adamant within the campaign that Russia couldn’t have carried out the attack and that U.S. intelligence wouldn’t be able to figure out who had done it, Gates recalled.

That skepticism was adopted by Trump himself, who memorably said during a presidential debate that “it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, OK?”

All the while, U.S. officials were agreeing with a private cybersecurity firm’s findings that Russia was responsible, collecting evidence over the next several months that tied individual Russian military intelligence officers to the hack.

Adding to the FBI’s concern was the revelation that a Trump campaign official had been told Russia had damaging information about Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. That July, the bureau opened an investigation into whether Russia and the Trump campaign were working together to sway the election in Trump’s favor, a probe eventually taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller.

TWEETS, ARTICLES FUEL THEORY

As the Democrats’ stolen emails were published online and the U.S. prepared to publicly blame the Kremlin for the hack, assertions surfaced online that Ukraine had meddled — directly or indirectly — in America’s presidential campaign.

In September 2016 Roger Stone, a Trump confidant later convicted of lying about his efforts to get inside information about the emails, tweeted: “The only interference in the U.S. election is from Hillary’s friends in Ukraine.”

His tweet highlighted a Financial Times article that said some Kyiv leaders were determined “to intervene, however indirectly” in the U.S. election. The story detailed efforts by Serhiy Leshchenko, a former Ukrainian parliament member who opposed Trump’s bid, to expose off-the-books payments Ukraine’s pro-Russia political party made to Manafort.

Leshchenko maintains his efforts don’t amount to interference or compare to Russia’s attack on the U.S. elections.

Still, some Republican legislators, including a few contacted by AP, pointed to the article as proof Ukraine interfered.

“I think both Russia and Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election,” Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said last month on NBC’s “Meet the Press. He cited the Financial Times as evidence.

As Trump prepared to take office, news reports fueled doubts online over the conclusion that Russia had hacked the DNC and Clinton campaign.

“So how and why are they so sure about hacking if they never even requested an examination of the computer servers? What is going on?” Trump tweeted on Jan. 5, 2017, the day after a BuzzFeed News article reported that the FBI did not physically examine the Democrats’ servers to determine Russia infiltrated the system.

A Politico report days later documented a Democratic consultant’s opposition research in 2016 on Manafort’s work in Ukraine — which included consulting on behalf of former leader Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia after his 2014 ouster — and described efforts by some Ukraine leaders to support Clinton over Trump.

The article said there was not a top-down effort by Ukraine to push voters toward Clinton, but some Republicans now point to the reporting to support their allegations of meddling.

Citing the reports, anti-establishment conservative and liberal bloggers made misleading connections between Ukraine and CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that traced the hack back to Russia.

This online speculation helped shape the Ukraine conspiracy theory, explained Thomas Rid, a Johns Hopkins University professor who has tracked disinformation campaigns and election interference.

“The landscape has made it so easy to find rabbit holes, and go down these rabbit holes, stay there, and find a community of like-minded amateur sleuths,” Rid said.

It is the nebulous nature of the Ukrainian theory, which leaves room for both direct and indirect interference, that has given the idea a shape-shifting, evolving form that has contributed to its staying power.

One online commentator misleadingly claimed CrowdStrike’s co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch works for a think tank funded by a Ukrainian oligarch. Alperovitch is a fellow at the Atlantic Council, which is based in the U.S. and receives funding from a variety of sources. Donations from Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk’s foundation made up less than less than 1.6 percent of the group’s funding in 2018.

“A great deal of misinformation relies upon serendipity or mere contacts,” said John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. “Then they draw egregious or conspiratorial conclusions based on those contacts.”

Putin himself weighed in days after Trump moved into the White House, publicly claiming that Ukraine’s entire government had favored Clinton during the election and now needed to “improve relations” with the new Trump administration.

“As we all know, during the presidential campaign in the United States, the Ukrainian government adopted a unilateral position in favor of one candidate,” Putin said in at a news conference that February with Hungary’s prime minister.

Russian media used the comments to suggest it was Ukraine that had actually interfered.

It was convenient for the Kremlin to point the finger at another offender: Just weeks earlier, U.S. intelligence agencies had released a detailed report accusing Russia of interfering in the election on Trump’s behalf. And Ukraine was the perfect scapegoat, experts said. The Kremlin has been locked in a 5-year war with Ukraine that has killed more than 14,000 people.

“It’s in Russia’s interest to amplify this issue because it wants Ukraine to be undermined,” said Jankowicz, the disinformation expert.

By April 2017, the Ukraine conspiracy theory was being promoted by Trump himself.

TRUMP TESTS NEW UKRAINE CONSPIRACY THEORY

Trump sat at the desk of the Oval Office, just shy of his first 100 days on the job, when he falsely suggested in an Associated Press interview that CrowdStrike had even stronger ties to Ukraine.

“I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian, that’s what I heard,” Trump said. “Why didn’t they allow the FBI in to investigate the server? I mean, there is so many things that nobody writes about. It’s incredible.”

In fact, CrowdStrike is a publicly held California company founded by two U.S. citizens — George Kurtz and Alperovitch, who was born in Russia but spent his adult life in America. The company has identified cyberattacks for major U.S. clients, including the U.S. government and the National Republican Congressional Committee.

And the FBI didn’t need to physically take the DNC servers to confirm CrowdStrike’s findings that Russia was behind the attack, said Eugene H. Spafford, a computer science professor at the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University who has assisted the bureau in cases.

Instead, CrowdStrike took digital images of the DNC system, capturing files, photos, emails, and browsing history to determine who had breached the system. Copies of those images were then handed over to the FBI, the company says.

The process is similar to how investigators at a crime scene take photos that are later analyzed for clues.

A physical review of the DNC’s data, a cloud system comprised of at least 140 servers, would have disabled the Democrats’ computer systems for days or weeks amid a presidential election, Spafford noted.

But Trump took his suspicions about the servers directly to Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the newly elected Ukraine president in the now-infamous July 25 phone call that resulted in articles of impeachment against Trump.

“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people…” Trump asked of Zelenskiy on the call, according to notes released by the White House in September. “The server, they say Ukraine has it.”

Dozens of news outlets debunked Trump’s comments and continue to do so. Finding itself at the center of the phone call, CrowdStrike then released a blog post rebuffing the president’s claims. The president’s own national security advisers rebutted the theory to no avail, former White House aide Fiona Hill told impeachment investigators in November.

“We spent a lot of time … trying to refute this one in the first year of the administration,” Hill said.

THE THEORY ENDURES

Still, Trump keeps the notion alive.

He insisted to Fox News viewers in November that he only withheld aid from Ukraine to investigate corruption in the country, hinting once again that the DNC’s servers are hidden there.

“You know, the FBI has never gotten that server,” Trump said “That’s a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?”

Parts of the Ukraine election interference theory have since been echoed by a growing number of the president’s Republican allies — some of whom concede that Russia interfered but posit that Ukraine did too.

Days before the president was impeached, Sen. Ted Cruz told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that there’s “considerable evidence” that Ukraine had interfered.

His office later said in a statement: “Russia’s campaign to interfere in our election was real and systematic. It is also true that Ukrainian officials did not want … then-candidate Trump to win. The two are not mutually exclusive.”

And as his Senate impeachment trial looms, Trump is pressing GOP senators to rally behind the discredited theory — asking his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani to brief them on his trip to eastern Europe, where he searched for witnesses and documents to back up the claims. Videos documenting his trip have aired on the pro-Trump television network, One America News, and have been viewed thousands of times online.

Hill, a Russia expert, told Congress in November that political leaders who spread such falsehoods about Ukraine are only polarizing the U.S. further and turning it into an easy target for misinformation campaigns by such foreign powers as Russia.

She warned: “These fictions are harmful even if they are deployed for purely domestic political purposes.”

_____

Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington and Yuras Karmanau in Kyiv contributed to this report.