Chris Hedges's Blog, page 611

Keep Saying ‘No’ to Dirty Energy Projects

“No one is doing their job to protect the people of Pennsylvania. We’re out here on our own.” Elise Gerhart sounds stressed and tired – but resolute. She and her family have been battling the Mariner East 2 pipeline for more than two years through both legal and direct action. In 2016, the pipeline resistance camp known as Camp White Pine began – deploying tree-sits in trees marked for clearing. Going up against Sunoco and their subsidiary, Energy Transfer Partners, the same company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline has been intensely taxing, in all senses of that word. Surveillance drones and helicopters, private security thugs, legal threats and action, character assassination, death threats and mysterious visitors to the Gerhart’s home have become the norm.

When Elise says they’re out there on their own, it’s true both literally and figuratively. The Gerharts and the people going to camp to support are fighting more than just a pipeline. They’re fighting apathy, censorship, corruption and collusion as well. Without much media coverage and without any real help from officials and the legal system, the fight for people and planet is too often a lonely one. It’s also very often remote – away from the hustle and bustle of a city that could provide more visibility and pushback.

The area of Pennsylvania where Gerharts property and Camp White Pine sit is rural – and deceptively picturesque. Home to the Marcellus Shale and the fracking boom it catalyzed, Pennsylvania is also home to rolling hills, streams, farms and fields dotted with little schoolyards and modest homes. When you look closely though, you’ll see the scars of the oil and gas industry. The rolling hills bear shaved ridges and yellow markers warning of pipelines underneath the surface. Hundreds of families with wells on their property get water delivered to their homes because their well water is varying shades of brown and foul-smelling. And those are only the families that could afford it. The others abandoned their homes. Stories of crops dying as soon as they were planted, sludge seeping into backyards and illnesses ranging from rashes to cancer are far too common. What’s also horrifyingly common is Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s laissez-faire response. A 2017 report by Public Herald shows that of the drinking water complaints filed by PA residents, the DEP considers 94% to be wholly unrelated to the oil and gas industries. In other words, the DEP claims that the water of thousands of PA residents living close to fracking operations is being poisoned by…gremlins? The DEP apparently sees no need to either answer that question or reign in the fracking industry that’s always at the scene of the crime. The report reviewed more than 1,000 water complaints and found that the DEP goes above and beyond mere negligence. As one resident put it, “I think the state is in bed with the gas companies. My husband calls them DGP – Department of Gas Protection – because that’s what they’re about. To hell with us.” Her hunch is spot on. According to a 2016 report by Common Cause Pennsylvania and Conservation Voters of PA, between 2014 and 2015 alone, the natural gas industry contributed $2.7 million to political campaigns in the state and spent about $17.5 million lobbying. This kind of direct bribery explains why the DEP has not only ignored water complaints but why it’s shrugged at the Mariner East 2 project spilling 90 times in 42 distinct locations amounting to 202,000 gallons of leaked drilling fluids – and it’s still only in the construction phase. Indeed, the entire regulatory and permitting process for the project has been a joke. Despite the fact that 350-mile long ME2 pipeline would carry highly explosive compressed liquified gasses, it’s only subject to the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s safety standards governing uncompressed liquids such as methane and flammable liquids – which are less volatile. For instance, in 2016, a methane leak due to a ruptured pipeline, destroyed a house 200 feet away and severely damaged a home 800 feet away. A man inside sustained third degree burns. Still, that was just methane. When the compressed liquified gasses leak from a pipeline like ME2, they immediately convert to gas and disperse at varying rates, making containment impossible. Simply turning on a light switch could trigger an explosion miles from the leak point. A 2016 FracTracker report shows that more than 100,000 people and 40 schools are in the blast zone for the ME2 pipeline. Regardless, ETP enjoys public utility status meaning that they can seize land via eminent domain, operating under the guise of delivering a necessary public utility. How an ecologically and economically disastrous pipeline bound for an export facility bound for foreign markets amounts to a local public utility is an answer no public official seems able to answer.

Ongoing public pressure did finally force the DEP into action earlier this year. In January, the DEP suspended ETP’s construction permits citing permit violations which included even more spills and horizontal directional drilling at sites they had no legal right to drill at. A flimsy reprieve, the work stoppage came too late for many as construction had already damaged many waterways and poisoned drinking water. About a month and $12 million later, ETP got the go-ahead to carry on with construction and marked the occasion by dumping toxic sludge into landowner’s backyards. Meanwhile, in March, ETP’s existing natural gas liquids pipeline, Mariner East 1, was temporarily shut down due to the emergence of numerous sinkholes along the pipeline route. The Mariner East 2 project, however, was allowed to continue.

It’s important to note that the aforementioned incidents are only a cherry-picked selection of horrors. Still, to understand the current situation and the ongoing battle against the Mariner East 2 pipeline, some context is needed. (More backstory & coverage on the ground can be seen on Episode 125 of Act Out!) Any pipeline is unacceptable and unnecessary. But shoving a pipeline through a state that has been and continues to be ravaged by the oil and gas industries – is nothing short of ongoing ecological rape for corporate profit. But the fight continues.

In the early morning hours of Sunday, April 8th work crews arrived on the Gerhart’s property and cut down three trees and a monopod that had stood since the initial tree-clearing began in 2016. A few days later, workers and security crews showed up to fell trees on a neighboring property belonging to Rod Roberts, a wealthy landowner who bought up property in the area at the start of the fracking boom. All workers and security refused to identify themselves to landowners and on the warmest day of the year so far, workers wore masks to further obscure their identities. Based on previous knowledge, there’s a good chance the security firm is TigerSwan, the now infamous jacked-up private security firm that used counter-terrorism tactics to infiltrate, surveil and attack water protectors at Standing Rock who were fighting ETP’s other project, the Dakota Access Pipeline. In November of 2016, TigerSwan received a license to operate in Pennsylvania and the Intercept reported in June of last year that the company has had a presence in the state since at least April. The surveillance tactics seen at Standing Rock have been noted at Camp White Pine as well including drones and low-flying helicopters. When the masked workers showed up, the helicopter returned as well. A couple of small shacks were also set up where workers and security stayed overnight. As of the writing of this article, workers and security still have not identified themselves and refuse to answer questions even pertaining to the legality of their actions. When Ellen Gerhart approached them and asked for a waiver that gives special permission to cut trees after March 31st, in accordance with the Endangered Species Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, she was further ignored.

The situation is dire but the fight is not over. “Energy Transfer Partners always operates without the ability to imagine the perseverance and dedication of the people who oppose it,” a Camp White Pine Facebook post from April 11th notes. When I spoke to Elise she re-iterated this message and added “We have to fight it. People can do more than they think.” She said it’s our collective responsibility to take a stand, that those with privilege should use it in these fights because regardless of who you are, you are affected by the oppression and destruction meted out by these companies. There are ongoing legal actions regarding water contamination and eminent domain and this coming weekend, Camp White Pine will host an Earth Day celebration to plant new trees and renew the fight for people and planet in the face of corporate destruction. In the midst of the fight, the plan to build is always present. Elise started her Earth Day celebration early by planting a tree she named “ol pain in the ass,” remarking that it was part of her 50 year plan.

Lonely though the front lines may be, the company couldn’t be better. And as we’ve also seen with the ongoing tree-sits against the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a small group of dedicated people can make a big difference. No company, no dirty energy project is insurmountable. Before hanging up the phone, Elise closes with a simple but loaded phrase: “Keep saying no.”

‘Cool and Calm’ Southwest Pilot a Pioneer in Her Field

BOERNE, Texas—The Southwest Airlines pilot being lauded as a hero in a harrowing emergency landing after a passenger was partially blown out of the jet’s damaged fuselage is also being hailed for her pioneering role in a career where she has been one of the few women at the controls.

Tammie Jo Shults, one of the first female fighter pilots in the U.S. Navy, was the captain and piloting the Dallas-bound Flight 1380 when it made an emergency landing Tuesday in Philadelphia, according to her husband, Dean Shults.

One of the engines on the Boeing 737 exploded while the plane was traveling 500 mph (800 kph) at 30,000 feet (9144 m) with 149 people on board. Shrapnel hit the plane and passengers said they had to rescue a woman who was being blown out of a damaged window. The woman later died of blunt force trauma to her head, neck and torso.

Shults calmly relayed details about the crisis to air traffic controllers, and passengers commended her handling of the situation.

Friends at Shults’ church in Boerne, Texas, about 30 miles northwest of San Antonio, said Wednesday they were not surprised after listening to the recording and reading media reports about her actions.

“Everybody is talking about Tammie Jo and how cool and calm she was in a crisis, and that’s just Tammie Jo,” Rachel Russo said. “That’s how she’s wired.”

Shults was commissioned into the Navy in 1985 and reached the rank of lieutenant commander, said Commander Ron Flanders, the spokesman for Naval Air Forces in San Diego.

Women aviators were excluded from combat missions until the month after Shults got off active duty in March 1993, but Flanders said Shults flew during Operation Desert Storm trainings as an aggressor enemy pilot.

“While we at that time had an exclusion, she was in fact helping male pilots hone their skills,” Flanders said.

Veteran Navy combat aviator Linda Maloney said that she and Shults were among a small group of women who worked to see the combat exclusion rule repealed.

“Obviously it was frustrating,” said Maloney, who became among the first women to join a combat military flying squadron and was deployed to the Arabian Gulf. “We go through the same training that the guys do, and our hope was the Navy would allow us to fly in combat at some point.”

Shults was featured in Maloney’s book “Military Fly Moms” along with the stories and photos of 69 other women U.S. military veterans.

Russo and Staci Thompson, who has known Shults for about 20 years and was nanny to her two children when they were small, said she “loved” her military career but has alluded to frustrations and challenges that came with it.

They also said she embraced those experiences to make her stronger and guide her into a role as a mentor to young female pilots or girls thinking about a military career.

“She learned a lot about overcoming things as a woman in a male-dominated field,” Russo said.

Shults is from New Mexico, according to a personnel file from the Navy, and was a 1983 graduate of MidAmerica Nazarene University in Olathe, Kansas, where she earned degrees in biology and agribusiness.

Shults’ brother-in-law, Gary Shults, said her husband also is a Southwest pilot and told him she made the emergency landing.

“She’s a formidable woman, as sharp as a tack,” said Gary Shults, a dentist in San Antonio. “My brother says she’s the best pilot he knows.”

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Schmall reported from Fort Worth, Texas. Associated Press writers Adam Kealoha Causey in Oklahoma City, Ben Finley in Norfolk, Virginia, and Terry Wallace and business writer David Koening in Dallas contributed to this story.

Ex-Playboy Model Free Now to Talk About Affair With Trump

LOS ANGELES—A former Playboy model who said she had a 10-month affair with now-President Donald Trump settled her lawsuit Wednesday with a supermarket tabloid over an agreement that prohibited her from discussing the relationship publicly.

Karen McDougal’s settlement with the company that owns the National Enquirer “restores to me the rights to my life story and frees me from this contract that I was misled into signing nearly two years ago,” she said in a statement Wednesday.

In August 2016, the tabloid’s parent company, American Media Inc., paid McDougal $150,000 for the rights to her story about the alleged relationship, but the story never ran.

Last month, McDougal filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles asking to invalidate the contract. The suit alleged Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, was secretly involved in her discussions with AMI executives.

Federal agents raided Cohen’s office and residence last week seeking any information on payments made in 2016 to McDougal and porn actress Stormy Daniels, according to people familiar with the investigation but not authorized to discuss it publicly. Daniels has said she had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006. The search warrants also sought bank records, records on Cohen’s dealings in the taxi industry and his communications with the Trump campaign, the people said.

Under the settlement agreement, McDougal can keep the $150,000 she was paid and AMI has the rights to up to $75,000 for any future profits from her story about the relationship. The company also retains the rights to photographs of McDougal that it already has, the settlement said.

AMI had argued McDougal had been allowed to speak about her relationship since 2016 and the contract gave the company discretion over whether to publish the story.

In an interview with CNN that aired last month, McDougal said Trump tried to pay her after their first sexual tryst at a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2006. McDougal said she continued the relationship with Trump for about 10 months and broke it off in April 2007 because she felt guilty.

The White House has said Trump denies having an affair with McDougal. Trump married his current wife, Melania Trump, in 2005, and their son, Barron, was born in 2006.

“My goal from the beginning was to restore my rights and not to achieve any financial gain, and this settlement does exactly that,” McDougal said. “I am relieved to be able to tell the truth about my story when asked, and I look forward to being able to return to my private life and focus on what matters to me.”

Republican Official Credits Voter ID Law for Trump Wisconsin Victory

Democrats and elected officials have long argued that a Wisconsin voter identification law allowed Donald Trump to win the state in 2016 by keeping thousands of voters from the polls. A top Republican official has now asserted the same.

Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, who defended the voter identification law in court, told conservative radio host Vicki McKenna Thursday, “We battled to get voter ID on the ballot for the November ’16 election. How many of your listeners really honestly are sure that Sen. [Ron] Johnson was going to win reelection or President Trump was going to win Wisconsin if we didn’t have voter ID to keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest and have integrity?”

Mother Jones reports:

The law, which went into effect in 2016, required specific forms of government-issued photo identification to vote. In a cover story last year, Mother Jones reported that the law kept tens of thousands of eligible voters from the polls and likely tipped the state to Trump. A federal court found in 2014 that 9 percent of registered voters in Wisconsin did not possess the identification necessary to vote. In a University of Wisconsin study published in September 2017, 1 in 10 registered voters in Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County who did not cast a ballot in 2016 cited the voter ID law as a reason why. That meant that up to 23,000 voters in the two heavily Democratic counties—and as many as 45,000 voters statewide—didn’t vote because of the voter ID law. Trump won the state by 22,000 votes.

African Americans, who favored Hillary Clinton over Trump by an 88-to-8 margin, were three times as likely as whites to say they were deterred from voting by the law.

Voter turnout indeed fell most dramatically in Milwaukee’s black neighborhoods, which were expected to vote for Clinton. Nearly 41,000 fewer people in Milwaukee voted in 2016 than in 2012. Rolling Stone reports that while Wisconsin ranked second in the nation in voter participation in 2008 and 2012, the state saw a 3.3 percent drop in voter turnout in 2016—the largest decrease of any state other than Mississippi. About half of the decrease occurred in Milwaukee.

Neil Albrecht, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, told Mother Jones, “It is very probable that between the photo ID law and the changes to voter registration, enough people were prevented from voting to have changed the outcome of the presidential election in Wisconsin.”

Republicans asserted that the voter ID laws were necessary to prevent fraud, though voter fraud is rare in Wisconsin and nationwide: According to one major study, there were only 31 cases of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion votes cast between 2000 and 2014.

Mother Jones continues:

Though Schimel said the law would “keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest,” the state didn’t present a single case of voter impersonation in court that the law would have stopped. The law remains in effect for the 2018 elections and could once again boost Republicans running for reelection, including Schimel and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

Walker disagreed with Schimel’s suggestion that the voter ID law enabled Johnson to win re-election and Trump to win the state in the 2016 election. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Asked Monday whether he agreed with Schimel that voter ID made the difference for both candidates, Walker told reporters that Johnson worked “his tail off” on the campaign trail and made a “great connection” with voters.

As for Trump, Walker said it was clear people weren’t happy with Hillary Clinton because she didn’t visit the state after the primary and Trump connected with people who felt ignored.

Republicans have also been accused of gerrymandering by manipulating Wisconsin voter district boundaries. In November 2016, a federal court panel struck down Wisconsin’s state legislative maps as “an unconstitutional political gerrymander” that was “intended to burden the representational rights of Democratic voters … by impeding their ability to translate their votes into legislative seats.”

How Much Longer Can the U.S. Remain a Superpower?

Having already violated every tenet of international law in its proxy jihadist war against Syria, including the seizure of one-third of the country, the United States invoked a Non-Law, a Law That Never Was, to justify its missile strikes against fictitious “chemical warfare” facilities. Syrian President Assad “kills his own people,” said Trump, leader of the nation whose police kill more of its “own people” than any country except (fellow white settler state) Brazil, and whose prisons entomb one-quarter of all the world’s inmates. (One out of every eight prisoners on the planet is an African-American.)

On the Saturday morning after the bombs fell in Damascus and Homs, Omalii Yeshitela, chairman of the Black Is Back Coalition for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations, held a press conference in St. Louis to denounce Washington’s aggression. “If you can use that justification,” said Yeshitela, “that, somehow, the Syrian state is attacking its own people and, therefore, the U.S. can rain missiles, along with France and England, on Syria, then what would prevent Russia from attacking the United States because of all the people that the United States is killing in our communities, all of the starvation that is imposed on our communities, the fact that more than a million Africans are lumped up in prison?”

In his post-strike statement, President Trump called chemical weapons “uniquely dangerous”—as if such uniqueness provided legal justification for Washington’s act of war. But the United States has been poisoning “its own” Black people for generations. “They talk about chemical warfare, but books have even been written about how crack cocaine was introduced into the community through the CIA—the same CIA that’s involved in murdering people in Syria and other places around the world,” said Yeshitela.

The United States began in smallpox-infected blankets and mountains of Native American scalps-for-bounty, and remains true to its genocidal imperatives. “We live in a country today where people are living in concentration camps that are euphemistically referred to as Indian reservations. What is it that would keep another country from attacking the United States based on that?” asked Yeshitela.

Imperial Shriek

The fading empire refuses to accept the humiliation of defeat of its jihadist proxies, the head-cutters Washington and Saudi Arabia have nurtured as a foreign terror legion since deploying them against a leftist government in Afghanistan and its Soviet ally almost 40 years ago.

The billions in cash and arms that flowed into jihadist structures in Syria and Iraq since 2011 equipped and financed an al-Qaida army (al Nusra) mighty enough to absorb and dominate a menagerie of other murderous Islamic factions, and to finally birth ISIS, the death cult caliphate. But the Syrian Arab Army, with the help of Russia, Iran, and its Shia neighbors in Lebanon and Iraq, is now on the cusp of retaking the bulk of its national territory—except for the vital region of its oil fields, upon which the U.S. military sits like flies on shit.

Aside from the remaining head-hunters, Washington’s only indigenous ally in Syria is an army of Marxist Kurds who were among the prime victims—and fiercest resisters—of the American-sponsored jihadist onslaught. For years they were tacit allies of Syria’s government—whose secularism they share—in the struggle against the U.S.-sponsored barbarians. But Don Uncle Sam made them an offer of protection-or-else that they believed could not be refused, and the Kurds are now pawns—as is the whole planet, in a sense—to Washington’s quandary: How does the world’s sole Superpower remain in a region where it is despised, after its proxy forces have been defeated? And if it cannot remain, is it any longer The Superpower?

Washington is answering this imperial existential question the only way it can, with its awesome war machine, oiled by lies that no one believes outside the western corporate information bubble. There was no chemical attack by Syria, this month or last April or in August of 2013. All lies, but derivative of the much bigger lies that sought to justify the U.S.-Saudi-Turkish-French-British (and, of course, Israeli) war against, first Libya, and all but simultaneously, Syria: that these were civil wars, rather than naked imperial aggression.

Huge lies require powerful megaphones to mold the minds of the host country population, the only people that can (theoretically) shut down the U.S war machine without firing a shot. The Iraq war so repulsed the U.S. public, it became politically impossible for George Bush to “stay the course,” or for Pentagon planners to contemplate another large-scale American invasion of the region. The only alternative was an enormously beefed-up al-Qaida to wage holy terror wars that the corporate media would dutifully “report” as civil wars of an “Arab Spring.”

Most white Americans bought into the lie because they wanted to: imperial-mindedness is white privilege on a global scale. Blacks have historically opposed U.S. militarism, but they acquiesced to Obama’s aggressions and neutered their own peace politics because they wanted to—in deference to the Black family in the White House.

But Obama-Time is over; the spell is broken. Donald Trump is the sum of all Black fears and loathings, an arch racist who is perceived as rendering the entire planet unsafe for people of color. Blacks are primed to oppose all of his policies, foreign and domestic. Black people are the only U.S. group that shares the general global distrust of U.S. foreign policy motives. Moreover, Black America is inherently skeptical of U.S. power structures, because Power in the U.S. has always lied about Black people—and about people of color elsewhere in the world.

As Omali Yeshitela said of Trump’s “flimsy excuse” for bombing Syria: “It’s all fabrication, and we have been victims of such fabrications for 400 years in this country.”

Glen Ford is the executive editor of Black Agenda Report. He can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Island-Wide Blackout in Puerto Rico: ‘Like the First Day of Maria’

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — An island-wide blackout hit Puerto Rico on Wednesday as the U.S. territory struggles to repair an increasingly unstable power grid nearly seven months after Hurricane Maria. Officials said an excavator accidentally downed a transmission line.

Officials said it could take 24 to 36 hours to fully restore power to more than 1.4 million customers as outrage grew across the island about the state of Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority. It is the second major outage in less than a week, with the previous one affecting some 840,000 customers.

“This is too much,” said Luis Oscar Rivera, a 42-year-old computer technician who just got normal power back at his house less than two months ago. “It’s like the first day of Maria all over again.”

Several large power outages have hit Puerto Rico in recent months, but Wednesday was the first time since the Category 4 storm struck on Sept. 20 that the U.S. territory has experienced a full island-wide blackout. It snarled traffic across the island, interrupted classes and work and forced dozens of businesses to temporarily close, including the island’s largest mall and popular tourist attractions like a 16th-century fort in the historic part of Puerto Rico’s capital.

Backup generators roared to life at the island’s largest public hospital and at its main international airport, where officials reported no cancellations or delays. Meanwhile, the power company said its own customer service center was out of service and asked people to go online or use the phone.

Officials said restoring power to hospitals, airports, banking centers and water pumping systems was their priority. Following that would be businesses and then homes.

Carmen Yulin Cruz, mayor of the capital of San Juan, said the outage would not interrupt the last of a two-game series between the Cleveland Indians and Minnesota Twins, which is being played on the island. She said all emergency systems at Hiram Bithorn stadium are functioning and that tower lights and additional security will be placed at the stadium’s parking lot.

Justo Gonzalez, the power company’s executive sub-director, told reporters that a private contractor removing a collapsed tower during unrelated power restoration efforts near the south coast hit the transmission line on Wednesday with an excavator.

“We are working in areas that are quite crowded with high voltage lines,” he said.

It is the second such incident in less than a week. On Thursday, a tree fell on a power line as the same private contractor cleared land in central Puerto Rico, leading to a widespread power outage. A backup line that was supposed to prevent that outage failed.

Fredyson Martinez, vice president of a union that represents power company workers in Puerto Rico, told The Associated Press that he was concerned about the two back-to-back incidents.

“That is not normal,” he said.

Government officials said that a company hired by Cobra Energy known as Dgrimm was involved in both incidents that led to the power outages. Dgrimm had been asked to change its security protocols after the first incident, and it has since been terminated, said William Rios, power generation director.

“This is unacceptable for us,” he said, adding that government attorneys are meeting with officials at Cobra Energy, a Mammoth Energy subsidiary hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to help with power restoration efforts.

Angel Figueroa, president of the power workers’ union, told reporters workers are investigating why a backup breaker at a main power station in the island’s southern region did not function when the outage occurred, causing the entire electrical grid to shut down to protect itself. He noted it was the same problem that caused a 2016 power outage that affected the entire island.

Geraldo Quinones, a power company spokesman, said in a phone interview that crews are investigating why the breaker failed.

Rivera said he worries that such serious power outages are still occurring as the new Atlantic hurricane season, which starts on June 1, approaches.

“If there’s a slight storm, we’re going to be worse off than we are right now,” he said.

Federal officials who testified before Congress last week said they expect to have a plan by June on how to strengthen and stabilize the island’s power grid, noting that up to 75 percent of distribution lines were damaged by high winds and flooding. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing the federal power restoration efforts, said they hope to have the entire island fully energized by May. Some 40,000 power customers still remain without normal electrical service as a result of the hurricane.

The new blackout occurred as Puerto Rico legislators debate a bill that would privatize the island’s power company, which is $14 billion in debt and relies on infrastructure nearly three times older than the industry average.

Miguel Diaz-Canel, 57, to Be Cuba’s Next President

HAVANA—Cuba on Wednesday selected 57-year-old First Vice President Miguel Mario Diaz-Canel Bermudez as sole candidate to succeed Raul Castro as president of Cuba, the centerpiece of an effort to ensure that the country’s single-party system outlasts the aging revolutionaries who created it.

The virtually certain unanimous approval of the National Assembly will install someone from outside the Castro family in the country’s highest government office for the first time in nearly six decades.

The 86-year-old Castro will remain head of the Communist Party, designated by the constitution as “the superior guiding force of society and the state.” As a result, Castro is almost certain to remain the most powerful person in Cuba for the time being. His departure from the presidency is nonetheless a symbolically charged moment for a country accustomed to 60 years of absolute rule first by revolutionary leader Fidel Castro and, for the last decade, his younger brother.

Nominated as new first vice president was Salvador Valdes Mesa, a 72-year-old Afro-Cuban former union official who has held a long series of high posts in the Cuban government. The government’s official Candidacy Commission also nominated another five vice presidents of the Council of State, Cuba’s highest government body. Only one of the five, 85-year-old Ramiro Valdez, was among the revolutionaries who fought with the Castros in the eastern Sierra Maestra mountains.

Facing biological reality, Raul Castro is working to ensure a smooth transition from him and his small group of former guerrillas to a new generation that can maintain the government’s grip on power in the face of economic stagnation, an aging population and waning revolutionary fervor among Cuban youth attuned more to global consumer culture than the anti-capitalist, nationalist messaging of the state-run media.

That media went into overdrive Wednesday with a single message: Cuba’s system is continuing in the face of change. Commentators on state television and online offered lengthy explanations of why Cuba’s single-party politics and socialist economy are superior to multi-party democracy and free markets, and assured Cubans that no fundamental changes were occurring, despite some new faces at the top.

“It falls on our generation to give continuity to the revolutionary process,” said assembly member Jorge Luis Torres, a municipal councilman from central Artemisa province who appeared to be in his 40s. “We’re a generation born after the revolution, whose responsibility is driving the destiny of the nation.”

Most Cubans know their first vice president as an unremarkable speaker who initially assumed a public profile so low it was virtually nonexistent. Until March, Diaz-Canel had said nothing to the Cuban people about the type of president he would be. The white-haired, generally unsmiling Diaz-Canel had been seen at greatest length in a leaked video of a Communist Party meeting where he somberly pledged to shutter some independent media and labeled some European embassies as outposts of foreign subversion.

That image has begun to change slightly this year as Diaz-Canel stepped into the moderate limelight offered by Cuba’s Soviet-style state media. With his public comments in March, many Cubans got a glimpse of him as a flesh-pressing local politician, an image familiar to residents of the central province where he was born and spent nine years in a role akin to a governor.

Castro entered the National Assembly just after 9 a.m. accompanied by a broadly smiling Diaz-Canel.

The 604 assembly members were sworn in — a 605th was absent — then voted for the president and vice president of the legislative body itself. The result of the votes for president and vice presidents and other national leaders is expected to be officially announced Thursday, the anniversary of the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion defeated by Cuban forces in 1961.

As in Cuba’s legislative elections, all of the leaders being voted in on Wednesday are selected by a government-appointed commission. Ballots offer only the option of approving or disapproving the official candidate. Candidates generally receive more than 90 percent of the votes in their favor.

Fidel Castro was prime minister and president from 1959 until he fell ill in 2006. Although Osvaldo Dorticos was president of Cuba during Fidel Castro’s time as prime minister, he was considered a figurehead beside the man who led Cuba’s revolution, forged its single-party socialist system and ruled by fiat.

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Associated Press Writer Ben Fox contributed to this report.

Court Reins In ‘Crime of Violence’ Deportations

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a provision in a law subjecting immigrants to deportation for crimes of violence is unconstitutionally vague, thanks to the swing vote of President Trump’s high court nominee, Justice Neil Gorsuch. The ruling goes against the president’s effort to deport immigrants who commit crimes in the United States, and it takes issue with the criterion of having committed a “crime of violence” as grounds for deportation.

“What does that mean?” Gorsuch asked of the term “crime of violence.” “Just take the crime at issue in this case, California burglary, which applies to everyone from armed home intruders to door-to-door salesmen peddling shady products. How, on that vast spectrum, is anyone supposed to locate the ordinary case and say whether it includes a substantial risk of physical force? The truth is, no one knows.”

“The law’s silence leaves judges to their intuitions and the people to their fate. In my judgment, the Constitution demands more,” he added.

Politico continues:

The law does add a bit more definition to the standard, covering crimes that include actual violence, attempted violence or a threat of violence, but goes on to sweep in crimes that involve “a substantial risk [of using] physical force against the person or property of another.” That last portion requiring an assessment of how likely a crime is to involve violence is too vague to be enforced, the high court ruled Tuesday.

The majority opinion, written by Justice Elena Kagan, reads:, “The void-for-vagueness doctrine, as we have called it, guarantees that ordinary people have ‘fair notice’ of the conduct a statute proscribes. And the doctrine guards against arbitrary or discriminatory law enforcement by insisting that a statute provide standards to govern the actions of police officers, prosecutors, juries and judges.”

The four dissenters released two separate opinions totaling more than 47 pages. Justice Clarence Thomas warned that the court’s decision could lead to “the invalidation of scores of similarly worded state and federal statutes.”

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: “Today’s holding invalidates a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act … on which the government relies to ‘ensure that dangerous criminal aliens are removed from the United States,’ ” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.

Department of Homeland Security press secretary Tyler Houlton said the ruling “significantly undermines DHS’s efforts to remove aliens convicted of certain violent crimes, including sexual assault, kidnapping, and burglary.”

The ruling follows a similar one made in 2015, in which the court struck down a provision targeting armed violence on the grounds that it was unconstitutionally vague. The clause allowed past convictions to be treated as violent felonies if they involved “conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another.” The late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion in that case, asserting, “Decisions under the residual clause have proved to be anything but evenhanded, predictable, or consistent.”

A Justice Department spokesman issued a statement that reads: “The Justice Department believes that certain crimes committed by an illegal alien, visa holder, or an alien otherwise granted lawful status in the United States, should trigger their removal. Therefore, we call on Congress to close criminal alien loopholes to ensure that criminal aliens who commit those crimes—for example, burglary in many states, drug trafficking in Florida, and even sexual abuse of a minor in New Jersey—are not able to avoid the consequences that should come with breaking our nation’s laws.”

University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck told Politico that Gorsuch’s vote should not come as a surprise: “He signaled pretty clearly he was leaning this way at argument, and it’s deeply consistent with Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in Johnson,” he said. “As for the White House, they may well be pissed, but this is Gorsuch’s formalist textualism—and the real problem lies with the statute.”

A conservative attorney who asked to remain anonymous added that Gorsuch is “sort of following the Scalia tack on this,” adding, “You’ve got a penalty being carried out by an administrative process and he would impose a higher burden [where] life, liberty or property are at issue.”

Who Will Protect Elections From U.S. Oligarchs?

I recently heard on cable news that special counsel Robert Mueller wanted to interview some “Russian oligarchs” about their supposed influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Liberal talking heads at such organizations as MSNBC and CNN keep warning that nothing has been done yet to protect the integrity of our voting process against “Russian interference” as the 2018 midterm elections loom ever closer on the nation’s horizon.

What about the American oligarchs, I wondered, people like businessman Richard Uihlein, who regularly distort U.S. elections at every level—local, state and federal? Who will protect our “democracy” from the plutocratic “wealth primary” power of the American oligarchy?

If you are like most U.S. citizens, you’ve never heard of Richard Uihlein. An heir to the Milwaukee-based Schlitz beer fortune, Uihlein is the billionaire CEO of Uline Inc., a private, family-owned Wisconsin company that sells shipping and packaging materials to the tune of $2 billion in annual revenue. He lives in a mansion in Lake Forest, a hyper-opulent preserve north of Chicago.

He’s also way into right-wing politics. As one can learn from a quick trip to the Center for Responsive Politics’ (CRP) website, Uihlein invested $24 million—that’s right, $24 million—in the 2016 elections. His political contributions went to Republican candidates and Republican-affiliated and “conservative” (that is, radically regressive and reactionary groups such as the Club for Growth. A longtime supporter of right-wing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Uihlein is a major sponsor of hard-right Republican candidates—at both the state and federal levels—and organizations across the nation.

So far, Uihlein is the top political contributor in the 2018 federal U.S. election cycle, at $21 million. In 2016, however, he was just the nation’s ninth biggest political investor. Above him on the plutocratic “wealth primary” scale stood the San Francisco hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer ($91 million, all to Democratic candidates and Democratic Party-affiliated “liberal outside groups”); Las Vegas billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson ($83 million to Republicans and the right); Florida billionaire financier Donald Sussman ($42 million to Democrats and “liberal” groups); Chicago multimillionaire media mogul Fred Eychaner ($38 million to Democrats and “liberal” groups); Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook and the “world’s youngest self-made billionaire” ($27 million to Democrats and “liberal” groups); billionaire mathematician and hedge fund manager James Simons ($27 million to Democrats and “liberal” groups); billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer ($26 million to Republicans and right-wing groups); and billionaire right-wing hedge fund manager Robert Mercer ($26 million to Republicans and right-wing groups). Michael Bloomberg rounded out the top 10 list at a cool $23,786,083.

These megadonors are the superrich cream atop a deep plutocratic pitcher. The CRP’s list of the top 100 individual contributors to federal candidates during the 2016 election cycle ends with Karen Wright, CEO of a leading gas-compressor manufacturer. She gave a whopping $2.2 million to Republicans and the right.

How are such ridiculously astronomical political investments—far beyond the capacity of all but a super-opulent minority of U.S. citizens—possible under U.S. law? Aren’t there limits on how much rich people can spend on U.S. elections?

Not really. Not for rich people whose agents know how get past the nation’s porous regulations. Federal law sets a $2,500 per-person, per-election limit on how much a donor can give to a federal candidate, a $30,800 per-person, per-year limit on donations to national party committees, and a $10,000 total limit on per-person contributions to state, district or local party committees.

But the rules change when it comes to technically “independent” nonparty and “outside” groups called political action committees, known as PACs. A person can give as much as $5,000 to a PAC that contributes directly to candidates. And there are no limits whatsoever on how much a person can give to a PAC that declares it will spend its money totally independently from a candidate’s campaign. These “independent expenditure” groups, which can receive unlimited contributions from individuals, corporations or unions, are commonly called super PACs.

Some nonprofit groups, called “social welfare” organizations or “501(c)(4) groups,” can also accept unlimited contributions. The primary purpose of these groups cannot technically be political, but they can spend substantial amounts on political activities, such as TV commercials.

Adding to the plutocratic muddle, the Supreme Court’s infamous 2010 Citizens United decision overthrew a federal ban on corporations and unions making independent expenditures and financing electioneering communications. It gave corporations and unions the green light to spend unlimited sums on ads and other political tools calling for the election or defeat of individual candidates.

This has opened the door to astonishing levels of private spending in the nation’s public elections. “During the 2016 election cycle,” CRP staffer Bob Biersack notes, “the top 20 individual donors (whose contributions were disclosed) gave more than $500 million combined to political organizations. The 20 largest organizational donors also gave a total of more than $500 million, and more than $1 billion came from the top 40 donors. … At a time when Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were confirming that large numbers of people donating small amounts could fund successful campaigns, the extraordinary role being played by the very few donors who give the most may be the most important element in this new era.”

Thanks to the problem of “dark money,” moreover, we don’t have a complete record of which rich people give how much to which candidates. While super PACS must disclose their donors, 501(c)(4)s are not required to do so. These nondisclosing organizations engage in numerous political activities: buying ads that advocate for or against a candidate, running phone banks, making contributions to super PACs (!) and more.

It’s reached the point where, as a former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer last year, “a single billionaire can write an eight-figure check and put not just their thumb but their whole hand on the scale—and we often have no idea who they are. … [A] random billionaire can change politics and public policy—to sweep everything else off the table—even if they don’t speak publicly, and even if there’s almost no public awareness of his or her views.”

Their right to not disclose means that the campaign finance data listed above significantly underestimates total political investments made by the nation’s leading election donors. (And that was just federal data. It does not include campaign finance at the state level, where the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers focus a lot of their legendary election funding and policymaking power. The Kochs and their allies understand that, in the words of historian Nancy MacLean, “corporate and conservative interests can make their will felt most easily in state governments—and are more likely to be challenged successfully by the citizenry at the federal and local levels—partly because state affairs are less well monitored by the people the press”).

According to the CRP, outside spending by nondisclosing 501(c)(4) groups—so-called dark money—exceeded $160 million in 2016. “A [U.S. campaign finance] system founded on the principle of individuals giving limited, disclosed contributions directly to candidates, parties and PACs has morphed into a system that allows individuals and organizations to give hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars, to groups to spend in elections, some of whom are closely aligned with candidates and parties, without disclosure. …”

Under the high court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the federal government can set no legal limits on a candidate’s total campaign expenditure except in cases in which public campaign funding is made available to candidates. The sky’s the limit.

All of this and more makes the United States’ ever more expensive electoral politics a wild West-like money chase in which candidates who want to be viable must endlessly court big-dollar, business-class donors who do not generally invest without profit-serving policy returns in mind.

No other “democracy” in the developed world comes close to the United States when it comes to giving big-money donors unregulated power in their national electoral processes. Along with other and related characteristics of its election and party system—winner-take-all contests with no proportional representation, rampant partisan gerrymandering of election districts, voter registration problems, corporate media bias and the “federalist” decentralization and partisan control of U.S. election process—this plutocratic campaign finance free-for-all is why the Electoral Integrity Project (a research undertaking funded by the Australian Research Council with a team of researchers based at the University of Sydney and Harvard University) ranks the democratic election integrity of U.S. elections below that of all 19 North and Western European democracies and also below that of 10 other nations in the Americas (Costa Rica, Uruguay, Canada, Chile, Brazil, Jamaica, Grenada, Argentina, Barbados and Peru), 10 nations in Central and Eastern Europe, nine Asian-Pacific countries, two countries in the Middle East (Israel and Tunisia) and six African nations. The U.S. ranks dead last among “Western democracies.”

What does American campaign finance have to do with the 2016 election, whose outcome so much of the Democratic Party establishment and its many friends in the nation’s corporate media oligopoly blame on “Russian interference” and “Russian oligarchs”? A lot more than one might think from the media’s focus on “Russiagate” or from Biersack’s reflection on how “Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders [supposedly] confirm[ed] that large numbers of people donating small amounts could fund successful campaigns.”

An essential source here is the distinguished political scientist and money-politics analyst Thomas Ferguson’s recent study, co-authored with political scientist Paul Jorgensen and statistician Jie Chen, titled “Industrial Structure and Party Competition in an Age of Hunger Games: Donald Trump and the 2016 Presidential Election.” Ferguson, Jorgensen and Chen mined the nation’s complex finance data to paint an extraordinary portrait of how the American oligarchy’s campaign funding put Trump in the Oval Office.

Perhaps their most remarkable finding is that the left-leaning “populist” Sanders came tantalizingly close to winning the Democratic presidential nomination with no support from Big Business. The small-donor Sanders campaign was “without precedent in American politics not just since the New Deal, but across virtually the whole of American history … a major presidential candidate waging a strong, highly competitive campaign whose support from big business is essentially zero.” In the end, though, Sanders was foiled by the big-money candidate Hillary Clinton’s advance control of the Democratic National Committee and convention delegates. He dutifully complied with her corrupt victory and campaigned on her behalf as he promised from the start. The Wall Street establishment kept its command over the not-so-leftmost side of the American two-party system. Sanders failed.

Things were different on the Republican side. The right-leaning “populist” challenger—Trump—ran strangely outside the longstanding neoliberal Washington consensus, as an economic nationalist and isolationist. His raucous rallies were laced with dripping denunciations of Wall Street, Goldman Sachs and globalization; mockery of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq; rejection of the New Cold War with Russia; and pledges of allegiance to the “forgotten” American working class. “In striking contrast to every other Republican presidential nominee since 1936,” Ferguson, Jorgensen and Chen note, Trump “attacked globalization, free trade, international financiers, Wall Street, and even Goldman Sachs. … In a frontal assault on the American establishment,” Trump “proclaimed ‘America First.’ Mocking the Bush administration’s appeal to ‘weapons of mass destruction’ as a pretext for invading Iraq, he broke dramatically with two generations of GOP orthodoxy and spoke out in favor of more cooperation with Russia. He even criticized the ‘carried interest’ tax break beloved by high finance.”

This cost Trump much of the corporate and Wall Street financial support that Republican presidential candidates usually get. But however disingenuous and laced with racism and nativism it may have been, much of Trump’s rhetoric was popular with a considerable portion of the electorate, thanks to the widespread economic insecurity that had spread among the populace during the transparently bipartisan New Gilded Age and with special low-wage poignancy in the wake of the Great Recession. He would become the first Republican presidential nominee in memory to outperform his Democratic opponent with small (middle-class and working-class) donors.

It’s a mistake, however, to see Trump as a sign of small-donor potency in the American system. The billionaire Trump’s personal fortune permitted him to tap popular anger while leaping insultingly over the heads of his less wealthy, albeit corporate and Wall Street-backed competitors (“low energy” Jeb Bush and “little Marco” Rubio most notably) in the crowded Republican primary race. A Republican candidate dependent on the usual elite bankrollers would never have been able to get away with Trump’s crowd-pleasing—and CNN and Fox News rating-boosting—antics.

Things were different after Trump won the Republican nomination, however. He could no longer go it alone after the primaries. During the Republican National Convention and “then again in the late summer of 2016,” Ferguson, Jorgensen and Chen show, Trump’s “solo campaign had to be rescued by major industries plainly hoping for tariff relief, waves of other billionaires from the far, far right of the already far right Republican Party, and the most disruption-exalting corners of Wall Street.” By the authors’ carefully researched account, the Trump general election campaign relied for its success on “a giant wave of dark money—one that towered over anything in 2016 or even Mitt Romney’s munificently financed 2012 effort—to say nothing of any Russian Facebook experiments.” Along with giant contributions from the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife ($11 million), Sands Casino employees ($20 million) and Silicon Valley executives, Trump garnered a giant wave of money that “turned into a torrent” from big hedge funds and “large private equity firms, the part of Wall Street which had long championed hostile takeovers. …”

The critical late wave of right-wing big money came after Trump moved to rescue his flagging campaign by handing its direction from the Russia-tainted Paul Manafort to the white-nationalist and American-as-Apple-Pie Breitbart executive Steve Bannon, who advocated what proved to be a winning, Koch brothers-approved strategy: appeal to economically and culturally frustrated working- and middle-class whites in key battleground states, where the bloodless neoliberal and professional class centrism and snooty metropolitan multiculturalism of the Barack Obama presidency and Clinton campaign was certain to depress the Democratic “base” vote.

Along with the racist voter suppression carried out by Koch-backed Republican state governments (Ferguson, Jorgensen and Chen rightly chide Russia-obsessed political reporters and commentators for absurdly ignoring this important factor) and (the authors intriguingly suggest) major anti-union offensives conducted by employers in some battleground states, this major late-season influx of big right-wing political money helped tilt the election Trump’s way.

The Clinton campaign might still have prevailed if it hadn’t made egregiously stupid mistakes. It failed to set foot in Wisconsin after the Democratic convention or to purchase campaign ads in Michigan. Clinton got caught telling wealthy New York City donors that half of Trump’s supporters were “a basket of [racist, white, working-class] deplorables”—a hideous mistake hauntingly akin to Mitt Romney’s gaffe in 2012 when he was recorded telling elite donors that 47 percent of the population were a bunch of lazy welfare dependents. Above all, the Clinton team decided not to talk about policy. In an epic miscalculation, her team decided not to advance anything close to a standard, progressive-sounding, Democratic Party policy agenda. Clinton ran almost completely on the issue of candidate character and quality. This was a blunder of historic proportions, given Clinton’s own highly problematic character brand. Any campaign needs a reasonably strong policy platform to stand on in case of candidate difficulties.

What was her deafening policy silence about? Money—big American oligarchs’ money. Clinton’s campaign funding success went beyond her party’s usual corporate and financial backers to include normally Republican-affiliated capitalist sectors less disposed than their more liberal counterparts to abide the standard, progressive-sounding policy rhetoric of Democratic Party candidates. This was a curse. For “one fateful consequence of trying to appeal to so many conservative business interests,” Ferguson, Jorgensen and Chen note, “was strategic silence about most important matters of public policy. … Misgivings of major contributors who worried that the Clinton campaign message lacked real attractions for ordinary Americans were rebuffed. The campaign sought to capitalize on the angst within business by vigorously courting the doubtful and undecideds there, not in the electorate.”

As the authors show, there is little empirical evidence to support the Clinton and corporate Democrats’ self-interested and diversionary efforts to explain her epic fail and Trump’s jaw-dropping upset victory as the result of (1) Russian interference, (2) then-FBI Director James Comey’s October Surprise revelation that his agency was not done investigating Clinton’s emails, and/or (3) some imagined big wave of white, working-class racism, nativism and sexism brought to the surface by Trump. The impacts of both items 1 and 2 were infinitesimal in comparison with the role that big campaign money played both in silencing Clinton and funding Trump. The blame-the-deplorable-racist-white-working-class narrative is belied by basic underlying continuities in white, working-class voting patterns. As Ferguson, Jorgensen and Chen note, “Neither turnout nor the partisan division of the vote at any level looks all that different from other recent elections. … 2016’s alterations in voting behavior are so minute that the pattern is only barely differentiated from 2012.” It was about the money—the big establishment money that the Clinton campaign took (as the authors plausibly argue) to recommend policy silence and the different, right-wing big money that approved Trump’s comparative right-populist policy boisterousness.

Imagine if Sanders had snuck past Clinton in the primary race. Could he have defeated the billionaire and right-wing billionaire-backed Trump in the general election? Perhaps. Sanders consistently outperformed Clinton in one-on-one match-up polls vis-à-vis Trump during the primary season, but much of the big money (and corporate media) that backed Clinton would likely have gone over to Trump had the supposedly “radical” Sanders been the Democratic nominee.

Even if Sanders has been elected president, moreover, Noam Chomsky is certainly correct in his recent judgment that a President Sanders “couldn’t have done a thing” because he would have had “nobody [on his side] in Congress, no governors, no legislatures, none of the big economic powers, which have an enormous effect on policy.” A Sanders presidency would certainly have been undermined—if it had tried to do anything seriously progressive—by several factors, including a significant downturn in capitalist investment (with an attendant rise in joblessness) and the relentless hostility of the corporate media oligopoly. Right-wing media, including Fox News, talk radio and Breitbart News (which has received at least $10 million in backing from the arch-reactionary U.S. plutocrat Robert Mercer) would have gone ballistic, driving its followers to scary new levels of deadly disruption.

As Chomsky might have added, Sanders’ oligarchy-imposed “failures” would have been great fodder for the disparagement and smearing of progressive, left-leaning and majority-backed policy change. “See,” the reigning plutocratic media and politics culture would have said, “we tried all that and it was a disaster!”

That and more are reminders of something I made a special point of highlighting (with no special claim to originality) in my 2014 book, “They Rule: The 1% vs. Democracy“: Campaign finance is just the tip of the iceberg in how the American capitalist ruling class owns and runs the political and policy systems the United States. It’s got nothing to do with Russia.

Meanwhile, though, political money matters a great deal as we race into the 2018 midterm contests and the 2020 elections with U.S. “election integrity” still unprotected from the special plutocratic power of America’s wealthy masters. Nobody in Congress is talking seriously about passing bills to remove private cash from the public elections—or even to mandate reasonable “dark money” disclosure. Fuming about Moscow’s allegedly powerful conspiracy against our supposedly democratic elections looks more than a little ridiculous when considered alongside the deafening official silence on America’s own oligarchic electoral system.

Pompeo and Kim Have Met in North Korea, U.S. Officials Reveal

WASHINGTON—CIA Director Mike Pompeo recently traveled to North Korea to meet with leader Kim Jong Un, two officials told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

The highly unusual, secret visit comes as the enemy nations prepare for a meeting between President Donald Trump and Kim within the next couple of months.

The officials spoke about Pompeo’s trip on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.

The Washington Post, which first reported Pompeo’s meeting with Kim, said it took place over Easter weekend — just over two weeks ago, shortly after the CIA chief was nominated to become secretary of state.

Trump, currently at his Florida resort hosting Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, said Tuesday that the U.S. and North Korea were holding direct talks at “extremely high levels” in preparation for a possible summit with Kim. He said five locations were under consideration for the meeting, which is slated to take place by early June.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump and Kim have not spoken directly.

Kim’s offer for a summit was initially conveyed to Trump by South Korea last month, and the president shocked many when it was announced that he had accepted. U.S. officials have indicated over the past two weeks that North Korea’s government has communicated directly with Washington that it is ready to discuss its nuclear weapons program.

It would be the first ever summit between U.S. and North Korea during more than six decades of hostility since the Korean War. North Korea’s nukes and capability to deliver them by ballistic missile pose a growing threat to the U.S. mainland.

The U.S. and North Korea do not have formal diplomatic relations, complicating the arrangements for contacts between the two governments. It is not unprecedented for U.S. intelligence officials to serve as a conduit for communication with Pyongyang.

In 2014, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper secretly visited North Korea to bring back two American detainees.

At his confirmation hearing last week to become the top U.S. diplomat, Pompeo played down expectations for a breakthrough deal on ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons at the planned Trump-Kim summit, but said it could lay the groundwork for a comprehensive agreement on denuclearization.

“I’m optimistic that the United States government can set the conditions for that appropriately so that the president and the North Korean leader can have that conversation and will set us down the course of achieving a diplomatic outcome that America and the world so desperately need,” Pompeo told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

After a year of escalating tensions, when North Korea conducted nuclear and long-range missile tests that drew world condemnation, Kim has pivoted to international outreach.

The young leader met China’s President Xi Jinping in Beijing in late March, Kim’s first trip abroad since taking power six years ago. He is set to meet South Korean President Moon Jae-in in the demilitarized zone between the rival Koreas on April 27.