Chris Hedges's Blog, page 9

Italy Quarantines More Than a Quarter of Country to Slow Virus Spread

ROME — Italy took a page from China’s playbook Sunday, locking down around 16 million people — more than a quarter of its population — for nearly a month to halt the relentless march of the new coronavirus across Europe.

Weddings and museums, movie theaters and shopping malls are all affected by the new restrictions, which focus on a swath of northern Italy but are disrupting daily life around the country. After mass testing uncovered more than 7,300 infections, Italy now has registered more cases of the virus than any country but China, where the disease is in retreat. The death toll in the country rose to 366.

From Venice to Milan, confusion reigned as residents and tourists tried to figure out when and how the new measures would be put into practice. Travelers crammed aboard standing-room-only trains, tucking their faces into scarves and sharing sanitizing gel.

Around the globe, more and more events were canceled or hidden behind closed doors, from the pope’s Sunday service to a Formula One car race in Bahrain to a sumo competition in Japan, where wrestlers arrived at the arena in face masks and were required to use hand sanitizer before entering. In Saudi Arabia, officials announced all schools and universities would be closed starting Monday, following the lead of other Gulf countries. Questions grew about whether to maintain U.S. presidential campaign rallies and other potential “super-spreading” gatherings, as the virus enters new states.

Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte signed a quarantine decree early Sunday for the country’s prosperous north. Areas under lockdown include Milan, Italy’s financial hub and the main city in Lombardy, and Venice, the main city in the neighboring Veneto region. The extraordinary measures will be in place until April 3.

Tourists in the region, including those from abroad, were free to head home, the Italian transport ministry said, noting that airports and train stations remained open.

The pope, who has been ill, held his Sunday blessing by video instead of in person, even though he wasn’t directly affected by the lockdown. He described feeling like he was “in a cage.”

It’s a feeling familiar in China, where the government locked down about 60 million people in central Hubei province in late January. Six weeks later, they are still effectively stuck.

The World Health Organization has said China’s move helped the rest of the world prepare for the virus to arrive, and WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus tweeted his support Sunday for Italians and their “bold, courageous steps aimed at slowing the speed of the coronavirus.”

China has suffered about three-fourths of the world’s 109,000 coronavirus infections and most of its 3,800 deaths. New infections in China have leveled off, however, and most of those infected, in China and globally, have already recovered.

Infections mounted higher Sunday in other epicenters — South Korea, Iran and especially Italy. And with a nose-dive in tourist traffic and major disruptions to supply chains worldwide, stocks struggled Sunday as Mideast indexes fell 4% to 10%.

Italy is closing all museums and archaeological sites, even those far from the lockdown zone. It suspended all weddings until April 3. The northern regions concerned by Sunday’s decree are closing cinemas and ski slopes.

Eateries all around Italy are expected, somehow, to keep patrons a meter away from each other.

The Vatican Museums are now closed, including the Sistine Chapel, in yet another blow to Italy’s all-important tourism industry. Alitalia, the Italian airline that was already financially ailing before the virus, suspended all national and international flights from Milan’s Malpensa airport starting Monday.

Lombardy’s governor, who is in quarantine himself, sought to calm the public, discouraging hoarding and insisting “we’re not going to war.”

Chaos erupted in the hours before Conte signed the decree, as word leaked about the planned quarantine.

Students at the University of Padua in northern Italy who had been out at bars on a Saturday night saw the reports on their phones and rushed back to the train station.

Tensions over the restrictions triggered a riot at a prison in Modena by inmates angered that their loved ones would not be able to visit, the Italian daily La Repubblica reported. The inmates eventually surrendered.

In a reversal of the stereotypical north-south tensions in Italy, the governor of Puglia urged northerners to stay away and not bring virus infections down south.

“Get off at the first railway station. Don’t take planes,” Gov. Michele Emiliano said in his dramatic appeal. “Turn around in your cars, get off the pullman buses at the next stop.”

By Sunday afternoon, residents of northern Italy remained confused.

Factory worker Luca Codazzi was set to come out of a two-week quarantine at midnight Sunday — but instead was facing new limits on his freedom.

The government decree “was badly written, there are very many interpretations,’’ he said. “In theory, the cordon should go down at midnight,’’ Codazzi said. He still doesn’t know whether his factory will be open Monday.

Governments across Europe tightened their rules. Bulgaria banned all indoor public events. France’s president and Germany’s governing parties held emergency security meetings as the number of cases in each country surpassed 1,000.

In waters around the world, the virus has left the cruise ship industry in disarray.

The Grand Princess cruise ship, where 21 people have tested positive for the virus, was heading Sunday to Oakland after idling off San Francisco for days. It expects to land Monday. Americans will be transferred to facilities around the country for testing and isolation, but it’s not yet clear what will happen to passengers from other countries. The ship had a cluster of almost 20 infections during an earlier voyage that has led to one death.

Another cruise ship is in quarantine on the Nile in Egypt with 45 confirmed virus cases. Two other ships with no confirmed cases were turned away this weekend from Malaysia and Malta amid virus fears.

Advice to the public continues to vary. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged older adults and people with severe medical conditions to “stay home as much as possible” and avoid crowds. A federal official told The Associated Press that the White House had overruled health officials who wanted to recommend that elderly and sick Americans not fly on commercial airlines too. A spokesman for U.S. Vice President Mike Pence denied that.

The U.S. death toll from the virus climbed to 19, with most victims in Washington state. Infections rose to more than 470, including the first case in the nation’s capital.

Even as the virus spreads, dozens of research groups around the world are racing to create a vaccine.

China on Sunday reported 44 new cases over the past 24 hours, the lowest level since it began publishing nationwide figures on Jan 20, and 27 new fatalities. Italy is now the No. 2 epicenter, surpassing South Korea, whose total is now 7,313, with 50 deaths overall.

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Angela Charlton reported from Paris. Nicole Winfield and Trish Thomas in Rome, Aya Batrawy in Dubai, Ken Moritsugu in Beijing, Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo, Chris Blake in Bangkok, Maria Sanminiatelli in New York, Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul, Ashok Sharma in New Delhi, Anna Johnson in London, David Rising in Berlin and Jonathan Poet in Philadelphia contributed to this report.

Saudis’ Arrest of 2 Princes Called a Warning to Royal Family

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Saudi Arabia’s King Salman was shown in state media Sunday in apparent good health and working, just days after the arrest of two senior princes triggered speculation about a possible coup attempt or a sudden deterioration in the king’s health.

Two people close to the royal family said Saturday that the two princes were under arrest for not supporting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has consolidated control of all major levers of power inside the kingdom with the support of his father, King Salman.

The arrests of the king’s younger and beloved brother, Prince Ahmed bin Abdelaziz, and the king’s nephew and former counterterrorism czar, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, came after what one person in Saudi Arabia with knowledge of the arrests described as an accumulation of behavior that was provocative to leadership.

The source added that the arrests sent a message to anyone in the royal family feeling disenfranchised: Stop grumbling and toe the line, because if Prince Ahmed can be arrested, any prince can and will be. Prince Ahmed was seen as a person who royals could look to when feeling vexed with the crown prince’s grip on power, the person said.

The reports of a crackdown emerged early Friday. In the king’s first appearance since then, state media showed the 84-year-old king on Sunday standing and greeting two Saudi diplomats being sworn in as ambassadors. He was previously seen Thursday meeting with British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab in Riyadh.

The arrests came as a surprise, given that Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, 60, was widely known to be under close surveillance since he was shunted out of the line of succession by the king’s son in mid-2017, a person close to the royal court said.

The arrest of Prince Ahmed, 78, was also unexpected since he is the king’s full younger brother and also a senior member of the ruling Al Saud family.

Prince Ahmed, however, has long held unfavorable views of the crown prince and was one of just a few senior princes to abstain from pledging allegiance to him when the young royal sidelined more senior princes to become first in line to the throne.

Both princes had served previously in the post of interior minister, overseeing security and surveillance inside the kingdom.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the arrests, quoting unidentified sources allied with the royal court as saying the princes were plotting a palace coup that would halt the rise of the crown prince. The Journal has since reported that the sweep broadened to include dozens of Interior Ministry officials, senior army officers and others suspected of supporting a coup attempt.

The two people who talked to The Associated Press declined to characterize actions by the two princes as a coup attempt. They agreed to discuss the highly sensitive matter related to security only if granted anonymity.

There has been no official comment from Saudi authorities on the arrests.

The crown prince has succeeded in a few short years at sweeping aside any competition from royals older and more experienced than him. He has also overhauled the most powerful security bodies to report to him.

Prince Mohammed bin Nayef is well-known and liked by U.S. intelligence officials for his counterterrorism cooperation in past years against al-Qaida. As head of the interior ministry, he was a feared and towering figure who oversaw the long arm of the government that both prosecuted and closely monitored and jailed dissidents and critics of the kingdom.

Prince Ahmed has been seen as critical of the crown prince, including telling protesters who were accosting him in London to ask the king and his son about the humanitarian disaster sparked by the war in Yemen. Religiously conservative, the prince also recently grumbled over the decision to close Islam’s holiest site in Mecca to stymie the spread of the new coronavirus, according to one of the people familiar with the arrests.

The arrest of the two senior princes is most likely a preemptive move to manage risks of a transition from King Salman to his son, according to an analysis by Eurasia Group. Both princes were seen as possible alternatives to Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The crown prince has succeeded in consolidating power and cementing his place as the day-to-day ruler, in part through far-reaching crackdowns on perceived critics or competitors.

The October 2018 killing of Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi by agents close to the crown prince inside the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul, however, damaged the prince’s reputation globally.

Foreign investors were also rattled by an anti-corruption operation overseen by the prince in late 2017 that saw top royals, officials and senior businessmen rounded up and detained for up to several months in the luxurious Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh and forced to sign over billions of dollars in assets in exchange for their freedom in secretive agreements.

As defense minister, the crown prince has also overseen the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which has killed thousands and led to the world’s worst humanitarian disaster. The kingdom has been trying oust Iran-allied rebels from power there.

The crown prince is popular among many in Saudi Arabia for pushing through bold reforms that have transformed life in the kingdom for many, including loosening severe restrictions on women and allowing concerts to be performed and movie theaters to open.

Still, his economic transformation plans have struggled to take off. The kingdom continues to rely heavily on oil for revenue, despite efforts to diversify. Oil prices have plunged amid the disruptions caused by the new coronavirus, signaling trouble for producers like Saudi Arabia.

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Associated Press diplomatic writer Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

Kamala Harris Endorses Joe Biden; Jesse Jackson Backs Bernie Sanders

WASHINGTON — Kamala Harris endorsed Joe Biden on Sunday and said she would “do everything in my power” to help elect him, becoming the latest dropout from the Democratic race for president to line up behind the former vice president in his battle with Bernie Sanders for the nomination.

The decision by the California senator who was one of three black candidates seeking to challenge President Donald Trump further solidifies the Democratic establishment’s move to close circles around Biden after his Super Tuesday success. Her endorsement comes before the next round of primaries, with six states voting Tuesday, including Michigan and Mississippi.

Sanders, a Vermont senator, countered with his own major endorsement on Sunday, announcing that civil rights icon Jesse Jackson was formally backing him.

Jackson appeared with Sanders during a campaign stop in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In a statement released by Sanders’ campaign, Jackson said Biden had not reached out to him for endorsement and Sanders had. He also said he chose Sanders after the senator’s campaign offered responses on 13 issues Jackson raised, including protecting voting rights, increasing funding for historically black colleges and universities and committing to putting African Americans on the Supreme Court.

In a statement on Biden, meanwhile, Harris said, “There is no one better prepared than Joe to steer our nation through these turbulent times, and restore truth, honor, and decency to the Oval Office.”

“He is kind and endlessly caring, and he truly listens to the American people,” her statement added.

Harris said the United States “is at an inflection point. And the decision voters make this November will shape the country and the world our children and grandchildren will grow up in. I believe in Joe Biden.”

Among Biden’s former rivals, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, Mike Bloomberg, Tim Ryan, Deval Patrick and John Delaney have endorsed him. Sanders has gotten the endorsement of Marianne Williamson and Bill de Blasio.

Also coming out for Biden on Sunday were two prominent Mississippi Democrats, former Gov. Ray Mabus and Mike Espy, agriculture secretary under President Bill Clinton. Espy is also on the ballot Tuesday as he seeks the party’s Senate nomination for the chance to face the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith, in November.

Harris withdrew from the race in December, ending a candidacy with the historic potential of becoming the first black woman elected president. The former California attorney general was seen as a candidate poised to attract the multiracial coalition of voters that sent Barack Obama to the White House. But she ultimately could not craft a message that resonated with voters or secure the money to continue her run.

Biden and Sanders, two white men in their 70s, are now the front-runners for the nomination in what was once a field of candidates that included several woman and much younger politicians.

Harris said in her statement that “like many women, I watched with sadness as women exited the race one by one.” Four years after Hillary Clinton was the party’s nominee, “we find ourselves without any woman on a path to be the Democratic nominee for president.”

“This is something we must reckon with and it is something I will have more to say about in the future,” she said. “But we must rise to unite the party and country behind a candidate who reflects the decency and dignity of the American people and who can ultimately defeat Donald Trump.”

Biden on Friday won the endorsement of former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who was one of the black candidates for the nomination. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker hasn’t made a public endorsement yet.

Black voters have anchored Biden’s comeback since disappointing finishes in overwhelmingly white Iowa and New Hampshire in early contests that put his campaign on the brink of collapse.

 

Protests and Celebrations Mark Women’s Day, Despite Threats

NEW YORK — From the streets of Manila to the plazas of Santiago, Chile, people around the world marked International Women’s Day on Sunday with calls to end exploitation and increase equality.

But tensions marred some celebrations, with police reportedly using tear gas to break up a demonstration by thousands of women in Turkey and security forces arresting demonstrators at a rally in Kyrgyzstan.

“In many different ways or forms, women are being exploited and taken advantage of,” Arlene Brosas, the representative of a Filipino advocacy group said during a rally that drew hundreds to the area near the presidential palace. Protesters called for higher pay and job security, and demanded that President Rodrigo Duterte respect women’s rights.

Turkish riot police tear gas to disperse thousands of demonstrators who, in defiance of a government ban, tried to march along Istanbul’s main pedestrian street to mark International Women’s Day, media reports said.

Turkish authorities declared Istiklal street, near Istanbul’s main Taksim square, off-limits, and said the planned march down the avenue was unauthorized. Thousands of demonstrators, most of them women, gathered near Istiklal regardless and tried to break through police barricades to reach it, according to the opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper and other media.

The independent T24 news website said police also fired blanks to disperse the crowd.

Several demonstrators were detained, according to Cumhuriyet.

Turkish authorities have restricted protests in the country in recent years, citing security. Police had set up barricades on all streets leading to Istiklal and closed down the nearest subway stop.

In Pakistan, however, women managed to rally in cities across the country, despite petitions filed in court seeking to stop them. The opposition was stirred in part by controversy over a slogan used in last year’s march: “My Body, My Choice.”

Some conservative groups had threatened to stop this year’s marches by force. But Pakistani officials pledged to protest the marchers. The rallies are notable in a conservative country where women often do not feel safe in public places because of open harassment. The main Islamic political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, organized its own rallies to counter the march.

One of the largest demonstrations occurred in Chile, where crowds thousands flooded the streets of the capital with dancing, music and angry demands for gender equality and an end to violence against women.

“They kill us, they rape us and nobody does anything,” some chanted.

National police estimated 125,000 took part in the capital and nearly 35,000 in other cities, but organizers said the crowds were far larger. Scattered clashes broke out at points when demonstrators threw rocks at police, who responded with water cannon.

Many protesters demanded that a proposed new constitution strengthen rights for women and thousands wore green scarves in a show of support for activists in neighboring Argentina, which is considering a proposal to legalize elective abortion.

Tens of thousands of women also marched through Paris, inveighing against the “virus of the patriarchy.”

“Enough impunity!” chanted some activists, who focused on France’s unusually high rate of women killed by their husbands. Last year, one woman was killed every two or three days by a current or former partner, and the government is increasing efforts to crack down on domestic violence.

“They should provide resources for shelters for women, victim of violence, real resources, human resources, also prevention programs for violent men,” union activist Julia Parbotin said.

Thousands of women also marched in Madrid and other Spanish cities, despite concern over the spread of the new coronavirus.

A massive banner reading, “With rights, without barriers. Feminists without frontiers” in Spanish was carried at the front of the march in the capital.

Spanish health authorities said did not put any restrictions on the march, but recommended that anyone with symptoms similar to those of the coronavirus stay home.

At a school in East London, meanwhile, the duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, joined students in listening to speeches about women labor activists, and urged both girls and boys to respect the contributions of women every day of the year.

“For young men … you have your mothers, sisters, girlfriends, friends in your life — protect them. Make sure they are feeling valued and safe,” she told the students.

But safety was in short supply at some events to mark the day.

The detonation of explosives triggered panic at a ceremony in Bamenda, an English-speaking town in the northwest of Cameroon. Suspicions focused on separatists who had vowed to disrupt the events. No one was killed or wounded.

Police in Bishek, the capital city of Kyrgyzstan, detained about 60 people after a group of unidentified men broke up what authorities called an unauthorized rally.

Demonstrators had gathered in the city’s main square to express support for women’s and children’s rights. But unidentified men barged into the gathering. Police said people from both sides were detained, but news reports said they were primarily women. They were released several hours later, after about 10 had been charged with resisting police, the Akipress news agency reported, citing an attorney.

Trump Ally Erik Prince Recruited Ex-Spies to Infiltrate Liberal Groups

An explosive New York Times report revealed Saturday that notorious war profiteer Erik Prince recruited former American and British spies to work with the right-wing group Project Veritas to infiltrate at least one Democratic congressional campaign and organizations “considered hostile” to President Donald Trump’s agenda.

Prince is the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and founder of the mercenary firm Blackwater. Through a spokesperson, he declined the Times‘ request for comment on the piece, which is based on interviews and documents obtained by the newspaper, including internal Project Veritas emails.

“Both Project Veritas and Mr. Prince have ties to President Trump’s aides and family,” the Times noted. “Whether any Trump administration officials or advisers to the president were involved in the operations, even tacitly, is unclear. But the effort is a glimpse of a vigorous private campaign to try to undermine political groups or individuals perceived to be in opposition to Mr. Trump’s agenda.”

The results of the Times‘ investigation were described by readers on social media as “chilling,” “stunning,” and “insane.” Jacobin magazine assistant editor Alex Press declared, “My paranoid fantasies are all true!” In response to a tweet about the reporting, author and activist Naomi Klein simply wrote, “Read.”

The consumer watchdog group Allied Progress responded with a statement Saturday night, calling on the House Oversight Committee to conduct an immediate investigation into what DeVos knew about Prince’s activities.

“There’s not a lot of dots to connect here,” said Allied Progress director Derek Martin. “Secretary DeVos’ brother was directly involved in a spying scheme in her home state against a teachers’ union she’s been hostile with for years. If this doesn’t clear the bar for an immediate Congressional investigation, nothing does.”

“We already know Secretary DeVos is no friend of public education, but if she gave the go-ahead to enlist former intelligence officers to steal documents from public education advocates that she disagrees with, it steps well beyond policy disagreement and into criminal territory,” Martin added. “If Secretary DeVos was in any way involved, it will confirm that she stops at nothing to undermine public schools.”

While Betsy DeVos dismantles public education, her brother, Erik Prince, uses spies to infiltrate and undermine advocacy organizations. This kind of espionage harkens back to the Hoover era. https://t.co/1OdWEyrun1

— Kristen Clarke (@KristenClarkeJD) March 7, 2020

According to the Times:

One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.

Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former CIA officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her.

Both operations were run by Project Veritas, a conservative group that has gained attention using hidden cameras and microphones for sting operations on news organizations, Democratic politicians, and liberal advocacy groups. Mr. Seddon’s role in the teachers’ union operation—detailed in internal Project Veritas emails that have emerged from the discovery process of a court battle between the group and the union—has not previously been reported, nor has Mr. Prince’s role in recruiting Mr. Seddon for the group’s activities.

The Times reported that it is unclear whether Seddon was involved in the Spanberger operation and the former British intelligence officer—who is married to American diplomat Alice Seddon—did not respond to the newspaper’s request for comment.

James O’Keefe of Project Veritas told the Times that his group is a “proud independent news organization” and “no one tells Project Veritas who or what to investigate.” Although he declined to discuss the details of the report, he also claimed that various sources are “providing confidential documents, insights into internal processes, and wearing hidden cameras to expose corruption and misconduct.”

Past targets of Project Veritas have included the nonprofit healthcare organization Planned Parenthood, the political group Disrupt J20, and recently, David Wright, a 20-year veteran political correspondent at ABC News. Project Veritas has also recorded undercover video of a Times editor and approached the Washington Post with a false story about Roy Moore, a Republican Senate candidate in Alabama.

Project Veritas is an amateur organization that embarrasses itself as often as it uncovers a faux scandal. The fact that people in Trumpworld are using professionals spies to help it is deeply worrying. pic.twitter.com/AjFnkBs8nN

— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) March 7, 2020

The Project Veritas operative inside AFT Michigan was Liberty University graduate Marisa Jorge, according to the Times. O’Keefe and Seddon used the code name “LibertyU” for Jorge when discussing the operation over email. Jorge, who also reportedly infiltrated the Spanberger campaign by posing as a volunteer, did not respond to the newspaper’s request for comment. The federal lawsuit that AFT Michigan brought against Project Veritas is scheduled to go to trial later this year.

In a statement to the Times, AFT president Randi Weingarten said: “Let’s be clear who the wrongdoer is here: Project Veritas used a fake intern to lie her way into our Michigan office, to steal documents and to spy—and they got caught. We’re just trying to hold them accountable for this industrial espionage.”

Weingarten added on Twitter Saturday, “They didn’t succeed in their attempt to hurt our union but note what the right wing will do to try to eliminate workers’ voice.”

.@BetsyDeVosED brother #ErikPrince now found part of #projectveritas attempt to spy & steal @aftmichigan documents. They didn’t succeed in their attempt to hurt our union but note what the right wing will do to try to eliminate workers’ voice. https://t.co/E2UHyOIgNv

— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) March 7, 2020

The Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill—who released the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army in 2007—wrote on Twitter Saturday that with this piece, the Times “pushes the 2017 story from [The Intercept‘s Matthew Cole]⁩ forward about Erik Prince attempts to infiltrate liberal groups via Project Veritas.”

Last year, Cole published an article for The Intercept titled “The Complete Mercenary: How Erik Prince Used the Rise of Trump to Make an Improbable Comeback.”

Noting that Trump gave Project Veritas thousands of dollars through his foundation and met with O’Keefe shortly after announcing his run for president, Cole reported:

It is unclear if Trump’s support of Project Veritas spurred Prince’s interest in the group, but in late 2015 or early 2016, Prince arranged for O’Keefe and Project Veritas to receive training in intelligence and elicitation techniques from a retired military intelligence operative named Euripides Rubio Jr. According to a former Trump White House official who discussed the Veritas training with Rubio, the former special operative quit after several weeks of training, complaining that the Veritas group wasn’t capable of learning. Rubio did not respond to requests for comment.

In the winter of 2017, Prince arranged for a former British MI6 officer to provide more surveillance and elicitation training for Veritas at his family’s Wyoming ranch, according to a person with direct knowledge of the effort. Prince was trying to turn O’Keefe and his group into domestic spies. For his part, O’Keefe posted photos on Instagram and Twitter from the Prince family ranch of himself holding a handgun with a silencer attached and wearing pseudo-military clothing. He described the ranch as a “classified location” where he was learning “spying and self-defense,” in an effort to make Project Veritas “the next great intelligence agency.”

“Erik was weaponizing a group that had close ties to the Trump White House,” said the former White House official familiar with Prince’s relationship with O’Keefe and Project Veritas.

Cole acknowledged the Times reporting on Twitter Saturday and highlighted a summary of it tweeted by The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer:

I like this alternate lede https://t.co/Iz8MXzfCTf

— Matthew Cole (@matthewacole) March 7, 2020

Currently, the Times noted, “Prince is under investigation by the Justice Department over whether he lied to a congressional committee examining Russian interference in the 2016 election, and for possible violations of American export laws.”

Former FBI assistant director and current NBC News national security contributor Frank Figliuzzi shared the Times report on Twitter Saturday and commented that “there are likely numerous criminal violations here.”

This post has been updated with comment from the consumer watchdog group Allied Progress.

Voices From America’s Brutal Prisons

“Prison Truth: The Story of the San Quentin News”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

In 2017, Oprah Winfrey visited Pelican Bay State Prison in California for “60 Minutes” and openly empathized with an inmate’s predicament. It was a departure from the standard primetime interviews with an inmate in which the journalist extracts lurid details about crimes. (Dr. Phil once asked a man convicted of murdering his mother with a sledgehammer what it sounded like.)

As celebrated journalist and UC Berkeley professor William Drummond notes in his new book, “Prison Truth,” Oprah’s empathetic interview was another milestone in the media’s portrayal of prisons. It represented a shift away from the violence and brutality of the tough-on-crime era and toward the prison reform narrative of our present day.

Drummond’s book is about the recent rebirth of the San Quentin News, a newspaper written, edited, and published by inmates at San Quentin prison. This newspaper delivered something the world has for too long suppressed: humanizing stories of prisoners, told by prisoners. “Inside the dingy confines of the newsroom at San Quentin,” Drummond writes, “a dozen or so convict journalists played a significant role in changing the narrative about prisoners and the way we think about all the people in the penitentiary.”

Click here to read long excerpts from “Prison Truth” at Google Books.

 The San Quentin News was founded in the 1940s. Many other prisons founded newsletters, papers, and magazines around that time (there were 250 in 1959 according to an article in The Nation), including the famous Angolite, a magazine published in Angola prison in Louisiana. But as Drummond notes, while the Angolite “enjoyed remarkable editorial freedom[,] California prison publications were not so lucky.” Prisoners in San Quentin operated under repressive censorship. A 1980s San Quentin News exposé of rotten prison conditions, including photos of bird-droppings covering the cafeteria, caused the warden to shut the newspaper down for the next couple decades.

When the San Quentin News was restarted in 2008, it primarily focused on uplifting stories: skills gained from training programs, freed inmates who successfully reintegrate into the outside world, and events like plays staged by community groups with inmates. “By definition,” Drummond writes, “San Quentin News operates under a regime of self-censorship.” But as he wisely adds, “It is by no means the only media organization to do so.” For Drummond, this is the paper’s strength. By telling the positive stories of men behind bars, it allows them to move away from the deleterious portrayals of “super-predators” that dominated the last 50 years, and toward the stories of redemption that dovetail with the contemporary prison reform movement. Importantly, the San Quentin News newsroom is racially diverse in a way that the vast majority of US newsrooms are not.

Not only does Drummond’s book chronicle the shifting story of crime, prisons, and prisoners, he helpfully adds to a woeful lack of human stories of prisoners. An entire section of the book is devoted to telling the stories of individual inmates that he worked with in his time advising the SQN. He finds a hero in Arnulfo García, one of the original executive editors after the paper resumed in 2008.

García was a former heroin addict and a victim of California’s Three Strikes Law, serving 60 years to life for breaking into a home. He requested to transfer to San Quentin in 2008 to be closer to his family, but also because he heard the prison had a good number of programs for inmates. At the prison, García dove headfirst into the business of journalism (even though, initially, he didn’t even know how to use a computer). By the time Drummond met him in 2010, he was leading the paper. Drummond, at this moment, was losing his faith in journalism, as successive newspapers shrunk or crumbled. “And then,” Drummond recalls, “along came this handsome Mexican guy with boundless optimism about convict journalists turning the tide of forty years of mass incarceration.”

As journalists, San Quentin News reporters bring a perspective largely unseen anywhere in media. And, Drummond stresses, it works. Today, the San Quentin News has won the James Madison Freedom of Information Award, has an active web presence, and an enormously popular podcast called “Ear Hustle” (downloaded more than 15 million times, according to Drummond).

Drummond is in a good position to evaluate the value of the printed word. He was born in Oakland to black, working-class parents. Two years after he graduated from Columbia Journalism School in 1966, he landed at the Los Angeles Times, where his race meant that he was something of a token figure there. Newsrooms in the United States at the time were exceedingly white. Between 1956 and 1966, the number of African Americans working on US metropolitan newspapers (over 1,700 nationwide) went from 38 to 60.

In the late 1970s, at a time when most newspapers were beginning to sensationalize crime, Drummond pursued fearless stories that confronted race relations, including a prescient one about escalating tensions in California prisons. The media drove a narrative of degeneration at the same time that lawmakers were enacting new mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes and finding new ways to try teenagers as adults. Tough-on-crime politicians of the 1980s and ’90s ramped up the war on drugs and drove more people of color into California’s prison system.

“This kind of dramatic public policy shift,” Drummond says, “could not have taken place without compliant and docile public opinion. And that is where the insistent drumbeat of news media messages took its toll.” This coincided with the escalating prison population in California (from 25,000 in 1970 to 160,000 in 2016).

Recently though, the narrative began to change. Drummond credits the Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black,” which debuted in 2013, as a turning point in the popular narrative of prison. The public started to see inmates as humans and became more interested in hearing the stories of their lives, beyond the simple details of their crimes.

News has great influence over public opinion; who creates the news affects where that influence takes us as a society. A homogeneous media landscape, depopulated with inmates, aided the rise of the wasteful and ruinous carceral state. For anyone concerned with the prison reform movement, it is critical to engage with the media portrayals of inmates. And for that, “Prison Truth” is an essential book. Today, inmates write their own stories, and it is more important than ever.

This article originally appeared on the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Tear Gas Sprayed Across Migrants at Turkey-Greece Border

EDIRNE, Turkey — A group of migrants on Saturday tried to bring down a fence in a desperate attempt to bust through the border into Greece while others hurled rocks at Greek police. Greek authorities responded, firing volleys of tear gas at the youths.

At least two migrants were injured in the latest clash between Greek police and migrants gathered on the Turkish side of a border crossing near the Greek village of Kastanies. As in previous confrontations this week. officers in Greece fired tear gas to impede the crowd and Turkish police fired tear gas back at their Greek counterparts.

Groups of mostly young men tied ropes onto the fence in an attempt to tear it down. Some shouted “Allah is Great” while others shouted “open the border.”

It was not immediately clear what caused the two migrants’ injuries. A Greek government official said the tear gas and water cannons were used for “deterrence” purposes.

Thousands of migrants headed for Turkey’s land border with Greece after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government said last week that it would no longer prevent migrants and refugees from crossing over to European Union territory. Greece deployed riot police and border guards to repel people trying to enter the country from the sea or by land.

Erdogan plans to be in Brussels on Monday for a one-day working visit. A statement from his office did not specify where he would be during his visit or the reason why he’s heading to the EU’s headquarters.

The announcement came hours after EU foreign ministers meeting in Croatia on Friday criticized Turkey, saying it was using the migrants’ desperation “for political purposes.”

In a statement Saturday, the Greek government said that around 600 people, aided by Turkish army and military police, threw tear gas at the Greek side of the border overnight. It also said there were several attempts to breach the border fence, and fires were lit in an attempt to damage the barrier.

“Attempts at illegal entry into Greek territory were prevented by Greek forces, which repaired the fence and used sirens and loudspeakers,” the statement read.

Thousands of migrants have slept in makeshift camps near the border since the Turkish government said they were free to go, waiting for the opportunity to cut over to Greece.

“It is very difficult, but there is hope, God willing,” said Mahmood Mohammed, 34, who identified himself as a refugee from Syria’s embattled Idlib province.

Another man who identified himself as being from Idlib said he was camped out in western Turkey both to get away from the war at home and to make a new life for his family in Europe or Canada after crossing through the border gate.

Erdogan announced last week that Turkey, which already houses more than 3.5 million Syrian refugees, would no longer be Europe’s gatekeeper and declared that its previously guarded borders with Europe are now open.

The move alarmed EU countries, which are still dealing with the political fallout from a wave of mass migration five years ago. Erdogan has demanded that Europe shoulder more of the burden of caring for refugees. But the EU insists it is abiding by a 2016 deal in which it gave Turkey billions in refugee aid in return for keeping Europe-bound asylum-seekers in Turkey.

In a phone call with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday, Erdogan said the Turkey-EU migration deal is no longer working and needs to be revised, according to the Turkish leaders’s office.

While crediting Turkey for hosting millions of migrants and refugees, European foreign ministers said the bloc “strongly rejects Turkey’s use of migratory pressure for political purposes.” They called the situation at the border unacceptable and said the EU was determined to protect its external boundaries.

In Berlin on Saturday, about 1,000 people rallied in front of the Interior Ministry urging Germany to take in asylum seekers stuck at the Greek border. They then marched through the streets downtown behind a banner reading “Europe, don’t kill. Open the borders, we have space.”

From a slow-moving truck, one of the leaders led a chant in English: “No borders, no nations. Stop deportations.”

Greek authorities said they thwarted more than 38,000 attempted border crossings in the past week and arrested 268 people — only 4% of them Syrians. They reported 27 more arrests Saturday, mostly migrants from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Greece has described the situation as a threat to its national security and has suspended asylum applications for a month, saying it will deport new arrivals without registering them. Many migrants have reported crossing into Greece, being beaten by Greek authorities and summarily forced back into Turkey.

A video handed out by the Turkish government on Saturday, purported to show a Greek soldier firing shots toward a barbed-wire fence at the border. The Associated Press was not in the area and could not verify its authenticity.

Turkish authorities say one migrant was killed earlier this week by bullets fired by Greek police or border guards near the border crossing. Greece denies the accusation. A child also drowned off the island of Lesbos when a boat carrying 48 migrants capsized.

On Saturday, Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu renewed accusations of Greek authorities mistreating migrants.

“Their masks have fallen,” he said. “The ruthlessness of those who gave lectures on humanity has become evident.”

Soylu claimed that some 1,000 Turkish special operations police deployed on the border had started to thwart the actions of the law enforcement teams assembled by Greece to drive the migrants back.

The minister also predicted that Greece would not be able to “hold on to its borders” when the river that delineates most of the Turkey-Greece border gets shallower and easier to cross.

Soylu has said Erdogan instructed Turkish authorities to prevent migrants from attempting to reach the Greek islands in dinghies to avoid “human tragedies.” Hundreds have drowned attempting the comparatively short but dangerous voyage from Turkey’s coast.

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Fraser reported from Ankara, Turkey. Associated Press reporters Costas Kantouris in Kastanies, Greece, Demetris Nellas in Athens and David Rising in Berlin contributed.

Trump Names Rep. Mark Meadows His New Chief of Staff

WASHINGTON — In the midst of one of the most daunting crises of his administration, President Donald Trump announced he had made a major staff overhaul, replacing his acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney with Republican Rep. Mark Meadows.

While much of the country was focused on the spreading coronavirus, Trump announced the surprise reshuffle by Friday night tweet, saying Mulvaney would become the U.S. special envoy for Northern Ireland.

“I have long known and worked with Mark, and the relationship is a very good one,” he wrote, thanking Mulvaney — who never shook his “acting” title — “for having served the Administration so well.”

The long-rumored move comes as Trump has been pulling together a team of loyalists and allies ahead of what is expected to be a bitter reelection fight. But the timing — as his administration was already facing criticism over its handling of the outbreak — threatened to exacerbate concerns about the government’s ability to protect the nation from a virus that has now infected more than 100,000 people worldwide. Meadows will be Trump’s fourth chief of staff in as many years.

Mulvaney had been leading the administration’s interagency response to the virus until Trump designated Vice President Mike Pence to lead the whole-of-government effort more than a week ago.

It was just one of a long series of downgrades for Mulvaney, whose relationship with Trump began to sour not long after he was named to the position in December 2018. Indeed, Trump had been eyeing the change for many months, according to people familiar with his thinking, but wanted to wait until after the impeachment saga was over to make his move.

Meadows, the onetime leader of the House Freedom Caucus, is a longtime Trump confidant and sounding board, whose political instincts Trump respects. He announced last year that he would not be seeking reelection for his North Carolina House seat, and said he expected to join Trump’s team in some capacity, though it was not clear in what role.

He was officially offered the job Thursday, according to one of the people familiar with the matter, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the changes publicly. Mulvaney was informed Friday.

Some outside advisers had cautioned Trump that making such a high-profile switch during the coronavirus crisis would rattle markets craving stability, and his decision to make the announcement after Wall Street had closed Friday was partly informed by those concerns, the people said.

First elected in the post-Tea Party wave of 2012, Meadows quickly established himself as a leader of a new generation of conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. He served as chairman of the unyielding Freedom Caucus, and his antics in the House helped spur Speaker John Boehner’s sudden retirement.

As Trump ascended in 2016, Meadows switched from his earlier backing of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and — urged on by his wife — joined the Trump train. Since then he has proven himself an unwavering Trump ally.

A skilled negotiator, Meadows is seen as both a leader and an outlier among Republicans on Capitol Hill. Meadows was central to talks on the failed effort to repeal Obamacare and pass the GOP tax cuts. But in many ways, he remains his own counsel, with a skill set and status that may serve him well in Trump’s White House.

Meadows has also made clear to the White House and those close to the president that he has no plans to try to rein in Trump, as others — like Mulvaney’s predecessor, retired four-star Gen. John Kelly — have tried and failed to do.

Having seen how Kelly’s efforts to impose military order had grated on Trump and antagonized outside allies, Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, took a laissez-faire approach, making clear he believed his job was to manage the staff and not the president.

He adopted the “Let Trump be Trump” mantra that had served others in Trump’s orbit well and focused instead on trying to boost staff morale and wooing lawmakers at the Camp David presidential retreat. But while he never irritated Trump and outside allies, Mulvaney had been relegated to the sidelines even before a disastrous mid-October press conference in which he insisted quid pro quo was normal when it came to foreign policy, undercutting the president’s position that there was no such thing in his dealings with Ukraine.

Still, his allies had repeatedly brushed off rumblings of his imminent departure and had said as recently as last month that he planned to stay at least through the election in November.

Trump had other plans. Ever since he was acquitted by the Senate on the impeachment charges, Trump has been on a tear to rid his administration of those he deems insufficiently loyal. And he has been assembling a team of trusted confidants as he prepares for a tough reelection fight.

Still, one person close to Mulvaney insisted he was pleased with the decision to bring in Meadows, noting the two were friends and had served together on the Freedom Caucus. Indeed, they said Mulvaney had raised the idea of Meadows as chief of staff before Trump had tapped Mulaney for the job, and said he discussed the plan with Trump following his trip to India last week.

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Lemire reported from New York. Associated Press writer Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.

Joe Biden, The ‘Impulse Buy’ Candidate

Now that the dust has settled from the political earthquake of the Super Tuesday primary races, one thing has become clear: Former Vice President Joe Biden, who has become the new frontrunner of the Democratic Party, was an impulse buy — one that voters may come to regret deeply.

Just a week ago, reality matched expectations. The first few Democratic primary races of the season played out just as polls said they would: with a crowded field of candidates splitting votes several ways and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders drawing pluralities of support in Iowa (where he essentially tied with former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg), New Hampshire and Nevada. Even in South Carolina Sanders appeared to be closing in on Biden until Rep. Jim Clyburn stepped in with an endorsement. Biden’s luck instantly changed, and the stunning speed with which the center-right faction of the party consolidated itself around him between the South Carolina victory and Super Tuesday races was breathtaking.

There was no time to poll voters about a dramatically narrowed field after Buttigieg suspended his campaign just three races after officially winning the Iowa caucuses to align behind the old guard of the party. Following Buttigieg, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who had not long ago been leading all candidates in her home state of Minnesota — ahead even of Sanders and Biden — also pulled out of the race and joined the obedient ranks of Biden backers. Former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke, who had ended his campaign months ago, waited until the day before the most concentrated set of primary races to show his allegiance to Biden. The timing couldn’t have been more obvious.

Other Democratic Party figures chimed in, including former House Speaker Harry Reid, who wrote an op-ed calling Biden “the Democrat best equipped to oust Trump and stabilize America.” In his opinion piece, Reid effectively said what most Biden backers are communicating: While we are in favor of policies that Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren back, we choose Biden over the progressive candidates because we think he can beat Trump better than anyone else can.

Others in the corporate media openly expressed relief and fawned over Biden. CNN senior analyst John Avlon explained the day before Super Tuesday that Biden was a “known quantity,” “known for his decency and empathy,” and was therefore the opposite of Trump. It didn’t seem to matter to Avlon that Biden’s numerous policy decisions over his long career have been far more right wing and Trump-like than Sanders’ — just so long as his personality is affable.

While Reid can be forgiven for papering over Biden’s record (Reid is a political figure, after all) Avlon, who is a journalist, failed to raise even a single aspect of Biden’s deeply controversial and right-leaning past — a legacy that is expertly documented in Branko Marcetic’s political biography “Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.” Marcetic explaines how “Biden cast a decade’s worth of votes that turned into political boomerangs,” including on issues of abortion where his Catholic beliefs pushed against the Democratic Party’s stance. Much has also been written about Biden’s attacks on Anita Hill, his authorship of the 1994 crime bill, his support for the Iraq war and so much more. Additionally, Marcetic reminds us of how “little sympathy” Biden had for the economic woes when he was vice president under Obama:

As he told one gathering in September 2010, he wanted to “remind our base constituency to stop whining.” If they “didn’t get everything they wanted, it’s time to just buck up here,” not “yield the playing field to those folks who are against everything we stand for.”

This is the Biden that corporate media outlets are loathe to remind us of as he takes on Sanders’ progressive economic agenda in the remaining primary races. Jake Novak, writing for CNBC.com, went as far as giving Biden’s campaign helpful advice on how best to crush Sanders: “What does he need to do now to make sure he defeats Senator Bernie Sanders and closes the deal this time?”

Has anyone writing in the corporate media yet given Sanders similar advice? There is no pretense about which side the corporate media is on.

With former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg dropping out of the race on Wednesday and promising his financial support to Biden, the image of the dead guy in the 1989 film, “Weekend at Bernie’s,” being artificially made to look alive by his employees comes to mind. Biden’s once-lifeless operation has been resurrected, zombie-like, by a hastily built edifice of power, influence and money to resemble a successful presidential campaign.

Given his lack of a real progressive agenda, the only justification for Biden as the Democratic nominee is the near-unanimous corporate media insistence that he is best poised to beat Trump and Sanders is not. Except that it’s just not true. In a rare instance of The New York Times publishing a clear-eyed view of the election, Steve Phillips, author of “Brown Is the New White,” explained how Sanders had a path to victory. According to Phillips, “Almost all of the current polling data shows Mr. Sanders winning the national popular vote.” Even others like USA Today columnist Jason Sattler, who openly admitted Sanders was not his favorite candidate, pointed out that the Vermont senator, “has generally beaten Trump in head-to-head polls for five years now.” A recent study claiming to prove that Sanders was unelectable, gleefully cited by the pro-Biden crowd to buttress their choice, was thoroughly debunked by Jacobin Magazine’s Seth Ackerman.

But with Biden’s South Carolina win and the centrist candidates’ unexpected endorsements ahead of Super Tuesday, the barrage of anti-Sanders messaging finally paid off, fueling a perfect storm among undecided Super Tuesday voters. The Washington Post explained on Wednesday that “Biden’s victories in Virginia and North Carolina and his competitive showing in Texas were aided by voters who made up their minds within the last few days, according to preliminary exit polls … Biden won about 6 in 10 of the late deciders in Virginia and North Carolina.” In other words, voters who chose Biden were not loyal to his candidacy. Instead, their choice was a spur-of-the-moment decision, an impulse buy. In contrast, “Sanders did better in both states among voters who decided earlier than in the last few days.”

On the day before Super Tuesday, I was invited to join a panel on MSNBC’s “All in With Chris Hayes” alongside actor-director Rob Reiner, who has supported Biden’s candidacy for months. During our conversation, Reiner kept insisting that Biden could beat Trump and therefore was the best choice for nominee. As the program wrapped up, we continued our conversation off-camera, and I said to him that even Hillary Clinton in 2016 had been a far stronger candidate than Biden. Reiner readily agreed but explained, “Now that we’ve had four years of Trump, people will be more likely to choose Biden over him.” In other words, our standards for president are so low thanks to Trump that even a weak candidate like Biden meets it. If that is true, then why would Sanders not meet (or surpass) the same standard?

The answer to that question is that Democratic Party elites and corporate media would rather have a weak neo-liberal capitalist than a strong democratic socialist as president, even at the risk of four more years of Trump. After all, with Biden as the nominee, Wall Street wins no matter the outcome of the race. In a testament to the post-Super Tuesday relief of the moneyed class, stock prices shot up, especially in the health insurance industry.

While Biden may indeed be a “nice guy,” he is quite possibly the worst candidate to challenge Trump. His debate performances have ranged from lack luster to confused, to utterly unprepared. Remember when Kamala Harris took on Biden last June just as Warren recently took on Bloomberg?

Trump’s favorite label for Biden is, sadly, well deserved — Googling “Creepy Joe” brings up far too many photos and videos of the vice president putting himself disgustingly close to women, smelling their hair, putting his hands on their shoulders from behind and more. He is the butt of jokes on late night shows and the focus of right-wing media scorn. Republicans are lining up attack lines against Biden’s role in the Ukraine scandal, and Trump is eager to reflect the humiliation of his impeachment trial back on Biden. Add to that Biden’s 30 years of regressive and right-leaning policy decisions, and what remains is a ready-made punching bag for the sadistic and relentless Trump juggernaut.

Corporate media and Democratic Party propaganda convinced enough voters on Super Tuesday to choose Biden at the last minute. But if Biden does end up as the nominee it is likely that his weaknesses will become more apparent with each passing day and voters may experience “buyer’s remorse.” In just a few weeks and months as the primary races continue, it will be too late to return the damaged goods.

Rudy Giuliani’s State Department Coup

Imagine, just for the sake of argument, that the president of the United States was an arrogant, information-challenged, would-be autocrat with a soft spot for authoritarian leaders from China, Russia, and North Korea to Egypt (“my favorite dictator”), Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. And then, suppose that very president, while hollowing out the State Department and slamming its diplomats as “Deep State” troublemakers, were to name a voluble wheeler-dealer attorney as his unofficial, freelance White House go-between with shady characters worldwide. Imagine further that the president would do an end run around the professionals of the U.S. intelligence community — more Deep Staters, natch — and rely instead on conspiracy theories trundled back to Washington in that attorney’s briefcase.

Now, one last unimaginable thing, but humor me: accept that the attorney in question went by the name of Rudy Giuliani.

That, of course, is a reasonable description of the state of America in 2020. Three-plus years into Donald Trump’s misshapen presidency, as the “adults” fled the room one by one or were pushed to the exits, the president was left with a rump collection of family loyalists and third-tier yes-people around him.

Rarely, if ever, do mainstream media types take a step back to survey the classic Star Wars bar-like crew of know-nothings, Bible-thumpers, and connivers who’ve been assembled as Trump’s “team” and their breathtaking incompetence and perfidy. Luckily, with Giuliani in the mix, there’s at least one figure so wildly over-the-top that analysts and pundits have heaped scorn or ridicule on his head, and often his alone, as a person so outrageously unfit, so borderline deranged, so nakedly in it for profit that it’s impossible to consider him without marveling at the tragicomedy of it all.

Since 2017, however, Rudy Giuliani has emerged as Trump’s shadow secretary of state with his hands in American foreign policy and politics from Iran to Russia, Turkey to Ukraine and beyond. That means anyone, anywhere in the world, with a few million bucks to proffer and an angle to pursue in Washington can avoid Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the Christian-right uber-hawk from Kansas, and sidle up instead to the former U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York and mayor of New York City.

During most of 2019, as is well known to anyone who even casually followed the impeachment proceedings in Congress, Giuliani had a starring role in President Trump’s conspiracy-laden efforts to prove that Ukraine, not Russia, intervened in the 2016 election and that Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, were mixed up in something nefarious there. (To those in the reality-based world, of course, it was Russia, not Ukraine that meddled massively in 2016. And the Bidens, it’s clear, did nothing illegal in Kyiv.)

As we shall see, the Trump-Giuliani conspiracy theory about that country originated with and was “fertilized” by three individuals who’d earlier been caught up in Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation of the White House: Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security advisor in the White House; Paul Manafort, who chaired Trump’s election campaign; and Manafort’s Ukraine partner and ally, an apparent operative for Russia’s GRU intelligence service, Konstantin Kilimnik. In other words, the Trump-Giuliani Ukraine adventure did indeed get a boost from Vladimir Putin’s secret service and Moscow’s propaganda machine.

You’ll remember, perhaps, or maybe you’ve forgotten, that before Mike Pompeo was secretary of state, before his predecessor Rex (“Rexxon”) Tillerson even took the job, it looked for a while like Giuliani was going to get it. He and Donald Trump had been political friends-with-benefits since the mid-1990s, as evidenced by a cringe-worthy 2000 video of Trump placing his lips unbidden on Giuliani-in-drag’s “breast.” The former mayor had quietly sought to reposition himself as the reincarnation of Roy Cohn, the mob-connected lawyer who had been a mentor to the up-and-coming New York real estate tycoon. (“Where’s my Roy Cohn?”) It’s hardly surprising then that, following Trump’s surprise victory in November 2016, Giuliani began lobbying hard for the secretary of state job. At the same time, he was fervently urging the president-elect not to select never-Trumper Mitt Romney for it. (Giuliani did, however, also  John Bolton, Washington’s warmonger-in-chief, for the job.)

Back in 2016, a week or so after the election, a New York Times editorial drily noted that the appointment of Giuliani as secretary of state “would be a dismal and potentially disastrous choice,” that he lacked “any substantive diplomatic experience and has demonstrated poor judgment throughout his career,” appeared “unhinged,” and would come with a “flurry of potential conflicts of interest.” And keep in mind that, back then, Giuliani was only getting started.

In recent years, much has been written, and accurately so, about the exodus of veteran diplomats — ambassadors to toilers in the ranks — from a gutted Foggy Bottom and its global outposts under both Tillerson and Pompeo. Writing last October for Foreign Affairs, for instance, former diplomat William Burns noted that fewer people took the department’s entrance exam in 2019 than in any year in previous decades. “Career diplomats,” wrote Burns, “are sidelined, with only one of 28 assistant secretary-rank positions filled by a Foreign Service officer, and more ambassadorships going to political appointees in this administration than in any in recent history.” He added: “One-fifth of ambassadorships remain unfilled, including critical posts.”

At the State Department, as one ambassador told the Hill, morale “is at a new low, although I am not sure it could fall much lower than where it has been for the past three years.” And that decline only accelerated after the humiliating dismissal of the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv, Marie Yovanovitch, whose ouster was orchestrated by Giuliani.

To be sure, the State Department was never a progressive bastion, not during the Cold War years nor in the era when America was the global hyperpower. It is, nonetheless, the main vehicle for any president wishing to use the levers of diplomacy rather than the oft-chosen military option. Now, with the adults gone and the diplomats increasingly neutered, we’re left with Trump and Giuliani. Neither hawks nor doves, they’re vultures, viewing every country as part of a vast veldt where they can pick at carcasses of every sort for their own business or political gain.

How to Become a Shadow Secretary of State

Giuliani’s foreign policy portfolio extends far and wide, though it was in Ukraine — specifically with that country’s many corrupt, Russian-leaning oligarchs — that he rocketed to world attention and helped trigger the president’s impeachment. In his world travels, Giuliani has combined his roles as businessman, security consultant, political fixer, and the president’s personal attorney into a mishmash of overlapping identities. He has, in other words, become a kind of walking, talking conflict-of-interest machine.

Before zeroing in on Ukraine, however, let’s consider just a few of Giuliani’s other foreign ventures. Since leaving office as New York’s mayor, through Giuliani Partners, the Bracewell & Giuliani law partnership, and (after 2016) the giant law firm of Greenberg Traurig, along with Giuliani Security & Safety and Giuliani Capital Advisers, the former mayor has pulled in millions of dollars working on behalf of foreign clients, including highly controversial ones. Among those deals, contracts, and maneuvers, before and after Trump became president and hired his old friend Rudy to serve as his personal attorney in 2018, Giuliani has been involved in a far-flung series of deals: he’s been a paid lobbyist in Romania; had a cybersecurity contract in Qatar; had deals in Colombia, Argentina, and El Salvador; worked shadow diplomacy (with a business angle) with Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro; operated in Japan, Serbia, and Guatemala; and that only begins to tell the story.

Consider Turkey, starting in 2017. Back then, when Lieutenant General Michael Flynn was forced to resign after just a few weeks as national security advisor, it turned out that he had quietly (and without reporting it) been working on behalf of Turkey’s autocratic government, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, during the 2016 election campaign. Erdogan was disturbed by the presence of a dissident, Fethullah Gulen, in the United States. As an unregistered advocate for Turkey, Flynn lobbied in 2016 to have the United States expel Gulen and send him back to Turkey. Early the next year, Flynn was gone, but no fear, Rudy Giuliani promptly took up the same cause. He began urging President Trump to extradite Gulen to Turkey, where Erdogan was accusing him of having plotted an attempted coup d’état. (In the end, Gulen wasn’t expelled.)

Given Giuliani’s ability to mix policy with business, you won’t be surprised to learn that he was also enmeshed in more lucrative efforts in Turkey. At around the same time, he was lobbying Trump to endorse a prisoner swap involving one of his clients, an Iranian-born Turkish gold trader named Reza Zarrab whom the FBI had arrested in 2016 on charges of money laundering and trying to do an end run around economic sanctions on Iran. According to the New York Times, Zarrab had been working with Halkbank, a major Turkish bank with close ties to Turkish Finance Minister Berat Albayrak who is also President Erdogan’s son-in-law, to “funnel more than $10 billion in gold and cash to Iran.”

At first blush, it might seem odd for Giuliani to offer his services on behalf of an Iranian expat accused of trying to break U.S. sanctions whose family, it turned out, had close ties to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Curious, yes, but for Giuliani, business is business and there were bucks to be made. That he would use his connections to the Oval Office in an ultimately unsuccessful appeal for his client is even odder, given that Giuliani is otherwise a militant hardliner when it comes to demanding the overthrow of the Iranian government.

Case in point: his long-time affiliation with the People’s Jihadists, otherwise known as the Mujaheddin-e-Khalq, or MEK. Like many of Giuliani’s escapades abroad, his efforts with MEK were a money-making project. Along with John Bolton, the late Senator John McCain, former National Security Advisor Jim Jones, and former Attorney General Mike Mukasey, Giuliani has for years been affiliated with the MEK, making perhaps a dozen appearances, mostly paid speeches, at its conventions and rallies.

The MEK has almost no support inside Iran, not only because it’s conducted a terror campaign against that country’s top officials since 1981, but because it operated with the backing of Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein during and after the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. It’s also widely regarded as a cult. Last year, in the midst of his anti-Joe Biden skullduggery in Ukraine, in his 11th appearance at an MEK confab, Giuliani traveled to Albania, of all places, where the group has established a military and political base. There, he called Trump “heroic” for “doing away with the reckless nuclear agreement and putting [Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] on the terrorist list.”

In 2018, this reporter attended one of the MEK’s large-scale events, held at a hotel in midtown New York City. General Jim Jones, who became an ultra-hawk after being ousted as President Obama’s national security advisor in 2010, spoke to the gathering first, noting proudly that he is supposedly on a list of people the government in Tehran plans to assassinate.

Rising to speak after Jones, Giuliani seemed jealous. “I hope I say enough offensive things that they’ll put me on that list to kill me,” he commented. Needless to say, both Jones and Giuliani are still alive and kicking, and there’s no evidence that either one is on any Iranian kill list. However, thanks in part to Giuliani’s hardline, anti-Iran advice to the president, that country’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, was indeed placed on a presidential kill list and drone assassinated as 2020 began.

And Then There Was Ukraine

It was, of course, in connection with Ukraine that Giuliani’s freelancing came to the world’s attention. In the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s impeachment report, his name is mentioned about 160 times. He’s cited, first and foremost because, in that infamous “perfect” July 2019 phone call of his, Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work through him; because the former mayor was the primary organizer of the smear campaign against the actual ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was subsequently fired; and because it was he who, starting as early as May 2019, masterminded a months-long political witch hunt against the Bidens, demanding over and over that Ukraine carry out an ersatz investigation of the man the president then expected to be his chief 2020 election opponent.

Numerous figures, including Ambassador Bill Taylor, who succeeded Yovanovitch at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, would express dismay over Giuliani’s role as the “irregular” channel for the Trump administration’s Ukraine policy — the “Giuliani factor,” as Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker called it. The story of how all this led to the president’s impeachment is too well known to be rehashed here.

The Joe Biden/Hunter Biden part of the Ukraine story was straightforward enough in its own way. Far more complicated and troubling was the adherence of the president and Giuliani to a weird conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, used its intelligence service to try to sway the 2016 election. According to various official reports and in the opinion of virtually every expert who’s studied the matter, it was Russia that intervened to boost Trump’s election campaign. According to Trump and Giuliani, however, Ukraine meddled in 2016 on behalf of Hillary Clinton and indeed, they argue, the actual Democratic National Committee server somehow found its way to Kyiv, thanks to a computer security firm called CrowdStrike, which Trump claimed was owned by a wealthy Ukrainian. (It is not.)

Naturally enough, this Trump-Giuliani theory was nonsense, but according to the Washington Post, it had its origins — perhaps not surprisingly — in propaganda generated in Moscow. The Post reported that Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and Manafort’s partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, “played a role in convincing Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, despite what both Mueller and the U.S. intelligence community have concluded, and that it was actually Ukraine.”

According to Rick Gates, Manafort’s deputy, the Ukraine conspiracy theory originated with his boss who “parroted” the line from Kilimnik. And both Manafort and Kilimnik — who was indicted by Mueller — had ties to Moscow operatives and pro-Russian forces in Ukraine, while Kilimnik himself was identified by Mueller and the FBI as part of Russia’s GRU.

As the Post concluded: “So we have two men [Manafort and Flynn] who have been convicted of offenses related to their Russia ties, have both lied to investigators about their interactions with Russian interests, and who apparently played a significant role in pushing a theory to Trump that Russia did not actually interfere in the 2016 election. They instead pointed the finger at Russia’s nemesis, Ukraine, and that has apparently stuck with Trump for more than three years.”

And it was that line that would be spread eagerly by pro-Trump writers like the Hill’s John Solomon. In a review of Solomon’s pieces, released this month, the Hill’s editors analyzed 14 of his columns with titles like “As Russian collusion fades, Ukraine plot to help Clinton emerges.” In doing so, they found numerous troubling facts about Solomon, his sources, and his overall reporting. As the Hill report put it:

“Giuliani has indicated he was a key source of information for Solomon on Ukraine, telling the New York Times in November 2019 that he turned over information about the Bidens earlier in the year to Solomon. ‘I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon,’ Giuliani said.

“The former New York City mayor later told the New Yorker he encouraged Solomon to highlight information on the Bidens and Yovanovitch, stating, ‘I said, “John, let’s make this as prominent as possible,”’ adding, “‘I’ll go on TV. You go on TV. You do columns.’”

Two colorful characters who acted as Giuliani’s Ukraine go-betweens, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, have been indicted on conspiracy charges and, according to Fortune, Giuliani, too, could be indicted in that case. As CNN noted in January, it’s nearly unheard of for a U.S. Attorney’s office — in this case the one for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) — to end up indicting a former U.S. attorney who led the same district. CNN added: “The SDNY community has watched in disbelief as Giuliani continues to seek the spotlight even as the investigation has unfolded and expanded into new fronts on a nearly weekly basis. The impeachment inquiry has also unleashed new evidence regarding his role performing shadow diplomacy on behalf of President Donald Trump as recently as [mid-January].”

Indeed, Giuliani is still at it. In concert with a collection of corrupt ex-prosecutors in Ukraine and in his ongoing role as shadow secretary of state-cum-intelligence chief, Giuliani is still gathering conspiracy-riddled information on the Bidens in Kyiv — and Attorney General William Barr has obligingly created an “intake process in the field” to absorb Giuliani’s work product straight into the Department of Justice. One thing is guaranteed: “Secretary of State” Giuliani will have a clear field in Kyiv, since Ambassador Taylor was unceremoniously fired on January 1st of this year.