George Packer's Blog, page 120

January 12, 2017

Mike Pompeo and the Question of Torture

On Thursday morning, during the Senate Intelligence Committee’s confirmation hearing for Representative Mike Pompeo, of Kansas, Donald Trump’s nominee to be the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, he took a question from Senator Dianne Feinstein, of California. “If you were ordered by the President to re-start the C.I.A.’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques that fall outside of the Army Field Manual, would you comply?” Feinstein asked. In other words, if Pompeo were asked to break what is the clear law of the land, under a 2015 act of Congress, by directing his agents to torture detainees, would he do it?

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Published on January 12, 2017 17:36

Can Mad Dog Mattis Save America from Trump?

It is our privilege or our curse, depending how you look at it, to be living in a time when tradition and precedent are being tossed out on a daily basis. Thursday saw another significant break with history when, for the first time in almost seventy years, the Senate voted to allow a recently retired military officer—James Mattis, a former four-star general—to serve in the civilian post of Secretary of Defense.

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Published on January 12, 2017 16:25

How Trump Could Kill the Investigation of James Comey’s Actions

It is surely cold comfort to Hillary Clinton and her supporters that the inspector general of the Department of Justice will conduct an investigation of James Comey’s behavior on the eve of the Presidential election. But the decision by Michael Horowitz, the I.G., to examine the propriety of the F.B.I. director’s disclosure of politically damaging information about Clinton last October 28th was the right one.

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Published on January 12, 2017 15:50

January 11, 2017

Marco Rubio Doesn’t Let Rex Tillerson Off Easy

There were many issues to cover during the confirmation hearing for Rex Tillerson, the former C.E.O. of ExxonMobil who is the President-elect’s nominee for Secretary of State, all of them containing the potential for fireworks: climate change; Tillerson’s financial entanglements; the rise of anti-democratic movements around the world; ISIS. The subject that actually lit up the room was raised relatively early in the proceedings on Wednesday, and was the only thing that anyone seemed to want to talk about all day; it came up when the Florida senator Marco Rubio started asking questions about Russia.

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Published on January 11, 2017 19:13

Trump Takes On the Press but Not His Conflicts

At ten past eleven on Wednesday morning, Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and some other flunkies of Donald Trump emerged from an elevator in the lobby of Trump Tower. Packed into a smallish space that had been turned into a makeshift room were about two hundred reporters, a few dozen supporters of Trump, and some Secret Service agents. A couple of minutes later, Trump, three of his children—Ivanka, Donald, Jr., and Eric—and the Vice-President-elect, Mike Pence, stepped out of the same elevator.

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Published on January 11, 2017 16:42

A Murky Legal Mess at Standing Rock

In early September, Allisha LaBarge, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, travelled from Hibbing, Minnesota, to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, in North Dakota, where she began living in a tepee and taking part in protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, which is meant to transport oil eleven hundred and seventy miles to Illinois. LaBarge, who is thirty-four, joined the protest camps, she said, because she believed that the pipeline, which some Native Americans call “the black snake,” would pollute the Missouri River, violate treaty rights, and harm lands and burial grounds sacred to the Sioux.

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Published on January 11, 2017 14:20

Donald Trump’s Dossier-Dominated Press Conference

“Does anyone really believe that story?” Donald Trump said, at his first press conference in more than five months. He was referring to a dossier that BuzzFeed had published the night before, which contained unproved allegations of material that the Russians had supposedly gathered to blackmail Trump. The press conference might not have gone half as well for Trump if that story hadn’t been out. Trump looked angry, in a way that, as anger sometimes does, left him more rhetorically focussed. The rambling defensiveness that criticisms often provoke in him was not so visible. His grandiosity, his resentments, and, at moments, his crudity were all on full display, but not in a way that is likely to alienate his supporters. The first question asked of Trump was whether he had been briefed by American intelligence about the alleged Russian efforts to compromise him, as CNN had reported. He said that he couldn’t talk about classified intelligence, but he did have something to say about what had been publicly reported. “It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen,” he said. “And it was gotten by opponents of ours, as you know, because you reported it and so did many of the other people. It was a group of opponents that got together—sick people—and they put that crap together.”

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Published on January 11, 2017 13:47

The Increasingly Lonely Hope of Barack Obama

“You can tell I’m a lame duck,” Barack Obama joked before his farewell address, on Tuesday night, in Chicago, “because nobody’s following instructions.” This was a teasing reference to the unbridled whoop of cheers that had gone up as he’d appeared at the podium; despite his best efforts, the President couldn’t convince the twenty-thousand-person congregation of true believers and long-standing aides to quiet down and take a seat. The quip also worked as a mordant description of the wider atmosphere of chaos and unpredictability that has taken hold during the two months since Donald Trump’s still-shocking election as Obama’s successor. To the extent that there exist “instructions” for a dignified transfer of power in America, they would seem to include the principle of “one President at a time,” a willingness on the part of the President-elect to communicate at reasonable intervals via press conference rather than Twitter outburst, and a general disinclination to comment on the fortunes of once-storied reality shows or the Golden Globes. Trump, in shredding these unwritten rules to ribbons, has made them seem instantly outdated. In the hours before Obama’s speech, a series of news reports and document dumps concerning the role of Russian interference on Trump’s behalf only served to deepen the impression of disorder.

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Published on January 11, 2017 06:51

January 10, 2017

Unanswered Questions from Sessions’s First Day

“There are areas that are rightly clear and right, there are areas that may be gray, and there are areas that are unacceptable,” Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, said on Tuesday, at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “And a good Attorney General needs to know where those lines are, to help the President where possible and to resist improper, unacceptable actions.” But what, exactly, is unacceptable to Sessions, when it comes to Donald Trump? The hearing did not quite manage to wrest an answer from Sessions on that point, despite some disturbing glimpses. Nor did the Democrats manage, at least on the first day, to present a clear narrative of why Sessions is unacceptable—something that, given the material they had, one might have imagined they could do. Sessions was denied confirmation as a federal judge, in 1986, with, as I’ve written before, good reason. Then, the hearing uncovered comments he had made about race and a troubling record when it came to civil-rights enforcement; more recently, Sessions served as an unabashed cheerleader for Donald Trump at his ugliest, most jingoistic moments. But what Democrats mostly sought to do was to offer ways for Sessions to distinguish himself from Trump—to drag him into the gray, perhaps with hopes that he would, in turn, do his part to keep Trump out of the worst of the murk.

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Published on January 10, 2017 19:23