George Packer's Blog, page 76

Listening to Sean Hannity

Sean Hannity often looks angry, although sometimes it’s hard to tell. Even when he’s content, he looks like someone who’s spoiling for a fight. That’s how he appeared earlier this month, after Fox News fired its co-president Bill Shine, a Hannity booster whose career had, in turn, been helped by Hannity’s success. Shine’s dismissal came in the wake of lawsuits, and allegations of sexual harassment, bequeathed to Fox by its former president, Roger Ailes, and its former ratings king, Bill O’Reilly. Hannity had tweeted that Shine’s departure would mean “the total end of the FNC as we know it. Done.” That almost sounded like a threat to quit. The next day he began “Hannity,” the hour-long program that he anchors, by addressing what he imagined to be an impatient, Schadenfreude-hungry audience: “I want to welcome all of our friends from the alt-left propaganda media I kind of suspect may be tuning in tonight.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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What Will Become Of Roger Ailes’s Fox News?
Paul Ryan Sets Google News Alert for the Moment When Trump Becomes Unpopular Enough to Betray

Robert Mueller: A Most Welcome Special Counsel

In a week of mind-bending political developments, there is finally some good news. On Wednesday evening, the Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller, a former F.B.I. director, as a special counsel to oversee the F.B.I.’s investigation into possible collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign and the Russian government.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Robert Mueller to Head Russia Probe: First Thoughts
Paul Ryan Keeps It All in the Family
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Robert Mueller to Head Russia Probe: First Thoughts

On Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that Robert Mueller, a former director of the F.B.I., had been appointed special prosecutor to oversee the investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s election. The appointment follows the uproar caused last week by President Trump’s sudden dismal of the F.B.I. director, James Comey. Below, New Yorker writers offer some initial reactions to the news.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Robert Mueller: A Most Welcome Special Counsel
Paul Ryan Keeps It All in the Family
Donald Trump’s Advice to Graduates

Paul Ryan Keeps It All in the Family

The old-school Mafiosi are fading into the past, pale imitations of their pharaonic forefathers. As the late Murray Kempton, the greatest of all New York columnists, once wrote, “Where are the scungilli of yesteryear?” In the late nineties, federal agents insinuated an informer into the ranks of the DeCavalcante crime family, of New Jersey, and the resulting wiretaps and transcriptions revealed a dying language of secrecy, petty schemes, and blood oaths gone wrong. Sad old veterans of the Punic Wars of Essex County talked about selling old comic books and Viagra to make money, and yet they knew they were losing touch with the new world.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Robert Mueller: A Most Welcome Special Counsel
Robert Mueller to Head Russia Probe: First Thoughts
Donald Trump’s Advice to Graduates

Donald Trump’s Advice to Graduates

“I’ve accomplished a tremendous amount in a very short time as President,” Donald Trump told the graduating class of the Coast Guard Academy, in New London, Connecticut, on Wednesday, a day when, with talk of impeachable offenses in the air, it became reasonable to wonder if his entire time as President might be very short. Multiple congressional committees were on their way to subpoenaing any documentation that James Comey, who was the director of the F.B.I. until last week, had written regarding his meetings with the President. According to a Times report, the notes memorialized Trump saying, with regard to the F.B.I.’s investigation of the former national-security adviser Michael Flynn and his dealings with Russia, “I hope you let this go.” Comey didn’t; Trump fired him. The Times story was published on Tuesday evening. By the time that Trump got on the stage in New London, more than one congressional committee was going after what was quickly becoming known as the Comey memo. Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican and the chair of the House Oversight Committee, was busy scheduling hearings, with Comey as a witness, for next week. And, as much as the President regaled the graduates with tales of his victories—he has “saved the Second Amendment” and appointed a Supreme Court Justice “who’s going to be fantastic for forty-five years,” and the construction of his border wall is “going along very, very well”—what came across most clearly were his borderless delusions.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Robert Mueller: A Most Welcome Special Counsel
Robert Mueller to Head Russia Probe: First Thoughts
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The Comey Memo Creates a Dilemma for Republicans and Democrats

That deathly silence you hear is the sound of Republicans rushing to defend Donald Trump in the wake of allegations that he asked James Comey, the former F.B.I. director, to drop the Bureau’s investigation into Michael Flynn, the former national-security adviser.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Robert Mueller: A Most Welcome Special Counsel
Robert Mueller to Head Russia Probe: First Thoughts
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James Comey and the Revenge of Washington’s Professional Class

Washington is a lawyer’s town, built on protocols and rules. If this tends to make happy-hour conversation in the city a little more pedantic than the American norm, then it also has its advantages, among them a fanaticism for records. James Comey, the fired F.B.I. director, began his career as an associate at the powerhouse law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Later, during his years of government service, he routinely documented conversations with his superiors as a method of self-preservation. During the Bush Administration, he documented his resistance to the use of torture, which helped extend his career from a conservative epoch to a liberal one. “A showboat,” President Trump called Comey, last week, in defending his decision to fire the man. Perhaps, but one with the daily routines of a clerk.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Robert Mueller: A Most Welcome Special Counsel
Robert Mueller to Head Russia Probe: First Thoughts
Paul Ryan Keeps It All in the Family

Maria Sharapova Is Turned Away by the French Open

News came Tuesday afternoon that Maria Sharapova, the winner of five major tournaments in her long career, would not be offered one of two possible wild cards into the French Open, a tournament she has won twice. She was denied a wild card into the hundred-and-twenty-eight-woman main draw of the event, and she was denied a wild-card entry into the qualifying rounds, which begin in Paris, at Roland Garros, next week. Sharapova needed a wild card to play the French Open because her current ranking is not in the top two hundred, the cutoff to earn an invite to be a qualifier. Her ranking is outside the top two hundred because she has not been earning ranking points, having just returned to the women’s tour at the end of last month after serving a fifteen-month doping ban, which was originally meant to last two years but was reduced on appeal.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Is the Comey Memo the Beginning of the End for Trump?

Donald Trump, who may well have attempted to obstruct justice within just a few weeks of taking his oath of office, came to the Presidency with a wealth of experience in the art of deceit. He may know little of domestic or foreign policy, he may be accustomed to running an office of satraps and cronies, and he may be unable to harness an institution as complex as the executive branch, but experience told him early on that he could dodge any accusation and deny any aggression against the truth.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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H. R. McMaster and Appropriate Presidential Behavior
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H. R. McMaster and Appropriate Presidential Behavior

“Wholly appropriate” was a phrase that H. R. McMaster, the national-security adviser, used more than half a dozen times in a press briefing on Tuesday morning, in describing what President Donald Trump revealed to Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in an Oval Office meeting last week. The Washington Post, followed by other media organizations, had described the conversation in a way that was wholly dismaying. The various accounts had Trump boasting about his intelligence (perhaps in both senses of the word) and showing off the most sensitive information in the same way that he showed reporters who visited his Trump Tower office the framed magazine covers on his wall, each one bearing a picture of Trump. Worse, the Post reported that the intelligence Trump bragged about came from a Middle Eastern ally that had not given permission to share it, and that might not want the Russians, in particular, to know the sources and methods by which it had learned that information—information which, according to press reports, Trump may have put at risk. (According to further press reports, the ally in question is Israel, raising the possibility that what Trump did was roughly the fun-house-mirror image of what Jonathan Pollard was convicted of doing.) One of the Post’s sources, a former official, called it “all kind of shocking.” Not even Republicans seemed to know what to do with the story when it broke on Monday; many of them, like Senator Bob Corker, repeated worried comments about the need for order in the White House. Others muttered about national security—like Paul Ryan, who sent out a spokesman to say that “protecting our nation’s secrets is paramount,” and then went into hiding.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Is the Comey Memo the Beginning of the End for Trump?
Obama Willing to Serve as Temp President While Trump Receives Psychiatric Evaluation
Presidential Nondisclosure Agreement