The Watergate Editor on How Trump “Leads the Press Around by the Nose” The New Republic / by Jeff Stein

The Watergate Editor on How Trump “Leads the Press Around by the Nose”

The New Republic / by Jeff Stein / 42min

Everybody’s heard of Woodward and Bernstein, if only from their portrayals by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the avenging angels of Watergate in All the President’s Men. But their editor, Barry Sussman? Not so much. Yet it was Sussman, then the city editor of The Washington Post, who guided the young duo and their paper to a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. “From the start, the Post was ... unusually lucky” to have Sussman, the late David Halberstam wrote in The Powers That Be, his monumental book on the media. “Before anyone else at the Post, Sussman saw Watergate as a larger story, saw that the individual events were part of a larger pattern, the result of hidden decisions from somewhere in the top of government which sent smaller men to run dirty errands.” 

Sounds familiar. Some four decades later, with the media and Donald Trump in a similar titanic struggle, it seemed a good time to get Sussman’s take on events then and now. Contrary to decades of myth-making, Sussman reminds us, the Post didn’t bring down Richard Nixon alone and certainly not overnight. As with Trump today, Nixon retained a large segment of hardcore supporters in Congress and the public that hung on—until, at the last minute, they didn’t. As Sussman explains, what turned opinion against Nixon was a watershed moment that dramatically shifted public perceptions. And he suggests that moment may come for Trump soon, too. 

Jeff Stein: What’s your take on the press coverage of Trump, starting with the first allegations about his associates’ contacts with the Russians, up to the Mueller report? How has the press been doing? 

Barry Sussman: The problem is the media have allowed Trump to set the agenda. When he changes the subject, they change the subject. They follow him wherever he goes. He leads the press around by the nose. That was even true on the Russia investigation. How many weeks did we go, months, where there were front-page stories questioning whether Trump would even testify? Imbeciles like Giuliani were getting press attention as though they had something to say, when all they were doing was trying to stretch things out and humiliate the press. That’s my main difficulty, not only with the Russia investigation but with everything else.

The press didn’t even cover the presidents every single day until Reagan. You may remember this. It was Reagan’s sharp advisers who decided to make him the center of attention and pretty much get stories day by day, every day. Before then, there was not even daily coverage of presidents. I think that we might keep that in mind as Trump is covered.

“The press didn’t even cover the presidents every single day until Reagan.”

The way Trump is covered now is that he is covered first. If there’s any room for anything, or anybody else, or anything else, it will follow, if there’s room. I think that we have such a great list of real problems that need to be dealt with, that are newsworthy and important, starting of course with climate change, but the list is a very, very strong list. Even some Trump issues make the list, like immigration.

Just because Trump wants people to pay attention to immigration doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. We just don’t have to pay attention to him on immigration. My solution to this is that the press, especially the elite press that already has beats on all the important subjects, it should pay attention to what’s going on. It should write about them as needed, and when there’s room left over, they give us Trump. Turn things around on their face.

Stein: Trump’s followers seem to be impervious to facts. It’s been noted again and again that there’s two different worlds we live in, but that’s not particularly new, is it? I mean, during Watergate, Nixon had a large following that would not accept the revelations of The Washington Post and others about the criminality of the Nixon administration.

Sussman: That’s exactly right. The Nixon followers, both in Congress and in the public, stayed with him for a long time, but they didn’t stay with him forever. There’s no reason to think that a portion of Trump followers won’t stay with him forever. The single most important issue here, in the case of Nixon, was the matter of public opinion. Nixon lost when his approval ratings went down. As they descended, you could knock off more and more Republican supporters in Congress, so that when his final approval ratings got into the low 20s, he was lost in Congress. He was done for.

Now, I don’t expect Trump’s approval ratings to go that low. He just has his own popular TV network that will keep him up there. If nothing else will, Fox News will, and these days, Sinclair as well, and other minor news organizations. So he won’t plummet the way Nixon did. At the same time, he won’t stay popular as the enormity of the things he’s done becomes clearer and clearer to more and more people. Even though we now have a Republican Senate, even there, we’re going to see inroads.

The trick is this. What changed during the Nixon years was that in the beginning, say in 1973, even after the Saturday Night Massacre in 1973, Republicans in the House and Senate would say to themselves, “Do I need this headache? Which is worse for me personally, to favor Nixon’s impeachment or to be against Nixon’s impeachment?” For a long time, they felt it was better to side with Nixon than to side against him. Gradually, that changed, and gradually, that could conceivably change with Trump, as well. You would expect it. I expect it, but of course, I’ve been expecting it for a while now.

Stein: They’ve stuck with him through obviously scores of odious revelations of odious behavior and perhaps criminal behavior, obstruction of justice. What could possibly break the back of his support?

Sussman: Well, one thing that could happen is exactly what happened to Nixon. It’s his taxes could become public. Nixon was guilty of criminal fraud in his taxes. He backdated his taxes and took a $570,000 deduction that was illegal. He ended up having to repay the government $470,000 in taxes. Had he been anybody else, he would have been charged for that. As a matter of fact, Nixon’s taxes made it into one of the articles of impeachment in the drafts of the impeachment proceedings.

They were dropped in the end. There were only three items of impeachment. His taxes were dropped, but the issue was clear to the people. Nixon always said that Watergate was false, as usual. He also called Watergate a third-rate burglary, but his main approach was that, “Well, this happens on both sides.” People didn’t know how to deal with that. Some people believed that, and to an extent, things did happen on both sides. But the taxes weren’t complicated. When you have the president claiming less than $900 in taxes two years in a row on his federal income taxes, people are going to understand that, because it’s less than anybody paid. When it’s not only just paying a little bit but the tax deduction is illegal, and the way president claimed it was criminal fraud, that’s not complicated.                        

We don’t know what’s going to happen with Trump’s taxes, if and when they become public, but there have been possibilities that something similar could happen, and that would be the end.

Stein: It’s possible also that the taxes would be greeted with a shrug. It seems to me a big difference between Nixon and Trump is that Nixon always proclaimed one way or another, “I am not a crook. I am an honest man,” whereas Trump sort of shrugs and says, “Yeah, I’m kind of a crook, but so what?” Many have noted that when his financial improprieties are revealed, many of his followers just shrug and say, “Well, that’s great. He socked it to the man by cheating the man on taxes.”

Sussman: That’s exactly right, but it’s only right for one reason. The reason is the press doesn’t stay with the story long enough. It’s again a case of them being led around by the nose by Trump. If his taxes show the kind of fraud that some people think could be there, and the press writes about it, that’s not a one-day story. That’s not a two-day story. It’s a story that they have to get into, dig deep, and actually it’s dealt with properly, incrementally.

“The press doesn’t stay with the story long enough. It’s again a case of them being led around by the nose by Trump.”

If they write what they find and keep finding more, then Trump won’t be able to change the subject and it will take effect. Because not all of Trump’s supporters are loony. Many of them are disaffected for other reasons, and some of them for very good reasons. That’s why they stay with Trump, because they don’t like the alternatives. I think that’s fair for a lot of people, but if they see that, “Well, no, this is just too much,” which they would see if the press did a better job, a more straightforward, better job, instead of following Trump around by the nose, dealing with other issues.

The issues I’m talking about, I’m talking about climate change and a whole list, these are issues where Trump comes out poorly. People will know that, too. A main problem that I have is not just Trump. It’s the Republican Party, who are very happy to have Trump there because they’re getting what they want, to the detriment of everybody else and the planet. The problem is just flat-out poor press coverage, not well thought-out press coverage.

Stein: What would you be doing differently?

Sussman: Well, one of the main offenders is cable television. What I would do differently on cable television is I would eliminate from CNN, for example, which is somewhat popular—I would eliminate the partisan supporters of the president who are not interested in giving a legitimate point of view of what’s going on. Their only interest seems to be the party line.

I would report a little bit harder. I’d like to know if some of these Republicans who appear as interpreters and as media experts, talking heads, I wonder if they have discussions and talking points given to them by people involved in the party. I wonder how often they meet with party officials, how often they talk, and why would anybody pretend or accept them when it’s so clear that they’re not interested in facts or news, but only the party line.

Stein: Should they continue to book people like Kellyanne Conway, who just comes on and spouts one lie after another?

Sussman: Well, that’s a perfect example, Conway. That’s a fine example of, why would anybody pay any attention to anything she says? She’s not reliable. We don’t expect her to be anything except a mouthpiece. That’s her job.

But I’m also talking about people who aren’t in public office anymore, who are called on. This doesn’t go for everybody.

Stein: What should major newspapers, such as The Washington Post and New York Times, be doing differently?

Sussman: It’s not that they don’t cover other news, because they do. They’re great newspapers. They’re great news organizations. They spend a lot on foreign coverage. That’s not inexpensive. I don’t really like to criticize them all that much, but I think in this instance, they have to do a little more than they’re doing in terms of, what should we be covering? What are we not covering day by day that should be covered? Where does Trump fit into all this? Because he’ll do a tweet, and lead everybody around by the nose with a tweet. “Lock her up” is still an expression. Last week, he went after John Kerry. What in the world is that about? The point of it is just to change the subject.                        

“If there were less coverage, could Trump set the agenda to a lesser degree?”

If there were less coverage, could Trump set the agenda to a lesser degree? If he were not allowed to set the agenda, the investigative coverage would stand out more, because there would be less of the foolish coverage, the unnecessary, foolish coverage.

Stein: Let’s talk about Trump and Russia for a minute. I’m remembering the Halberstam characterization of you as the perfect editor, or something like that, on Watergate because you knew something was there. You saw the bigger story. In terms of the Trump Russia coverage, me as a Cold War baby, one of the things that alarms me is Trump’s obeisance to Putin. It seems to me that a larger story is he is dancing to Putin’s tune. Do you see it that way?

Sussman: I do see it exactly that way. I always believed, always that you give people the benefit of the doubt. At the same time, if there’s ever been somebody who acts like he’s hiding something, always, if you can’t explain his actions for any good reason but only with bad reasons, maybe there’s something there. I agree with you entirely on Trump and Putin. It’s just gone past the point of surprise. I’d be surprised if he says something that makes sense when it comes to Putin.                        

So yes, it looks like there’s something there. There may be something there. We ought to be able to find out if there’s something there. That’s one thing that a look at his taxes might help. At least we ought to look, and try to find out, and try to see if anything is there. More and more it looks as though there’s no clean answer to why Trump behaves this way toward Putin.

Stein: Do you think that Mueller should have knitted all these Russian contacts and arrangements together to make a declarative statement, a stronger declarative statement that something was really amiss here?

Sussman: Mueller had a very broad mandate.He could have done a lot more than he did. He, for example, could have looked at Trump’s taxes himself, had he been allowed to.

Stein: What prevented him?

Sussman: I don’t know whether he was allowed to or not allowed to. But as we’ve been saying, if the taxes tie Trump, conceivably, to obligations to Russia, then they explain a lot of his behavior toward Russia and toward Putin. Now, it may be that higher-ups in the Justice Department told Mueller, “No, you’re not going to go after his taxes.” Maybe Mueller himself decided he didn’t need that headache, he had enough to look at.

I feel overall there are a number of areas where Mueller could have done more, but I don’t know if he decided not to do more, or if he was told, “You’re not going to get into that area,” because I think that’s also possible. I think that it would be nice to have him testify and find out answers to some of these questions.

Stein: Going back to being able to see the larger story at work, the Post was able to find Donald Segretti, who revealed that there was a much larger operation of sabotage against the Democrats. Do you suspect anything like that going on with this administration? Would it surprise you?

Sussman: Well, the corruption in the Nixon administration, by and large—not solely, but by and large—was over power. They looked at the country, they looked at it as us and them, and they tried to make us stronger at the expense of them, them being everybody else.                        

The current administration, the Trump administration, it’s mostly about money, and turning the clock back. It’s really a very different kind of corruption going on than there was in the Nixon group. By and large.

Stein: Can you explain that?

Sussman: I don’t want to push that too far, because of course Nixon had his Southern Strategy and all of that. Much of that was the same, but the main difference or a main difference was the Vietnam War, which took 57,000 American lives. Nixon came to office saying he was going to end the war. Instead, he doubled the life of the war, and tried to make anybody who dissented, who was a war dissenter, an anti-war person, seemed to be a bit un-American.                        

Trump is, in a way, doing some similar things. Nixon in his first year had the vice president, Agnew, go out all around the country saying bad things about the press, criticizing the eastern establishment press. Of course, Trump is doing that in spades, saying the press is the enemy of the people. It’s an incredible thing.

“A great political party has been turned into a disaster.”

People keep thinking that the Republicans are toadies in this. It’s true that some of them feel it’s politically difficult because if they go against Trump, they lose all their support, and if they back Trump, they lose support. But I think a lot of them don’t have any problem at all. If you looked over the list of Republicans who might vote... who might do something that’s good for the country instead of good for the party, I think you’ll find three to five Republicans who might, at any given time, vote like that, out of more than 50. I’m not even sure there are that many.

A great political party has been turned into a disaster. That’s not to defend the Democrats or say good things about the Democrats, although there are some really fine Democrats. It’s to say that we’ve never had a situation like this. As bad as Trump is, the Republican Party really is no better. We’ve come to a strange place in American political life.

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Arrest Me, You Alabama Cowards The New Republic / by Emily Atkin

Arrest Me, You Alabama Cowards

The New Republic / by Emily Atkin / 9h

I don’t remember the name of the doctor who performed my abortion. I don’t even remember what she looked like.

Maybe it’s because she didn’t actually “perform” a procedure. She answered my questions; she wrote my prescription. But she wasn’t there when I went to the pharmacy. She wasn’t there when I took the pills. She wasn’t there while I thrashed around on my couch for two hours, screaming in pain and vomiting.

That wouldn’t matter in Alabama, where Governor Kay Ivey on Wednesday signed the most extreme anti-abortion bill in the country. The “Human Life Protection Act,” which makes no exception for rape or incest, defines abortion as “the use or prescription of any instrument, medicine, drug, or any other substance or device with the intent to terminate the pregnancy of a woman.” A doctor caught performing one—at any stage of a pregnancy—would be charged with Class A felony.

If this were the law in New York when, at age 19, I chose to get an abortion about five weeks into an accidental pregnancy, my doctor could have been arrested. I may have been the one who put the pill in my mouth, who handled the fetal tissue, and who cleaned up the blood. But since my doctor was the one who prescribed the pill, she’d be the one facing up to 99 years in prison.

As Joyce White Vance, a former U.S. attorney in Alabama, explained in The Washington Post, the “draconian nature of the bill is its point—because its sponsors aren’t just looking to prohibit abortion in Alabama. They are looking for a clean vehicle to take to the Supreme Court. They want to overturn Roe v. Wade, supplanting it with something that makes state laws prohibiting abortion the law of the land.”

And yet, the law—which likely won’t go into effect without a long legal fight—is not quite as draconian as it could have been. Alabama’s male lawmakers could have sought to punish the women themselves. But they knew that throwing women in jail for doing what they please with their own bodies would have been seen as too cruel. So they targeted doctors instead. Cowards.

But you can see their twisted logic. Most abortion opponents probably don’t regard women who get abortions as criminals, but rather victims—not just of a broadly permissive society, but of a specifically godless doctor. It is much easier to see a medical professional as morally depraved, and deserving of consequences, than a pregnant woman. She didn’t know any better! She was brainwashed! She’s just hysterical!

Too many Americans still think of abortion as a medieval procedure in which a white-coated doctor stands at the edge of an exam table, armed with clamps, ready to pry a nearly fully formed baby from a woman’s womb. This is not reality. About a quarter abortions in the United States are so-called medication abortions, in which the woman takes one or more pills to induce an abortion, usually prior to nine weeks of gestation and in their comfort of their home. And most surgical abortions, which require a doctor and occur in a clinic or other medical setting, are not being done to viable fetuses. More than 90 percent of abortions in the United States are performed at or before 13 weeks of gestation. (The earliest a fetus can survive is after 20 weeks, and the odds are extremely lowuntil 25 weeks.)

But even if all abortions were surgical abortions performed by doctors, Alabama’s choice to punish the doctor and not the patient would still be cowardly. They’re not just trying to the mask the horror of punishing women by punishing their doctors instead; they’re trying to guilt women into submission. We are taught, from a young age, to suppress our own needs if they might burden other people. So whereas we might be willing to get an illegal abortion at the risk going to jail ourselves, we’d be less willing to do so if it put our doctor at risk.

I may not remember my abortion doctor’s name, but I value what she did for me. I remember wishing she had been there when my uterine lining began to shed—not so she could comfort me, but so I could scream-vomit at her lying face. She had made me feel so comfortable with my decision earlier that day. She made me feel in control. She assured me that I was making the choice that was right for me.

But when the pain passed, so did my anger at her, because she was right. My 19-year-old self did make the right choice, and ten years later I am grateful that she helped me make it. If I knew her name, I would call her and thank her.

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The Unstoppable Rise of Phoebe Waller-Bridge The New Republic / by Rachel Syme

The Unstoppable Rise of Phoebe Waller-Bridge
The New Republic / by Rachel Syme / 11h

In a scene about halfway through the new season of Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who writes and stars in every episode, sits inside a confession booth in an old church. The fact that her character, Fleabag, is moved to confess to a priest is a kind of meta-joke for the audience. Because the show itself functions as one long confessional monologue, with the viewer as the protagonist’s personal sounding board as she strides around the streets of London, causing trouble. Waller-Bridge often turns directly to camera in the middle of a scene to add an aside or a nasty piece of commentary; she tells us everything she is about to do and everything she has done, no matter how depraved or desperate. Her eyes plead with the camera not to pan away.


Over the first season, which aired in 2016, we learn that her misdeeds—sleeping around, drinking too much, stealing objects of priceless art from her father’s house—are meant to mask her sadness. She is grieving the loss of the two women closest to her: her mother, who died of breast cancer, and her best friend, Boo, with whom she co-owned a guinea pig–themed café in London, and who killed herself by walking into traffic. If Fleabag were played by a more conventional actress, her spiral might feel cloying or gimmicky. But Waller-Bridge’s delivery is dry and detached, more elegant than enervating. Although she’s a millennial woman carving her way through an alienating urban environment, Fleabag has little in common with other recent characters in this mode, from Girls’ mopey Hannah Horvath to the street-smart pratfallers of Broad City. With her coltish humor, Waller-Bridge is better placed in a lineage of chic and cutting wits—more Noël Coward than Lena Dunham.


The program quickly made her a star and one of the most in-demand (and prolific) screenwriters and showrunners in the business. In 2018, she had a second hit with Killing Eve, a series that she created but did not act in; a blistering cat-and-mouse thriller for BBC America starring two women, a detective and an assassin, who chase each other around Europe. Her next project is the series Run for HBO, starring Merritt Wever and Domhnall Gleeson as friends who abandon their lives and disappear together. Daniel Craig asked her to polish the new James Bond script, to bring a sense of play and a shot of world-weary humor to a staid, hyper-masculine franchise. If you want to inject instant charisma into a hoary property, Phoebe Waller-Bridge is the person you call.


The second season of Fleabag reaches beyond debonair spikiness to something more complex and searching. Waller-Bridge takes the big questions her character struggles with—Am I good enough? Can I ever forgive myself? Will anyone ever love me?—and does something so unexpected with them that it is almost sublime. She brings in a priest, and by extension the subject of faith. Fleabag’s wandering takes on a spiritual dimension. She’s not just a messy woman who can’t get her life together. She is a lost lamb, seeking divine redemption.


Although Fleabag might have looked like an overnight success, Waller-Bridge had in fact been working on the project for at least three years before it aired in America. It began as a one-woman show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2013, written when, as a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she was getting by on bit parts in British dramas like Doctors. Her hour-long show was a promising blueprint for her cacophonous, frenetic style: Revived in New York earlier this year, it swings wildly from comedy to tragedy, always testing the viewer. About halfway through, there is a five-minute segment in which she attempts to mime taking a picture of her vagina with her phone, raising her leg at an awkward 90-degree angle. Waller-Bridge revels in these moments, when the audience directly in front of her in the theater can’t look away. It is brilliant physical comedy, which she translates to television with a kind of gangly, Buster Keaton-esque energy.


After Edinburgh, she found herself creating two shows at once: Crashing and the Fleabag adaptation. Waller-Bridge acted in both projects, carrying them forward with her own mesmerizing screen presence. But she had bigger goals in mind. She wanted to create a wider range of roles for other actresses. Many of the roles she’d found herself reading for were “two-dimensional”; she wanted her characters to do things that were “genuinely shocking.” Killing Eve, adapted from a series of e-books by Luke Jennings, follows Eve (Sandra Oh), an ambitious MI6 agent, and Villanelle (Jodie Comer), the feline female assassin she pursues around the globe. It’s a detective story infused with feminine jealousy and desire. The two women become mutually obsessed, trying to kill each other at the same time as they develop an erotic infatuation. When, in the finale of the first season, Eve stabs Villanelle in the stomach, Villanelle chooses to view it as an act of love.


The show, now in its second season, has become BBC America’s splashiest success. (Its star, Sandra Oh, co-hosted this year’s Golden Globes.) Driven by the wicked dialogue that is Waller-Bridge’s trademark, the series’ complex appeal draws on the traditions of spy novels and noir cinema, while foregrounding fascinating and twisted female antiheroes. Waller-Bridge allowed women to be violent, terrifying sociopaths, but she also made them undeniably feminine. Men exist on only the periphery of the story. Perhaps more important, with Killing Eve Waller-Bridge avoided the trap that so many women creators find themselves in—of being pigeonholed by their first-person work as confessional artists who don’t want to stray past their own experience. It proved she could write a world-spanning, big-budget thriller full of murder and intrigue.


When she leapt back into Fleabag, Waller-Bridge had a more expansive vision. The show’s second season is about reckoning and consequences. When we meet Fleabag in the second season, she is still acting out. She kicks off the season by punching her sister’s husband at a dinner where her father and “stepmonster” announce that they are planning a fancy wedding. She is also looking for ways to make sense out of tragedies that seem senseless. At the same dinner, she meets a young priest with a scruffy, hangdog affect (Andrew Scott, best known for playing the villain Moriarty in the BBC’s Sherlock) who is new to her father’s parish and has agreed to perform the wedding ceremony. She is drawn to him, both because he is a man she cannot have and because she sees him as a chance to fill her chaotic days with meaning and structure.


The season unfolds more like a romantic comedy than anything else. The supporting characters are still around, and they have their moments (a particularly funny scene happens when Fleabag’s sister, Claire [Sian Clifford], asks her to cater a posh corporate event, and Fleabag accidentally shatters a priceless award), but the real meat of the show is the tango between Fleabag and The Priest. The two dance around each other all season, growing closer even as they know that they can never be together. Fleabag takes a sudden interest in the Holy Bible, reading it in the bathtub. The Priest asks her to help him pick out his satin robes for her father’s wedding. But mostly, they spend a lot of time walking and talking. It is refreshing to see Fleabag make a friend; you can imagine how buoyant she must have been before her mother and Boo died. But even as Fleabag opens up to The Priest, she still cannot stop talking directly to the camera, her safety blanket.


The Priest notices this behavior and comments on it. We start to see that Fleabag addressing the audience is not a clever exposition device, but something she is doing in the real world to disassociate from reality. “Where did you just go? You went somewhere,” the Priest says to her during a conversation when she pauses to clarify a fact for the viewer. The camera had been a crutch for Fleabag, her way of disconnecting from her surroundings. The Priest cares enough to ask why she keeps drifting, a question that comes across as incredibly romantic in context.


As the sexual tension builds, The Priest suggests one night over whiskey that perhaps Fleabag might want to confess her sins. She’s been hiding a lot from him—how Boo died, why she can’t stop punishing herself—but she does not admit any of that. Instead, she recites a litany of her desires, a striking monologue that is pure Waller-Bridge, skating the fine line between weakness and danger. “I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning,” she says. “I want someone to tell me what to eat, what to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what to not joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in, who to vote for, who to love, and how to tell them. I want someone to tell me how to live my life, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong.”


By the end of her confession, Fleabag is in tears, but The Priest doesn’t offer her comfort. He later succumbs to Fleabag’s charms and breaks his sacred vows to spend a night with her. The two keep flip-flopping, in a constant exchange of control and dominance, until they need to make a final decision whether to walk away or stay together. He doesn’t want to abandon his faith for her, but he also doesn’t want to lose her. She wants to open herself up to love, but she also knows that he is cosmically unavailable. I won’t spoil the ending, except to say that it’s about letting go. In the final episode, Fleabag turns to the camera, and she asks it not to follow her. Wherever she is off to next, we cannot come along. 

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Nancy Pelosi Shouldn’t Normalize Trump’s Worst Behavior by Brendan Nyhan

medium.com
Nancy Pelosi Shouldn’t Normalize Trump’s Worst Behavior
Brendan Nyhan
5-6 minutes

The greatest danger of Donald Trump’s presidency is that seemingly abnormal things become seen as normal. After more than 10,000 false or misleading claims, even the president’s outrageous assertions that Democrats support the murder of live infants barely seem newsworthy.

What’s even worse, however, is that other political actors have started to normalize this behavior and adjust their expectations accordingly. First, Republicans acquiesced to Trump’s controversial campaign in 2016. Most stood by when Trump fired the FBI director for investigating him, said there were very fine people on both sides of a white nationalist protest in Charlottesville, and endorsed the physical assault of a journalist. And now, even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — a Democrat who vehemently opposes Trump — is taking behavior that should be unthinkable for an American president as a given.

Since taking back control of the House of Representatives, Pelosi has implored her fellow Democrats to focus on defeating Trump politically rather than impeaching him. Though some members of her caucus support impeachment, the speaker believes it would be divisive and ultimately unsuccessful.

However, Pelosi argued for this view using a political logic that normalizes a potential election challenge. In an interview with New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush, Pelosi voiced concern that Trump would not willingly cede power if he lost by a slim margin. “We have to inoculate against that, we have to be prepared for that,” Pelosi told Thrush. Thrush further reported that “Pelosi has told associates that she does not automatically trust the president to respect the results of any election short of an overwhelming defeat.”

    Pelosi has inadvertently increased expectations of a direct challenge to the American system of government.

There are genuine reasons to worry that Trump might challenge the legitimacy of the election. In 2016, he famously refused to commit to accepting the results of the election if he lost. He has since made a number of “jokes” about extending his time in office. There is no precedent in modern American history for a prolonged election challenge by a losing presidential candidate, which would be dangerous and destabilizing. Even Al Gore stood down and accepted the results of the 2000 election when he lost the Bush v. Gore case in the U.S. Supreme Court (though reports indicate George W. Bush’s campaign was preparing to contest the election if Bush won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College — exactly what ultimately happened to Gore.)

Trump’s refusal to accept the election results would be especially dangerous because he already serves as the commander in chief of the armed forces. Should he refuse to relinquish power, the U.S. could become engulfed in a constitutional crisis that threatens the stability of our democracy. In such a scenario, other political actors would most likely force him to step down, but the process could easily provoke riots and violence. Moreover, Trump would likely base any such challenge on dubious claims of election fraud, which could threaten the perceived integrity of the electoral system and the legitimacy of his successor.

We must make clear that an election challenge is unthinkable. Though Pelosi seeks to prevent such an outcome, her statement increases expectations that Trump will contest the election absent a massive defeat. In trying to hold the line within her caucus against impeachment and argue for the most electable candidate, she has inadvertently increased expectations of a direct challenge to the American system of government.

Pelosi’s argument is especially foolish given our current political context. Trump enjoys a strong economy and faces no major foreign policy crises — circumstances under which presidents are typically reelected. Though his approval ratings remain low, given the strong state of the economy, Democrats are still unlikely to defeat Trump by the large margin that Pelosi has established as the only standard under which Trump will acquiesce. Moreover, no one should concede the point that the validity of an election contest depends on the margin of victory. It is no more legitimate to contest a fairly decided election when a candidate loses by 1% of the vote rather than 5%.

At a time when so many norms are in danger, national leaders should be defending the integrity of our elections, not publicly strategizing about challenges to their legitimacy.

What Joe Biden Is Teaching Democrats About Democrats by Jonathan Chait, nymag.com

    View Original
    May 12th, 2019
    13 min
    jonathan chait

Over the past five years, the Democratic Party has seemed to race leftward so fast that its recent standard-bearers are considered no longer qualified to lead it. Bill Clinton? An embarrassment not welcome on the campaign trail. Barack Obama? A neoliberal whose half-measures should not be repeated. Nor does the new crowd of Democrats qualify by the stringent standards of ideological purity: Cory Booker has ties to Wall Street; Kamala Harris was a prosecutor; Beto O'Rourke once mused about cutting Social Security.

But nobody is thought of as more retrograde than Joe Biden — "a deeply flawed candidate who's out of step with the mood of his party," Politico wrote last year. Biden's heresies are comprehensive: on foreign policy (supporting the Iraq War), social policy (his dismissive treatment of Anita Hill, harsh criminal-justice stances, opposition to school busing), and economic policy (support for the Reagan tax cut, balanced-budget fetishism). And Biden, being Biden, has articulated these positions with cringey sound bites that make the situation even worse.

The prevailing mood toward a Biden candidacy has been a combination of anger that he has the temerity to lead a party that has left him behind and sympathy that he's too addled to grasp his predicament. A genre of op-ed has developed out of liberals pleading with Biden, with such headlines as "Why Joe Biden Shouldn't Run for President" (The Week, The Guardian); "I Like Joe Biden. I Urge Him Not to Run" (the New York Times); "I Really Like Joe Biden, but He Shouldn't Run for President" (USA Today); and, as exasperation has sunk in, "Again, Joe Biden, for the Love of God: Do Not Run for President" (The Stranger).

The poor guy has disregarded all the advice and decided to run anyway. And initial polling has revealed that a large number of Democrats have not left Biden behind at all. He begins the race leading his closest competitors, including early front-runner Bernie Sanders, by as much as 30 points. Perhaps it was the party's intelligentsia, not Biden, that was out of touch with the modern Democratic electorate.

The conclusion that Biden could not lead the post-Obama Democratic Party is the product of misplaced assumptions about the speed of its transformation. Yes, the party has moved left, but not nearly as far or as fast as everybody seemed to believe. Counterintuitively, House Democrats' triumph in the midterms may have pushed their center of gravity to the right: The 40 seats Democrats gained were overwhelmingly located in moderate or Republican-leaning districts.

Biden's apparent resurrection from relic to runaway front-runner has illustrated a chasm between perception and reality. The triumph of the left is somewhere between a movement ahead of its time and a bubble that has just popped.

This is not to say we imagined the whole thing. Beginning in President Obama's second term, important social movements began to burble out of the left and into American culture. Black Lives Matter helped drive criminal-justice reform to a point where even President Trump went along with a bill to shorten sentences for thousands of people in federal prison. The #MeToo movement highlighted workplace discrimination and sexual exploitation, exposing sexual predators in media, politics, and other commanding heights of culture. In just a couple of years, attitudes seemed to leap forward two generations.

And then, in an economic analogue to these social movements, the Sanders campaign sparked to life a socialist faction inside the Democratic Party. The influence of socialist thought can be seen in Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, the latter of which argues that climate change demands a sweeping reorganization of the entire economy.

News accounts have emphasized the growing share of self-identified liberals in the party as well as the diminishing stigma of socialism among younger Democrats. But political parties are large groups of people, and they change very slowly. Socialism may be growing less unpopular, but it remains quite unpopular. In a recent poll, just 10 percent of Americans held a positive opinion of socialism, and 29 percent said it is compatible with American values (against 57 percent saying otherwise). While the liberal share of the Democratic electorate is rising, it's only just caught up to the combined share of Democrats who call themselves moderate or conservative. A small majority of Democrats say they wish the party would move in a more moderate direction.

In the New York Times, Frank Bruni suggested that Biden's "party can't get enough of the word progressive, but he's regressive, symbolizing a step back to an administration past." Yet, according to another recent poll, it seems most Democrats can get enough of the word progressive and also are quite fond of the administration in which Biden served: When Democrats were offered a choice of different ideological labels, "socialist" and "democratic socialist" each drew 1 and 6 percent, respectively, and "progressive Democrat" got 5 percent. Sixteen percent of respondents chose "moderate Democrat," and 20 percent of them picked "Obama Democrat."

So why did the media spend the past few years getting the state of the Democratic Party so wrong? One reason is that a numbers of factions had an incentive to hype the rise of the left. The left itself came out of 2016 giddy with its conviction that Sanders lost to Hillary Clinton only out of inertia (or even, the more radical members of the movement claimed, party manipulation). Sanders had won the young, and therefore the future.

In reality, Sanders received lots of votes from people who either appreciated his earnest persona or objected to Clinton for a variety of reasons, including her being too liberal. (Sanders ran up the vote in places like West Virginia and Oklahoma with many of the same conservative Democrats who had supported Clinton over Barack Obama in 2008. Both times, they were registering protest votes against the party and its presumptive nominee. The Sanders movement convinced itself that his success reflected an unsated demand for socialism. The rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—young, nonwhite, native to social media—gave the movement the ideal image of its ambitions. Their plan to take over the party involved repeating that they had already done so.

In this project, they enjoyed the support of the conservative media. Saddled by his own unpopularity, Trump cast his opponents as radical socialists. Last year, a White House economic report hysterically announced, "Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx's birth, socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse," as if, any day now, bands of bloodthirsty Marxist guerrillas might descend from the mountains. Right-wing media focused almost obsessively on Ocasio-Cortez and a handful of her closest allies, including Minnesota's Ilhan Omar, Massachusetts's Ayanna Pressley, and Michigan's Rashida Tlaib. That these had a habit of supplying TV-ready controversies made the cycles of outrage perfectly symbiotic. The conservative media would attack Ocasio-Cortez and her crew, who would rally their supporters to defend against the attacks. Both had an interest in portraying her as the Democratic Party's true leader.

On top of it all, the familiar cast of centrist independents cycling through the greenrooms of CNN and MSNBC found the left to be a convenient balancing tool. Trump's gross bigotry and authoritarianism threatened to place them in the uncomfortable spot of blaming the country's problems on a single party. But you can't make a centrist message out of distancing yourself from one entire party and three members of the other party. To make the comfortable "both sides have gone too far" formulation work, the Democratic left flank had to be portrayed as a dominant force. "Liberals wondering why conservatives who worry about Trump don't join the Democrats should consider what is happening on their own side of the aisle," wrote anti-Trump conservative Peter Wehner in The Atlantic. "Progressivism is wrecking the Democratic Party even as crude populism and ethnic nationalism have (for now) wrecked the Republican Party." This message formed the basis of the Howard Schultz campaign.

The most important ingredient in the delusion was Twitter. It is hard to exaggerate the degree to which the platform shapes the minds of professional political observers. Part of Twitter's allure to insiders is that it creates a simulacrum of the real world, complete with candidates, activists, and pundits all responding to events in real time. Because Twitter superficially resembles the outside world's political debate — it does, after all, contain the full left-to-right spectrum — it is easy to mistake it for the real thing.

But the ersatz polity of Twitter doesn't represent the real world. Democrats on Twitter skew young and college educated. A study last month found that the Twitter-using portion of the Democratic electorate harbors far more progressive views on everything than the party's voting base.

One striking example of the disconnect took place earlier this year in Virginia. An old medical-school yearbook showed Ralph Northam, the state's Democratic governor, in a picture featuring a blackface costume and Ku Klux Klan robe and hood. If you followed the debate on Twitter, as nearly all political reporters did, Northam's resignation was simply a given. The debate turned to when he would step down, who would replace him, and what other prominent people would have career-ending blackface yearbook photographs.

Virginians, however, were split in ways the political elite would never have guessed. Whites and Republicans favored his resignation, while African-American voters believed, by a 20-point margin, that Northam should not resign.

As the Democratic Party in 2019 begins to wake up to the fact that its intellectual and activist vanguard is deeply at odds with both its voting base and the vast majority of its elected officials, the politics of Washington and the 2020 primary are shifting in unexpected ways.

In Congress, Nancy Pelosi survived a campaign in which more than three dozen Democratic candidates, nearly all running in conservative or moderate districts, refused to endorse her for House Speaker. Pelosi, in turn, has embraced the large wing of newly elected centrists that gave her the majority. Pelosi has repeatedly dismissed Ocasio-Cortez and her peers as irrelevant.

"When we won this election, it wasn't in districts like mine or Alexandria's … But those are districts that are solidly Democratic. This glass of water," she said at one event, hoisting a glass, "would win with a D next to its name in those districts." In an interview, she repudiated socialism ("I do reject socialism as an economic system. If people have that view, that's their view. That is not the view of the Democratic Party"), and when asked about the faction associated with Ocasio-Cortez, she replied, "That's like five people."

Pelosi keeps making this point so insistently and even rudely because, perhaps, the media have kept missing it. Only half of House Democrats support Medicare for All, and slightly fewer representatives support the Green New Deal. (Pelosi's assessment of the latter — "It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive. The green dream, or whatever they call it" — summarized its very dim prospects.) Meanwhile, Pelosi has broken from the left on other high-profile controversies. She has refused to initiate impeachment hearings and held a vote condemning anti-Semitism following Ilhan Omar's comments accusing Israel supporters of foreign allegiance.

College-educated white Democratic voters have shown a growing concern about structural bias in American society: a transformation owed to social progressives, who tend to be the most skeptical about nominating a white man for president. To them, the struggle against racism and sexism correlates with a belief in increasing representation of women and people of color. Many Democratic voters, on the other hand, have arrived at the opposite conclusion. If racism and sexism are so endemic, they've decided, then beating Trump requires nominating a white man. "You'll always hear, 'There's no way a woman can win this,' and they go back to Hillary," one voter told the Times. "Even among my female friends."

Most of the party's presidential candidates took the claims of the ascendant left at face value when they undertook their campaigns. Candidates like Harris, Booker, O'Rourke, and Elizabeth Warren designed their platforms as if they had to compete ideologically with Sanders. Several of them have already advocated Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, which could expose them to withering attacks from Trump if they win the nomination. Harris told an interviewer that, yes, she would do away with private health insurance. Julián Castro endorsed cash-payment reparations. Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand called for abolishing ICE, before backing off and saying they only wanted to reform it.

None of these plans stands a chance to pass Congress under the next president, even in the best-case scenario. All of them poll badly. (Medicare for All sounds popular until you tell people it means eliminating private insurance, at which point it grows unpopular.) The candidates seem to have overestimated how much left-wing policy voters actually demand. Democratic voters might be dissuaded from nominating their former vice-president if they hear more about his long record or if he repeats the undisciplined campaigning that led to defeats in both of his previous presidential campaigns. But it is already clear enough that he is supplying something much closer to what the party's electorate wants than either the political media or the other candidates had assumed. A Democratic Party in which Biden is running away with a nomination simply cannot be the one that most people thought existed. Some of Harris's advisers, the Times recently reported, are urging her to stop mollifying activists and embrace her prosecutorial past.

It might slowly be dawning on the left that its giddy predictions of ascendancy have not yet materialized. Corey Robin, a left-wing writer who has previously heralded the left's impending takeover of the Democratic Party, recently conceded he may have miscalculated. "We have nothing like the organizational infrastructure, the party organization, the intellectual and ideological coherence, or political leadership we need," he wrote. "I don't see anything on the horizon like the cadre of ideologues and activists that made the New Deal or Reagan Revolution."

The long-term question for the left is whether it can build a movement that can dominate in the real world, not just on Twitter and in some magazines. The short-term question is whether it can leverage what power it does have among activists and intellectuals without blowing up an election many Democrats see as an existential fight for the republic.

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Georgia: The Epicenter of America’s Corrupted Electronic Elections by Jennifer Cohn

medium.com
Georgia: The Epicenter of America’s Corrupted Electronic Elections
Jennifer Cohn
30-39 minutes

Go to the profile of Jennifer Cohn

By Jennifer Cohn
@jennycohn1
June 29, 2018, Updated August 20, 2018
Introduction

On August 7, 2018, the plaintiffs in the federal action titled Donna Curling, et al. v. Brian Kemp, et al., filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to enjoin the state of Georgia from using its paperless touchscreen voting machines in the November midterm elections. As explained in the lawsuit, when voting machines are paperless, there is no independent record of voter intent with which to confirm the legitimacy of an electronic vote tally. Thus, according to the plaintiffs, the state must instead allow voters to hand mark paper ballots at the polls.

The court denied the motion. It reasoned that although the plaintiffs are likely to win on the merits of their claim that Georgia’s paperless machines are unconstitutional, it would cause too much “chaos” and “confusion” to switch to paper ballots at this late date.

The article below discusses the Georgia 6th District special election of 2017, which was the catalyst for the Georgia paper ballot suit, as well as the disturbing history of Georgia’s corrupted electronic elections from 2002 through the present.
The special election in Georgia’s 6th district.
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In 2017, Georgia politician Tom Price joined the Trump administration, leaving his House seat in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District vacant.

The vacancy represented one of the first realistic opportunities for Democrats to “flip” a House seat from red to blue in the aftermath of the 2016 election. The race was billed by the media as a “referendum on Trump” and a “bellwether” for 2018.

The national significance of the contest brought forth a flood of advertising and organization, making it the most expensive House race of all time.

The top two contenders were Republican Karen Handel (an anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ, pro-gun “Christian”) and Democrat Jon Ossoff (who is pro-choice on abortion, pro-gay rights, and less gun happy than Handel).

But even before the first ballot was cast, election integrity advocates and IT experts were sounding the alarm about the integrity of the race. Georgia is one of just five states that still exclusively uses paperless voting machines. Paperless voting machines are an especially attractive target for hackers because there is nothing to compare against the electronic tally to confirm whether it was manipulated. Thus, the only way to know if a paperless machine has been hacked is to conduct a forensic audit, which courts have consistently refused to allow based on the purportedly proprietary nature of the vendors’ software.

Georgia bought its paperless machines from Diebold Election Systems in 2002, making Georgia the “first state to launch electronic voting statewide”. At the time, Georgia’s Secretary of State was Cathy Cox, who allowed Diebold to use her image on its promotional materials.

Cox’s former boss, Lewis Massey, undoubtedly profited from the decision, as he had been retained by Diebold to lobby for the Georgia contract.

Georgia’s election director at that time was a woman named Kathy Rogers, who played a major part in the decision.

Diebold had entered the voting machine business just a few months prior with its acquisition of Global Election Systems, a company founded by three criminals.

Global’s Senior VP was a convicted felon, Jeffrey Dean, who had served time for sophisticated crimes involving “computer tampering.” According to the Guardian, Dean was also the company’s senior programmer.

Global brought on Dean several months before the 2000 Bush v. Gore election. Soon after hiring Dean, Global hired convicted cocaine trafficker John Elder to oversee punch card printing in several states.

We all remember the punch card recount fiasco of the 2000 election.

A lesser known fiasco from the Bush v. Gore election involved a Global/Diebold machine that inexplicably “lost” 16,000 Gore votes in Volusia County, Florida. The Volusia error was caught only “because an alert poll monitor noticed Gore’s vote count going down through the evening, which of course is impossible.”

Dean and Elder’s criminal past and relationship to Global/Diebold were discovered not by the mainstream media, but rather by election integrity advocate and “Black Box Voting” author Beverly Harris.

Diebold told the AP that Dean left the company in 2002 (when Diebold acquired Global), and the AP took the company’s word at face value. But Harris obtained Dean’s court file, which included internal Diebold memos showing that Dean remained as a Diebold consultant. The mainstream media wasn’t interested.

The bill’s primary sponsor was Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio who used his position as chairman to defeat legislation that would have required voting machines to include a paper trail.

Ney would eventually go to prison for corruption involving his acceptance of bribes from Washington DC lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose firm received at least $275,000 to lobby the federal government on behalf of Diebold, the number one vendor of paperless voting machines.

Abramoff was a member of Bush’s Rangers and Pioneers, an elite group of fundraisers who had raised at least $100,000 for Bush’s reelection campaign. He too would eventually land in prison for corruption involving his lobbying work.

When Diebold acquired Global in 2002, Diebold’s CEO was Walden O’Dell, also a member of Bush’s Rangers and Pioneers. O’Dell would himself soon achieve infamy for sending a letter to potential donors stating, “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president [Bush]…[in 2004].”

Georgia Secretary of State Cox — -who had been “very active in working with members of Congress on the Help America Vote Act” — — signed Georgia’s contract with Diebold on or about May 3, 2002.

A month or two later, according to the deposition of Jeffrey Dean (obtained by Beverly Harris), Diebold called convicted felon Dean back to do “consulting work.”

The ensuing election in November 2002 yielded several surprising Republican victories in Georgia. The most notable upset occurred when Saxby Chambliss, a favorite of the Christian Right and President Bush, defeated incumbent senator Max Cleland (D).

Karl Rove and Ralph Reed — a Republican strategist in Georgia — had personally recruited Chambliss to run against Cleland. Cleland, a decorated Vietnam veteran, lost to Chambliss by 7 points even though election polls on the “eve of the 2002 general election showed. … Cleland ahead … by 2–5 points,” a swing of 9–12 points.

An analysis of Chambliss’s victory revealed that, “nearly 60% of the state’s electorate by county switched party allegiances between the primaries and the general election.” Chambliss’s surprising victory helped the GOP take control of the US Senate. (It needed only two seats.)

Another 2002 upset occurred when Confederate Flag defender Sonny Perdue was elected Georgia’s first Republican governor in 130 years, defeating Democratic incumbent Roy Barnes.

Opinion polls in Georgia on the eve of the 2002 general election showed … Barnes leading by 9–11 points,” but Perdue defeated him by 5, a swing of 14–16 points.

Pundits credited a surge of “angry white men” punishing Barnes for removing the Confederate symbol from the state flag. But a demographic breakdown published by the Georgia Secretary of State showed no such surge of white men; the only subgroup showing a modest increase in turnout was black women.

During the same election, Brian Kemp — Georgia’s current Secretary of State — defeated Doug Haines, a liberal incumbent in a left-leaning state House seat that had been held by Democrats for more than four decades. Kemp won by only 486 votes, an exceedingly small vote margin that likely would have triggered a recount but for the paperless machines.

In 2003, “A former worker in the Diebold warehouse in Georgia” alleged that the company had patched Georgia’s voting machines after they were delivered to the counties and shortly before the … election in 2002.” This was corroborated by the New York Times after about 15,000 internal Diebold e-mail messages — some of which referred to the installation of software patches before the 2002 election — somehow made their way onto the internet.

Equally disturbing, in 2004, the DHS quietly released a Cyber Alert concerning an “undocumented backdoor account” to the Diebold Global Election Management System, which programs the electronic ballots for its touchscreen machines.

Georgia Secretary of State Cox was unconcerned. In 2005 or 2006, she doubled down on Diebold with a $15 million purchase of new electronic poll books, which (according to voters) would later fail in multiple locations.

Unlike Cox, the media and public had at this point begun to question the wisdom of continuing to use unverifiable voting machines. Here is a quote from a 2006 article in Savannah Now, a local Georgia publication:

    At first, it was easy to brush aside complaints by small but noisy groups that e-voting invited vote-stealing.

    But now people with gold-plated academic pedigrees agree.

    Avi Rubin, professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, says devices like Diebold’s can be rigged — without detection.

    “There are major flaws in the security design of the software,” said David Dill, a computer scientist at Stanford University in Southern California.

    In June, The Brennan Center for Justice, a non- partisan New York think tank, said systems like Georgia’s “pose a real danger to the integrity of … state … elections.”

This was the year that a team of computer security researchers published a report finding that “touchscreen voting machines made by the notably litigious vendor Diebold were vulnerable to ‘extremely serious attacks.’ The researchers were so afraid of being sued by Diebold … that they broke with longstanding practice and didn’t tell the company about their findings before publishing.”

The same year, a Diebold whistleblower named Chris Hood spoke to RFK Jr. about the 2002 Georgia election. “Hood wondered why Diebold, the world’s third-largest seller of ATMs, had been awarded the [Georgia] contract. The company had barely completed its acquisition of Global Election Systems, a voting-machine firm that owned the technology Diebold was promising to sell Georgia. And its bid was the highest among nine competing vendors. Whispers within the company hinted that a fix was in.”

Hood claimed that, in late July, to speed deployment of the new machines, [former Georgia Secretary of State] Cox quietly signed an agreement with Diebold that effectively privatized Georgia’s entire electoral system. * * * The company [Diebold] was authorized to put together ballots, program machines and train poll workers across the state — all without any official supervision.”

Hood reported that in mid-August, Diebold’s president, Bob Urosevich, personally came to Georgia from Texas to distribute a software “patch” for the voting machines. He said they were “told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn’t do…The curious thing is the “very swift, covert way this was done. . . It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state.”

According to Hood, “Diebold employees altered software in some 5,000 machines in DeKalb and Fulton counties — the state’s largest Democratic strongholds!

In 2006, the Georgia legislature considered a bill that would at least have required the addition of a paper audit trail to the paperless voting machines themselves. But the bill was defeated after Cox’s appointee, Georgia Elections Director Kathy Rogers, objected to it.

Several months later, Rogers took a job with Diebold.

Meanwhile, Cox pursued an unsuccessful run for governor, and Karen Handel won the election to succeed her as Secretary of State.
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During her campaign, Handel had promised to make Georgia elections verifiable with a paper audit trail. But once in office, Handel instead defended and defeated a lawsuit challenging Georgia’s unverifiable voting machines. When the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in Handel’s favor, she “praised the Georgia Supreme Court ruling and claimed that ‘Georgia has the most secure elections in the nation…’”

Plaintiffs later discovered that Handel “had taken about $25,000 in campaign contributions from employees and family members connected with [Diebold’s] lobbyist, Massey & Bowers”

In 2009, Diebold sold its election division to voting machine vendor Election Systems & Software of Nebraska.

Former Georgia Elections Director Kathy Rogers and several other key Diebold personnel moved to ES&S with the acquisition.

But even before the acquisition, Diebold and ES&S were related in that the president of Diebold’s Election Division (Bob Urosevich) had previously founded ES&S with his brother, Todd Urosevich. Todd Urosevich remains at ES&S in Nebraska to this day.

It was on Bob Urosevich’s watch that Global/Diebold brought convicted cyber-felon Jeffrey Dean into the company in 2000. It was also Bob Urosevich who reportedly instructed workers to install unauthorized software patches before the 2002 Republican takeover election in Georgia.

ES&S has a colorful history as well. It was previously called “American Information Systems,” but changed its name to ES&S in 1997, when it acquired Business Records Corporation (“BRC”). BRC was reportedly financed primarily by Nelson Bunker Hunt, a Texan billionaire and heavy contributor to the Christian Reconstruction movement. AIS had received most of its financing from Howard Ahmanson, another billionaire and proponent of Christian Reconstruction, and/or his family.

Coincidentally, or not, Hunt and Howard Ahmanson were both members of the Council for National Policy (“CNP”), a powerful networking group for social conservatives and wealthy donors. Current members include KellyAnne Conway, Steve Bannon, Ken Blackwell (infamous Ohio Secretary of State in 2004), Mike Pence, and the Mercers.

Paul Weyrich — who founded the CNP with Hunt and several other men — once gave a speech in which he admitted that he did not want everyone to vote.

Here is the CNP’s mission statement from its 2014 directory:

    A united conservative movement to assure, by 2020, policy leadership and governance that restores religious and economic freedom, a strong national defense, and Judeo-Christian values under the Constitution.

Like Diebold, ES&S has had its share of publicity. In 1996, Republican Chuck Hagel, a first-time candidate, ran for the U.S. senate in Nebraska and managed to defeat the Democratic incumbent by 15 points, even though pre-election polls had called the race a dead heat.

Hagel “miraculously won virtually every demographic group in the state, including large African American communities that had never previously voted Republican.” Hagel was also the first Republican to win a Nebraska senate race since 1972.

Hagel’s surprising landslide victory raised eyebrows because Hagel had been the chairman of AIS (ES&S’s predecessor) until a few weeks or perhaps even just a few days before he announced his candidacy. Nebraska election officials reported that AIS machines had counted about 85% of the votes in the race.

ES&S has had many reported failures since the Hagel election, as detailed on a startlingly long list (with links to news articles) created by a group called Voters Unite In 2006.

In 2007, a team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania conducted a security evaluation of ES&S optical scanners and ES&S touchscreen voting machines and published a report (the “Everest report”), stating that they had found “numerous exploitable vulnerabilities in nearly every component of the ES&S system … These vulnerabilities enable attacks that could alter or forge precinct results, install corrupt firmware, and erase audit records.”

In 2010, the Department of Justice forced ES&S to sell Diebold because the combined company accounted for more than 70% of US election equipment, violating anti-trust laws. In a settlement with the DOJ, Diebold purportedly dissolved, and its assets were split between ES&S and a Canadian company called Dominion Voting.

The following year, an interim election board in Venango County, Pennsylvania commissioned a forensic audit of the county’s 100% unverifiable ES&S iVotronic touch-screen voting systems. The court, county Commissioners, and ES&S eventually shut down the audit (with ES&S threatening legal action against the board members and scientists). But an interim report stated that the scientists had found “evidence that the system was repeatedly accessed by an unidentified remote computer, for lengthy periods of time, on “multiple occasions.”

The same year, a laboratory run by the Department of Energy showed how Diebold voting machines — used by a third of all voters nationwide (at the time), including Georgia — could be hacked via remote control.

By then, Georgia’s governor, Sonny Perdue, had appointed Brian Kemp to the office of Secretary of State, replacing Handel who had left office to pursue an unsuccessful bid for governor.

Kemp expressed no interest in replacing Georgia’s paperless machines, and the national media gave him little grief.

But that has begun to change courtesy of the Georgia 6th District special election in 2017. On March 3, 2017, a little more than a month before the primary, Politico and other national news outlets reported that the FBI was investigating a breach at Georgia’s Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University.”

And a few weeks later, equipment “used to check-in voters at the polls” — including a “flash card with a voter list” — was stolen from a parked car.

A concerned national election integrity advocate, Marilyn Marks, filed a lawsuit to compel Kemp to use hand marked paper ballots (counted on optical scanners) in the race. But Georgia Secretary of State Kemp swiftly defeated it on a procedural technicality (sovereign immunity), declaring that the machines are “safe and accurate.”

Kemp assured voters that Georgia’s voting machines could not be hacked because they aren’t connected to the internet. But he omitted to mention that all voting machines, including those in Georgia, must receive programming before each election from centralized election management systems that can and often do connect to the internet.

Kemp also omitted to mention that Georgia uses a single flash drive to upload its election results from a central tabulator to an online Election Night Reporting System and then reinserts the same flash drive into the same central tabulator for the next round of results. Thus, if the flash drive becomes infected with malware from the online reporting system, it could spread the malware to the central tabulator and change the results from each polling place as they are uploaded.

On the night of the primary, Ossoff was poised to win the primary outright with 50.3% of the vote when the counting stopped, causing a stir on social media (and presumably elsewhere):

    https://twitter.com/Nysteveo2AOLcom/status/854542626195943424 [“Something smells with this vote count. All websites have 54%. CNN has 77% in which hasn’t changed in a hour. Ossoff 50.3%”]

    https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/854540200776802304 [“A really bad look that Ossoff is at 50.3% and suddenly Handel’s home county has a mysterious “bad card” issue that stops _all_ counting….”]

An hour or so later, CNN announced that there had been a “technical glitch” in Fulton County. According to the local news, the glitch involved a “rare memory card problem.”

When the counting finally resumed around 11:00 p.m., Ossoff’s total had dropped from 50.3% to 48.6%.

Ossoff eventually dropped even further to 48.1%, forcing him into a runoff against Handel (who received 19.8%) scheduled for June 20, 20:

The bad news for Ossoff continued when, the week before the runoff, news broke that Georgia’s Election Center had “inadvertently” left 15 gigabytes worth of files online and without password protection.

According to the white hat hacker who made this discovery, Logan Lamb, the exposed files “looked like they could be used to hack an election,” and included:

    A “database containing registration records for the state’s 6.7 million voters.” “a number of files, arranged by county, that looked like they could be used t*o hack an election.”
    “software files for the state’s ExpressPoll pollbooks — electronic devices used … to verify that a voter is registered before allowing them to cast a ballot.”
    “multiple PDFs with instructions and passwords for election workers to sign in to a central server on Election Day.”
    “software files for the state’s ExpressPoll pollbooks — electronic devices used … to verify that a voter is registered before allowing them to cast a ballot.”
    databases for the so-called GEMS [Global Election Management System] servers,” which “are used to prepare paper and electronic ballots, tabulate votes and produce summaries of vote totals.”

The files were supposed to be behind a password-protected firewall, but the center had misconfigured its server so they were accessible to anyone..”

Lamb discovered the breach in August 2016. (Id.) When he told the Georgia Election Director (Merle King) about his discovery, King told him to keep the information to himself or “the people downtown, the politicians…will crush [you].” (Id.) King also told Lamb that he would secure the files.

But as reported by Politico in June 2017, one of Lamb’s colleagues discovered in March 2017 that, for the most part, the files were still exposed.

On the eve of the runoff, polls gave Ossoff a slight edge, but called the race a “tossup.”

But the official results showed that Handel had defeated Ossoff 51.9% to 48.1%.

Election integrity advocates noted with concern that Ossoff had won the only verifiable aspect of the race — paper absentee ballots (which have historically leaned Republican) — by a landslide 28 points. But the electronic results from Georgia’s unverifiable touchscreen voting machines skewed so heavily in favor of Handel that it didn’t matter. (Charts by election integrity advocate and author of Code Red: Computerized Elections, Jonathan Simon.)

Ossoff also ended up with the exact same total in the runoff, where he had no Democratic challengers, that he had in the primary, where he had four Democratic challengers.

Evangelicals from the Faith & Freedom Coalition founded by Georgia politician Ralph Reed — with money from the Koch family — gleefully declared that “God [had] won.” The mainstream media and even some Democrats said that the outcome of the race meant that Nancy Pelosi was toxic. But voters and election integrity advocates still worried about the voting machines.

Marilyn Marks and plaintiffs — including Donna Price and Donna Curling — thus spearheaded a new lawsuit that challenged Handel’s win and sought to enjoin the use of Georgia’s paperless machines in future elections, including the upcoming 2018 midterms.

Soon after the new suit was filed, however, Georgia’s Election Center wiped its election server, including backup copies, which would have been a key piece of evidence in the election challenge.

The public outcry was substantial, but Kemp managed to tamp it down by conducting a pilot study of ES&S’s new voting system called the “ExpressVote,” which both he and the media characterized as a “paper ballot system.”

The ES&S executive promoting the ExpressVote in Georgia and throughout the United States is none other than Kathy Rogers, the former Georgia Election Director who helped usher in a generation of paperless Diebold voting machines before taking a job with Diebold and then ES&S, her current employer.

Unfortunately, despite the media hype, the ExpressVote is not really a paper ballot system. Rather, it is a touchscreen ballot marker that generates a paper “summary card” containing abbreviated text and a barcode, which the voter then inserts into a scanner to be counted. Unlike a real paper ballot, the only part of the summary card counted as your vote is the barcode, which humans can’t read and thus can’t verify.

Lest you think that, at least voters can verify the abbreviated text on those “summary cards,” think again. Professor Philip Stark, the UC Berkeley statistics professor who invented Risk Limiting Audits, recently explained to the Election Assistance Commission’s advisory board that even he was unable to verify his votes using one of these summary cards:

    Personally, I had gone thru the exercise of voting … and then going back & trying to verify my selections, & my memory was not good enough to tell whether any contests had been omitted from the summary ballot, nor from the brief descriptions….. or the abbreviated names of the contests, to recall how I intended to vote when I went in and looked at the summary ballot.”

The ExpressVote also must be used in conjunction with ES&S’s popular DS200 scanners, which were “upgraded” in 2015 to include cellular modems. According to Computer Science Professor Andrew Appel, these cellular modems make the DS200 scanners vulnerable to a “Man in the Middle” hack via a fake cell tower.

But when U.S. Senator Ron Wyden asked ES&S what it has done to secure its elections since 2016, Kathy Rogers, who is ES&S’s VP of governmental affairs, responded vaguely that the company has “multiple safeguards in place to protect against known and unknown threats…” Wyden was unimpressed.

In the past year, election officials throughout the U.S. have flocked to replace their aging touchscreen machines with the ExpressVote. Behind the scenes, independent IT experts express grave concerns about the use of barcodes on ballots and the absence of independent human usability testing on the summary cards from systems like the ExpressVote. But nobody knows because the Election Assistance Commission and national election integrity groups have decided to remain quiet.

Thus far, Maryland is the only state that has tried the ExpressVote for universal statewide use, although Rogers hopes to change that with Georgia. Here’s a link to a video clip of Rogers promoting the ExpressVote to a local Maryland station.

That Maryland would fall for the ExpressVote early on is no surprise. In 2004, Maryland’s current election administrator, Linda LaMone, made Maryland the second state (after Georgia) to deploy paperless Diebold voting machines statewide, despite a report stating that testers had been “able to remotely upload, download, and execute files with full system administrator privileges. Results could be modified at will, including changing votes from precincts.”

LaMone even allowed Diebold to operate its “touch-screen voting machines during the state’s 2002 gubernatorial election and the 2004 presidential primaries before the state agency actually certified the controversial machines…”

LaMone has been so enamored of paperless touchscreen voting that, after the Maryland House of Delegates voted to switch to paper ballots and optical scanners, she used the allotted money to instead buy Diebold electronic pollbooks. Reminiscent of Cathy Cox in Georgia, LaMone allowed Diebold to feature her in its promotional materials after the electronic pollbooks had malfunctioned.

LaMone — who has landed a position on the Advisory Board to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission— also helped vote down a resolution that would have required human usability testing of the ExpressVote as a condition of certification.

It was LaMone who reportedly made the decision to try the ExpressVote, ignoring the “grave concerns” of the state’s IT experts.

But after using the ExpressVote in the 2016 primaries, “all but one [Maryland] county opposed widespread use” because (among other reasons) they took voters longer to use than hand marked paper ballots, causing long lines. The Maryland Elections Board was so unimpressed that it has since decided to limit the use of the ExpressVote — -originally leased for “universal use” — -to those voters who are physically unable to mark their ballots by hand.

Despite it all, the Georgia senate recently voted 50–1 to pass a bill (SB403), which would have allowed the state to replace its touchscreen voting machines with touchscreen barcode ballot markers like the ExpressVote. The bill failed only after Marilyn Marks and several other election integrity advocates caught wind of it and worked with a group of on-the-ground activists to defeat it in the Georgia House of Representatives at the eleventh hour. Here are some posts from social media during that time period.

Georgia lawmakers can and most certainly will revisit the issue when they return from recess. And Kemp, who is running for governor, remains keen on the ExpressVote. It can’t hurt that, per a recent expose in McClatchy, ES&S has for years rewarded election officials with all-expense paid trips and even show tickets in Las Vegas.

As for Karen Handel, who is up for reelection this year, she has yet to hold an in person town. But she did make time to oppose birthright citizenship in a telephonic town hall last year.

She has also made the top ten list of candidates to whom the Koch Brothers have donated money in 2018.

Recently, in the wake of the Trump administration’s decision to separate immigrant children from their parents at the border, it was Karen Handel who tried to silence Representative Ted Lieu’s audio on the House floor of children crying as they were ripped away from their parents.

It remains to be seen whether Handel’s reelection bid — and Kemp’s race for governor — will be conducted on the same unverifiable touchscreen voting machines that she and Kemp staunchly defended during their respective tenures as Secretary of State. If the Georgia paper ballot suit succeeds, the 2018 midterm elections will be the first verifiable elections to be conducted in Georgia since 2002.

If it fails, Georgia may have to buckle up for a generation of unverifiable barcode voting courtesy of ES&S and Kathy Rogers.

If you live outside of Georgia, you should be concerned too, as counties everywhere are flocking to the ExpressVote. The only difference is that, unlike Georgia, there is no lawsuit trying to stop the train wreck.
Update 8/20/18

On August 7, 2018, the plaintiffs in the Georgia paper ballot suit filed a motion for preliminary injunction seeking to enjoin the use of the paperless touchscreen machines in the November midterm elections. The defendants have already filed their responses, and the final replies are due today, August 20, 2018. The court is expected to reach a decision soon.
Update 7/5/18

Here is some additional intriguing information: In April 2016, Russian ambassador Kislyak visited Kennesaw University, which housed the Georgia Election Center. This information was discovered by Michelle Avery Weston.

In August 2016, Secretary of State Kemp refused help from the Department of Homeland Security to secure its systems.

The same month, white hat hacker Logan Lamb discovered the Election Center had left 15 gigabytes of data, which looked like it could be used to hack an election, online and without password protection.

In April 2017, about a week before the Georgia 6th District primary election, the director of Fulton County’s Election Board (Rick Barron) — who had recently observed elections in Kazakhstan — was chatting on Facebook with a woman in Moscow named Julya Kudaneeva.

Someone by the name of “Yulia Kudaneeva” is apparently a Chief Consultant to the Russian Election Federation.

Recall that it was a “rare error” in Fulton County that caused the counting to stop during the Georgia 6th District primary on April 18, 2017. Before the counting stopped, Ossoff was poised to win the primary and avoid a runoff with more than 50% of the vote. When the counting resumed, he had fallen below 50% where he remained.

Per election integrity advocates Marilyn Marks and Dana Bowers, one polling place in Fulton County had 171 more ballots cast than registered voters in the Georgia 6th District primary. They reportedly have found this type of irregularity in both the Georgia 6th District election primary and in the runoff. Here is the state certified voting machine recap log, which was discussed on Georgia local news a week or so ago:

Meanwhile, it was just reported today that “Going back at least to 2012, a major error by either/or Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp‘s office or the DeKalb County Board of Elections has put nearly 700 voters who should be in Democratic Rep. Scott Holcomb’s House District 81 in (up until recently) safe Republican House District 79.” http://brambleman.com/major-georgia-voting-snafu-has-robbed-rep-scott-holcomb-of-hundreds-of-votes-for-years/
Bio

Background: Jennifer Cohn is an attorney and election integrity advocate in the San Francisco Bay Area who graduated from UCLA and Hastings College of the Law. As an attorney, her areas of practice included insurance coverage and appellate law. She practiced law for more than twenty years, including seven years as a partner with Nielsen Haley & Abbott, LLP in Marin County, California. Since 2016, she has devoted her professional efforts full time toward investigating our insecure election system and potential solutions. She can be contacted through her Twitter account, @jennycohn1.

From Profound Conflicts of Interest to a Blind Eye for Harassment, Barry Myers Is the Wrong Choice for NOAA

[ BLOG ] UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS

Photo: C-SPAN
From Profound Conflicts of Interest to a Blind Eye for Harassment, Barry Myers Is the Wrong Choice for NOAA
ANDREW ROSENBERG, DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR SCIENCE & DEMOCRACY | APRIL 24, 2019, 9:19 AM EDT

When the founder and CEO of AccuWeather was nominated by President Trump to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), it immediately raised serious concerns from me and many others. After all, Myers is not a scientist but will be leading a major science agency. His business, AccuWeather, is essentially built around the re-processing, re-packaging, and marketing of the weather data developed and routinely produced at public expense by NOAA. Therefore, much of the work of NOAA in scientific research, data collection, and forecasting of weather, climate, and severe storms directly impacts AccuWeather, which relies on those agency efforts for their business. That is the very definition of a conflict of interest for the putative NOAA administrator.

I worked at NOAA for 10 years as a scientist and a senior manager. It is a great agency that does outstanding science and provides vital services for the nation—weather forecasts, severe storm warnings, tsunami warnings, oceanography, climate science, charting, coastal management and marine resource management including fisheries, marine mammals, and endangered species and habitat. NOAA’s work on behalf of the public is deeply science-based.  Many companies utilize NOAA data (not just weather data), which makes the agency’s work critical to the nation’s economy as well as public health and safety.

Myers was first nominated way back in October 2017 and it has apparently taken nearly two years for Myers to come up with a way to try to address his conflicts of interest. His solution? Sell his shares in the family company to other family members at a reduced price. With a provision to buy them back when he leaves government. In other words, Myers and the White House believe that he can manage a large federal agency that is the basis of his family business by pretending that he doesn’t care about what his brothers, wife, and other relatives earn. And then at the end of his tenure at NOAA he can buy back the shares, again at a reduced price, and share in the earnings. Somehow in his view that’s not a conflict of interest? Right.

I for one am NOT comfortable that Myers will make decisions as the head of NOAA that will solely benefit the public and not his business and his family.  How about you?

As if that weren’t enough to halt all further consideration of Mr. Myers to lead NOAA, it gets worse. Recent reporting has revealed that even before the nomination went to the Senate back in 2017, the Department of Labor opened an investigation into allegations of “widespread sexual harassment” at Accuweather.  And that Myer’s company was aware of the harassment while he was CEO, and took no action for a long period of time. The report of that investigation was available more than a year ago to the administration, even though it was only revealed by the press to the public this month. Still, the White House re-nominated Myers in January of this year.

So, let’s review. Barry Myers is not a scientist. He would have deep and unresolved conflicts of interest if he were to lead NOAA. He is touted as an experienced manager as his primary qualification, but as a manager he led a company that fostered a culture of sexual harassment and workplace hostility.

Myers’ nomination is now approaching a vote on the Senate floor to confirm him for the position. NOAA and the nation don’t deserve an unqualified and conflicted nominee that turns a blind eye to sexual harassment. Under no circumstances should he be confirmed. Tell your senators: Myers? NO for NOAA!