Trump's Helsinki Fiasco

Since Donald Trump became president, I've often reacted to news stories with disgust, anger, frustration, fear, or a combination of the four; but I've only been distressed over current events to the point of losing sleep twice.  November 9, 2016 - the night Trump won the election - was one.  Last night was another.  I have a Chicken Little-type tendency to assume the worst and engage in panicked hyperbole at the earliest sign of bad news, and it's a reflex that I have to work hard to keep in check.  However, in light of recent events, I don't think it's a big stretch to say that the United States is in a bad spot.

On July 16th, in a joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Trump rejected the United States intelligence community's conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, instead choosing to take Russian President Putin at his word.  Trump's refusal to acknowledge this conclusion is significant for two reasons.  First, it wasn't one or two intelligence agencies making that claim, it was the entire intelligence community's unanimous assessment.  Second, on June 13, Special Counsel Mueller had indicted a dozen GRU agents for hacking into the DNC's computer networks (among other targets) to acquire information it intended to use to interfere with the 2016 elections.  That second reason is particularly significant because any case that's going to be made in court requires hard, tangible evidence.  This case, especially.  Mueller is accusing foreign nationals of committing a cyber-crime against US government-affiliated institutions.  Even though the best-case scenario is that the dozen GRU agents will be tried in absentia - if there's a trial at all - Mueller's case needs to be as close to airtight as possible, because of the stakes involved.

Taken together, the intelligence community's assessment and Mueller's indictments mean that the conclusion is pretty conclusive: Russia interfered in the 2016 election.  Yet the President of the United States chose to disregard his own intelligence apparatus' conclusion.

Why did he do that? Or, to ask the question another way, why is Trump so quick to believe Putin? Well, there are a couple of different possibilities.  One is that Trump's ego is driving all of this.  If he had to acknowledge that Russia's interference contributed to his victory, it takes some of the glow off of his win.  That would be a crushing blow to his pride.  Another possibility is Trump's well-documented affinity for dictators and strongmen.  Putin isn't the only authoritarian who Trump has fawned over, but he does seem to hold the place of honor in Trump's hall of heroes.  Yet another possibility is that Trump has a relationship with the Russian government that goes back decades.  Jonathan Chait's recent piece about this has been making the rounds, but Sarah Kendzior has a one-year lead on him.  I'd stop short of calling Trump a Russian "asset" (that word has certain HUMINT connotations), but I think "useful idiot" is more fitting.  I think the Russian government saw Trump as an easy-to-manipulate pawn, and they played him like a fiddle. 

And if the Helsinki presser is any indication, Russia is still playing him.  That is about as terrifying as it gets.  It tells all of America's allies that the President of the United States can't be trusted.  It tells hostile nations that the United States won't push back if another cyber-attack happens.  It tells the world that Trump won't do anything to protect America's national security.  And it tells Russia it has unlimited license to do what it wants.  Trump's performance in Helsinki also adds credibility to long-running suspicions that his loyalty is to Russia.

And while Trump has been enabling Russia, the GOP has been running interference for him.  A handful of its key leaders had a reasonable suspicion in mid-2016 that Trump had an allegiance to Russia, but they kept it a secret.  Its Senate majority leader knew that Russia hacked the DNC, but he refused to publicly confirm that information.  The GOP has tried to undermine Robert Mueller's investigation at every turn - by holding dog-and-pony shows like the Strzok hearings; by spreading falsehoods in the news and on social media; and by refusing to act in response to a growing mountain of evidence that Russia tampered with the 2016 election results, and that the Trump campaign was involved in that effort.

So why is the GOP so committed to helping Trump?

Because the party's future has been tied to Trump since 2015, and it will continue to need him for the next few years.  He helped the GOP win it the presidency and both houses of Congress in 2016, establishing a fast-track for the GOP's legislative agenda.  (Although there have been a handful of self-inflicted injuries.) He appointed ideologically sympathetic judges to several courts, including two (pending Kavanaugh's confirmation) Supreme Court Justices, allowing conservatives to interpret the law for a generation.  And possibly most important of all, he brought a political party that looked like it was dying back to life, by hitting all the right notes that resonate with the conservative base: a tough stance on immigration; a strong, fearsome military; law and order with a draconian flavor; pro-business; anti-regulation - all the things they want to hear.  The fact that his actual track record is pretty dismal is irrelevant.  Trump has hit upon a winning political formula that will keep the GOP in the game for several more election cycles.  And all they have to do is turn a blind eye to someone who never bothered to hide his disdain for American and democratic institutions and ideals.


Which is something they will gladly do, if current events are any indication.  That makes them complicit in Trump's war on American security and well-being.  Putting party over country in normal circumstances is, well, politics.  Putting party over country in the wake of a cyber-attack that most likely influenced the outcome of a presidential election is dereliction of duty.  Trump's conduct in Helsinki shows that he represents a danger to the United States, and he has far exceeded the threshold for being removed from office.  And his enablers in Congress - McConnell, Ryan, Nunes, all of them - I don't know if what they did is considered a crime, but if it is, they should all be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

It won't be enough to simply vote them out of office.  Simply voting them out means they become the objects of scorn for a few years, and that's pretty much it. That can't be allowed to happen.  They need to be made into examples, to discourage future of politicians from doing the same thing.  Trials need to be held.  Prison sentences need to be handed down. Safeguards need to be put into place to keep it from happening again. 

Because none of this will simply revert back to normal the day after Trump leaves office.  The damage being done - to our relationships with our allies, to our global reputation, to our citizens' faith in government - will take years to be repaired.  And the longer it goes on, the worse the damage will be. 

A Torture Enabler's Career Path

A news story that I thought should have gotten a lot of attention was President Trump's decision to nominate Gina Haspel to be Director of the CIA.  Unfortunately, like many other important stories, it was pushed out of the news cycle by later events.  If you don't know who Gina Haspel is, that's okay.  There are probably a lot of people who don't.  Here's a quick rundown of the most important details about her: Haspel oversaw a CIA "black site" in Thailand in 2002, where agents used various forms of torture like waterboarding to extract information from detainees.  (I strongly encourage you to click on that link and read the accounts of the torture from people at the site.) She also was part of a concerted effort to obstruct a federal investigation by destroying recordings of CIA employees torturing detainees.  Neither of those things impeded her career progression, because she is currently the CIA's Deputy Director.

Haspel didn't get to where she is overnight, though: America has gotten far too accepting of an unarguably immoral practice since 9/11.  "Enhanced interrogation," Camp X-Ray, preemptive wars - they all led us to where we are now.  Our government's hands weren't clean before that, of course; but torture wasn't promoted so openly and wholeheartedly before the War On Terror.  "Dubya" basically started a course of action that has proven difficult to reverse.  Obama, to his credit, managed to rein in some of the torture programs, like the "black sites"; but he couldn't halt it completely.  And his unwillingness to make good on his campaign promises ensured that it would be an uphill battle to hold anyone accountable. There's also an argument to be made that Obama's decision to not confront the torture issue paved the way for Trump's endorsement of it.

In addition to the obvious moral (it's cruel and evil) and practical (it doesn't work) objections, there are also political ones.  It's hard to say to say "You shouldn't torture people" to countries like China, The Philippines, or Saudi Arabia when three successive presidents have said "It's okay" in one way or another.  It also sends a bad message to other liberal democracies, including our allies in Europe.  How can the US present itself as a "beacon of democracy" when we engage in such a barbaric practice? On a domestic level, it also says to the intelligence community that participating in torture, and then trying to cover it up, is not an impediment to career advancement.  Expect to see the CIA and other agencies start loosening restrictions on torture soon, if they haven't already.  ICE has already taken its cue from Trump's tone and adopted more aggressive tactics, so government agencies are taking note and responding accordingly.

"Torture is bad" is such an easy and obvious judgement to make that I'm not going to spend time explaining why.  Promoting someone who had a hand in it sends the message that torture is acceptable, maybe even desirable.  The longer torture is seen as acceptable, the harder it will be to dislodge once we decide it's not tolerable any longer.  If you disagree with my position on torture, you're welcome to do so, but don't waste your time or mine trying to change my mind.

ICE's Push for a Seat at the Intelligence Community's Table

"There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people." - Commander Adama, Battlestar Galactica

In December of 2002, a militia operating a checkpoint in Khost Province stopped a local taxi driver in his early 20s named Dilawar.  The militia turned Dilawar and his three passengers over to US personnel, who incarcerated the four at the Bagram Collection Point.  However, Dilawar and his passengers were detained solely on circumstantial evidence: the militia discovered items in the taxi and on the passengers which could have theoretically (but unlikely in reality) been used to conduct a rocket attack on Camp Salerno which had occurred earlier that same day.  Those items were the entire basis for detaining Dilawar and his passengers.  Additionally, US officials began to suspect the commander of the militia that had captured Dilawar and the others was actually behind the attacks, and had been covering his tracks by accusing innocent Afghans of his own crimes.  I brought up this story because it serves as an illustrative "absolute worst case" example of what can go wrong when the line between intelligence collection and law enforcement gets blurred, and it's relevant now because a recent news article has reported that Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) wants to become a part of the US intelligence community.  The article isn't clear on exactly what kind of role ICE envisions for itself, so there's a lot of room for interpretation; however, in most scenarios it is an awful idea.

I didn't know a lot about ICE or what it does, beyond the vague opinion I formed based on news stories about it.  So, I went to its official website to learn more about it, and from what I can tell, the organization's core mission is to investigate any and all individuals and goods that have entered or exited (but mostly entered) the country unlawfully.  That's a pretty broad mission, and it covers these things, among others: immigration (obviously), human trafficking, gangs and organized crime, worker exploitation, fugitive extradition, drug smuggling, illegal weapons and ammunition, black markets, and of course, antiterrorism.  ICE's workload practically guarantees that it needs access to at least some of the intelligence that agencies such as the CIA and NSA collect and disseminate.  There are already (or should be) processes in place for that kind of thing, though.  For example, if the CIA comes across something that the DEA might need, there is most likely a DEA liaison working at a CIA office somewhere; all the CIA has to do is redact the intelligence so that anything the DEA only receives what's relevant to its specific mission.  Most intelligence and law enforcement agencies, if they're smart, have coordination offices set up to handle this sort of information-sharing.  I don't really have a problem with that kind of cooperation, but that's the best-case scenario.

A second scenario that I consider to be likely is that other agencies provide ICE with intelligence it shouldn't see, in ways that violate individuals' rights.  That's not so farfetched.  There's a shady-as-all-hell technique called "parallel construction", in which law enforcement officers conduct investigations and make arrests based on unlawfully-obtained intelligence (say, an NSA intercept), then fabricate a legal rationale for the investigation or arrest to conceal the fact that the intelligence played a role in the process.  According to TechDirt, the DEA has been using the practice for quite some time; and if ICE gets a place at the intelligence community table, it will very likely start doing the same thing.

But even if ICE doesn't start engaging in its own parallel construction, there's a good general reason why it should be kept at arm's length from the intelligence community.  The process of intelligence collection is vastly different from a law enforcement investigation.  Collected intelligence isn't required to meet legally-mandated standards for admissibility in a courtroom, nor is there a defense counsel to attack the prosecution's argument.  Concepts like "fruit of the poisonous tree" and "unreasonable search and seizure" don't constrain intelligence collection the way they do law enforcement investigations.  And while good intelligence is provable, it doesn't need to be.  Fairly often, the acceptable standard for intelligence is that it's plausible: the source is reliable, the intelligence has a ring of truth, and it dovetails with other available information. Intelligence-collection procedures don't transfer very smoothly into the law enforcement world, though; and that's by design.  When you receive tactical intelligence about an enemy tank battalion half a mile away or that a terrorist group wants to blow up a crowded concert venue, you don't evaluate it as if it needs to withstand scrutiny in the legal system. That's why there needs to be a very high wall dividing the two fields of intelligence collection and law enforcement.

ICE's current conduct is another reason to be uneasy about this push to join the intelligence community. ICE ultimately answers to the president, so its aggressive anti-immigration stance are meant to reflect the current president's political views.  That's normal in any boss-subordinate relationship.  However, rounding up individuals who have been upstanding and productive members of society, such as highly-educated chemistry teachers and combat veterans, shows extremely poor judgment and is obviously a way to pad ICE's productivity numbers, therefore making it appear useful.  These people being apprehended and deported are threats to nobody, and the country would be better served by ICE targeting the hardened criminals; but ICE is sucking up to the "boss" and also taking the lazy route.  Additionally, Congress still retains authority over ICE in a few important ways.  It ultimately approves or rejects ICE's budget, and it is responsible for crafting any legislation that would allow ICE to join the intelligence community.  Now, Congress is currently controlled by the GOP, so ICE's hardline stance is likely a reflection of that; however, the Democrats seem poised to retake at least one Congressional chamber this fall, so if ICE's aggressive stance is meant to curry political favor, it had better hope that Congress passes favorable legislation very soon. (Seeing how the government seems to be shutting down every other day lately, I wouldn't count on that happening.) It's such a shortsighted move that from a political perspective I'm surprised ICE is doing this.

The bottom line is that intelligence agencies operate without having to consider things the rule of law mandates, because their work rarely sees the inside of a courtroom.  That's necessary, considering an intelligence collector's mission. But when a law enforcement agency, which is duty-bound to respect the rights of the accused and obey laws concerning evidence collection/discovery and due process, wants to move closer to a world with a more permissive set of rules and norms, it is disabling a vital mechanism for accountability.  That should raise a serious red flag, especially after ICE's heavy-handed methods of late.

ICE doesn't need to build ties with the intelligence community beyond the intelligence-sharing relationships that already exist.  Period.