“If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart, epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt.”
One of the mysteries of Trump's first six months was why the administration came out of the gate so hot for Saudi and UAE--with Trump traveling to Saudi Arabia and then going along with the Qatar blockade. The Tom Barrack indictment explains a lot.
Just want to distill one point: According to Bolton, the president encouraged China to put people in concentration camps. But Bolton didn’t do anything about this, and put it in his book. And now he blames the impeachment inquiry for focusing only on Ukraine.
“The odd thing about reporting on the coronavirus is that the nonexperts are supremely confident in their predictions, while epidemiologists keep telling me that they don’t really know much at all.”
NEW: Top White House officials spent weeks pressuring the C.D.C. over the summer to downplay the risk of sending children back to school. W/
@noahweiland
@SharonLNYT
Plenty of bad stuff to hang on Suleimani without trying to tie him to 9/11. The Vice President of the United States needs to stop peddling this stuff. Bad echoes of pre-Iraq war.
In a statement after the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the president said we should all move on because the Saudis promised to buy a lot of American weapons
"I'm not saying the military’s in love with me,the soldiers are.The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t, because they want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.
NEW: Inside a secret Trump-era campaign to discredit perceived "enemies" of the president inside government, including the president's national security adviser and F.B.I employees w/
@adamgoldmanNYT
The report was pretty striking
@Susan_Hennessey
. Am amazed there hasn’t been more attention to it. It literally undercuts everything Barr has been saying for a year
“A confidential U.N. report obtained by The New York Times... reveals how Mr. Prince deployed a force of foreign mercenaries, armed with attack aircraft, gunboats and cyberwarfare capabilities, to eastern Libya.”
@declanwalsh
No email was sent out informing NSC staff that their boss, Robert O'Brien, had tested positive for coronavirus. He abruptly left the office last Thursday. Some found out from press reports (!),
@vmsalama
and I are told.
BREAKING: Gen. McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, to announce no ISIS-K fighters killed in U.S. drone strike in Kabul Aug 29. 10 civilians killed, including 7 children in Toyota. No disciplinary action expected, officials say. US military stands by intel leading to strike.
It takes time, and there’s a crush of news right now, but history has a way of sorting out the heroes from the yes-men and syncophants. The latter group always looks terrible.
@EricSchmittNYT
@johnismay
When I was Director of the CIA, we valued individuals based on their talent and skill, not their race or sexuality. I’ll never forget what one female analyst said to me: “Thank you for valuing me for my work. I want my abilities and achievements to define me, not my sexuality.”
There is an epic amount of finger-pointing going on at the White House right now about who's to blame for a group of grown adults in serious positions in government - and in one case the president - talking to Woodward.
Seems some people haven’t been following the work
@adamgoldmanNYT
and I have done about spying, Project Veritas, and political sabotage. I’ll catch you up. This was the first:
William Barr said that the Flynn calls contained “nothing inconsistent” with Obama administration policy. Actually, they showed that Flynn seemed to view the Kremlin as more of an ally than the Obama White House
Important point here for those alleging vast conspiracy against Flynn. When you are asking for someone to be unmasked it’s because....you don’t know who the person is.
April Falcon Doss, a former lawyer with the National Security Agency: “When the officials are sending requests in, by definition they don’t know whose identity is going to be unmasked.”
A document released today provides strongest evidence to date that Russian spies had penetrated the inner workings of the Trump campaign in 2016. W/
@nytmike
“Government power was used to spy on American citizens,” Barr said. Will be interesting to hear how he distinguishes from every single other FBI operation.
After a four year assault on the keepers of America’s secrets, perhaps the least surprising thing Donald Trump did during his final days in office was ship boxes of sensitive material from the White House to his oceanside palace in Florida.
She described an onslaught of patients who were dying before they could even be taken out of ambulances.
“She tried to do her job, and it killed her,” said her father. "She’s a casualty just as much as anyone else who has died.”
“A British former spy recruited by Erik Prince, the security contractor close to the Trump administration, played a central role in a secretive effort to hire dozens of operatives for the conservative group Project Veritas.” W/
@adamgoldmanNYT
The Saudi team was so busy carrying out a campaign of rendition and torture, they asked MBS for a bonus for Eid, the annual holiday commemorating the end of Ramadan
“That’s how you beat dangerous disease. You don’t beat them by offering Lotto scratch-off cards. We need to get over the current ‘pretty please?’ phase of this fight. Vaccination mandates change everything.”
NEW: "Mr. Mueller and Mr. Barr, once close friends, have been like two students standing shoulder to shoulder at a blackboard: what one has diligently written down, the other has tried to steadily erase."
“That would be a question more for the White House,” Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, says on Fox News when asked if Joe Biden will receive access to the presidential daily brief.
The lawyer who took on the Flynn case had private calls with President Trump, wrote a secret letter to AG Barr, and months later saw the DOJ drop the case w/
@charlie_savage
@adamgoldmanNYT
“It’s a tale as old as time: Military scientist meets prostitute. Scientist falls in love with prostitute. Scientist gets prostitute hired as an Air Force Research Laboratory contractor. A federal investigation ensues.”
"Even as late as 1 p.m. on Jan. 6, as a pro-Trump mob began to breach the outer barricades...an agent in the F.B.I.’s domestic terrorism unit told a Justice Department official that the F.B.I. still had no information about any specific threat."
There’s so much in Lennon’s final interview. This passage about how fans don’t let artists evolve is amazing—he’s talking about a new kid named Springsteen 1/
When Barr and Durham showed up in Rome late last month, diplomatic and intelligence officials at the American embassy there didn’t know what he was doing in Italy
To escape the bubonic plague, Isaac Newton left London for the near total solitude of his family farm, where he invented calculus, created the science of motion, unravelled gravity, and more. Or so the story goes.
The publisher of the NYT reveals that, two years ago, the American government seemed content to let Cairo reporter
@declanwalsh
be arrested in Egypt. So paper turned to Irish diplomats to get him to safety
NEW: The White House believed it had struck a secret deal with the Saudis on oil production, and gave classified briefings to Congress. Things turned out differently. w/
@ewong
@adamentous
NEW: Days after the White House in 2021 blacklisted NSO, the notorious Israeli hacking firm, a secret contract was signed for a hacking tool. The contract states that the USG is the user. A thread