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Sebastian Gorka Disagrees With His Own Government’s Terrorism Statistics

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Until recently, Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to President Trump and a self-proclaimed expert on radical Islam, wasn’t a well-known or respected figure in the national-security community. In fact, every profile of him — and there have been a bunch lately — quotes national-security wonks either saying they hadn’t heard of Gorka until he was appointed by Trump, or casting aspersions on his scholarship.

“When I first encountered his name during the transition, I did a triple-take,” Daniel Benjamin, counterterrorism coordinator for Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of State, told Politico. “I’ve been in counterterrorism since 1998, and I thought I knew everyone. But I’d never heard his name and couldn’t recall anything he’d written or said.” Cindy Storer, a former CIA analyst and radicalization expert, was more straightforward: “He thinks the government and intelligence agencies don’t know anything about radicalization, but the government knows a lot and thinks he’s nuts,” she told the Washington Post. As these and other articles have pointed out, Gorka, who has a Ph.D. in political science from his native Hungary (correction: his parents are from there, but Gorka was born in Britain), is a relative newcomer to counterterrorism, and simply hasn’t built up an impressive academic track record on the subject. (The fact that, per Politico, “[s]everal passages of [Gorka’s] 2007 dissertation” appear to be lifted verbatim from a Human Events article written by his wife, who works in the same field, doesn’t help matters.)

But Gorka, who prior to Trump’s inauguration crowed to Fox News that “the alpha males are back” in charge, isn’t in the White House because of his CV; rather, the available evidence suggests he’s there because of his hard-line beliefs. He is an ardent proponent of the “counter-jihad” ideology that permeates the Trump administration, and which is centered on Steve Bannon and Trump himself — the belief that America is locked in a global war with radical Islam that most people don’t take nearly seriously enough, and that both the EU and the U.S. are seriously threatened by the possible imposition of Sharia law by hordes of innocent-seeming Muslims. (Before he was ousted, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn was an enthusiastic proponent as well.) Gorka has helped spread these sorts of ideas both in his recently released book, Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War, and in his role as a Breitbart’s former national security editor and a TV talking head.

Like Gorka himself, this counter-jihad movement is not taken seriously by the mainstream national-security establishment. Members of that establishment acknowledge that radical Islamic terrorism is a problem, of course, but simply don’t see the epochal, black-and-white civilizational struggle folks like Gorka, or the counter-jihad movement’s de facto leader Frank Gaffney (who has advised Trump in the past), do. Nor do they fall in for some of the feverish conspiracy theorizing that persistently dogs the movement — Gaffney, for example, frequently spread the falsehood that former president Obama himself was a radical Muslim trying to help terror groups from within the White House. Rather, members of the national-security establishment understand that different Muslim-affiliated terror groups have different motivations — not all of them religious — and don’t see it as their role to overhype the reach and strategic strength of groups like ISIS or Al Qaeda, when those groups happen to be in decline. (While the mainstream natsec community is decidedly more reality-based than the counter-jihadists, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t also screwed up in spectacular ways over the years, of course.)

This gap between the excesses of counter-jihad and the more deliberate and rational approach taken by the mainstream natsec community is inevitably going to cause tensions within the Trump White House, simply because the two camps see the world so differently. Trump appointees like Jim Mattis and Flynn’s replacement, H.R. McMaster, do not believe we are locked in an existential struggle against a giant Muslim conspiracy; Gorka, Bannon, and Trump do.

The divide manifested itself in an interesting way yesterday morning on Fox & Friends. During the broadcast, Gorka, in the course of discussing a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who recently blew himself up in Iraq — and making the case for the expand-Guantanamo-don’t-close-it “toughness” that characterized Trump’s terror-talk during the campaign — offered some scary statistics about what might happen if more Gitmo detainees are released. “We know there’s at least 30 if not more than 40 percent recidivism rate from the people released at Gitmo,” Gorka said. “President Obama released lots and lots of people that were there for very good reason, and what happened? Almost half the time they returned to the battlefield.”

But according to the government’s own statistics — that is, statistics prepared by the sorts of wonks who tend to say mean things about Gorka — that’s just not true. Federal law requires the director of National Intelligence to release a public report at least every six months that tracks what has happened to released Gitmo detainees. Here’s a handy chart from the most recent one, published in July of last year:

The main thing that stands out is that the Obama years saw a much lower recidivism rate among former Gitmo prisoners than the Bush years. Since Obama was sworn in, the recidivism rate for released Gitmo inmates has been just 5.6 percent, or 12.4 percent if you count each and every “suspected” case of recidivism as a “confirmed” one as well. During the Bush years, those rates were 21.2 percent and 35.3 percent, respectively. According to Human Rights First, an advocacy group, this change is mostly attributable to the fact that the Obama administration instituted a more thorough vetting process than the George W. Bush administration had in place (though there could be other contributing factors as well, such as the reduced direct-combat role of the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan).

So it simply doesn’t make any sense for Gorka, in the course of criticizing the Obama administration, to claim the recidivism rate is between 30 and 40 percent — let alone “almost half.” During the Obama years, the recidivism rate was a fraction of that.

John Horgan, a psychology professor at Georgia State who is a leading researcher in the field of countering violent extremism, said that he viewed Gorka’s claims as emblematic of his broader disdain for mainstream national-security and CVE work. “The reality is he is someone who uses the credibility associated with having a PhD and associated with being an academic,” he told Intelligencer, “but at the same time wants to stand outside that and doesn’t want to be held to facts and figures and evidence, and you simply can’t have it both ways.” (Horgan, who doesn’t have an affiliation with Human Rights First, also said he thought the organization’s account about the difference between the Bush and Obama administrations’ Guantanamo Bay policies was accurate.) And the broader problem, Horgan said, is that the counter-jihad framing itself simply doesn’t lend itself well to the careful, rational and cost-benefit-analysis-laden work that is supposed to define this sort of policy making. “Bannon and Gorka and their colleagues have framed this as an existential threat that can’t be qualified, can’t be measured, can’t be thought about in terms of facts and figures and evidence,” he said. “And if we buy into that narrative then we have lost perspective.”

Of course, if Gorka’s ultimate goal is to promote the idea of an apocalyptic struggle between Islam and the West, it makes perfect sense that he would overstate the probability of recidivism among Guantanamo detainees. But this is just a Fox & Friends segment, relatively harmless in the grand scheme of things. What happens when it comes time to carefully evaluate a complicated pile of evidence and make a big decision about national-security policy or counterterrorism? Who will win, the Trump-Bannon-Gorka crowd, or Mattis, McMaster, and their allies in the traditional national-security establishment?

Terror Expert Critical of Trump Advisor Was Threatened Legal Action By White House

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An embattled White House terrorism advisor whose academic credentials have come under widespread fire telephoned one of his main critics at home Tuesday night and threatened legal action against him, Newsweek has learned.

Sebastian Gorka, whose views on Islam have been widely labeled extremist, called noted terrorism expert Michael S. Smith II in South Carolina and expressed dismay that Smith had been criticizing him on Twitter, according to a recording of the call provided to Newsweek.

“I was like a deer in the headlights,” Smith, a Republican who has advised congressional committees on the use of social media by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) and al-Qaeda, tells Newsweek. “I thought it was a prank. He began by threatening me with a lawsuit.”

Gorka apparently used his personal cell phone, with a northern Virginia area code, rather than making the call from his White House office or government-issued cell phone, where it would be officially logged, Smith says. The terrorism expert says he suspected Gorka “was trying to conceal the call.”

Smith says he did not begin recording the call until after Gorka allegedly threatened to sue Smith. In an email to Newsweek, Smith said that, “Gorka asserted my tweets about him merited examination by the White House legal counsel. In effect, he was threatening to entangle me in a legal battle for voicing my concerns on Twitter that he does not possess expertise sufficient to assist the president of the United States with formulating and guiding national security policies.”

Gorka did not respond to an email requesting comment.

Smith has been a regular contributor to think tank and TV discussions on terrorism, particularly the use of social media by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State militant group. Last year Foreign Policy magazine included him in its list of “100 Leading Global Thinkers.”

Smith has kept up a steady stream of jabs at Gorka since he learned that the Hungarian born, British-educated terrorism specialist had been hired by President Donald Trump’s top adviser Steve Bannon. Both Bannon and Gorka came from the far-right Breitbart News, where Bannon was editor-in-chief and Gorka was national security editor. On his Twitter page, Gorka describes himself as “deputy assistant to the 45th president of America” and an “Irregular Warfare Strategist.”

His views on the “global jihadist movement,” as he calls it, align with a small cadre of right-wing observers who depict Islamist militants and extremists as being driven principally by passages from the Koran, rather than by government repression, or sectarian, tribal, political or economic factors.

On Tuesday, Smith tweeted that Gorka “doesn’t know the enemies’ ideologies well enough to combat them.” In an earlier tweet directed at Trump, Smith wrote: “You are endangering the lives of Americans by hiring fake ‘terrorism experts.’”

Gorka earned his doctorate from a Hungarian university in 2008 and “a few months later landed a faculty job at the College of International Security Affairs (CISA), a new Pentagon-funded school that was still working toward accreditation,” The Washington Post reported. According to an online biography, he is also an associate fellow at the Joint Special Operations University, at the U.S. Special Operations Command, and holds the Major General Horner Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University Foundation, which was funded by Thomas Saunders III, a major Republican Party donor and chairman of the conservative Heritage Foundation. The program’s current director, James Howcroft, also a retired Marine colonel, told Politico that Gorka only “periodically delivered lectures or served as a seminar leader.”

The White House advisor was clearly wounded by Smith’s taunts. “Why is this vitriol popping out of you, every day now?” Gorka asked Smith in his call. ”I look at your Twitter feed once or twice a day and it’s half a dozen tweets about me, and I’ve never even met you.”

“Wow,” Smith responded. “Are you defeating jihad by monitoring or trolling my Twitter feed?”

Gorka expressed puzzlement several times that he was being attacked “by someone who’s never met me.”

“I’ve never met you and I’ve never attacked you,” he said to Smith, his voice rising in frustration and anger. “And your Twitter feed is an incessant berating of my professional acumen. Put yourself in my shoes, Mr. Smith. Have you done that? How would you like it if someone you’ve never met, daily and professionally attacked you?”

“Happens all the time,” Smith responded. Generally speaking, academics and journalists laboring in the field of public policy expect to be criticized for their views.

“It’s not happened to me,” Gorka said, “I can tell you. Maybe you can show me some trick on how you deal with it. This is the first time ever.”

In fact, questions about Gorka’s views and credentials to speak authoritatively on Islam and terrorism were severely criticized in lengthy feature articles in The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal in recent days. He also received a wave of unfavorable publicity in January 2016 when he was arrested for trying to pass through a TSA checkpoint at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. carrying a loaded handgun. He was charged with a misdemeanor and sentenced to six months probation.

One of his most influential critics is Cindy Storer, a leading former CIA expert on the relationship between religious extremism and terrorism.

“He thinks the government and intelligence agencies don’t know anything about radicalization, but the government knows a lot and thinks he’s nuts,” Storer was quoted as saying in the Post.

Smith asked Gorka why he didn’t telephone Storer, “who called you nuts in the Washington Post,” to complain. Gorka responded that Storer’s remark wasn’t “in a Twitter feed that is being sent to people on Capitol Hill.”

Gorka’s scholarship has also come under scrutiny by Mia Bloom, an expert on “transcultural violence” at Georgia State University. “He doesn’t understand a fraction of what he pretends to know about Islam,” Bloom was quoted as saying by the Journal. Bloom has participated in TV appearances with Gorka and at a panel last year at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Nor has Gorka—who does not speak Arabic and has never lived in a Muslim-majority nation, according to news accounts—submitted any of his articles for review in scholarly journals, says Lawrence P. Rubin, associate editor of Terrorism and Political Violence, the leading journal in that field.

“Gorka has not submitted anything to the journal in the last five or so years, according to my records and we have never used him as a reviewer,” Rubin tells Newsweek. “We would not have used him as a reviewer because he is not considered a terrorism expert by the academic or policy community.”

A government expert on Middle East radical movements, who asked not to be named for fear of being fired, tells Newsweek she was disturbed to hear Gorka suggest at a talk he gave in Israel a few years ago that he knew of a “specific person in the [Obama White House] who was deliberately misleading the government” on terrorism issues. “He said he wouldn’t name the person on stage but would provide the particulars” privately to anyone there who wanted to know, she said. Noting the audience was full of potential adversaries, she called Gorka’s remark “‘beyond the pale.”

Several times during his call with Smith, Gorka invited him to the White House to hash out their differences “face to face, man to man,” as he put it in one exchange. They set a tentative date for March 8.

But Smith warned Gorka that “in absolute fairness to you, what you will hear is that I have very serious concerns about our national security,” and in particular Gorka’s role “as an adviser to the president of the United States.”

“If you make a devastating case, then so be it,” Gorka said.

“So be it?” Smith answered. “Then what, you’ll acknowledge you’re out of your league?”

Yeah, absolutely,” Gorka said. “Bring it on.”

Late Wednesday, Gorka withdrew his invitation.

“Given your statements for the latest attack piece and continued disparaging Tweets against not only myself but the administration and the President,” Gorka wrote Smith, “consider your invitation to meet withdrawn.”

Media

Trump Calls for Building Up Nuke Arsenal To Be ‘Top Of the Pack’

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President Trump said Thursday he wants to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal so that it is at the “top of the pack.”

“I am the first one that would like to see everybody — nobody have nukes, but we’re never going to fall behind any country, even if it’s a friendly country. We’re never going to fall behind on nuclear power,” Trump said in an interview with Reuters.

“It would be wonderful — a dream would be that no country would have nukes — but if countries are going to have nukes, we’re going to be at the top of the pack.”

The interview also touched on Russia’s violation of an arms control treaty, North Korea’s ballistic missile tests and China’s ability to pressure Pyongyang.

Trump also claimed the U.S. has “fallen behind on nuclear weapon capacity,” according to Reuters.

Trump previously called in a December tweet for the U.S. to “greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”

The December comment drew consternation from arms control advocates, who said the U.S.’s current 30-year, $1 trillion nuclear modernization efforts and 7,000 existing nuclear warheads are already more than enough.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Thursday that Trump was “very clear” that the U.S. cannot “yield its supremacy to anybody.”

“That’s what he made very clear in there in that if other countries have nuclear capabilities, it will always be the United States that has the supremacy and commitment to this,” Spicer said at Thursday’s press briefing.

“The question that was asked was about other people that were growing their stockpiles.”

In the Reuters interview, Trump slammed the New START Treaty with Russia that caps the number of nuclear warheads the U.S. and Russia can deploy, calling it “a one-sided deal.”

“Just another bad deal that the country made, whether it’s START, whether it’s the Iran deal,” he said. “We’re going to start making good deals.”

Trump also reportedly called the New START Treaty a bad deal in a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin last month.

A separate treaty with Russia, known as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, bans ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. Russia has violated the treaty by deploying a cruise missile within its borders.

Trump called the violation a “big deal” in the Reuters interview. He said he would bring it up with Putin “if and when we meet.”

Trump also said that “we’re very angry” at North Korea’s ballistic missile tests. Accelerating the deployment of a missile-defense system in South Korea was among many options available, he added.

As he has in the past, Trump pointed at China as being able to curb North Korea’s provocative behavior, saying Beijing could do so “very easily if they want to.”

“There’s talks of a lot more than that,” Trump said when asked about the missile defense system. “We’ll see what happens. But it’s a very dangerous situation, and China can end it very quickly in my opinion.”

(h/t The Hill)

Pay to Play: Trump’s Cabinet is His Donors

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President Donald Trump’s transition efforts raised more than $6.5 million, according to government filings, with the vast majority of the donations coming after the election — including thousands of dollars from people linked to his future Cabinet.

According to filings with the General Services Administration obtained by CNN through the Freedom of Information Act, Trump’s transition fundraising vehicle, Trump for America Inc., raised $6,513,947.93 through February 14.

Donors included individuals, corporations and advocacy groups. Each entity is by law allowed to donate up to $5,000 maximum to transition efforts, which are financed in part by private fundraising and in part by federal funds.

Trump Cabinet nominees or their families were consistent donors.

His earliest supporter of the Cabinet was Linda McMahon, who is now confirmed as chief of the Small Business Administration. She gave the maximum donation on July 14, before Trump was even formally named the nominee by the Republican National Convention.

McMahon was nominated in December.

Wilbur Ross, expected to be confirmed as commerce secretary, maxed out on October 31. He was formally announced on November 30.

Other nominees waited until after the election.

The DeVos family gave 10 individual $5,000 donations on December 14. Betsy DeVos, now the secretary of education, was announced as the nominee on November 23.

Alan Mnuchin, the brother of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, gave $5,000 on December 9, though Steven Mnuchin did not donate. Exxon Mobil Corporation, the company that was helmed by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson before he was confirmed, gave $5,000 December 28 — though Tillerson himself did not donate to the transition.

Tillerson was named December 13 and Mnuchin was named November 30.

Former Labor nominee Andrew Puzder, a fast food executive, gave $5,000 on November 30. He withdrew from consideration this month after a series of controversial headlines and opposition from GOP senators. He was nominated on December 8.

There is no indication that Trump or his decision-making inner circle would have known about the donations.

Asked if DeVos had any concerns about the appropriateness of donating, her personal spokesman Greg McNeilly said “no concerns whatsoever.” The Department of Education did not immediately respond.

The White House did not immediately answer an inquiry as to whether Trump or his staff knew about the donations.

(h/t CNN)

Trump Lawyer Pushed Pro-Russia Deal For Ukraine

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The setting was a Manhattan restaurant, and after 25 minutes what allegedly emerged was a pro-Russian peace plan for Ukraine that its author believes may have ended up in the White House.

In a CNN interview, Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Artemenko said he discussed his left-field proposal for Ukraine in January with US President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, who offered to deliver the plan to the Trump administration.

The exact details of the plan are unclear, yet reports have suggested it revolves around leasing Crimea — annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014 — to Moscow for 50 to 100 years. In exchange, Russia would withdraw its troops from the separatist regions in Ukraine’s war-torn east.

Artemenko declined to discuss the plan’s details, yet hinted that a lease might be part of the idea.

The lawmaker says Cohen, who has long advised Trump, wanted to take the plan to Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser.

Any suggestion that the White House might consider a plan that formalizes Russia’s control of Crimea would cause consternation in Kiev and among its allies in Europe. The White House has flatly denied any knowledge of the proposal.

In his interview with CNN, Artemenko shines a light on how a key Trump associate was allegedly prepared to push a controversial peace plan that might benefit Russia at a time when questions were being raised about the Trump’s ties to that country.

The Ukrainian member of parliament told CNN he met Cohen through a mutual acquaintance, businessman Felix Sater, and that the three had dinner in a Manhattan hotel in January.

Cohen told CNN in a text message that although he had dinner with Artemenko, they never discussed peace in Ukraine. Other media organizations reported that he offered them a different account. The White House has denied that Cohen delivered any peace plan to Flynn.

Russia and Ukraine have since rejected the plan, and Artemenko has now become the subject of investigation for treason for suggesting it to Cohen.

In a hurried interview in a Kiev hotel, Artemenko said Cohen told him that Flynn — who resigned in mid-February due to a controversy over calls with the Russian ambassador to the US — was his best connection at the White House.

“Michael Flynn is the best person, the best of my connections in the Trump administration, who if he likes [it], it’s going to [get] huge support, huge support,” Cohen said, according to Artemenko.

Flynn did not respond to CNN’s request for comment on this story.

Artemenko knew the proposal would be controversial as it undercuts both the US and Ukrainian diplomatic corps, and he says he knows it angered Kiev, who will have seen it as a pro-Russian proposal.

“That’s why I feel pressure, and for sure today I can see people accusing me, and I see the prosecutor of Ukraine is trying to do something, to open a new case, to do an investigation about me,” he told CNN.

He said of the January meeting that Sater invited Cohen to “a dinner in the hotel in Manhattan, and we probably spoke around 20-25 minutes, where I presented my intentions, my peace plan for the Ukraine, how we can stop the war, how we can stop the killing.”

Artemenko said he had never dreamed that his proposal would be seen by the White House, but he claims Cohen said the plan had “great potential” and wanted to deliver it to the Trump administration.

“It was Michael Cohen’s idea,” he said. “He [Cohen] mentioned his name first in my meetings. And he said ‘listen, Michael Flynn’ — from his personal opinion — ‘is most powerful man who can really support this idea, who can support, who can help you, who can provide this information to President Trump.'”

Flynn resigned 24 days into the job after misleading administration officials regarding his communications with the Russian ambassador to the US before Trump took office.

Flynn made several calls to the ambassador in December, including some on the same day that the outgoing Obama administration placed fresh sanctions on Russia over alleged election meddling.

The Justice Department also warned the Trump administration in January that Flynn could be subject to Russian blackmail, a person familiar with the matter told CNN last month.

In a text message to CNN, Cohen denied delivering any documents to Flynn, and refuted Artemenko’s recollection of their January conversation.

“If this continued fake news narrative wasn’t so ridiculous, I would be angered. Despite the multitude of statements issued denying any nexus between Presidents Trump and [Russian President Vladimir Putin], the main stream media just keeps on trying to perpetuate this lie.

“I acknowledge that the brief meeting took place, but emphatically deny discussing this topic or delivering any documents to the White House and/or General Flynn; something I stated to the New York Times.”

According to the Times, Cohen said he left a sealed envelope with the proposed peace plan in Flynn’s office. Later, Cohen denied delivering a peace plan to Flynn.
Artemenko insists, however, that it was Cohen’s idea to show the peace proposal to the senior White House official. “It was his idea, absolutely his idea,” he said.

After Russia seized the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014, it sent military help to separatists in the country’s east, where violent conflict over disputed territory drags on to this day.

Kiev has refused to discuss the official transfer of the peninsula to Russia, and dismissed Artemenko’s plan as a result.

Moscow considers the peninsula already its territory, after its residents — under a substantial Russian military presence — voted in a 2014 referendum to join the Russian Federation.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov says Russia refuses to discuss the lease of a region it already controls: “How can Russia rent its own region? This question itself is absurd.”

Sater, who attended the dinner with Artemenko, did not respond to emailed questions, yet he emphatically denied any links between the Trump camp and Russia in an interview with Fox News: “What could be wrong in helping stop a war and trying to achieve peace? I have done so much for my country and thought that promoting peace was a good thing. People are getting killed, it’s a war.”

A White House spokesman offered this statement in response to CNN’s request for comment: “No one in the White House — including the President, Vice President and senior members of the NSC — has spoken to Mr. Cohen about any Russia-Ukraine peace proposal, and no one has spoken to Andrii Artemenko at all about any matter.

“In addition, the NSC keeps comprehensive records of documents received, and we have no record of receiving any proposal from Mr. Cohen. This is another absurd, misleading attempt to distract from the real reform taking place under President Trump.”

Artemenko left the interview with CNN to attend what he said was a meeting with the President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, although the presidential administration denied such a meeting took place.

Yet moments after leaving the interview, Ukrainian prosecutors announced he would be investigated for “treason” over the deal.

(h/t CNN)

Trump Calls Deportation Push a ‘Military Operation’

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President Trump on Thursday called his effort to ramp up deportations a “military operation” aimed at ridding the U.S. of “really bad dudes.”

“We’re getting really bad dudes out of this country,” he said at a meeting with manufacturing CEOs. “And at a rate nobody has ever seen before. And they’re the bad ones. And it’s a military operation.”

Trump is touting his administration’s new immigration enforcement policies, which could result in millions of deportations.

The Department of Homeland Security guidelines vastly increase the number of immigrants who are considered priorities for deportation. They also direct law enforcement agencies to hire thousands of new agents to apprehend people living in the country illegally, with local police and sheriffs’ offices enlisted in the effort.

The military, however, is not involved. The guidelines did not adopt a draft plan to enlist National Guard troops to help apprehend undocumented immigrants in nearly a dozen states.

Trump officials have said the effort is aimed at deporting criminal undocumented immigrants.

“You see what’s happening at the border,” the president said. “All of the sudden, for the first time, we’re getting gang members out. We’re getting drug lords out.”

“When you see gang violence and you’ve read about it like never before, all of the things, much of that is people who are here illegally. And they’re tough and they’re tough, but they’re not tough like our people,” he continued.

Under the administration’s guidelines, any immigrant who is convicted, charged or suspected of a crime is considered a priority for removal.

That is a break from Obama administration policy, which focused on serious criminals, recent border crossers and suspected terrorists.

The changes angered immigrant-rights groups, who said they could result in families being split apart and violations of due-process rights.

(h/t The Hill)

Trump Staffers Plant Alternative Facts to Stop Him From Tweeting Them

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Several days have passed since the last news story appeared filled with hair-raising reports from inside the White House attesting to Donald Trump’s utter unfitness for office. The latest dispatch from the child monarchy of Donald Trump comes via Politico’s Tara Palmeri, who conveys the methods used by Trump’s staffers to manipulate his delicate and damaged psyche.

The thrust of the story revolves around the constant struggle to prevent Trump from tweeting out angry or false things that degrade his standing with the public by opening up a window into his mind. Palmeri, who spoke with six former Trump campaign officials, discovered that their method for controlling the president is based on a combination of his pathologies:

1. Media criticism makes Trump irrationally angry. The president’s habit of firing off replies to critical media outlets is well known, but Palmeri provides more details of his vulnerability to psychic distress when presented with criticism:

One Trump associate said it’s important to show Trump deference and offer him praise and respect, as that will lead him to more often listen. And If Trump becomes obsessed with a grudge, aides need to try and change the subject, friends say.

2. Trump does not control his own print-media diet. Other than a handful of legacy newspapers and magazines that he reads in print, the rest of the president’s news diet is spoon-fed to him by his staff:

He rarely reads anything online, instead preferring print newspapers — especially his go-to, the New York Times — and reading material his staff brought to his desk.

3. Trump does control his own television-media diet. He surfs cable for hours, a habit that can feed into his self-destructive mental state:

Leaving him alone for several hours can prove damaging, because he consumes too much television and gripes to people outside the White House.

4. Trump’s staff manipulates him by presenting him with favorable “news.” Trump tweets his own message out of a belief that his allies are not defending him with sufficient vigor, so he can he dissuaded from doing so if he sees favorable coverage in the printed-out news collection handed to him:

“He saw there was activity so he didn’t feel like he had to respond,” the former campaign official said. “He sends out these tweets when he feels like people aren’t responding enough for him.”…

“If candidate Trump was upset about unfair coverage, it was productive to show him that he was getting fair coverage from outlets that were persuadable,” said former communications director Sam Nunberg.

5. If there was not enough favorable coverage available, Trump’s aides would plant favorable stories in conservative media. Palmeri reports several such examples of planted stories in the right-wing media:

During another damage control mission, when former Miss Universe Alicia Machado took to the airwaves to call out Trump for calling her “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping,” the communications team scrambled to place a story in conservative friendly outlets like Fox News, the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller and Breitbart.

“Alternative media” describes media that will report the Trump administration’s “alternative facts.” The Washington Examiner and Fox News contain a mix of legitimate reporting with conservative propaganda. Infowars is a fever-swamp conspiracy site run by Alex Jones, who promotes hoaxes like “Pizzagate,” insists the Sandy Hook shooting was faked, is suspicious of fluoridated water, and so on. Jones is barking mad. Breitbart and the Daily Caller lie in the middle ground between normal, conservative, Fox News–crazy, and Alex Jones–crazy. (Jim Rutenberg recently noted the overlap between Jones’s conspiratorial beliefs and Trump’s, but the administration refused to tell him that Trump followed Jones’s claims. Now Palmeri has confirmed it.)

And so Trump’s staff essentially outsources the job of circulating pro-Trump alternative facts to the right-wing media in order to dissuade the president from doing it himself and thereby tarnishing his brand. The president is therefore not only the subject but also the object of his own staff’s propaganda campaign.

Palmeri also reports a fascinating detail about the efforts to confirm Neil Gorsuch. The nominee’s comments to Senator Richard Blumenthal expressing dismay with Trump’s attacks on the judiciary were planned, out of the calculation that demonstrating Gorsuch’s independence from Trump and willingness to oppose his attacks on the judiciary would ease his path to confirmation. “White House officials anticipated that Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch would distance himself from Trump’s attack and thought the planned comments would help the nominee’s bid, said a person with knowledge of the conversations,” she reports. Alas, Trump was not privy to the plan and, filled with rage, fired off a series of tweets attacking Blumenthal:

Trump himself didn’t like Gorsuch’s “disheartening” and “demoralizing” critique. He fired off a tweet criticizing Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who repeated the comments, digging up a past controversy over the senator’s military record and accusing him of incorrectly characterizing Gorsuch’s comments. Afterwards, Blumenthal and other Democrats criticized Trump and said the president’s comments would hurt his nominee’s chances. Asked if aides and advisers liked the tweet, one White House official said sarcastically: “What do you think?”

(h/t New York Magazine)

Stephen Miller Admits the New Executive Order on Immigration Ban is Same as the Old

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During a town hall hosted by Fox News Tuesday night, White House adviser Stephen Miller confirmed that President Donal Trump’s new executive order — which will replace the immigration ban on seven majority-Muslim countries — will effectively have the same policy outcome.

As one of the architects of the first executive order, Miller insisted that “nothing was wrong with the first executive order” — although the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reinstate the ban earlier this month. Miller admitted that a new order was necessary to avoid the judicial rulings from the appellate courts.

Although there will be changes in the language of the upcoming executive order, Miller said the policy outcome will remain the same.

“One of the big differences that you are going to see in the executive order is that it is going to be responsive to the judicial ruling which didn’t exist previously,” Miller said. “And so these are mostly minor, technical differences. Fundamentally, you are still going to have the same, basic policy outcome for the country.”

Critics were quick to point out that Miller had involuntarily provided civil rights organizations the material needed to challenge the order once it’s signed by the president.

Lawyers that challenged the first executive order cited former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s remarks on Fox News, when he said that Trump sought advice for a legal way to carry out a “Muslim ban.” Civil rights activists argued that Giuliani’s statement was evidence that the Trump administration wanted to discriminate against people of a certain religion.

Miller still believes the appellate courts’ rulings were wrong.

“The rulings from those courts were flawed, erroneous and false,” he said. “The president’s actions were clearly legal and constitutional and consistent with the longstanding tradition of presidents of the past.”

(h/t Salon)

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Caught in Lie, White House Reverse Trump’s Golf Game

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President Donald Trump played a full round of golf Sunday, enjoying once again a habit he regularly assailed Barack Obama for. After initially saying Trump had only played a few holes, the White House reversed itself Monday after professional golfer Rory McIlroy posted on his website that he had played 18 holes with the president.

“As stated yesterday the President played golf. He intended to play a few holes and decided to play longer,” White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders said Monday. “He also had a full day of meetings, calls and interviews for the new NSA, which he is continuing today before returning to Washington, D.C. tonight.”

This weekend marks Trump’s third straight at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, which he has taken to calling the “Winter White House.”

Trump regularly panned Obama for his penchant for hitting the links, but Trump made it to the golf course far faster than the previous two presidents, waiting just two weeks before playing his first round. Trump recently golfed with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and is expected to conduct more such golf diplomacy.

(h/t Politico)

Non-Lawyer Stephen Miller Told US Attorney How to Defend Travel Ban, Report Says

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White House aide Stephen Miller, who does not have a law degree, told a federal attorney how his office should defend the president’s controversial travel ban on seven Muslim-majority nations, The New York Daily News reports.

The executive order, signed Jan. 27, quickly faced legal challenge from non-citizens who already had visas. This included two detained Iraq men, Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq and Hameed Khalid Darweesh, and their case landed in a Brooklyn federal court. A federal law enforcement official reportedly told the Daily News that on Jan. 28, Miller called up Robert Capers, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and told him how he had to defend the policy.

The Eastern District declined to comment on this report when the Daily News reached out to them. We reached out to a White House spokesperson for comment.

The federal attorneys faced a setback. In court on Jan. 28, Assistant U.S. Attorney Susan Riley argued that the hearing was scheduled too soon.

“This has unfolded with such speed, we haven’t had an opportunity to address any of the important legal issues,” she said.

The judge issued a temporary stay of the order. The policy has also gotten tied up in other federal courts nationwide, so Trump has promised a new EO.

Harry Siegel, the Daily News columnist who wrote the report, wasn’t sanguine about all this.

“That’s not how it works, since the legal issues the ongoing suits raise won’t all just disappear when Trump issues a new order,” he wrote. “But it shows how hard it is to distinguish sloppiness from nastiness, clumsiness from willful disruption, in this terribly new, terribly different administration led by a President with no prior governing experience.”

His article echoes other reports that claim the Trump administration failed to inform Congress and relevant federal agencies before releasing the EO, leading to disorganization. The president has denied these reports.

“The media is trying to attack our administration because they know we are following through on pledges that we made, and they’re not happy about it, for whatever reason,” he said at a Thursday press conference. “I turn on the news and I see stories of chaos. And yet it is the exact opposite. The administration is running like a fine-tuned machine.”

(h/t LawNewz)

Update

“Stephen Miller did not speak to Robert Capers,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Lindsay Walters said Tuesday, two days after this story was published. “They have never spoken to one another.”

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