RUTHFULLY YOURS

If Donald Trump had been referring to Rep. John Lewis’s civil-rights record when he wrote on Twitter Saturday that the congressman was “all talk” and “no action,” the president-elect might need a refresher course in U.S. history. One of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest allies, Mr. Lewis was on the front lines of the successful fight to end Jim Crow.

But for anyone who bothers to check out the full tweet, it’s clear that Mr. Trump was referring to Mr. Lewis’s record as a lawmaker. “Congressman John Lewis,” wrote Mr. Trump after the lawmaker questioned the legitimacy of the election, “should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results. All talk, talk, talk—no action or results. Sad!”
Mr. Lewis, a liberal Democrat from Georgia, was first elected to Congress in 1986, and he has spent much of the past three decades reminding people what he did before he got there. “Lewis has worked to commemorate the civil rights revolution in which he played such a large part,” explains the Almanac of American Politics. “He got a federal building in Atlanta named for King and won historic trail designation for the demonstrators’ route [for the 1965 march] from Selma to Montgomery [Ala.]. . . . Since 1998, he has led members of Congress on pilgrimages to civil rights sites.
All of which should further secure John Lewis’s rightful place in U.S. history. But to Mr. Trump’s point, what do Mr. Lewis’s mostly black constituents in Atlanta have to show for his time in Washington representing them? Atlanta has one of the widest gaps in the country between high- and low-income households, according to the Brookings Institution. A 2015 report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that although Atlanta “is considered an economic powerhouse and ‘black mecca,’ its wealth and promise don’t extend to many of its residents, particularly those of color, who struggle to make ends meet, get family-supporting jobs and access quality education.” The study found that incomes for Atlanta’s white residents were more than triple those of blacks; the high school graduation rate was 57% for blacks and 84% for whites; and black unemployment in Atlanta was 22%, versus a city average of 13% and a white rate of 6%.

Atlanta also hasn’t avoided the surge in violent crime that has hit other major cities in recent years. Last summer the mayor announced the creation of a task force to reduce gun violence, and in November the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the city had been named “one of America’s top 25 murder capitals, according to the latest data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.”

Mr. Lewis’s poor record is not unique among black politicians with large black constituencies. Atlanta has had black Democratic mayors pushing liberal policies for decades, and blacks have been well-represented as city councilmen and in the top echelons of the police department and school system. Much the same is true of other major cities with large black populations—Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Washington—which are lagging economically, notwithstanding black political clout from Congress down to the local school board. This is what Republicans mean when they say black voters have been getting little in return for their steadfast loyalty to Democrats. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Obama’s decision Tuesday to commute the 35-year prison sentence of Pfc. Chelsea, née Bradley,Manning will be celebrated on the left as a vindication of a well-intentioned whistleblower whose imprisonment at Ft. Leavenworth as a transgender woman was a travesty of justice. The real travesty is the show of leniency for a progressive cause célèbre whose actions put hundreds of lives at risk.

For those who need reminding, Manning was stationed in Iraq as a low-level intelligence analyst when he gained access to troves of classified material. Starting in 2010 he leaked nearly 750,000 documents to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks. Included in the material were thousands of secret State Department cables and masses of military information on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange worked with reporters from several news organizations to publish the material, to much self-congratulation about the virtues of transparency.

U.S. diplomats and military officers took a less charitable view, with good reason. While many of the State Department cables contained little more than diplomatic party gossip, others disclosed sensitive conversations between U.S. diplomats and opposition leaders in repressive regimes. After the disclosure, Zimbabwe’s Morgan Tsvangirai was investigated by the regime of Robert Mugabe for “treasonous collusion between local Zimbabweans and the aggressive international world,” as the country’s attorney general put it.

Even more dangerous were leaks of operational secrets, including the names of Afghan informants working with U.S. coalition forces against the Taliban. A Navy SEAL who participated in the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan testified that Manning’s leaks were found on the terrorist’s computer.

Little wonder that at the time Mr. Obama criticized “the deplorable action by WikiLeaks.” Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that the document dump “puts people’s lives in danger” and was “an attack on America’s foreign policy,” its partnerships and alliances. Prosecutors initially sought a life sentence against Manning, who was eventually convicted of 17 of 22 charges, including espionage and theft.

Within 24 hours of sentencing in 2013, Manning said he wanted to begin hormone therapy and be known as Chelsea. Last year the Army agreed to finance her medical treatment for gender dysphoria. In December the ACLU and numerous LGBT groups wrote to Mr. Obama urging that he grant clemency to Manning, in part on grounds that she has been held in solitary confinement after suicide attempts.

The commutation sends a dreadful message to others in the military who might have grievances or other problems but haven’t stolen national secrets. The lesson is that if you can claim gender dysphoria or some other politically correct condition, you can betray your country and get off lightly.

On Tuesday Mr. Obama also commuted the sentence of Puerto Rican terrorist Oscar López Rivera, who was convicted of “seditious conspiracy” against the U.S. government. He belonged to the FALN, which was responsible for more than 70 bombings in the U.S. between 1974 and 1983, killing five and injuring dozens. Rivera, who has been in prison since 1981, had become the political project of “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is a pal of President Obama. No word from the White House on whether the President alerted the families of the FALN’s victims.

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama shortened Chelsea Manning’s 35-year prison sentence Tuesday, setting a May release for the former Army intelligence analyst convicted of leaking government secrets.

Mr. Obama’s decision about the transgender former soldier was announced along with more than 200 other commutations and dozens of pardons by the White House three days before he leaves office.

The president also issued a pardon in the case of James Cartwright, a retired four-star general and former vice chairman of the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was awaiting sentencing for lying to authorities investigating leaks about a classified effort against Iran’s nuclear program. Prosecutors had been seeking a two-year prison sentence for Gen. Cartwright, who was one of Mr. Obama’s most-trusted military advisers.

Republicans immediately criticized the commutation. “This is just outrageous,” said House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.). “Chelsea Manning’s treachery put American lives at risk and exposed some of our nation’s most sensitive secrets. President Obama now leaves in place a dangerous precedent that those who compromise our national security won’t be held accountable for their crimes.”
Commutations shorten the punishment meted out, typically by reducing the time in prison a convict must serve, but they don’t remove the recipient’s criminal record. A pardon wipes their slate clean.

Senior administration officials said Mr. Obama has now granted 1,385 commutations to individuals, more than the previous 12 presidents combined.

This column by a Trump antagonist, published in the paper of dreckord is valuable in exposing the intel report on Russia’s interference in U.S. elections….rsk

After months of anticipation, speculation, and hand-wringing by politicians and journalists, American intelligence agencies have finally released a declassified version of a report on the part they believe Russia played in the US presidential election. On Friday, when the report appeared, the major newspapers came out with virtually identical headlines highlighting the agencies’ finding that Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered an “influence campaign” to help Donald Trump win the presidency—a finding the agencies say they hold “with high confidence.”

A close reading of the report shows that it barely supports such a conclusion. Indeed, it barely supports any conclusion. There is not much to read: the declassified version is twenty-five pages, of which two are blank, four are decorative, one contains an explanation of terms, one a table of contents, and seven are a previously published unclassified report by the CIA’s Open Source division. There is even less to process: the report adds hardly anything to what we already knew. The strongest allegations—including about the nature of the DNC hacking—had already been spelled out in much greater detail in earlier media reports.

But the real problems come with the findings themselves. The report leads with three “key judgments”:

“We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election”;
“Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or ‘trolls’”;
“We assess Moscow will apply lessons learned from its Putin-ordered campaign aimed at the US presidential election to future influence efforts worldwide, including against US allies and their election processes.”

It is the first of these judgments that made headlines, so let us look at the evidence the document provides for this assertion. This evidence takes up just over a page and contains nine points. The first four make the argument that Putin wanted Hillary Clinton to lose. I will paraphrase for the sake of brevity and clarity:

Putin and the Russian government aimed to help Trump by making public statements discrediting Hillary Clinton;
the Kremlin’s goal is to undermine “the US-led liberal democratic order”;
Putin claimed that the Panama Papers leak and the Olympic doping scandal were “US-directed efforts to defame Russia,” and this suggests that he would use defamatory tactics against the United States;
Putin personally dislikes Hillary Clinton and blames her for inspiring popular unrest in Russia in 2011-2012.

None of this is new or particularly illuminating—at least for anyone who has been following Russian media in any language; some of it seems irrelevant. (Though the report notes that the NSA has only “moderate confidence” in point number one, unlike the CIA and FBI, which have “high confidence” in it.) The next set of points aim to buttress the assertion that Putin “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump over Secretary Clinton.” The following is an exact quote:

Beginning in June, Putin’s public comments about the US presidential race avoided directly praising President-elect Trump, probably because Kremlin officials thought that any praise from Putin personally would backfire in the United States. Nonetheless, Putin publicly indicated a preference for President-elect Trump’s stated policy to work with Russia, and pro-Kremlin figures spoke highly about what they saw as his Russia-friendly positions on Syria and Ukraine.

The change in the cyber risk environment coinciding with a heightened need for procurement of new technologies and services has created a new paradigm for a cybersecurity partnership between government and industry. The prioritization of that special partnership appears to be in the immediate plans for the new Trump Administration.
The appointment of former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani as a cybersecurity adviser signals the elevated importance of that intended government/industry partnership. One of his first tasks will be to assemble cybersecurity subject matter experts and leaders from industry to advise and spur innovation in and out of government. Mayor Giuliani has made it clear that the proposed group will work on cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions across industries such as the energy, financial, and transportation sectors.
Collaboration between government and industry stakeholders is a proven model that makes good sense. Together, government and the private sector can identify products and align flexible product paths, evaluate technology gaps, and help design scalable architectures that will lead to greater efficiency and fiscal accountability. Bridging R&D spending between the government and private sectors should also allow for a more directed and capable cybersecurity prototype pipeline to meet new technology requirements.
In addition to being collaborative, a working partnership of government and industry leaders should be focused and strategic in nature. To be effective the evolving cybersecurity partnership must also be 1) proactive and adaptive to change; 2) coordinated with The Department of Homeland Security (DHS); and 3) have a cyber risk management/consequence strategy.
Being Proactive and Adaptive to Change: There are many challenges of functioning in an exponentially changing digital world. This requires restructuring of priorities and missions for both government and industry. That is not an easy task and there is logic in joining forces.
As the capabilities and connectivity of cyber devices have grown, so have the cyber intrusions and threats from malware and hackers. The growing and sophisticated cyber threat actors include various criminal enterprises, loosely affiliated hackers, and adversarial nation states. A first mission for the new Administration’s cyber team will be to review recommendations prepared by cybersecurity experts from within and out of government and to assess gaps and vulnerabilities across the threat landscape.
In the past decade, the cybersecurity focus and activities by both government and industry have been predominantly reactive to whatever is the latest threat or breach. As a result, containing the threats was difficult because at the outset, defenders were always at least one step behind. That mindset has been changing due to a major series of intrusions and denial of service attacks (including OPM, Anthem, Yahoo, and many others) that exposed a flawed approach to defending data and operating with a passive preparedness.
Being proactive is not just procuring technologies and people it also means adopting a working industry and government framework that includes tactical measures, encryption, authentication, biometrics, analytics, and continuous diagnostics and mitigation, as applicable to specific circumstances.
The new advisory council led by Mayor Giuliani will become more proactive and adaptive in protecting assets and will also likely address policy and technology development implications around a whole host of other topics related to cyber threats. Some of these topics will include information sharing, securing the Internet of Things (IoT), protection of critical infrastructures, and expanding workforce training to mitigate the shortage of cybersecurity

Rep. Jerry Nadler took to CNN to explain why he will not be attending President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration this Friday. The Manhattan Democrat, whose spokesman confirmed to us on Saturday that he was skipping the event, said, “I cannot go because of the President-elect’s inflammatory comments racist campaign, his conflict of interests, refusal to disclose his taxes, and the last straw was his personal ad hominem attacks on an icon of civil rights movement, someone who suffered beatings and almost gave his life for this country, John Lewis.”

Nadler also agreed with Lewis’s belief that Trump isn’t a “legitimate” leader. “He was legally elected, but the Russian weighing in the election, the Russian attempt to hack the election — and frankly, the FBI’s weighing in on the election — I think makes his election illegitimate. It puts an asterisk next to his name,” Nadler explained.

Nadler did say that he and other Democrats will “work with him when we agree with him, we’ll oppose him when we don’t agree with him.”

Here’s Nadler’s formal statement about refusing to participate in the inauguration:

“The rhetoric and actions of Donald Trump have been so far beyond the pale – so disturbing and disheartening – and his continued failure to address his conflicts of interest, to adequately divest or even to fully disclose his financial dealings, or to sufficiently separate himself from the ethical misconduct that legal experts on both side of the aisle have identified have been so offensive I cannot in good conscience participate in this honored and revered democratic tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.

“We cannot normalize Donald Trump, and we certainly cannot turn our heads and ignore such a threat to the institutions and values of our democracy. His refusal to adequately address his business conflicts of interest, to show remorse for the inflammatory rhetoric in which he engaged during his campaign, his attempts to intimidate the press, and his continuing failure to demonstrate any interest in uniting Americans reveal a deep disrespect for the office of President.

“I refuse to sit idly by as he flaunts his illicit behavior without regard for the American people’s interest. I refuse to abide any effort to undermine a free and independent press, which serves a pivotal role in any democratic system and whose rights are guaranteed by our Constitution. I refuse to applaud for a man with a history of offensive and abusive behavior to women and minorities. I refuse to treat January 20, 2017, as business as usual.

“For these reasons, I have no interest in participating in the inauguration ceremony of Donald J. Trump.”

The Clinton Foundation filed papers this week warning that 22 staffers will be laid off on April 15, when the Clinton Global Initiative is formally shut down.

The CGI is a program of the Clinton Foundation, centered around an annual meeting described as “the networking event of choice for corporations, nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations and wealthy philanthropists.” Before the election, when Hillary Clinton’s victory in the presidential race appeared likely, the Clinton Foundation declared that it would wind down the initiative no matter how the election turned out.

At the time, those plans made sense: It would be unseemly to say the least if a corporate- and foreign-government-funded networking event was directly connected to the sitting president. But there was never much official explanation of why CGI would need to shut down in the case of a Clinton defeat. After all, the world didn’t run out of poor people or sick people on November 8.

But after the election, some of the foundation’s donors acted as if the causes CGI supported were no longer worthy. The Australian government said it did not intend to continue its donations to the Clinton Foundation; it had given $88 million over ten years. After dramatically increasing its yearly donation in 2014 and 2015, the government of Norway chose to reduce its donation by 87 percent after the election.

Why would foreign governments suddenly lose interest in the charitable work the Clinton Foundation purported to do? They wouldn’t, unless the Clinton Foundation and CGI had existed to give foreign governments and businessmen a way to curry favor with a future president from the beginning. The April shutdown, then, makes complete sense: Why keep operating if there’s no influence left to peddle?

Clinton fans will vehemently deny that there’s anything to this cynical explanation, but the behavior of many foundation partners suggests that selling access and goodwill was a big part of the organization’s operations. Right before the election, one of the infamous WIkiLeaks documents revealed just how blurry the line was between the foundation’s non-profit activities and Bill Clinton’s for-profit activities.

Even a prominent Trump adviser accepts the false premise that there has been no ‘ethical shadiness.’
You often hear that the Obama administration, whatever its other failings, has been “scandal-free.” Valerie Jarrett, the president’s closest adviser, has said he “prides himself on the fact that his administration hasn’t had a scandal and he hasn’t done something to embarrass himself.”

Even Trump adviser Peter Thiel seems to agree. When the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd observed during an interview that Mr. Obama’s administration was “without any ethical shadiness,” Mr. Thiel accepted the premise, saying: “But there’s a point where no corruption can be a bad thing. It can mean that things are too boring.”

In reality, Mr. Obama has presided over some of the worst scandals of any president in recent decades. Here’s a partial list:

• State Department email. In an effort to evade federal open-records laws, Mr. Obama’s first secretary of state set up a private server, which she used exclusively to conduct official business, including communications with the president and the transmission of classified material. A federal criminal investigation produced no charges, but FBI Director James Comey reported that the secretary and her colleagues “were extremely careless” in handling national secrets.

• Operation Fast and Furious. The Obama Justice Department lost track of thousands of guns it had allowed to pass into the hands of suspected smugglers, in the hope of tracing them to Mexican drug cartels. One of the guns was used in the fatal 2010 shooting of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Congress held then-Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt when he refused to turn over documents about the operation.

• IRS abuses. Mr. Obama’s Internal Revenue Service did something Richard Nixon only dreamed of doing: It successfully targeted political opponents. The Justice Department then refused to enforce Congress’s contempt citation against the IRS’s Lois Lerner, who refused to answer questions about her agency’s misconduct.

This column has previously observed that few things are as dangerous to democracy as a demagogue with a half-valid argument. The president-elect has offered at least a half-dozen such arguments, and that’s merely in the last week.

First we had Donald Trump’s press conference attack on CNN’s Jim “You Are Fake News” Acosta. Then a salvo against the pharmaceutical industry, which, he said, is “getting away with murder.” Mr. Trump also accused intelligence agencies of leaking a smear against him, asking in a tweet: “Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

This was followed by an interview with British and German newspapers, in which Mr. Trump called NATO “obsolete,” dismissed the European Union as “basically a vehicle for Germany,” and threatened to slap a 35% tariff on BMW for wanting to build a plant in Mexico.

Oh, and the feud with John Lewis. The congressman from Georgia had accused Mr. Trump of being illegitimately elected on account of Russian meddling. Mr. Trump fired back on Twitter that Mr. Lewis should spend his time fixing his “crime infested,” “falling apart” district in Atlanta.

Say this for Mr. Trump: He has no use for pieties. Mr. Lewis is routinely described in the press as a “civil rights icon.” The next president could not care less. Wall Street Journal Republicans believe that business decisions should be left to business. As of Friday those businesses will do as Mr. Trump says. NATO? Too old. The EU? Not salvageable. The fourth estate? A fraud. The folks at Langley? A new Gestapo.

All this baits Mr. Trump’s critics (this columnist not least) into fits of moral outrage, which is probably his intention: Nobody in life or literature is more tedious than the prig yelling, “Is nothing sacred anymore?” Liberals intent on spending the next four years in a state of high-decibel indignation and constant panic are paving the way to Mr. Trump’s re-election.

But the main reason the president-elect’s attacks stick is that they each have their quotient of truth.

Mr. Trump is not wrong that NATO’s European members don’t carry their weight. He isn’t wrong that the EU is in deep trouble no matter what he says. He isn’t wrong that Mr. Lewis’s attack on the legitimacy of his election was out of line, or that the congressman’s courage in the 1960s should not insulate him from criticism today. He isn’t wrong that drug companies price-gouge.

Nor is he wrong to be infuriated by BuzzFeed’s publication of an unverified opposition dossier regarding his Russia ties. He isn’t wrong, either, to suspect that outgoing CIA Director John Brennan may have leaked that the president-elect had been briefed on the contents of the dossier. In his previous incarnation as President Obama’s top counterterrorism aide, Mr. Brennan developed a reputation as a leaker and spinner of the first rank.

But the opposite of not wrong isn’t necessarily right. There’s a distinction between “unverified” and “fake.” There’s a difference between BuzzFeed’s unethical decision to publish the unredacted dossier and CNN’s appropriate efforts to report on what Mr. Trump knew about it. To complain that our European allies don’t spend enough on defense is one thing. To conclude that NATO is obsolete is a non sequitur, reminiscent of the old joke about lousy food and small portions.