It’s a Mistake for the U.S. to Leave Niger

By James H. McGee

Wednesday, May 29, 2024

 

After “difficult” negotiations, the U.S. and the government of Niger have agreed to a complete withdrawal, by mid September, of U.S. military personnel from bases in Niger. Since the military coup last July, which ousted President Mohamed Bazoum, relations between the U.S. and Niger’s military junta have steadily worsened. To that extent, at least, the recent announcement provided reassurance that our personnel would not simply be summarily ejected. 

 

Some would have it that our departure from Niger is of little moment. A case for this proposition was made in late March here at National Review by Daniel DePetris. DePetris correctly noted that the purpose of our military presence in Niger was to “monitor” terrorist activity across the Sahel region of West Africa and concedes that this is a growing problem in West Africa. He observes that “one can reasonably expect to see more terrorist activity in Niger with less U.S. eyes in the sky,” noting, again correctly, that the Islamic State and al-Qaeda now view the region as their “main base of operations.” Finally, there is the acknowledgement that Russia and China, already well-represented across Africa, will likely take advantage of the opening provided by the U.S. departure.

 

He then dismisses each of the foregoing concerns. Chinese investment, while substantial, has disappointed African governments. Closer ties with Russia might endanger relations with the West, and all Russia really has to offer are the services of “mercenary thugs” who protect “highly unpopular heads of state.” Finally, he reassures us that the Biden administration has already thought “this entire situation through,” having opened talks with the coastal states of Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Benin regarding hosting alternative locations for U.S. drone operations.

 

The very notion that the Biden administration has “thought” any foreign policy situation “through” should give us pause. So, too, with each of the foregoing arguments, which either ignore or minimize other critical considerations. DePetris dismisses the rising terrorist activity across the Sahel as largely aimed at the governments of the region and, therefore, inconsequential for the U.S. But these local governments are demonstrably incapable of dealing with this terrorist activity without our assistance. We’ve been down this path before. After all, we went into Afghanistan after 9/11 precisely because it was intolerable to leave terrorist movements to grow unmolested, to enjoy a “safe haven,” to move beyond simply being “local” threats.

 

Both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda remain irredeemably hostile to the “great Satan” and, left to build out their African sanctuaries, may once again become a threat to the U.S. Iran has also become a more significant player across Africa. Moreover, the mullahs have demonstrated repeatedly that, when it comes to discomfiting the U.S., they’re remarkably ecumenical when it comes to the Sunni versus Shiite divide and may well have an interest in working with these groups.

 

DePetris suggests that China has overplayed its economic hand in Africa, but the Chinese presence remains significant, particularly wherever critical natural resources are in play. But to focus simply on the economic dimension is to ignore the larger pattern of Chinese influence operations. The Chinese threat cannot be reduced to concerns about the Taiwan Strait. There is an important Chinese military base on the Horn of Africa in Djibouti. China is now well along in developing a similar military presence on the South Atlantic coast, in Equatorial Guinea. The Chinese have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to fill the voids we leave behind. China has significantly increased its influence in Africa over the last 20 years while, in the words of Thomas Sheehy, an African expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace, U.S. influence has “flatlined.”

 

Putin, of course, had a golden opportunity to rein in the presence of Russian mercenary thugs in Africa in the aftermath of the Prigozhin “can we call it a coup?” attempt. Instead, he doubled down, taking tighter control of these African assets but pushing their availability more widely than ever. One may wish, idealistically, that aligning Russia with African dictatorships may eventually prove costly and that time is on the side of democratic forces across the continent. But that requires playing a very long game, one measured in decades, and maybe not even then.

 

As for relocating our drone operations, one should simply look at the map. Our current base at Agadez is located in the center of Niger, which means that it is also located in the strategic center of the whole of western Africa. Drone coverage is not simply a function of range but also loiter time, which is maximized from a central location. Moving to a coastal region represents a poor tradeoff. Not incidentally, a presence in the Agadez region also offered an opportunity to influence, positively, the growing tide of illegal immigration flowing toward Europe and, increasingly, the southern border of the United States.

 

What, then, do we stand to lose? Unlike the French, tainted with colonial misdeeds and Macron’s ham-handed African diplomacy, we enjoyed a reasonable basis for good relations with the military in Niger. As some have noted, sniffily, several of the key leaders of the new junta had trained in the U.S. Perhaps, between now and September, we still find a modus vivendi. Niger’s leaders have left that door at least slightly ajar.

 

Against the myriad threats we currently face around the globe, maintaining a small base in Niger seems hardly significant. But the resources involved were small and the benefits many. Maintaining a visible presence and demonstrating staying power — these are important parts of ensuring our ability to shape events in our favor. One may dismiss the concept of “presence” as an outmoded relic, gunboat diplomacy redolent of Steve McQueen in The Sand Pebbles. But the old gunboats — or an ultramodern drone base — provided benefits all out of proportion to their size. We might ponder that going forward.

You’d Boo, Too

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, May 28, 2024

 

“The Libertarian Party should nominate Trump for president of the United States,” Trump said in an address to the Libertarian National Convention over the weekend. The exhortation was met with a resounding chorus of boos and jeers. “What?” the former president asked, reeling from the hostile reception. “Only if you want to win,” he steadied himself. “Maybe you don’t want to win.”

 

When it comes to the Libertarian Party, that’s not an assumption that can be summarily ruled out. But nor is it especially remarkable to see a group of committed ideologues beholden to the promotion of laissez-faire economics at home and nonintervention abroad look askance at the former Republican president, particularly given his explicit disdain for the virtues of small government.

 

Nor should the reaction to Trump surprise anyone given the way in which he solicited libertarians’ support. Trump insisted that he was himself a “libertarian without even trying to be one.” Why? Because “in the last year, I’ve been indicted by the government on 91 different things, so, if I wasn’t a libertarian before, I sure as hell am one now.”

 

For libertarians who come to their free-market maximalism and civil libertarianism by way of an intellectual exercise, Trump’s shallow profession of fealty to the libertarian movement comes off as remarkably flip. His conversion narrative begins and ends with a self-pitying reflection on his own circumstances. It culminates in the stereotype that libertarians are thoughtlessly soft on crime. By the end of his solicitation, Trump appears to lose even the few convention attendees who initially cheered his appearance.

 

Trump seemed embittered by his reception. “Keep getting your 3 percent every four years,” he closed dismissively. The animosity is clearly mutual.

 

In recent weeks, Trump and his campaign have received deserved plaudits for making the most of the former president’s legal obligations by cleverly holding impromptu campaign events in New York City’s diverse boroughs. Even if no one expects Trump to carry the Bronx in November, making a show of his appeal to voters outside the Republican base is still valuable. Not only can that approach yield dividends by peeling off Democratic voters on the margins, it also hijacks the news cycle. The Biden campaign seems incapable of doing anything interesting, and Trump has filled the void left by the president’s comatose reelection effort.

 

But there are risks in that strategy as well as rewards. As the former president’s appearance before the Libertarian Convention demonstrates, there’s little value in appealing to voters outside the base if the candidate cannot conceal his contempt for them.

 

The Main Character

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, May 28, 2024

 

This must be the first presidential campaign in which both candidates have the same strategy.

 

For one it’s a matter of deliberation and for the other it’s a symptom of narcissism, but they end up in the same place: Each wants the race to be a referendum on Donald Trump.

 

Trump’s advisers surely would prefer to make it a referendum on Joe Biden. The president has a job approval of 40.3 percent, an age problem that gets worse every day, and an albatross in the form of persistent inflation that he can’t shed. All Republicans need to do to win is clam up, lie low, and let political gravity do what political gravity does.

 

But that would require personal discipline from their nominee. And, well, you know.

 

In the last week alone, Trump has attacked the Hispanic judge in his criminal trial by calling attention to “where he comes from”; appeared onstage at a rally with two men charged with conspiracy to commit murder; seemed to discourage Russia from freeing Evan Gershkovich, the imprisoned Wall Street Journal reporter, unless and until he’s reelected; and celebrated Memorial Day by blaming his troubles on “the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country.”

 

Meanwhile, his effort to convince Americans that the election will be illegitimate if he loses is way, way ahead of the pace he set in the 2016 and 2020 cycles. To reassure wary swing voters, he should be doing everything he can to demonstrate that he’s no longer the maniac they remember from his final weeks in office. Instead, he’s done the opposite.

 

All of this is both exactly what the Biden campaign expected and hoped would happen when Trump became the Republican nominee. The president can’t win an election in which the core question is “Are you happy with Joe Biden’s first term?” But he might be able to win an election in which the core question is “Do you really want to see what a coup-plotting lunatic does for an encore?”

 

That explains why Biden agreed to a surprisingly early debate with Trump next month. It also explains the spectacle outside the courthouse in lower Manhattan on Tuesday morning in which Robert De Niro and a few of the hero cops from January 6 showed up to address the swarm of media on Team Biden’s behalf. Democrats are desperate for ways to call voters’ attention to Trump’s deviancy—and Trump himself, bless his heart, is doing everything he can to accommodate them.

 

And … Trump’s still winning anyway. In fact, he hasn’t trailed in the RealClearPolitics national polling average for so much as a day since early September of last year.

 

Liberals are coping with this by vacillating between panicking that Biden’s weaknesses are insurmountable and sweaty self-persuasion that the public will eventually reawaken to Trump’s insanity. “Voters do not realize, or have not fully grappled with the reality, that Trump will be on the ballot in November,” New York Times reporter Jason Zengerle wrote on Tuesday, summarizing the White House’s view. “Once they do, the Biden team appears convinced, they’ll remember all the reasons they sent Trump packing four years ago.”

 

I’m less convinced than they are that this election will ever be “about” Trump enough for voters to rescue Biden. As much as both candidates want him to be the main character in the story of 2024, that story will be a hard one for Democrats to tell.

 

***

 

One answer to the question of why Trump’s unfitness doesn’t matter to voters is that it does matter. Just not enough.

 

In the history of Gallup polling, no president has had a worse approval rating at this stage of his first term than Biden has. The second-worst belonged to George H.W. Bush, who still managed to crack 40 percent during the 1992 recession en route to a resounding defeat that fall. Biden averaged just 38.7 percent in the last quarter by comparison, which should make him unelectable.

 

But he isn’t. Because his opponent is grossly unfit for office, the president trails in national polling by only a point or so and is running nearly 6 full points ahead of his job approval. In the three Rust Belt battleground states that can guarantee his reelection, he’s behind by only 2.3 points or less. Public anxiety about giving Trump a second chance is single-handedly keeping Democrats in the game. A more generic Republican nominee would probably be waltzing to victory.

 

A guilty verdict this week in Trump’s criminal trial might help Biden fans sleep easier at night, as might next month’s debate if the president performs well (unlikely) or Trump behaves obnoxiously (inevitable). Biden and his party can find cause for hope in that.

 

But it feels strange and ungood that we’re five months out from a Trump restoration and still debating when (and whether) a critical mass of Americans will feel alarmed enough about it to hand the incumbent a lead in the polls.

 

One uncomfortable possible answer: Never. Biden might never be able to reach the voters he needs to make up the difference between him and Trump.

 

If you’d told someone 20 years ago that the internet would make it harder for politicians to reach persuadable voters, they’d have given you the same confused head tilt that a dog does when you hide its toy. Digital communication is all but costless, and new platforms arise every day, so modern candidates have many more “lanes” they can travel to deliver information to the average undecided voter. That should make it easier.

 

It doesn’t. The problem, as we’re frequently reminded in this newsletter, is that having more “lanes” means news consumers can be more selective about the information they allow through while still making a pretense of being informed. That’s how we ended up last week with populists hyperventilating about an FBI assassination plot against Trump. They can block off every lane to the left of Fox and still not want for, ahem, “news.”

 

An undecided voter won’t have the same information filter as a MAGA fanatic, of course, but they will have filters. Some will end up blocking off “lanes” having to do with the election out of sheer disgust with their choices this year. And insofar as either candidate does manage to puncture their bubble, a candidate like Trump with an enthusiastic fan base might have more success than an enervated alternative like the Biden operation will.

 

***

 

Another barrier for the White House in moving undecided voters is the nature of Trump’s candidacy. He’s not just a party nominee, he’s a former president. Voters observed him closely for four years and arrived at a judgment about him before the last election. Nothing that he’s said or done since then has given them a reason to change their opinion about him: For Trump boosters and Trump haters alike, the craziness is baked in. Even his boorish Memorial Day greeting is par for the course by now.

 

He had his reckoning with voters four years ago. Biden hasn’t had that same reckoning yet, which is why he’s probably destined to be the main character in this election despite his and Trump’s best efforts to make it about the Republican. Skim Gallup’s data on public opinion about the two candidates’ respective presidential qualities and you’ll find that views of Trump have barely budged since 2020. All of the movement in the numbers comes from declining esteem for Biden’s capabilities. 

 

Maybe it just isn’t possible for an incumbent to make his reelection bid a referendum on his opponent rather than on himself, especially when that opponent is someone about whom every American voter formed an unshakeable opinion long ago.

 

That would explain why the media isn’t covering Trump’s daily bursts of civic depravity as page-one news the way some of his critics would like. It’s not just a matter of the country being broadly and shamefully desensitized to it by now (although it is partly that). It’s a matter of it arguably not qualifying as “news” insofar as it no longer moves opinion at all. How many voters out there are willing to let Trump slide on a coup plot but draw the line at him tweeting about “human scum” on Memorial Day?

 

It might even be the case that Trump seems less radical to swing voters than he did four years ago despite the considerable news coverage of his illiberal designs for a second term. Political consultant Sarah Longwell speculated on a Bulwark podcast last week that Trump might be benefiting from a contrast with fringy Republican candidates down-ballot like Mark Robinson and Royce White insofar as his moderate positions on certain cultural issues make him seem “reasonable” by comparison. The MAGA-dominated GOP is now so wacky in some of its attitudes relative to its nominee, in other words, that that wackiness might be inadvertently insulating Trump from Democratic attacks that he’s some special threat to the constitutional order.

 

If that’s true, Biden’s going to have an even harder time convincing voters that he’s clearly the lesser of two evils in this election.

 

But even if he solved that problem and the others I’ve mentioned, there’s a structural problem lurking. Namely, the voters who look poised to decide the election might not be reachable by anyone.

 

***

 

A few days ago, Nate Cohn flagged an important finding in the New York Times’ polling on the election. Among Americans who voted in 2020, Biden still leads Trump by 2 points. That’s down a bit from his 5-point margin of victory four years ago, but only a little.

 

The sea change has come among those who didn’t vote in 2020 but might vote in 2024. Trump leads that cohort by no less than … 14 points. They’re the difference between victory and defeat.

 

Those “disengaged voters” aren’t white rural conservatives whom you might expect to prefer Republicans, either. Per Cohn, “these disengaged low-turnout voters are often from predominantly Democratic constituencies” like young adults and nonwhites. And winning them back will be more complicated for the White House than babbling on about traditional liberal causes like “canceling” student loans or raising the minimum wage:

 

Less engaged Democratic-leaning voters have distinct political views, and they get their political information from different sources. Even if the Biden campaign can reach these voters, it is not a given that they will return to the Democratic fold.

 

In the battleground states, Democratic-leaning irregular voters are far less likely to identify as liberal. They’re much less likely to say abortion and democracy are the most important issues, and instead they’re far likelier to cite the economy. They overwhelmingly say the economy is “poor” or “only fair,” even if they’re still loyal to Mr. Biden, while a majority of high-turnout Democratic-leaning voters say the economy is “good” or “excellent.”

 

By definition, disengaged voters are harder to reach than engaged voters because they don’t pay as much attention to politics. And to the extent that they are paying attention, Cohn points out that these voters tend to get more of their “news” from social media than most Democratic-leaning voters do. Here again, Team Biden will need to somehow puncture the information bubble that disengaged voters have created for themselves and will need to do so more effectively than the Trump campaign will.

 

You can understand why the campaign enlisted a celebrity like De Niro for its messaging purposes on Tuesday, then, and why it chose to have him speak outside the courthouse where Trump is being tried. It’s desperate for ways to reach disengaged voters and celebrities are more likely to do that than politicians are. Ditto for the coming verdict: If Trump is found guilty, that headline will make its way to people who normally avoid political news.

 

Let’s assume that the campaign’s message successfully reaches them, though. How do they get those voters to care?

 

The most striking detail from Cohn’s analysis is that disengaged voters prioritize the economy more than most Democrats do, and they’re relentlessly gloomy about it—which makes sense. Younger and nonwhite voters are less likely to be wealthy, so they’re apt to have felt the bite from inflation more acutely than higher-earning liberals have. You can picture them staring at this chart while the president lectures them about democracy and abortion and his words slowly morph into the gibberish spoken by Charlie Brown’s teacher.

 

Perhaps that’s why Biden is inescapably the main character in this election. When inflation is at a 40-year high, too many Americans don’t have the luxury of making the campaign “about” anything else. “If the frame of this race is, ‘What was better, the 3.5 years under Biden or four years under Trump,’ we lose that every day of the week and twice on Sunday,” one Democratic strategist told Politico. 

 

Which raises a new dilemma for the president and his party. If they do figure out a way to reach disengaged Democratic voters, might they be better off letting sleeping dogs lie?

 

Imagine if they invest $200 million into a robust turnout effort designed to get low-propensity young and nonwhite voters to the polls on Election Day. Maybe those voters will be swayed by Biden’s outreach and vote for him—or maybe they’ll vote for Trump, as many are currently inclined to do, aborting their plans to skip the election this year after Democrats made it easy for them to register and get to the polls.

 

If that happened  a left-wing get-out-the-vote effort will have inadvertently delivered a second term to a man whom Democrats impeached. Twice.

 

That Catch-22 will haunt Biden for the rest of the campaign, I think. Every time his team figures out a way to raise awareness about the election among disengaged voters, they’ll be left to wonder if they’re doing themselves more harm than good. If the election is “about” inflation and there’s no way plausibly to make it about anything else, Democrats should want low turnout in November. The less interest in voting among the public, the better off they are.

 

***

 

The bottom line is that Trump could end up winning reelection with one of the strangest coalitions in American political history. His movement is driven by rabid right-wing cultists who are prepared to tolerate all manner of dubious power grabs in the name of crushing the left. Yet the bloc that’s poised to put him over the top is a group of traditionally Democratic working-class voters who care mainly about getting prices under control.

 

Fanatic ideologues and kitchen-table pragmatists: He’s the candidate of disaffection in all its forms, and he’ll take full advantage. A dark part of me thinks it would be funny if young, left-leaning voters crossed over to support him in the belief that he’ll solve inflation and ended up getting a lot more than they bargained for.

 

As for pundits’ hand-wringing that Team Biden should be doing more to make Trump the main character in the race, it feels to me like cope.

 

It’s comforting to believe that, on some level, Americans still don’t know who Trump truly is rather than that they’re prepared to choose him knowingly and willingly. There are a lot of ignoramuses out there, admittedly, but we’re less than four years removed from a coup attempt he orchestrated that played out in full public view. To blame Trump’s strong polling on a failure of “messaging” by Democrats is to ask why, at this point, voters in a supposedly respectable country need the arguments against him “messaged” in the first place.

 

The fact that Biden is unpopular is no answer. If the president had opted against running for election and Democrats had nominated Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer instead, say, what do we think the polls would look like right now? Whitmer by 3 maybe? “This isn’t, ‘Oh my God, Mitt Romney might become president.’ It’s ‘Oh my God, the democracy might end,’” one Democratic operative said to Politico about panic on the left over Biden’s weakness. But, realistically, there’s no nominee the party might have chosen who would have enjoyed an easy victory over Trump.

 

Roughly half the country simply has no real problem with anything Trump has done and will support him over any Democrat, no matter how young and centrist that person might be. The only good thing about Trump winning this fall will be that it forces Americans who have lived in denial until now to confront what their country has become.

Negotiating with Terrorists: Campus Edition

By Kevin A. Hassett

Wednesday, May 29, 2024

 

The campus protests of the past semester have for the most part died down — until the fall at least. The pause gives us the opportunity to reflect a little more analytically and a little less emotionally on the position of the protesters. One can’t help but begin with the simplest question. What were they hoping to accomplish?

 

Columbia University, to pick a major target, could not possibly influence Israeli policy toward Gaza. The students, then, must have had some other goal. One, which they clearly accomplished, was to make the campus horribly inhospitable to Jews. While that might have given the most antisemitic among them some joy, the truth is that students across a large number of schools continued long negotiations and presented university officials with a set of demands, which, if met, would have presumably induced the students to suspend the protests. So, antisemitism for its own sake was likely not the only animating factor. Chief among the demands nationwide was that universities “divest” their endowments from Israel and perhaps from oil companies as well. The students appeared to believe that this would benefit the people of Gaza.

 

From news coverage at the time, it seemed clear that if universities had agreed to divest, things may well have settled down. But what else would that have accomplished?

 

First, consider that global capital markets for the most part are efficient, and equity prices are a risk-adjusted expectation of their future free cash flows. If every university in the U.S. dumped Israeli equities all at once, it would in all likelihood have no effect on the price of Israeli equities or on their future performance — in other words, it would do no harm to Israel — as other buyers would swoop in. Assuming the endowments were also invested in some other equities that were priced in an efficient market, universities’ portfolios would be expected to have the same risk-adjusted return going forward. So, the students demanded something that would have had no effect on the situation in Gaza or on their universities, and the universities refused.

 

On the other hand, perhaps the students believed in the very unlikely possibility that they could convince a large number of global investors to boycott Israeli equities. In that case, the market price of the equities would drop right away below their expected future profits, and they would therefore be expected to outperform relative to their price. So, an opportunistic Warren Buffett–like investor could swoop in and buy the undervalued stock and make outsized returns. But notice, since only “bad people” who support Israel hold or would be interested in buying Israeli stocks (or oil stocks), the effect of the change would be to take money that should have gone to “good people” and hand it over to “bad people.” From the students’ perspective, it would achieve the exact opposite of their goal.

 

The students’ final objective, perhaps, beyond proclaiming their own (supposed) virtue and establishing leadership positions for themselves on the campus left, was to “send a message” to Israeli firms that their government’s actions should be opposed. In this case, divestment would be exactly the wrong thing to do. Consider a careful and clever study by economist Matthew Kahn and his co-authors, who found striking evidence that firms whose equities were purchased by green activist funds reduced their pollution emissions relative to those not targeted. The logical conclusion, then, is that if the activist students wanted to affect the behavior of Israeli firms, they should have advocated that university endowments load up on Israeli equities.

 

In other words, the major demand of these fools, fanatics, and those who exploit them makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Many employers have announced that they will carefully examine job applicants and disqualify those who participated in the protests. Even abstracting from antisemitism, a college student who thinks poorly enough to make divestment his No. 1 issue has no place in a position with any material decision-making responsibility.

 

If I were a university president, I might have been tempted to divest because the cost of doing so would be equal to the effect: that is, zero. But it would set a bad precedent. One really shouldn’t negotiate with terrorists, or their dupes.

Three Giant Lies

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, May 23, 2024

 

On the menu today: Not exactly a slow news day! Former secretary of state John Kerry and the State Department blocked the U.S. Justice Department from arresting Iranians on the terrorist watch list in order to preserve the Iran deal; a top aide to Dr. Anthony Fauci used his personal email to conduct government business with Fauci and avoid FOIA requests, and warned “Tony” “really is concerned” about the NIH grant to EcoHealth Alliance; and the House Ways and Means Committee released evidence indicating that Hunter Biden lied under oath at least three times.

 

It adds up to three giant lies that will get check-the-box journalism from most of the mainstream media, while the New York Times is offering “flood the zone” coverage — three correspondents! — of Samuel Alito flying an “Appeal to Heaven” flag above his beach house. As our Dan McLaughlin observes, “The Pine Tree Flag, which features a pine tree against a white backdrop over the phrase ‘An Appeal to Heaven,’ is associated with that notorious insurrectionist . . . George Washington. To the Times, this is a ‘provocative symbol.’ Maybe to diehard British royalists.” Since October 7, the Palestinian flag has been so ubiquitous on the streets of America’s cities you would think it was the new logo for Starbucks, but this is the flag that the Times deems scandalous.

 

In the Times’ defense, George Washington was the last man to successfully overthrow the government in America.

 

On to the news. . . .

 

Under-Covered Scandal One: John Kerry Helped Iranians Escape the FBI

 

A bombshell accusation, with supporting documentary evidence, from Republican senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin:

 

The records provided to our offices show that the Obama/Biden administration’s State Department, under the leadership of John Kerry, actively and persistently interfered with FBI operations pertaining to lawful arrests of known terrorists, members of Iranian proliferation networks, and other criminals providing material support for Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

 

The FBI had a bunch of dangerous Iranians square in its sights, but the U.S. State Department insisted those figures were untouchable:

 

For example, unclassified FBI email records from August 25, 2017, detailed at least eight instances connected to the Iran deal where the “FBI/DOJ/USG could have moved forward with the cases but the State Department chose to block them.” According to the records, in six of these instances, the FBI lost the opportunity to arrest the main subject. The email says that one of the lost main subjects was noted to be “on the Terrorism Watch List” and another “returned to Iran.” The email further says that in another instance the State Department “blocked [FBI’s] plan to arrest while the subject was mid-flight and the subject was forced to leave the US immediately upon arrival.” The email also provides that at least two targets were arrested only after “State lifted their block . . . since the new [Trump] Administration took office. . . .”

 

According to FBI records, nothing changed the next year. An unclassified FBI email from April 28, 2016, stated that, “State has been blocking FBI actions where State has had a role for approval or concurrence — visas, lure ops primarily. We have prepared a package of several cases blocked by State and have been working it up the FBI/DOJ/State chain over the past 6 months.” The email also noted, “DOJ was surprised by this a bit because extraditions are ministerial functions and not something State would/should block.” Additional unclassified FBI emails indicate that the State Department’s alleged interference into ongoing FBI investigations became such an issue, that then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch had to discuss the matter with Secretary Kerry. An unclassified email from April 29, 2016, described a meeting between the two as: “[t]he Thursday meeting between Secretary Kerry and the AG didn’t go well for us . . . the read-out is that now is not a ‘good time’ to be requesting approvals for extraditions or lures on Iran CP cases.” Another email from May 3, 2016, describes the tension between the AG and Secretary Kerry as “when the PC [Principals Committee] ended, Kerry packed up his stuff and rushed out without engaging with the AG at all. The issues remain unresolved.”

 

You can find images of the emails in a letter from the senators to Secretary of State Blinken here, and similar letters to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI director Christopher Wray.

 

This kind of shortsighted, reckless prioritizing of a warm relationship with a hostile regime over stopping terrorists is exactly the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from John Kerry over the decades.

 

This is the man who shared an intimate dinner with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and shared laughs and handshakes with Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. This is the man who insisted the world would “feel better” about the Russian invasion of Ukraine if Moscow would just “make a greater effort to reduce emissions now.” This is the man who refused to call Xi Jinping a dictator, contradicting the president who appointed him. When asked about Beijing’s use of forced labor and other human-rights issues in Xinjiang, Kerry shrugged, “That’s not my lane.” And Kerry reportedly leaked classified information to Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

 

Under-Covered Scandal Two: Fauci and His Team Broke FOIA Laws

 

Meanwhile, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released new evidence indicating that one of the top advisers to Dr. Anthony Fauci conducted official government business from his private email account and then solicited help from the National Institutes of Health’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office to evade record requests. And most of his desire for secrecy revolved around his interactions with Fauci:

 

“[I] learned from our foia [sic] lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d [sic] but before the search starts,” Morens wrote in a Feb. 24, 2021, email. “Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail [sic].”

 

“’I ask you both that NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail [sic],’ he emphasized again in a Nov. 18, 2021, email to EcoHealth Alliance president Dr. Peter Daszak.” The EcoHealth Alliance funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s research on coronaviruses in bats in partnership with the Chinese government. Daszak was the only American citizen whom the Chinese would allow to visit Wuhan as part of the WHO investigation team. Daszak is also the guy who did an interview with a Chinese state-run newspaper in early 2021, echoing the supremely implausible claim of the Chinese government that SARS-CoV-2 originated in another country and was somehow imported into Wuhan.

 

On May 28, 2021, NIH’s Office of the General Counsel instructed the agency’s FOIA office to “not release anything having to do with EcoHealth Alliance/WIV,” referring to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

 

Why? There is a very limited set of reasons why the government can exempt documents from FOIA requests. At the top of the list is “information that is classified to protect national security.”

 

Was someone within NIH arguing that “anything having to do with EcoHealth Alliance/Wuhan Institute of Virology/” was a matter of national security?

 

Morens also wrote that he communicated with Fauci over private emails to avoid FOIA scrutiny:

 

“[T]here is no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail [sic], or hand it to him at work or at his house,” Morens wrote in an April 21, 2021 email. “He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

 

On June 16, 2020, Morens wrote to Daszak and others, “We are all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did we wouldn’t put them in emails and if we found them we’d delete them.”

 

If everything going on was on the up-and-up, legal, and wise, why were these guys worried about “smoking guns”?

 

Here’s something revealing: Morens wrote in an April 22, 2021, email, “If i [sic] had to bet, i [sic] would guess that beneath Tony’s macho I-am-not-worried reaction he really is concerned,”

 

The “Tony” in question is Fauci.

At one point, Morens told the committee, “I don’t consider telling them ‘don’t send me things because they could get FOIAed’ as intentionally avoiding FOIA.”

 

If the NIH, in partnership with EcoHealth Alliance, had been funding gain-of-function research on coronaviruses found in bats in a Chinese government-run lab that had “no equipment and technology standards, no design and construction teams, and no experience operating or maintaining [a lab of this caliber]” and then in November 2019, the lab experienced “some sort of biosafety emergency,” wouldn’t there be an extraordinary desire to hide those past funding decisions?

 

Under-Covered Scandal Three: Hunter Biden Lied to Congress While under Oath

 

Yesterday, the House Ways and Means Committee released more than 100 pages of newly obtained evidence indicating that Hunter Biden lied during his sworn testimony before Congress on February 28. Go figure, the president’s son is exactly the kind of person who would think he could BS Congress while under oath, but fail to remember that everything he said could be checked against phone records, text messages, legal documents, and emails.

 

The committee’s release points to at least three lies that Hunter Biden told under oath:

 

Hunter Biden’s Sworn Testimony: “The Zhao that this is sent to is not the Zhao that was connected to CEFC” and he “had no understanding or even remotely knew what the hell I was even G**d*** talking about.”

 

The Truth: According to phone records of Hunter Biden’s WhatsApp messages released by the Ways and Means Committee today, the President’s son communicated with only one “Zhao” — Raymond Zhao — in that exchange. Not only did the same Zhao respond, but his message indicates he knew exactly what Hunter Biden was talking about, and that Hunter Biden continued to communicate with the same “Zhao” phone number for an additional three months regarding matters related to CEFC.

 

Hunter Biden’s Sworn Testimony: Neither Rosemont Seneca Bohai, nor its associated bank accounts, were “under my control nor affiliated with me” and Hunter, “didn’t even know that there was such a thing” in reference to a corporate secretary of the entity.

 

The Truth: Evidence obtained by the Committee and released today from IRS investigator Joseph Ziegler shows otherwise. Not only is there documentation that Hunter Biden was the beneficial owner of a bank account in the name of Rosemont Seneca Bohai,  but the Committee has obtained a signed document where Hunter Biden affirms, “I, Robert Hunter Biden, hereby certify that I am the duly elected, qualified and acting Secretary of Rosemont Seneca Bohai, LLC” in order to enter into a contract on behalf of the entity with Porsche Financial Services.

 

Hunter Bidens’ Sworn Testimony: Hunter Biden stated he was unwilling to provide “any work as it related to visas that they needed.” In fact, he stated unequivocally that he’d “never pick up the phone and call anybody for a visa.”

 

The Truth: The Committee has obtained and made public today an email communication between Devon Archer, Hunter Biden, and Ukrainian associates in which, in response to concerns about the revocation of Nikolay Zlochevsky’s, the CEO of Burisma, U.S. visa and the resulting limitations on his foreign travel, Archer stated, “Hunter is checking with Miguel Aleman to see if he can provide cover to Kola on the visa.” “Kola” being Nikolay Zlochevsky. Archer also tells Vadim Pozharskyi to “please send Hunter an email with all Kola’s passport and visa documents and evidence and copy me. We’ll take it from there.” These documents show that Hunter Biden did in fact do work on visa issues. [All emphasis in original.]

 

Now, I know you’re going to be less than flabbergasted to know that Hunter Biden, a walking scandal magnet, is a shameless liar. The question is whether there will be any legal consequence for his lying under oath to Congress.

 

Hey, what is former Trump trade-policy adviser Peter Navarro doing these days? Oh, that’s right, he’s serving a four-month sentence in the Miami Federal Detention Center after being convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating January 6.

 

Now, if a 74-year-old White House staffer can get sent to federal prison for refusing to cooperate with a subpoena, why would the son of a president get a pass for lying under oath?

 

In 24 hours, we learned that the former secretary of state protected Iranian terrorists from the FBI; Fauci and his top aides were trying to illegally hide their communications from FOIA requests; and the president’s son lied under oath at least three times.

 

And Democrats wonder why so many people are willing to give Trump a pass for allegedly sending hush money to a porn star?

Why the Republican Party Needs a Platform

By Tevi Troy

Tuesday, May 28, 2024

 

For more than a century, going back to the origins of the GOP, the Republican Party has issued a platform telling voters what it planned to do in the years ahead. In 2020, this tradition was broken, and it is not clear that it will restart in 2024. The potential demise of a party platform should worry conservatives.

 

There were a number of reasons for what happened in 2020. First was the Covid outbreak, which made it hard to hold the meetings to deliberate over the platform. At the time, the party claimed that it “did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform without the breadth of perspectives within the ever-growing Republican movement.” But something else was going on as well. The Trump team wanted to rethink the platform, and the coronavirus challenge gave it an excuse for doing so.

 

The Trump operation had looked at skipping a platform in 2016. According to Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh, “a more focused platform was considered” in that cycle. That did not happen, and the Republican National Committee’s platform committee instead created a traditional 58-page platform in 2016, with a number of important provisions, including strong pro-Israel language pushed by David Friedman that foreshadowed a pro-Israel administration and Friedman as ambassador to Israel.

 

In 2020, the Trump team was more confident in its standing with the party and more determined in its quest not to have a traditional platform. Trump aide and son-in-law Jared Kushner had been pushing a pocket-card-size platform as early as December of 2019, even before Covid became a serious concern. This suggests that the Covid explanation for the short platform may have merely been an excuse for what they were trying to do anyway.

 

This effort to create a new kind of platform succeeded in 2020, as the Trump campaign, not the RNC, put out a 600-word compilation of policy preferences. This statement did not so much resemble a platform as a list filled with aspirations. One item, “Made in America Tax Credits,” came with no explanation whatsoever, leaving readers to wonder what exactly these were, and whether the party was for or against them.

 

The reason to avoid a platform is simple. It prevents the candidate from having to be tied down to any specific policy. It gives the party and its nominee maximum flexibility in governing. Changes in direction are relatively cost-free, as they will not entail the violation of any pledged positions.

 

Despite this understandable desire for flexibility, a vague platform is also a liability. A platform tells voters what a party aspires to do. A compelling platform can attract new voters and excite base voters. It does not lock in the party to a course of action, but it does force the party to explain itself if it acts in ways contrary to what it laid out in the platform.

 

From a conservative perspective, the platforms are generally pretty solidly designed to appeal to the right. Russ Vought, a former Office of Management and Budget director who has worked for conservatives like then-congressman Mike Pence and former senator Phil Gramm, was recently named the policy director of the platform committee, which is the primary drafter of a platform. His credentials suggest that this platform would be fairly conservative as well. If that is indeed the case, the more robust the platform the better, as detailed platforms help keep candidates tethered to a conservative agenda.

 

For these reasons, the 2024 party platform should be an articulation of the Republican Party’s vision, telling potential voters what the party stands for and why. It should be able to get an undecided voter to read it and say, “That party represents my values and my concerns,” as it did to a politically untutored 21-year-old named Mary Copeland in 1976. Copeland was from a Democratic family and expected to vote the same way, but upon reading a summary of the Republican platform that year, she became a Republican, and, years later, governor of Oklahoma Mary Fallin.

 

Typically, the small platform team collects material from a vast array of sources: talking points, speeches, policy papers, and op-eds. A skilled platform-writing team can get to the essence of what the party stands for, avoid unnecessary fights and controversies, and put together something coherent that can both unite the various party factions and attract new voters to the fold.

 

It’s a challenging task, and it takes some time, which is why the party needs to start the platform-creating process sooner rather than later. But in addition to time, it takes will. The party leaders have to want to make it happen. The will was lacking in 2020, and the party lost both the election and the chance to lay down its policy markers for the next four years.

 

As for this year, the jury is still out. While the platform staff has been selected, the party has yet to select platform chairs, which is the key step that would be required around now to produce a standard platform by the time of the conventions. This delay could suggest the creation of what’s known by platform veterans as an imperial platform, like the one Richard Nixon produced in 1972. In that case, the platform process, including the text of the draft, was largely dictated by the campaign. Conservatives know what happened there. Although Nixon won a large victory, his domestic-policy agenda was far from conservative.

 

If the intent for 2024 is to replicate the shortened 2020 platform, the delayed approach makes sense, as that kind of platform can be written fairly quickly. A longer, more detailed platform that takes into account the views of the conservative grassroots takes longer, and time is running out.

 

What all this means is that things remain in a state of uncertainty. When asked in a recent interview if the party would return to having a platform in 2024, RNC co-chair Lara Trump responded with an uninspiring, “Yeah, I think so.” The Republican Party will need more definitive leadership if it is to return to the grand and necessary tradition of laying out the party’s aspirations in a 2024 platform.

Tear It Down, and They Will Come

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, May 28, 2024

 

The phrase “a borderless world” has long been a metaphorical way to speak of greater global interconnectedness, but the Biden administration must have taken it literally.

 

The southern border is emphatically not just for Spanish-speaking migrants anymore.

 

It was apparently too narrow-minded and exclusionary only to allow illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America to walk into the country. This shameful, implicit bias in favor of our own hemisphere has now been rectified.

 

The United States no longer simply has a border to its south with Mexico and, by extension, Central America; it has a border with the world, and is doing just as poor a job enforcing it.

 

Why have a multicultural border crisis when it can be a truly global one?

 

In a notable clip, Bill Melugin of Fox News asked a line of illegal immigrants near San Diego where they were from and came across one lonely migrant from Ecuador, while the rest were from places like Turkey and India, including one from Iran.

 

Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) reports, “More Chinese nationals are now crossing the Southwest border near San Diego than Mexican nationals.”

 

In fiscal 2024, according to Andrew Arthur of CIS, about 500,000 of the roughly 1.2 million aliens apprehended at the border have been from places besides Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, or Nicaragua.

 

More than 160 countries have been represented in apprehensions at the southern border, raising the question, What’s wrong (or right) with the 30 or so countries that haven’t managed to send anyone?

 

It’s a basic matter of supply and demand. There’s endless demand to come into the United States, and — so long as people are making it in — there’s endless supply, too.

 

It was natural that Mexicans and Central Americans would be the first to take advantage of Biden’s laxness at the border, since they already had well-developed migration networks. As word has gotten out everywhere else that it’s easy to get in, other nationalities are showing up, too, and with time will build their own networks.

 

As we know, the perverseness of the current arrangement is that migrants typically don’t try to evade Border Patrol agents but seek them out so they can surrender and get processed into the country.

 

The Associated Press recently reported from the current migration hot spot of San Diego that groups of migrants gathered, “waiting hours for Border Patrol agents while volunteers deliver hot coffee, instant ramen and bandages for busted knees and swollen ankles.”

 

In one instance, polite Central American illegal immigrants were shouldered aside by pushy Chinese illegal immigrants. “Near Jacumba Hot Springs,” the AP related, “a town of less than 1,000 people, about a dozen people from Latin American countries arrived at a fork in a dirt road around 10 p.m. About 100 Chinese migrants came just before sunrise, many neatly dressed and playfully taking pictures on their phones. Some of the Latin Americans grumbled quietly when the Chinese lined up ahead of them as Border Patrol vehicles arrived.”

 

There are real complications when it comes to holding minors and so-called family units. Single men, though, should be easily transferable over to ICE for detention. Yet, we are releasing into the country single men from far-flung countries who don’t even have a pretense of being asylum-seekers.

 

Another factor here is that Mexico has been cracking down on migrants from Central America, helping Joe Biden by reducing the number of encounters at the border. But Mexico doesn’t appear as interested in keeping migrants from elsewhere from crossing the border. It’s hard for them to send someone back to, say, China, whereas blocked migrants from Central America — if they don’t simply come across the border in November or December after the U.S. presidential election — might eventually end up going home on their own.

 

Meanwhile, if Panamanian president-elect José Raúl Mulino follows through on his promise to close the Darién Gap, it would close off a major access point for migrants from all around the world.

 

As it is, Biden has created the most powerful magnet for migration imaginable by putting a giant “entry” sign on the southern border, and even people outside the continent have gotten the message and reacted accordingly.