Dave;
While lis­ten­ing to AFA #34 (part 6c I believe) you men­tion infor­ma­tion about the killing of Judge Wood and the Cha­gra broth­ers. Specif­i­cal­ly, that Jim­my Cha­gra had ties to the Nugen-Hand Bank. The show you ref­ered to is RFA 26 and part of RFA 32, which I can not find in the archives. Can you direct me to the cor­rect pro­gram?
Also curi­ous if you were aware that Jer­ry Wil­son, inven­tor of the Soloflex exer­cise machine was one of the Cha­gra drug pilots, detailed in Wilson’s biog­ra­phy:

http://www.viva-la-revolucion.org/hello-world/

I would like to find that archive on Woods, Har­rel­son and the Cha­gra’s to cross-ref­er­ence with oth­er info I have,

Thanks,

@swamp–

The RFA shows have been renamed “AFA.”
The shows you are inter­est­ed in are AFA #26 and AFA #32.

They’re there.

Best,

Dave Emory

Look who’s com­ment­ing on the Bergdahl pris­on­er swap:

TPM Livewire
Oliv­er North Of All Peo­ple Blasts Oba­ma For Financ­ing Ter­ror­ist Orgs In Bergdahl Swap

Tom Kludt – June 4, 2014, 10:21 AM EDT

Nat­u­ral­ly, Lt. Col. Oliv­er North has plen­ty to say about the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

...

Speak­ing to for­mer Rep. J.D. Hay­worth (R‑AZ) on his News­max pro­gram, North demand­ed to know if a ran­som was paid to ter­ror­ists in order to exe­cute the swap.

“Was there a ran­som paid?” North said. “Did the gov­ern­ment of the Unit­ed States, either direct­ly or indi­rect­ly, finance a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion?”

North went even fur­ther in an inter­view with News­max host Steve Malzberg..

He strong­ly dis­put­ed the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Bergdahl as a “pris­on­er of war,” assert­ing that he was in fact a “hostage” of the Haqqani ter­ror­ist net­work, which is allied with the Tal­iban.

More­over, North esti­mat­ed that the ran­som paid for Bergdahl must have been in the range of $5-$6 mil­lion, giv­en that he had heard it was around $1 mil­lion at some point in the past. North did­n’t pro­vide any evi­dence that a ran­som was paid in con­junc­tion with Bergdahl’s release.

“Some­one paid a ran­som,” North said. “Whether the Qataries paid it, or some big oil sheik, or some­body used our petrodol­lars, but there was a ran­som paid in cash for each one of them, my guess some­where in the round num­bers of $5 or 6 mil­lion to get Bergdahl freed. I know that the offer that was on the table before was close to a mil­lion.”

North had more to say on Tues­day night, join­ing his pal Sean Han­ni­ty on Fox News to sug­gest that Oba­ma might believe “uni­lat­er­al sur­ren­der is the way to end the war.” He once again demand­ed to know whether a ran­som was paid to the Haqqa­nis.

“And if a ran­som was paid, either at our behest or with Amer­i­can tax dol­lars, it means this gov­ern­ment is caus­ing to be fund­ed a crim­i­nal enter­prise that kills Amer­i­cans, the Haqqa­nis,” North said.

He also expressed con­cern that “five Tal­iban king­pins” were released from Guan­tanamo Bay in exchange for Bergdahl and blast­ed the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion for skirt­ing the law that required him to noti­fy Con­gress with­in 30 days of such a release.

North then tried to offer an his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive, remind­ing Han­ni­ty that he knows “a lot about hostage nego­ti­a­tions.” To that end, he said it’s wrong to sug­gest the Unit­ed States nev­er nego­ti­ates with the ene­my.

“That’s the way it works,” North said. “The real­i­ty is, they nev­er talk about it. Ronald Rea­gan did­n’t and this guy should­n’t have done it. It’s a dis­as­ter the way this has all come out.”

In fact, North’s own his­to­ry makes these com­ments pret­ty rich. It was North who, along with oth­er Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials, helped engi­neer the ille­gal sale of arms to Iran in an effort to secure the release of Amer­i­can hostages and then ille­gal­ly used the pro­ceeds to finance rebels in Nicaragua. North and oth­ers were indict­ed on mul­ti­ple charges in 1988, but his con­vic­tion was ulti­mate­ly appealed and over­turned.

Thom Hart­mann has a new piece that rais­es a very intrigu­ing pos­si­ble fac­tor in how the nuclear deal with Iran will be received in the US: Could a lift­ing of sanc­tions and the fur­ther open­ing of Iran to the world com­mu­ni­ty also result in an open­ing up of his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments and evi­dence regard­ing cer­tain sen­si­tive his­tor­i­cal top­ics that some would rather keep under wraps? A cer­tain par­ty with a cer­tain ‘saint’ is prob­a­bly won­der­ing about all that right about now:

Alter­Net
Don’t Count Out the GOP from Try­ing to Sink Oba­ma’s His­toric Iran Deal: They’ve Done It Before
Repub­li­can attempts to sab­o­tage a Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­t’s deal with Iran are noth­ing new.

By Thom Hart­mann
July 15, 2015

Ronald Rea­gan – or at least his cam­paign – com­mit­ted trea­son to become pres­i­dent, and nor­mal­iz­ing rela­tions with Iran may expose the whole thing.

As news of a US-Iran­ian nuclear deal spread like wild­fire this week, the main­stream media began to ask its usu­al set of ques­tions. Is the deal for real? Can we trust the Ira­ni­ans? And the Repub­li­cans in Con­gress are going total­ly nuts.

Repub­li­can attempts to sab­o­tage a Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­t’s deal with Iran are noth­ing new, how­ev­er. Just ask Jim­my Carter.

In the ear­ly fall of 1980, Carter thought he had reached a deal with new­ly elect­ed Iran­ian Pres­i­dent Abdol­has­san Bani-Sadr over the release of the 52 hostages held by rad­i­cal stu­dents at the Amer­i­can Embassy in Tehran. Pres­i­dent Bani-Sadr was a mod­er­ate, and as he explained in an edi­to­r­i­al in the Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor pub­lished on March 5, 2013, he had suc­cess­ful­ly run for pres­i­dent of Iran on the pop­u­lar posi­tion of releas­ing the hostages:

“I open­ly opposed the hostage-tak­ing through­out the elec­tion cam­paign.... I won the elec­tion with over 76 per­cent of the vote.... Oth­er can­di­dates also were open­ly against hostage-tak­ing, and over­all, 96 per­cent of votes in that elec­tion were giv­en to can­di­dates who were against it [hostage-tak­ing].”

Pres­i­dent Carter was con­fi­dent that with Bani-Sadr’s help, he could end the embar­rass­ing hostage cri­sis that had been a thorn in his polit­i­cal side ever since it began in Novem­ber 1979. But Carter under­es­ti­mat­ed the lengths his oppo­nent in the 1980 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, Cal­i­for­nia gov­er­nor Ronald Rea­gan, would go to win the pres­i­den­cy.

Behind Carter’s back, the Rea­gan cam­paign had pre­vi­ous­ly worked out a deal with the leader of Iran’s rad­i­cal fac­tion, Supreme Leader Aya­tol­lah Khome­i­ni, to keep the hostages in cap­tiv­i­ty until after the 1980 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in order to humil­i­ate Carter and hand the elec­tion to Rea­gan. This was noth­ing short of trea­son.

As Pres­i­dent Bani-Sadr wrote for the Mon­i­tor, “I was deposed in June 1981 as a result of a coup against me. After arriv­ing in France, I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion­ship between Khome­in­ism and Rea­gan­ism. Aya­tol­lah Khome­i­ni and Ronald Rea­gan had orga­nized a clan­des­tine nego­ti­a­tion, lat­er known as the ‘Octo­ber Sur­prise,’ which pre­vent­ed the attempts by myself and then-US Pres­i­dent Jim­my Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US pres­i­den­tial elec­tion took place.”

The Rea­gan cam­paign’s secret nego­ti­a­tions with Khome­i­ni — the so-called “Octo­ber Sur­prise” — were suc­cess­ful in sab­o­tag­ing Carter and Bani-Sadr’s attempts to free the hostages. And as Pres­i­dent Bani-Sadr told the Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor, “The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the [1980] elec­tion in Rea­gan’s favor.”

Iran released the hostages on Jan. 20, 1981, at the exact moment Ronald Rea­gan was sworn into office, by way of say­ing, “We kept up our part of the deal; now we expect you to start ship­ping us those weapons you promised.”

That Octo­ber Sur­prise embold­ened the rad­i­cal forces inside Iran. A polit­i­cal­ly weak­ened Bani-Sadr was over­thrown in June 1981 and replaced with Mohammed Ali Rajai, a favorite of Khome­ini’s.

The Octo­ber Sur­prise also led to the deaths of thou­sands of inno­cent peo­ple around the world, and in Cen­tral Amer­i­ca in par­tic­u­lar. Rea­gan took mon­ey from the Ira­ni­ans and used that mon­ey to desta­bi­lize Nicaragua, Hon­duras and El Sal­vador in ways that still haunt the region. And he set the Supreme Court (by appoint­ing Scalia and two oth­er right-wingers) and the nation on a course that would see the destruc­tion of much of the New Deal and the evis­cer­a­tion of America’s mid­dle class.

But those are just the most obvi­ous results of the Octo­ber Sur­prise. If Carter were able to free the hostages like he and Bani-Sadr had planned, Carter would have won re-elec­tion. After all, he was lead­ing in most polls in the months lead­ing up to the elec­tion, and most Amer­i­cans saw Rea­gan as a right-wing rad­i­cal shill for the bil­lion­aire class (his­to­ry proved them right).

So, now that the doors of Tehran may be thrown open to the press, Repub­li­can lead­er­ship is fac­ing a huge cri­sis: Saint Ron­nie could be exposed. If for­mer Iran­ian pres­i­dent Bani-Sadr is telling the truth – and all the evi­dence (includ­ing the fact that Rea­gan was sell­ing weapons to Iran in vio­la­tion of US law) points to his trea­son — then there’s cer­tain­ly evi­dence of it float­ing around in Tehran. If that evi­dence sur­faces, it could make for con­sid­er­able dis­com­fort on the Repub­li­can side of the aisle.

Of course, this is not the first time a Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date com­mit­ted trea­son to gain the White House. Con­sid­er the case of Richard Nixon.

...

You also have to won­der what the actu­al impact would be on Saint Ron­nie’s lega­cy even if indis­putable evi­dence did emerge of an arms-for-not-releas­ing-hostages-until-Ron­nie-is-in-the-White-House scheme. Would it be the polit­i­cal equiv­a­lent of explod­ing a nuclear weapon on the myth of Rea­gan? It cer­tain­ly would be explo­sive.

But let’s also keep in mind that even if future expo­sure does take place and it is the polit­i­cal equiv­a­lent of a nuclear weapon, it had bet­ter be a nuclear bunker buster if it’s going to do any real dam­age to that unre­al­i­ty-com­plex.

Thanks for all your great research. I’ve been lis­ten­ing to these invalu­able archives for months. I’m about 75% done. I’m a fel­low resarcher but I’ve only been going 3 years, not thir­ty-six plus. Cur­rent­ly I’m writ­ing about Iran Con­tra, which of course turned into a night­mare, as there is so much to cov­er. Obvi­ous­ly, many of your archive shows–WACL Who Shot the Pope, CIA mil­i­tary and Drugs, and this one were a huge help in mak­ing my task even more com­pli­cat­ed :) I’ll be sure to give you a plug. For your lis­ten­ers let me rec­om­mend Peter Dale Scot­t’s “Iran Con­tra Con­nec­tion”, “Road to 911”, and “Amer­i­can War Machine,” as well as Sibel Edmonds’ Glad­io Inter­views, to see how Iran Con­tra gave birth to 911.

Sott repub­lished my Iran/Contra arti­cle. I gave you a nice plug in the sources sec­tion as the worlds fore­most anti-fas­cist researcher with links to 3 of your archives shows
https://www.sott.net/article/319254-Beyond-the-Iran-Contra-Affair-Part-1-The-secret-team?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
The Orig­i­nal is at
http://anti-imperialist‑u.blogspot.com/2016/05/irancontra-pt-1-secret-team.html
Also found some fun sources like the com­ic “brought to light” and the trad­ing cards which, despite the medi­ums cho­sen were quite edu­ca­tion­al at least for review pur­pos­es. Plus the “Cov­er-Up” doc­u­men­tary, and of course Peter Dale Scott and Russ Bak­er and oth­er authors. Your “Fam­i­ly of Secrets” inter­views with Russ Bak­er were great for expos­ing Bush’s intel con­nec­tions.

Final­ly Fin­ished my Iran Con­tra part 2
http://anti-imperialist‑u.blogspot.com/2016/06/irancontra-pt-2-world-war‑3.html
Where I dis­cuss the many covert wars of the 80’s. I drew on the Anti-Fas­cist archives for a brief his­to­ry of fas­cist death squads from the black hun­dreds, to the Frei corps, to SS, to CIA and also men­tioned the great Sea­graves inter­views. Plus my thoughts on the destruc­tion of USSR. The arti­cle is over but the research on Iran/Contra nev­er ends. Just start­ed lis­ten­ing to your recent update on Fara Man­soor and the deep Octo­ber sur­prise.

What are the chances this Hob­by Lob­by arti­fact smug­gling case is part of some sort of Con­tra-style oper­a­tion where mon­ey and weapons are going to extrem­ist forces in the Mid­dle East?

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/hobby-lobby-smuggled-thousands-of-ancient-artifacts-out-of-iraq/532743/

Thanks. Fan­tas­tic pro­grams. Been lis­ten­ing to Dave since the mid-1980’s. Haven’t come across these archives yet. I’m guess­ing one of the goals of REX 84 — or what­ev­er for­mat name it has now — is to imple­ment Earl Turn­er’s “Day of the Rope.” We’re wit­ness­ing a low inten­si­ty ver­sion of that now with almost 500 mur­dered by police so far in 2017. Have you seen the 2006 declas­si­fied FBI intel­li­gence assess­ment on white suprema­cist infil­tra­tion of law enforce­ment? It’s avail­able online.

There’s also a very intense, recent Dal­las Morn­ing News series on the Texas Aryan Broth­er­hood. Think it was pub­lished in May or ear­ly June. Absolute­ly bru­tal stuff.

Here’s a rather dis­turb­ing report that’s extra dis­turb­ing in the con­text of the assas­si­na­tion attempt against Venezue­lan pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro via explo­sive-laden drones last month, which Maduro ini­tial­ly blamed on Colom­bia and the US but fol­lowed up with the arrest of a num­ber of Venezue­lan mil­i­tary offi­cer who were charged with tak­ing part in the assas­si­na­tion attempt: Accord­ing to inter­views with 11 cur­rent and for­mer US offi­cials and a for­mer Venezue­lan com­man­der, the US gov­ern­ment held sev­er­al meet­ings with a group of rebel offi­cers last year and ear­li­er this year. The offi­cers were inter­est­ed in US assis­tance on exe­cut­ing a coup.

The offi­cers did­n’t have any par­tic­u­lar plans dur­ing the first meet­ing in the fall of 2017 and US offi­cial got the sense that they were hop­ing the US would pro­vide guid­ance. The Venezue­lan offi­cer asserts that the the offi­cers nev­er asked for a US mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion. The offi­cer says they were con­sid­er­ing a plot last sum­mer, then anoth­er in March of this year, but that plan got leaked. Then they were look­ing at the May 20 elec­tions this year, but that plot also leaked out.

The offi­cer claims that the one thing they want­ed from the US was a way to com­mu­ni­cate secure­ly. Dur­ing their sec­ond meet­ing the offi­cers report­ed­ly specif­i­cal­ly request­ed encrypt­ed radios that they could use to com­mu­ni­cate secure­ly as they devel­oped a plan to install a tran­si­tion­al gov­ern­ment.

We are told that, in the end the US nev­er pro­vid­ed any assis­tance to the plot­ters. So about a month after there’s a failed drone assas­si­na­tion attempt that Maduro blamed on Colom­bia and the US, we have a report from 11 cur­rent and for­mer US offi­cials and one of these coup plot­ters talk­ing to the world about how they dis­cussed a coup but nev­er actu­al­ly fol­lowed through on the attempts:

The New York Times

Trump Admin­is­tra­tion Dis­cussed Coup Plans With Rebel Venezue­lan Offi­cers

By Ernesto Lon­doño and Nicholas Casey
Sept. 8, 2018

The Trump admin­is­tra­tion held secret meet­ings with rebel­lious mil­i­tary offi­cers from Venezuela over the last year to dis­cuss their plans to over­throw Pres­i­dent Nicolás Maduro, accord­ing to Amer­i­can offi­cials and a for­mer Venezue­lan mil­i­tary com­man­der who par­tic­i­pat­ed in the talks.

Estab­lish­ing a clan­des­tine chan­nel with coup plot­ters in Venezuela was a big gam­ble for Wash­ing­ton, giv­en its long his­to­ry of covert inter­ven­tion across Latin Amer­i­ca. Many in the region still deeply resent the Unit­ed States for back­ing pre­vi­ous rebel­lions, coups and plots in coun­tries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Brazil and Chile, and for turn­ing a blind eye to the abus­es mil­i­tary regimes com­mit­ted dur­ing the Cold War.

The White House, which declined to answer detailed ques­tions about the talks, said in a state­ment that it was impor­tant to engage in “dia­logue with all Venezue­lans who demon­strate a desire for democ­ra­cy” in order to “bring pos­i­tive change to a coun­try that has suf­fered so much under Maduro.”

But one of the Venezue­lan mil­i­tary com­man­ders involved in the secret talks was hard­ly an ide­al fig­ure to help restore democ­ra­cy: He is on the Amer­i­can government’s own sanc­tions list of cor­rupt offi­cials in Venezuela.

He and oth­er mem­bers of the Venezue­lan secu­ri­ty appa­ra­tus have been accused by Wash­ing­ton of a wide range of seri­ous crimes, includ­ing tor­tur­ing crit­ics, jail­ing hun­dreds of polit­i­cal pris­on­ers, wound­ing thou­sands of civil­ians, traf­fick­ing drugs and col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Armed Forces of Colom­bia, or FARC, which is con­sid­ered a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion by the Unit­ed States.

Amer­i­can offi­cials even­tu­al­ly decid­ed not to help the plot­ters, and the coup plans stalled. But the Trump administration’s will­ing­ness to meet sev­er­al times with muti­nous offi­cers intent on top­pling a pres­i­dent in the hemi­sphere could back­fire polit­i­cal­ly.

Most Latin Amer­i­can lead­ers agree that Venezuela’s pres­i­dent, Mr. Maduro, is an increas­ing­ly author­i­tar­i­an ruler who has effec­tive­ly ruined his country’s econ­o­my, lead­ing to extreme short­ages of food and med­i­cine. The col­lapse has set off an exo­dus of des­per­ate Venezue­lans who are spilling over bor­ders, over­whelm­ing their neigh­bors.

Even so, Mr. Maduro has long jus­ti­fied his grip on Venezuela by claim­ing that Wash­ing­ton impe­ri­al­ists are active­ly try­ing to depose him, and the secret talks could pro­vide him with ammu­ni­tion to chip away at the region’s near­ly unit­ed stance against him.

“This is going to land like a bomb” in the region, said Mari Car­men Aponte, who served as the top diplo­mat over­see­ing Latin Amer­i­can affairs in the final months of the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion.

Beyond the coup plot, Mr. Maduro’s gov­ern­ment has already fend­ed off sev­er­al small-scale attacks, includ­ing salvos from a heli­copter last year and explod­ing drones as he gave a speech in August. The attacks have added to the sense that the pres­i­dent is vul­ner­a­ble.

Venezue­lan mil­i­tary offi­cials sought direct access to the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment dur­ing Barack Obama’s pres­i­den­cy, only to be rebuffed, offi­cials said.

Then in August of last year, Pres­i­dent Trump declared that the Unit­ed States had a “mil­i­tary option” for Venezuela — a dec­la­ra­tion that drew con­dem­na­tion from Amer­i­can allies in the region but encour­aged rebel­lious Venezue­lan mil­i­tary offi­cers to reach out to Wash­ing­ton once again.

“It was the com­man­der in chief say­ing this now,” the for­mer Venezue­lan com­man­der on the sanc­tions list said in an inter­view, speak­ing on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty out of fear of reprisals by the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment. “I’m not going to doubt it when this was the mes­sen­ger.”

In a series of covert meet­ings abroad, which began last fall and con­tin­ued this year, the mil­i­tary offi­cers told the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment that they rep­re­sent­ed a few hun­dred mem­bers of the armed forces who had soured on Mr. Maduro’s author­i­tar­i­an­ism.

The offi­cers asked the Unit­ed States to sup­ply them with encrypt­ed radios, cit­ing the need to com­mu­ni­cate secure­ly, as they devel­oped a plan to install a tran­si­tion­al gov­ern­ment to run the coun­try until elec­tions could be held.

Amer­i­can offi­cials did not pro­vide mate­r­i­al sup­port, and the plans unrav­eled after a recent crack­down that led to the arrest of dozens of the plot­ters.

Rela­tions between the Unit­ed States and Venezuela have been strained for years. The two have not exchanged ambas­sadors since 2010. After Mr. Trump took office, his admin­is­tra­tion increased sanc­tions against top Venezue­lan offi­cials, includ­ing Mr. Maduro him­self, his vice pres­i­dent and oth­er top offi­cials in the gov­ern­ment.

The account of the clan­des­tine meet­ings and the pol­i­cy debates pre­ced­ing them is drawn from inter­views with 11 cur­rent and for­mer Amer­i­can offi­cials, as well as the for­mer Venezue­lan com­man­der. He said at least three dis­tinct groups with­in the Venezue­lan mil­i­tary had been plot­ting against the Maduro gov­ern­ment.

One estab­lished con­tact with the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment by approach­ing the Unit­ed States Embassy in a Euro­pean cap­i­tal. When this was report­ed back to Wash­ing­ton, offi­cials at the White House were intrigued but appre­hen­sive. They wor­ried that the meet­ing request could be a ploy to sur­rep­ti­tious­ly record an Amer­i­can offi­cial appear­ing to con­spire against the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment, offi­cials said.

But as the human­i­tar­i­an cri­sis in Venezuela wors­ened last year, Amer­i­can offi­cials felt that hav­ing a clear­er pic­ture of the plans and the men who aspired to oust Mr. Maduro was worth the risk.

“After a lot of dis­cus­sion, we agreed we should lis­ten to what they had to say,” said a senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial who was not autho­rized to speak about the secret talks.

The admin­is­tra­tion ini­tial­ly con­sid­ered dis­patch­ing Juan Cruz, a vet­er­an Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency offi­cial who recent­ly stepped down as the White House’s top Latin Amer­i­ca pol­i­cy­mak­er. But White House lawyers said it would be more pru­dent to send a career diplo­mat instead.

The Amer­i­can envoy was instruct­ed to attend the meet­ings “pure­ly on lis­ten­ing mode,” and was not autho­rized to nego­ti­ate any­thing of sub­stance on the spot, accord­ing to the senior admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial.

After the first meet­ing, which took place in the fall of 2017, the diplo­mat report­ed that the Venezue­lans didn’t appear to have a detailed plan and had showed up at the encounter hop­ing the Amer­i­cans would offer guid­ance or ideas, offi­cials said.

The for­mer Venezue­lan com­man­der said that the rebel­lious offi­cers nev­er asked for an Amer­i­can mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion. “I nev­er agreed, nor did they pro­pose, to do a joint oper­a­tion,” he said.

He claimed that he and his com­rades con­sid­ered strik­ing last sum­mer, when the gov­ern­ment sus­pend­ed the pow­ers of the leg­is­la­ture and installed a new nation­al assem­bly loy­al to Mr. Maduro. But he said they abort­ed the plan, fear­ing it would lead to blood­shed.

They lat­er planned to take pow­er in March, the for­mer offi­cer said, but that plan leaked. Final­ly, the dis­si­dents looked to the May 20 elec­tion, dur­ing which Mr. Maduro was re-elect­ed, as a new tar­get date. But again, word got out and the plot­ters held their fire.

It is unclear how many of these details the coup plan­ners shared with the Amer­i­cans. But there is no indi­ca­tion that Mr. Maduro knew the muti­nous offi­cers were talk­ing to the Amer­i­cans at all.

For any of the plots to have worked, the for­mer com­man­der said, he and his com­rades believed they need­ed to detain Mr. Maduro and oth­er top gov­ern­ment fig­ures simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. To do that, he added, the rebel offi­cers need­ed a way to com­mu­ni­cate secure­ly. They made their request dur­ing their sec­ond meet­ing with the Amer­i­can diplo­mat, which took place last year.

The Amer­i­can diplo­mat relayed the request to Wash­ing­ton, where senior offi­cials turned it down, Amer­i­can offi­cials said.

“We were frus­trat­ed,” said the for­mer Venezue­lan com­man­der. “There was a lack of fol­low-through. They left me wait­ing.”

The Amer­i­can diplo­mat then met the coup plot­ters a third time ear­ly this year, but the dis­cus­sions did not result in a promise of mate­r­i­al aid or even a clear sig­nal that Wash­ing­ton endorsed the rebels’ plans, accord­ing to the Venezue­lan com­man­der and sev­er­al Amer­i­can offi­cials.

Still, the Venezue­lan plot­ters could view the meet­ings as tac­it approval of their plans, argued Peter Korn­bluh, a his­to­ri­an at the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Archive at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.

“The Unit­ed States always has an inter­est in gath­er­ing intel­li­gence on poten­tial changes of lead­er­ship in gov­ern­ments,” Mr. Korn­bluh said. “But the mere pres­ence of a U.S. offi­cial at such a meet­ing would like­ly be per­ceived as encour­age­ment.”

In its state­ment, the White House called the sit­u­a­tion in Venezuela “a threat to region­al secu­ri­ty and democ­ra­cy” and said that the Trump admin­is­tra­tion would con­tin­ue to strength­en a coali­tion of “like-mind­ed, and right-mind­ed, part­ners from Europe to Asia to the Amer­i­c­as to pres­sure the Maduro regime to restore democ­ra­cy in Venezuela.”

Amer­i­can offi­cials have open­ly dis­cussed the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Venezuela’s mil­i­tary could take action.

On Feb. 1, Rex W. Tiller­son, who was sec­re­tary of state at the time, deliv­ered a speech in which he said the Unit­ed States had not “advo­cat­ed for regime change or removal of Pres­i­dent Maduro.” Yet, respond­ing to a ques­tion after­ward, Mr. Tiller­son raised the poten­tial for a mil­i­tary coup.

“When things are so bad that the mil­i­tary lead­er­ship real­izes that it just can’t serve the cit­i­zens any­more, they will man­age a peace­ful tran­si­tion,” he said.

Days lat­er, Sen­a­tor Mar­co Rubio of Flori­da, who has sought to shape the Trump administration’s approach toward Latin Amer­i­ca, wrote a series of Twit­ter posts that encour­aged dis­si­dent mem­bers of the Venezue­lan armed forces to top­ple their com­man­der in chief.

“Sol­diers eat out of garbage cans & their fam­i­lies go hun­gry in Venezuela while Maduro & friends live like kings & block human­i­tar­i­an aid,” Mr. Rubio wrote. He then added: “The world would sup­port the Armed Forces in #Venezuela if they decide to pro­tect the peo­ple & restore democ­ra­cy by remov­ing a dic­ta­tor.”

In a speech in April, when he was still White House pol­i­cy chief for Latin Amer­i­ca, Mr. Cruz issued a mes­sage to the Venezue­lan mil­i­tary. Refer­ring to Mr. Maduro as a “mad­man,” Mr. Cruz said all Venezue­lans should “urge the mil­i­tary to respect the oath they took to per­form their func­tions. Hon­or your oath.”

As the cri­sis in Venezuela wors­ened in recent years, Amer­i­can offi­cials debat­ed the pros and cons of open­ing lines of dia­logue with rebel­lious fac­tions of the mil­i­tary.

“There were dif­fer­ences of opin­ion,” said Ms. Aponte, the for­mer top Latin Amer­i­ca diplo­mat under Mr. Oba­ma. “There were peo­ple who had a lot of faith in the idea that they could bring about sta­bil­i­ty, help dis­trib­ute food, work on prac­ti­cal stuff.”

But oth­ers — includ­ing Ms. Aponte — saw con­sid­er­able risk in build­ing bridges with lead­ers of a mil­i­tary that, in Washington’s assess­ment, has become a pil­lar of the cocaine trade and human rights abus­es.

Rober­ta Jacob­son, a for­mer ambas­sador to Mex­i­co who pre­ced­ed Ms. Aponte as the top State Depart­ment offi­cial for Latin Amer­i­ca pol­i­cy, said that while Wash­ing­ton has long regard­ed the Venezue­lan mil­i­tary as “wide­ly cor­rupt, deeply involved in nar­cotics traf­fick­ing and very unsa­vory,” she saw mer­it in estab­lish­ing a back chan­nel with some of them.

“Giv­en the broad­er break­down in insti­tu­tions in Venezuela, there was a feel­ing that — while they were not nec­es­sar­i­ly the answer — any kind of demo­c­ra­t­ic res­o­lu­tion would have had to have the mil­i­tary on board,” said Ms. Jacob­son, who retired from the State Depart­ment this year. “The idea of hear­ing from actors in those places, no mat­ter how unsa­vory they may be, is inte­gral to diplo­ma­cy.”

But what­ev­er the ratio­nale, hold­ing dis­cus­sions with coup plot­ters could set off alarms in a region with a list of infa­mous inter­ven­tions: the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency’s failed Bay of Pigs inva­sion to over­throw Fidel Cas­tro as leader of Cuba in 1961; the Amer­i­can-sup­port­ed coup in Chile in 1973, which led to the long mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor­ship of Augus­to Pinochet; and the Rea­gan administration’s covert sup­port of right-wing rebels known as the con­tras in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

In Venezuela, a coup in 2002 briefly deposed Mr. Maduro’s pre­de­ces­sor, Hugo Chávez. The Unit­ed States knew a plot was being hatched but warned against it, accord­ing to a clas­si­fied doc­u­ment that was lat­er made pub­lic. The coup took place any­way and the George W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion opened a chan­nel to the new leader. Offi­cials then backed away from the new gov­ern­ment after pop­u­lar anger rose against the coup and coun­tries in the region loud­ly denounced it. Mr. Chávez was rein­stat­ed as pres­i­dent.

In the lat­est coup plot, the num­ber of mil­i­tary fig­ures con­nect­ed to the plan dwin­dled from a high of about 300 to 400 last year to about half that after a crack­down this year by Mr. Maduro’s gov­ern­ment.

The for­mer Venezue­lan mil­i­tary offi­cer wor­ries that the 150 or so com­rades who have been detained are prob­a­bly being tor­tured. He lament­ed that the Unit­ed States did not sup­ply the muti­neers with radios, which he believes could have changed the country’s his­to­ry.

...

———-

“Trump Admin­is­tra­tion Dis­cussed Coup Plans With Rebel Venezue­lan Offi­cers” by Ernesto Lon­doño and Nicholas Casey; The New York Times; 09/08/2018

“Estab­lish­ing a clan­des­tine chan­nel with coup plot­ters in Venezuela was a big gam­ble for Wash­ing­ton, giv­en its long his­to­ry of covert inter­ven­tion across Latin Amer­i­ca. Many in the region still deeply resent the Unit­ed States for back­ing pre­vi­ous rebel­lions, coups and plots in coun­tries like Cuba, Nicaragua, Brazil and Chile, and for turn­ing a blind eye to the abus­es mil­i­tary regimes com­mit­ted dur­ing the Cold War.”

Yeah, was quite a gam­ble for the US. A gam­ble that the US has tak­en many times before in Latin Amer­i­ca and has his­tor­i­cal­ly has result­ed in some sort of far right night­mare gov­ern­ment for the affect­ed coun­try. Omi­nous­ly, one of the Venezue­lan mil­i­tary com­man­ders involved with the secret talks was, in him­self, on the US sanc­tions list for cor­rupt offi­cials. And he has even been accused by DC of f a wide range of seri­ous crimes, includ­ing tor­tur­ing crit­ics, jail­ing hun­dreds of polit­i­cal pris­on­ers, wound­ing thou­sands of civil­ians, traf­fick­ing drugs and col­lab­o­rat­ing with FARC. So it already was look­ing like a replay of that pat­tern of the US sup­port­ing a mil­i­tary jun­ta run by hor­ri­ble peo­ple who are obvi­ous­ly going to do hor­ri­ble things because that’s their track record:

...
The White House, which declined to answer detailed ques­tions about the talks, said in a state­ment that it was impor­tant to engage in “dia­logue with all Venezue­lans who demon­strate a desire for democ­ra­cy” in order to “bring pos­i­tive change to a coun­try that has suf­fered so much under Maduro.”

But one of the Venezue­lan mil­i­tary com­man­ders involved in the secret talks was hard­ly an ide­al fig­ure to help restore democ­ra­cy: He is on the Amer­i­can government’s own sanc­tions list of cor­rupt offi­cials in Venezuela.

He and oth­er mem­bers of the Venezue­lan secu­ri­ty appa­ra­tus have been accused by Wash­ing­ton of a wide range of seri­ous crimes, includ­ing tor­tur­ing crit­ics, jail­ing hun­dreds of polit­i­cal pris­on­ers, wound­ing thou­sands of civil­ians, traf­fick­ing drugs and col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Armed Forces of Colom­bia, or FARC, which is con­sid­ered a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion by the Unit­ed States.
...

And not the com­ments from the for­mer Oba­ma and Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials. The Oba­ma offi­cial remarked on how the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion saw “con­sid­er­able risk in build­ing bridges with lead­ers of a mil­i­tary that, in Washington’s assess­ment, has become a pil­lar of the cocaine trade and human rights abus­es.” And while the Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cial agreed with that assess­ment, she still saw mer­its in estab­lish­ing this back chan­nel:

...
As the cri­sis in Venezuela wors­ened in recent years, Amer­i­can offi­cials debat­ed the pros and cons of open­ing lines of dia­logue with rebel­lious fac­tions of the mil­i­tary.

“There were dif­fer­ences of opin­ion,” said Ms. Aponte, the for­mer top Latin Amer­i­ca diplo­mat under Mr. Oba­ma. “There were peo­ple who had a lot of faith in the idea that they could bring about sta­bil­i­ty, help dis­trib­ute food, work on prac­ti­cal stuff.”

But oth­ers — includ­ing Ms. Aponte — saw con­sid­er­able risk in build­ing bridges with lead­ers of a mil­i­tary that, in Washington’s assess­ment, has become a pil­lar of the cocaine trade and human rights abus­es.

Rober­ta Jacob­son, a for­mer ambas­sador to Mex­i­co who pre­ced­ed Ms. Aponte as the top State Depart­ment offi­cial for Latin Amer­i­ca pol­i­cy, said that while Wash­ing­ton has long regard­ed the Venezue­lan mil­i­tary as “wide­ly cor­rupt, deeply involved in nar­cotics traf­fick­ing and very unsa­vory,” she saw mer­it in estab­lish­ing a back chan­nel with some of them.

“Giv­en the broad­er break­down in insti­tu­tions in Venezuela, there was a feel­ing that — while they were not nec­es­sar­i­ly the answer — any kind of demo­c­ra­t­ic res­o­lu­tion would have had to have the mil­i­tary on board,” said Ms. Jacob­son, who retired from the State Depart­ment this year. “The idea of hear­ing from actors in those places, no mat­ter how unsa­vory they may be, is inte­gral to diplo­ma­cy.”
...

It also sounds like this group of coup plot­ter has been try­ing to get US sup­port for a while. They appar­ent­ly sought access to the US gov­ern­ment dur­ing Oba­ma’s admin­is­tra­tion but were rebuffed. It was­n’t until last year, when Trump declared that the US had a “mil­i­tary option” for Venezuela, that the offi­cers decid­ed to reach out to the US again, telling US offi­cials that they rep­re­sent­ed a few hun­dred mil­i­tary mem­bers and ask­ing for encrypt­ed radios. :

...
Venezue­lan mil­i­tary offi­cials sought direct access to the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment dur­ing Barack Obama’s pres­i­den­cy, only to be rebuffed, offi­cials said.

Then in August of last year, Pres­i­dent Trump declared that the Unit­ed States had a “mil­i­tary option” for Venezuela — a dec­la­ra­tion that drew con­dem­na­tion from Amer­i­can allies in the region but encour­aged rebel­lious Venezue­lan mil­i­tary offi­cers to reach out to Wash­ing­ton once again.

“It was the com­man­der in chief say­ing this now,” the for­mer Venezue­lan com­man­der on the sanc­tions list said in an inter­view, speak­ing on con­di­tion of anonymi­ty out of fear of reprisals by the Venezue­lan gov­ern­ment. “I’m not going to doubt it when this was the mes­sen­ger.”

In a series of covert meet­ings abroad, which began last fall and con­tin­ued this year, the mil­i­tary offi­cers told the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment that they rep­re­sent­ed a few hun­dred mem­bers of the armed forces who had soured on Mr. Maduro’s author­i­tar­i­an­ism.

The offi­cers asked the Unit­ed States to sup­ply them with encrypt­ed radios, cit­ing the need to com­mu­ni­cate secure­ly, as they devel­oped a plan to install a tran­si­tion­al gov­ern­ment to run the coun­try until elec­tions could be held.
...

We are told that the US nev­er end­ed up pro­vid­ing mate­r­i­al sup­port and that the plans unrav­eled after a recent crack­down that led to the arrest of dozens of the plot­ters:

...
Amer­i­can offi­cials did not pro­vide mate­r­i­al sup­port, and the plans unrav­eled after a recent crack­down that led to the arrest of dozens of the plot­ters.
...

Again, note that the arrests took place fol­low­ing the drone assas­si­na­tion attempt and were direct­ly relat­ed to the inves­ti­ga­tion of the respon­si­bil­i­ty for that drone attack. So it does appear to be the case that the Maduro gov­ern­ment at least sus­pects this par­tic­u­lar net­work of rogue offi­cers was involved with the attack. And giv­en that their coup plots unrav­eled after these arrests it sure sounds like they prob­a­bly were involved.

And while we are told that the US nev­er end­ed up back­ing a coup plan or pro­vid­ing sup­port, as many not­ed, sim­ply meet­ing with them could have been see as a green light by the US to pro­ceed with the plans:

...
The Amer­i­can diplo­mat then met the coup plot­ters a third time ear­ly this year, but the dis­cus­sions did not result in a promise of mate­r­i­al aid or even a clear sig­nal that Wash­ing­ton endorsed the rebels’ plans, accord­ing to the Venezue­lan com­man­der and sev­er­al Amer­i­can offi­cials.

Still, the Venezue­lan plot­ters could view the meet­ings as tac­it approval of their plans, argued Peter Korn­bluh, a his­to­ri­an at the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Archive at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.

“The Unit­ed States always has an inter­est in gath­er­ing intel­li­gence on poten­tial changes of lead­er­ship in gov­ern­ments,” Mr. Korn­bluh said. “But the mere pres­ence of a U.S. offi­cial at such a meet­ing would like­ly be per­ceived as encour­age­ment.”
...

And that implic­it US approval of the plot would have been strong­ly backed by the open rhetoric used by the Trump admin­is­tra­tion and oth­er Repub­li­cans, like Mar­co Rubio and Ted Cruz, who have been open­ly talk­ing about sup­port­ing a mil­i­tary coup:

...
In its state­ment, the White House called the sit­u­a­tion in Venezuela “a threat to region­al secu­ri­ty and democ­ra­cy” and said that the Trump admin­is­tra­tion would con­tin­ue to strength­en a coali­tion of “like-mind­ed, and right-mind­ed, part­ners from Europe to Asia to the Amer­i­c­as to pres­sure the Maduro regime to restore democ­ra­cy in Venezuela.”

Amer­i­can offi­cials have open­ly dis­cussed the pos­si­bil­i­ty that Venezuela’s mil­i­tary could take action.

On Feb. 1, Rex W. Tiller­son, who was sec­re­tary of state at the time, deliv­ered a speech in which he said the Unit­ed States had not “advo­cat­ed for regime change or removal of Pres­i­dent Maduro.” Yet, respond­ing to a ques­tion after­ward, Mr. Tiller­son raised the poten­tial for a mil­i­tary coup.

“When things are so bad that the mil­i­tary lead­er­ship real­izes that it just can’t serve the cit­i­zens any­more, they will man­age a peace­ful tran­si­tion,” he said.

Days lat­er, Sen­a­tor Mar­co Rubio of Flori­da, who has sought to shape the Trump administration’s approach toward Latin Amer­i­ca, wrote a series of Twit­ter posts that encour­aged dis­si­dent mem­bers of the Venezue­lan armed forces to top­ple their com­man­der in chief.

“Sol­diers eat out of garbage cans & their fam­i­lies go hun­gry in Venezuela while Maduro & friends live like kings & block human­i­tar­i­an aid,” Mr. Rubio wrote. He then added: “The world would sup­port the Armed Forces in #Venezuela if they decide to pro­tect the peo­ple & restore democ­ra­cy by remov­ing a dic­ta­tor.”

In a speech in April, when he was still White House pol­i­cy chief for Latin Amer­i­ca, Mr. Cruz issued a mes­sage to the Venezue­lan mil­i­tary. Refer­ring to Mr. Maduro as a “mad­man,” Mr. Cruz said all Venezue­lans should “urge the mil­i­tary to respect the oath they took to per­form their func­tions. Hon­or your oath.”
...

We’ll see if there are more coup plots on the way for this par­tic­u­lar net­work of rogue mil­i­tary offi­cers. But per­haps one of the most omi­nous fun-facts in the arti­cle had to do with the fact that this net­work of rogue offi­cers was only one of at least three net­works active­ly plot­ting against the Maduro gov­ern­ment. That’s accord­ing to this mys­te­ri­ous Venezue­lan com­man­der who was will­ing to talk to reports. It’s quite an admis­sion:

...
The account of the clan­des­tine meet­ings and the pol­i­cy debates pre­ced­ing them is drawn from inter­views with 11 cur­rent and for­mer Amer­i­can offi­cials, as well as the for­mer Venezue­lan com­man­der. He said at least three dis­tinct groups with­in the Venezue­lan mil­i­tary had been plot­ting against the Maduro gov­ern­ment.
...

So we have an assas­si­na­tion attempt in ear­ly August, fol­lowed by a crack­down on rogue offi­cers. And a few weeks lat­er we get this report involv­ing inter­views of 11 for­mer and cur­rent US offi­cials and one of the coup plot­ters describ­ing a series of meet­ings with the coup plot­ters that did­n’t result in any US assis­tance and went nowhere. And then the coup plot­ter com­ments on how there are at least three dis­tinct groups of mil­i­tary plot­ters, which is cer­tain­ly believ­able but it’s a remark­able admis­sion to make to the New York Times right after your own group just got cracked down on.

It’s all quite mys­te­ri­ous, with per­haps the biggest mys­tery being why any of these peo­ple decid­ed to talk to the New York Times at all about all this.

Here’s a sto­ry worth keep­ing an eye on, although that could end up being dif­fi­cult due to the nature of the sto­ry: Back in 2016, Con­gress amend­ed the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act to place a 25-year cap on doc­u­ments pre­vi­ous­ly shield­ed by what the Jus­tice Depart­ment calls “delib­er­a­tive process priv­i­lege”. As a result, there’s poten­tial­ly quite a few legal doc­u­ments that are now acces­si­ble through FOIA requests. A LOT of doc­u­ments. And that includes doc­u­ments detail­ing the Jus­tice Depart­men­t’s Office of Legal Counsel’s prece­dent-set­ting legal opin­ions which the Jus­tice Depart­ment has pre­vi­ous­ly shield­ed from FOIA requests. The Office of Legal Coun­sel has for decades been mak­ing deci­sions about its inter­pre­ta­tion of what the law is for the exec­u­tive branch and keep­ing it secret under the “delib­er­a­tive process priv­i­lege.” So there’s been decades of secret legal deci­sions build­ing up and those deci­sions more than 25 years old are now arguably sub­ject to pub­lic release. But the Jus­tice Depart­ment has­n’t been com­ply­ing with those requests so last week a group of schol­ars filed a fed­er­al law­suit argu­ing that Office of Legal Coun­sel mem­o­ran­da that are at least 25 years old should be dis­closed to the pub­lic under FOIA. It’s poten­tial­ly a very big deal.

Part of what makes it such a big deal is that many of Office of Legal Coun­sel deci­sions made when Attor­ney Gen­er­al Bill Bar­r’s was ini­tial­ly Attor­ney Gen­er­al dur­ing the George H. W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion in 1991–1993 would now be sub­ject to release. This could include Office of Legal Coun­sel opin­ions on top­ics like Bar­r’s deci­sion to approve a vast sur­veil­lance pro­gram back in 1992 that was­n’t sub­ject to legal review or Bar­r’s rec­om­men­da­tion that the offi­cials behind the Iran Con­tra oper­a­tion be par­doned. The legal opin­ions for scan­dalous deci­sions like that might final­ly be revealed to the pub­lic. But only if this law­suit suc­ceeds:

Politi­co

The Jus­tice Depart­ment Can’t Keep Its Own Law Secret For­ev­er

By CRISTIAN FARIAS
August 29, 2019

Cris­t­ian Farias is a for­mer mem­ber of The New York Times’ edi­to­r­i­al board and a writer-in-res­i­dence at the Knight First Amend­ment Insti­tute.

When the Supreme Court and low­er courts inter­pret the Con­sti­tu­tion and laws, their decrees are pub­lic, acces­si­ble and sub­ject to debate. In some instances, if an inter­pre­ta­tion of the law doesn’t sit well with the pub­lic, Con­gress can respond by amend­ing the law, effec­tive­ly nul­li­fy­ing a court’s deci­sion. Or if a rul­ing on a con­sti­tu­tion­al ques­tion is espe­cial­ly egre­gious, a con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment, though unlike­ly, remains an option.

But it turns out there’s a whole cat­e­go­ry of Amer­i­can law that is above such checks and bal­ances. The pub­lic knows noth­ing about it and there’s no way to chal­lenge it in court, let alone debate it in the halls of Con­gress.

For decades, the Jus­tice Department’s Office of Legal Coun­sel has flexed its inter­pre­tive pow­er as the ulti­mate arbiter of what the law is for the exec­u­tive branch, build­ing a a whole body of secret law that remains shield­ed from pub­lic view. Very lit­tle is known about these opinions—which car­ry the force of law, resolve dis­putes between agen­cies, direct the con­duct of fed­er­al offi­cials and can even affect civ­il rights and lib­er­ties. In the view of one schol­ar, these opin­ions date “to the begin­ning of the Repub­lic” and can even “rival the opin­ions of the Supreme Court.”

These deci­sions num­ber in the thou­sands, and the few that become pub­lic see the light of day at the dis­cre­tion of the Jus­tice Depart­ment. But the vast major­i­ty stay secret—binding exec­u­tive branch offi­cials and activ­i­ties across admin­is­tra­tions. Because almost every­one who isn’t a lawyer in the office is kept in the dark about these legal con­clu­sions, Con­gress and the pub­lic can’t debate them or seek amend­ments in the event of abus­es. Courts are of no help either.

Indeed, with­out trans­paren­cy to test these legal opin­ions in a court of law or the court of pub­lic opin­ion, it is often the case that the Jus­tice Depart­ment has the final say on the actions of fed­er­al agen­cies and offi­cers, and there’s not much any­one can do about it. From Robert Mueller’s deci­sion to fol­low a 1973 Jus­tice Depart­ment rec­om­men­da­tion that a pres­i­dent can’t be indict­ed while in office to numer­ous pro­nounce­ments shield­ing Don­ald Trump or offi­cials in his admin­is­tra­tion from con­gres­sion­al over­sight, the Office of Legal Coun­sel makes law that holds tremen­dous sway over issues of pub­lic con­cern.

And yet despite the influ­ence of the office’s opin­ions across the exec­u­tive branch and their cen­tral­i­ty to many of Trump’s con­tro­ver­sies, all the pub­lic knows about them is the smat­ter­ing of deci­sions that are made pub­lic from time to time. The Jus­tice Depart­ment claims to have the last word over what gets released to the pub­lic, sub­ject to a secre­tive “pub­li­ca­tion review com­mit­tee” that calls the shots.

Accord­ing to one for­mer Jus­tice Depart­ment offi­cial, in 1991, when Attor­ney Gen­er­al William Barr first led the Jus­tice Depart­ment, the gov­ern­ment only pub­lished 13 opin­ions out of an esti­mat­ed 625 that the Office of Legal Coun­sel gave to oth­er agencies—a pal­try 2 per­cent that leaves Amer­i­cans with lit­tle under­stand­ing of the law that guid­ed the Unit­ed States’ gov­ern­ment at the time.

In 2016, Con­gress amend­ed the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act to place a 25-year cap on doc­u­ments pre­vi­ous­ly shield­ed by what the Jus­tice Depart­ment calls “delib­er­a­tive process privilege”—which the gov­ern­ment has cit­ed in the past to keep Office of Legal Counsel’s prece­dent-set­ting legal opin­ions secret. By law, then, that type of priv­i­lege should no longer cov­er such deci­sions old­er than 25 years—though some or por­tions of them may still be kept from dis­clo­sure if, for exam­ple, they con­tain clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion. And nei­ther should the depart­ment be allowed to claim attor­ney-client priv­i­lege over these opin­ions, which aren’t legal advice but con­trol­ling deci­sions of law.

With this under­stand­ing of the law and with an eye toward greater trans­paren­cy, a group of schol­ars last week filed a law­suit in fed­er­al court argu­ing that Office of Legal Coun­sel mem­o­ran­da that are at least 25 years old should be dis­closed to the pub­lic under the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act. Among the plain­tiffs are his­to­ri­ans of pres­i­den­tial pow­er, the civ­il rights move­ment, the laws of war, gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance and immigration—all areas where the government’s enor­mous dis­cre­tion to enforce the law has been guid­ed by legal judg­ments that our cit­i­zen­ry would be well served to under­stand and reck­on with, even today. The Jus­tice Depart­ment didn’t com­ply with an ear­li­er admin­is­tra­tive request for these opin­ions.

Under­stand­ing past over­reach could help us bet­ter under­stand today’s. Barr, then and now, is the kind of attor­ney gen­er­al whose expan­sive views of exec­u­tive pow­er deserve legal scrutiny—and the pub­lic is enti­tled to know to what extent the Office of Legal Coun­sel abet­ted or dis­re­gard­ed his max­i­mal­ist impuls­es. More than 25 years ago, he was behind some of the Jus­tice Department’s dark­est hours: From a law­less sur­veil­lance pro­gram he approved that long pre­dat­ed the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency’s post‑9/11 excess­es to his role in rec­om­mend­ing par­dons for offi­cials impli­cat­ed in the Iran-Con­tra affair, the Amer­i­can peo­ple deserve to know how much secret law he helped cre­ate for the pres­i­dents he’s served—and how much of it may still be good law for the rest of the exec­u­tive branch today. For all we know, some of these deci­sions may have been over­ruled by lat­er admin­is­tra­tions, pres­i­dents or attor­neys gen­er­al; the endur­ing secre­cy of these opin­ions makes it dif­fi­cult to tell.

Right now, we see these opin­ions’ weight and opac­i­ty play­ing out. In Decem­ber, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion is expect­ed to resume exe­cut­ing fed­er­al pris­on­ers on death row, end­ing a long­stand­ing, de fac­to mora­to­ri­um on the fed­er­al death penal­ty. Barr’s deci­sion to rein­state the prac­tice didn’t hap­pen in a vac­u­um, but was pre­ced­ed by the advice of the Office of Legal Coun­sel, which in May con­clud­ed in a 26-page mem­o­ran­dum that the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion lacks the author­i­ty to reg­u­late “drugs” and “devices” used in cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment.

That con­clu­sion was square­ly at odds with the agency’s pri­or dis­ap­proval of pen­to­bar­bi­tal, the drug Barr now wants to use in the upcom­ing exe­cu­tions. What­ev­er reg­u­la­to­ry road­blocks exist­ed before have been removed. The Office of Legal Coun­sel has now declared what the law is—at least as far as the exec­u­tive branch and the FDA are con­cerned. Unless a court steps in, these exe­cu­tions will move for­ward with Barr’s new lethal cock­tail of choice.

...

———-

“The Jus­tice Depart­ment Can’t Keep Its Own Law Secret For­ev­er” by CRISTIAN FARIAS; Politi­co; 08/29/2019

“For decades, the Jus­tice Department’s Office of Legal Coun­sel has flexed its inter­pre­tive pow­er as the ulti­mate arbiter of what the law is for the exec­u­tive branch, build­ing a a whole body of secret law that remains shield­ed from pub­lic view. Very lit­tle is known about these opinions—which car­ry the force of law, resolve dis­putes between agen­cies, direct the con­duct of fed­er­al offi­cials and can even affect civ­il rights and lib­er­ties. In the view of one schol­ar, these opin­ions date “to the begin­ning of the Repub­lic” and can even “rival the opin­ions of the Supreme Court.””

Decades of secret legal opin­ions from the office that acts as the ulti­mate arbiter of what the law is for the exec­u­tive branch. That’s quite a trea­sure trove of impor­tant his­to­ry. And it might be on the verge of being released thanks to 2016 con­gres­sion­al amend­ment to the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion act. Maybe. It depends on whether or not the Jus­tice Depart­ment com­plies, which has­n’t hap­pened yet. Hence the law­suit filed last week:

...
In 2016, Con­gress amend­ed the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act to place a 25-year cap on doc­u­ments pre­vi­ous­ly shield­ed by what the Jus­tice Depart­ment calls “delib­er­a­tive process privilege”—which the gov­ern­ment has cit­ed in the past to keep Office of Legal Counsel’s prece­dent-set­ting legal opin­ions secret. By law, then, that type of priv­i­lege should no longer cov­er such deci­sions old­er than 25 years—though some or por­tions of them may still be kept from dis­clo­sure if, for exam­ple, they con­tain clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion. And nei­ther should the depart­ment be allowed to claim attor­ney-client priv­i­lege over these opin­ions, which aren’t legal advice but con­trol­ling deci­sions of law.

With this under­stand­ing of the law and with an eye toward greater trans­paren­cy, a group of schol­ars last week filed a law­suit in fed­er­al court argu­ing that Office of Legal Coun­sel mem­o­ran­da that are at least 25 years old should be dis­closed to the pub­lic under the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act. Among the plain­tiffs are his­to­ri­ans of pres­i­den­tial pow­er, the civ­il rights move­ment, the laws of war, gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance and immigration—all areas where the government’s enor­mous dis­cre­tion to enforce the law has been guid­ed by legal judg­ments that our cit­i­zen­ry would be well served to under­stand and reck­on with, even today. The Jus­tice Depart­ment didn’t com­ply with an ear­li­er admin­is­tra­tive request for these opin­ions.
...

To get an idea of just how much could poten­tial­ly be up for release, when Bill Barr was Attor­ney Gen­er­al in 1991, only 13 out of 625 opin­ions by the Office of Legal Coun­sel were released to the pub­lic. So this is like a legal black box sud­den­ly get­ting opened. Maybe. If the law­suit suc­ceeds. And that legal black box might include the Office of Legal Coun­sel’s opin­ions on Bar­r’s rec­om­men­da­tion to par­don the Iran Con­tra cul­prits. That’s just one tan­ta­liz­ing exam­ple of the kind of top­ics these legal opin­ions might cov­er:

...
Accord­ing to one for­mer Jus­tice Depart­ment offi­cial, in 1991, when Attor­ney Gen­er­al William Barr first led the Jus­tice Depart­ment, the gov­ern­ment only pub­lished 13 opin­ions out of an esti­mat­ed 625 that the Office of Legal Coun­sel gave to oth­er agen­cies—a pal­try 2 per­cent that leaves Amer­i­cans with lit­tle under­stand­ing of the law that guid­ed the Unit­ed States’ gov­ern­ment at the time.

...

Under­stand­ing past over­reach could help us bet­ter under­stand today’s. Barr, then and now, is the kind of attor­ney gen­er­al whose expan­sive views of exec­u­tive pow­er deserve legal scrutiny—and the pub­lic is enti­tled to know to what extent the Office of Legal Coun­sel abet­ted or dis­re­gard­ed his max­i­mal­ist impuls­es. More than 25 years ago, he was behind some of the Jus­tice Department’s dark­est hours: From a law­less sur­veil­lance pro­gram he approved that long pre­dat­ed the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency’s post‑9/11 excess­es to his role in rec­om­mend­ing par­dons for offi­cials impli­cat­ed in the Iran-Con­tra affair, the Amer­i­can peo­ple deserve to know how much secret law he helped cre­ate for the pres­i­dents he’s served—and how much of it may still be good law for the rest of the exec­u­tive branch today. For all we know, some of these deci­sions may have been over­ruled by lat­er admin­is­tra­tions, pres­i­dents or attor­neys gen­er­al; the endur­ing secre­cy of these opin­ions makes it dif­fi­cult to tell.
...

Also keep in mind that many of these Office of Legal Coun­sel opin­ions may have been writ­ten by peo­ple who assumed the opin­ions were going to remain secret indef­i­nite­ly. If that’s the case, who knows how twist­ed the legal rea­son­ing may have got­ten in some of these cas­es. And there’s only one way to find out which is why the law­suit by this group of schol­ars is going to be a case to watch.

As we’ve seen, while there’s been no short­age of GOP sup­port for Pres­i­dent Trump’s calls for call­ing in the mil­i­tary to squash the grow­ing police bru­tal­i­ty protests fol­low­ing the killing of George Floyd, it’s been Sen­a­tor Tom Cot­ton who has per­haps been the most vocal in call­ing for fed­er­al troops to police US streets and com­bat a large­ly-phan­tom ‘antifa’ threat. So it’s no sur­prise that when it came to hav­ing a sen­a­tor for­mal­ly artic­u­late the argu­ments for the pub­lic as to why Trump should be essen­tial­ly declar­ing war on the protests it was Sen­a­tor Cot­ton who end­ed up pen­ning the New York Times opin­ion piece that frames the use of the mil­i­tary against the pro­test­ers as not just a viable option but a con­sti­tu­tion­al oblig­a­tion. Yep, Trump has to call in the mil­i­tary accord­ing to Cot­ton. Why? Because Demo­c­ra­t­ic gov­er­nors and may­ors are in some cas­es refus­ing to uphold the rule of law by refus­ing to call in the Nation­al Guard and there­fore the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly oblig­ed to step in accord­ing to Cot­ton. It’s that fram­ing of call­ing in the mil­i­tary as not just con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly allow­able but con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly nec­es­sary that made the piece so chill­ing. Plus the fact that he explic­it­ly frames the pro­test­ers engaged in loot­ing and riot­ing as insur­rec­tion­ists. Because if there’s one thing the far right has been want­i­ng for years it’s a sce­nario where they get to pre­tend like they have to go to war against ‘the Left’. It’s a desire the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion made clear with its Rex 84 mar­tial law con­tin­gency plans. Con­tin­gency plans drawn up pre­cise­ly for a sce­nario involv­ing quelling wide­spread race riots. And when we read Cot­ton’s piece in the New York Times, it’s hard to avoid the con­clu­sion that he’s basi­cal­ly call­ing for a ‘Rex 84’ sce­nario:

The New York times

Tom Cot­ton: Send In the Troops
The nation must restore order. The mil­i­tary stands ready.

By Tom Cot­ton
Mr. Cot­ton, a Repub­li­can, is a Unit­ed States sen­a­tor from Arkansas.

June 3, 2020

Edi­tors’ Note, June 5, 2020:

After pub­li­ca­tion, this essay met strong crit­i­cism from many read­ers (and many Times col­leagues), prompt­ing edi­tors to review the piece and the edit­ing process. Based on that review, we have con­clud­ed that the essay fell short of our stan­dards and should not have been pub­lished.

The basic argu­ments advanced by Sen­a­tor Cot­ton — how­ev­er objec­tion­able peo­ple may find them — rep­re­sent a news­wor­thy part of the cur­rent debate. But giv­en the life-and-death impor­tance of the top­ic, the senator’s influ­en­tial posi­tion and the grav­i­ty of the steps he advo­cates, the essay should have under­gone the high­est lev­el of scruti­ny. Instead, the edit­ing process was rushed and flawed, and senior edi­tors were not suf­fi­cient­ly involved. While Sen­a­tor Cot­ton and his staff coop­er­at­ed ful­ly in our edit­ing process, the Op-Ed should have been sub­ject to fur­ther sub­stan­tial revi­sions — as is fre­quent­ly the case with such essays — or reject­ed.

For exam­ple, the pub­lished piece presents as facts asser­tions about the role of “cadres of left-wing rad­i­cals like antifa”; in fact, those alle­ga­tions have not been sub­stan­ti­at­ed and have been wide­ly ques­tioned. Edi­tors should have sought fur­ther cor­rob­o­ra­tion of those asser­tions, or removed them from the piece. The asser­tion that police offi­cers “bore the brunt” of the vio­lence is an over­state­ment that should have been chal­lenged. The essay also includes a ref­er­ence to a “con­sti­tu­tion­al duty” that was intend­ed as a para­phrase; it should not have been ren­dered as a quo­ta­tion.

Beyond those fac­tu­al ques­tions, the tone of the essay in places is need­less­ly harsh and falls short of the thought­ful approach that advances use­ful debate. Edi­tors should have offered sug­ges­tions to address those prob­lems. The head­line — which was writ­ten by The Times, not Sen­a­tor Cot­ton — was incen­di­ary and should not have been used.

Final­ly, we failed to offer appro­pri­ate addi­tion­al con­text — either in the text or the pre­sen­ta­tion — that could have helped read­ers place Sen­a­tor Cotton’s views with­in a larg­er frame­work of debate.

This week, riot­ers have plunged many Amer­i­can cities into anar­chy, recall­ing the wide­spread vio­lence of the 1960s.

New York City suf­fered the worst of the riots Mon­day night, as May­or Bill de Bla­sio stood by while Mid­town Man­hat­tan descend­ed into law­less­ness. Bands of loot­ers roved the streets, smash­ing and emp­ty­ing hun­dreds of busi­ness­es. Some even drove exot­ic cars; the riots were car­ni­vals for the thrill-seek­ing rich as well as oth­er crim­i­nal ele­ments.

Out­num­bered police offi­cers, encum­bered by feck­less politi­cians, bore the brunt of the vio­lence. In New York State, riot­ers ran over offi­cers with cars on at least three occa­sions. In Las Vegas, an offi­cer is in “grave” con­di­tion after being shot in the head by a riot­er. In St. Louis, four police offi­cers were shot as they attempt­ed to dis­perse a mob throw­ing bricks and dump­ing gaso­line; in a sep­a­rate inci­dent, a 77-year-old retired police cap­tain was shot to death as he tried to stop loot­ers from ran­sack­ing a pawn­shop. This is “somebody’s grand­dad­dy,” a bystander screamed at the scene.

Some elites have excused this orgy of vio­lence in the spir­it of rad­i­cal chic, call­ing it an under­stand­able response to the wrong­ful death of George Floyd. Those excus­es are built on a revolt­ing moral equiv­a­lence of riot­ers and loot­ers to peace­ful, law-abid­ing pro­test­ers. A major­i­ty who seek to protest peace­ful­ly shouldn’t be con­fused with bands of mis­cre­ants.

But the riot­ing has noth­ing to do with George Floyd, whose bereaved rel­a­tives have con­demned vio­lence. On the con­trary, nihilist crim­i­nals are sim­ply out for loot and the thrill of destruc­tion, with cadres of left-wing rad­i­cals like antifa infil­trat­ing protest march­es to exploit Floyd’s death for their own anar­chic pur­pos­es.

These riot­ers, if not sub­dued, not only will destroy the liveli­hoods of law-abid­ing cit­i­zens but will also take more inno­cent lives. Many poor com­mu­ni­ties that still bear scars from past upheavals will be set back still fur­ther.

One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an over­whelm­ing show of force to dis­perse, detain and ulti­mate­ly deter law­break­ers. But local law enforce­ment in some cities des­per­ate­ly needs back­up, while delu­sion­al politi­cians in oth­er cities refuse to do what’s nec­es­sary to uphold the rule of law.

The pace of loot­ing and dis­or­der may fluc­tu­ate from night to night, but it’s past time to sup­port local law enforce­ment with fed­er­al author­i­ty. Some gov­er­nors have mobi­lized the Nation­al Guard, yet oth­ers refuse, and in some cas­es the riot­ers still out­num­ber the police and Guard com­bined. In these cir­cum­stances, the Insur­rec­tion Act autho­rizes the pres­i­dent to employ the mil­i­tary “or any oth­er means” in “cas­es of insur­rec­tion, or obstruc­tion to the laws.”

This ven­er­a­ble law, near­ly as old as our repub­lic itself, doesn’t amount to “mar­tial law” or the end of democ­ra­cy, as some excitable crit­ics, igno­rant of both the law and our his­to­ry, have com­i­cal­ly sug­gest­ed. In fact, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment has a con­sti­tu­tion­al duty to the states to “pro­tect each of them from domes­tic vio­lence.” Through­out our his­to­ry, pres­i­dents have exer­cised this author­i­ty on dozens of occa­sions to pro­tect law-abid­ing cit­i­zens from dis­or­der. Nor does it vio­late the Posse Comi­ta­tus Act, which con­strains the military’s role in law enforce­ment but express­ly excepts statutes such as the Insur­rec­tion Act.

For instance, dur­ing the 1950s and 1960s, Pres­i­dents Dwight Eisen­how­er, John Kennedy and Lyn­don John­son called out the mil­i­tary to dis­perse mobs that pre­vent­ed school deseg­re­ga­tion or threat­ened inno­cent lives and prop­er­ty. This hap­pened in my own state. Gov. Orval Faubus, a racist Demo­c­rat, mobi­lized our Nation­al Guard in 1957 to obstruct deseg­re­ga­tion at Lit­tle Rock Cen­tral High School. Pres­i­dent Eisen­how­er fed­er­al­ized the Guard and called in the 101st Air­borne in response. The fail­ure to do so, he said, “would be tan­ta­mount to acqui­es­cence in anar­chy.”

More recent­ly, Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush ordered the Army’s Sev­enth Infantry and 1,500 Marines to pro­tect Los Ange­les dur­ing race riots in 1992. He acknowl­edged his dis­gust at Rod­ney King’s treat­ment — “what I saw made me sick” — but he knew dead­ly riot­ing would only mul­ti­ply the vic­tims, of all races and from all walks of life.

Not sur­pris­ing­ly, pub­lic opin­ion is on the side of law enforce­ment and law and order, not insur­rec­tion­ists. Accord­ing to a recent poll, 58 per­cent of reg­is­tered vot­ers, includ­ing near­ly half of Democ­rats and 37 per­cent of African-Amer­i­cans, would sup­port cities’ call­ing in the mil­i­tary to “address protests and demon­stra­tions” that are in “response to the death of George Floyd.” That opin­ion may not appear often in chic salons, but wide­spread sup­port for it is fact nonethe­less.

The Amer­i­can peo­ple aren’t blind to injus­tices in our soci­ety, but they know that the most basic respon­si­bil­i­ty of gov­ern­ment is to main­tain pub­lic order and safe­ty. In nor­mal times, local law enforce­ment can uphold pub­lic order. But in rare moments, like ours today, more is need­ed, even if many politi­cians pre­fer to wring their hands while the coun­try burns.

————-

“Tom Cot­ton: Send In the Troops” by Tom Cot­ton; The New York times; 06/03/2020

“The Amer­i­can peo­ple aren’t blind to injus­tices in our soci­ety, but they know that the most basic respon­si­bil­i­ty of gov­ern­ment is to main­tain pub­lic order and safe­ty. In nor­mal times, local law enforce­ment can uphold pub­lic order. But in rare moments, like ours today, more is need­ed, even if many politi­cians pre­fer to wring their hands while the coun­try burns.”

These aren’t nor­mal times. This is a rare moment. A rare moment when mar­tial law is required. That’s lit­er­al­ly how he end­ed his piece. By fram­ing these protests, which are cer­tain­ly large and his­toric and have had real issues with loot­ing, as that rare moment when con­sti­tu­tion­al pro­tec­tions against the mil­i­tary oper­at­ing in US cities need to be sus­pend­ed. And that, accord­ing to Cot­ton, is why invok­ing the Insur­rec­tion Act is not just some­thing Trump can do but some­thing he has the con­sti­tu­tion­al duty to the states to do. Trump must do this now. That’s Cot­ton’s mes­sage:

...
One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an over­whelm­ing show of force to dis­perse, detain and ulti­mate­ly deter law­break­ers. But local law enforce­ment in some cities des­per­ate­ly needs back­up, while delu­sion­al politi­cians in oth­er cities refuse to do what’s nec­es­sary to uphold the rule of law.

The pace of loot­ing and dis­or­der may fluc­tu­ate from night to night, but it’s past time to sup­port local law enforce­ment with fed­er­al author­i­ty. Some gov­er­nors have mobi­lized the Nation­al Guard, yet oth­ers refuse, and in some cas­es the riot­ers still out­num­ber the police and Guard com­bined. In these cir­cum­stances, the Insur­rec­tion Act autho­rizes the pres­i­dent to employ the mil­i­tary “or any oth­er means” in “cas­es of insur­rec­tion, or obstruc­tion to the laws.”

This ven­er­a­ble law, near­ly as old as our repub­lic itself, doesn’t amount to “mar­tial law” or the end of democ­ra­cy, as some excitable crit­ics, igno­rant of both the law and our his­to­ry, have com­i­cal­ly sug­gest­ed. In fact, the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment has a con­sti­tu­tion­al duty to the states to “pro­tect each of them from domes­tic vio­lence.” Through­out our his­to­ry, pres­i­dents have exer­cised this author­i­ty on dozens of occa­sions to pro­tect law-abid­ing cit­i­zens from dis­or­der. Nor does it vio­late the Posse Comi­ta­tus Act, which con­strains the military’s role in law enforce­ment but express­ly excepts statutes such as the Insur­rec­tion Act.
...

So that’s at least one mes­sage being whis­pered in Trump’s ears: “You must call in the mil­i­tary, Mr. Pres­i­dent. It’s your duty”. And, again, it’s not like Cot­ton is alone in hold­ing these opin­ions. He’s just excep­tion­al­ly shame­less when it comes to pub­licly voic­ing them. So with that in mind, here’s a 2017 piece by Max Blu­men­thal that gives an overview of Cot­ton’s back­ground and ide­ol­o­gy. And ide­ol­o­gy that appears to have glob­al war as one of its fun­da­men­tal goals. It’s one of the things to keep in mind about Cot­ton: at least he’s consistent...he wants to see US troops occu­py­ing every­where, includ­ing US cities.

The piece also high­lights one of the more dis­turb­ing insights we can learn from Cot­ton’s old writ­ings about what makes Cot­ton tick: it turns out his senior the­sis at Har­vard about the Fed­er­al­ist Papers was basi­cal­ly an exal­ta­tion of polit­i­cal ambi­tion. “Ambi­tion char­ac­ter­izes and dis­tin­guish­es nation­al office­hold­ers from oth­er kinds of human beings,” Cot­ton wrote. “Inflam­ma­to­ry pas­sion and self­ish inter­est char­ac­ter­izes most men, where­as ambi­tion char­ac­ter­izes men who pur­sue and hold nation­al office. Such men rise from the peo­ple through a process of self-selec­tion since pol­i­tics is a dirty busi­ness that dis­cour­ages all but the most ambi­tious.”

So that’s some­thing to keep in mind about this young Sen­a­tor who is still con­sid­ered a ris­ing star in Repub­li­can pol­i­tics who is call­ing for war against US pro­test­ers: he’s real­ly, real­ly, real­ly ambi­tious:

The Gray Zone

Why the Mere Idea That Neo­con Sen­a­tor Tom Cot­ton Might Run Trump’s CIA Is Ter­ri­fy­ing

Strangelov­ian Sen­a­tor Tom Cot­ton effu­sive­ly advo­cates world war with­out end.

By Max Blu­men­thal
Decem­ber 17, 2017

This arti­cle was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished at Alter­Net.

In a recent pro­file of Tom Cot­ton, the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Willick char­ac­ter­ized the 40-year-old junior Repub­li­can sen­a­tor from Arkansas as “hawk­ish and real­is­tic” and described his world­view as “tinged with ide­al­ism.” Yet it was unclear what the unabashed­ly Strangelov­ian Cot­ton did to earn such a char­i­ta­ble descrip­tion, as he rat­tled off a series of opin­ions that amount­ed to a call for world war with­out end.

Cot­ton told Willick he favored arm­ing Japan and South Korea with nuclear weapons to counter North Korea, an unprece­dent­ed esca­la­tion that would bring the region a stride clos­er to armaged­don. Chi­na, accord­ing to Cot­ton, is a “rival in every regard” that must be iso­lat­ed eco­nom­i­cal­ly and con­front­ed mil­i­tar­i­ly with aggres­sive free­dom of nav­i­ga­tion oper­a­tions in the South Chi­na Sea. (The sen­a­tor ignored a recent Rand assess­ment that found the US could eas­i­ly find itself out­matched in a duel with the Chi­nese mil­i­tary.) From east­ern Europe to Asia to the Mid­dle East, Cot­ton urged regime change oper­a­tions to replace gov­ern­ments that resist­ed Pax Amer­i­cana with “coun­tries that share our prin­ci­ples.” On Iran, Cot­ton would accept noth­ing short of war, imag­in­ing a cake­walk that would only require “sev­er­al days” of bomb­ing, as he has pre­vi­ous­ly said.

Cotton’s remarks are espe­cial­ly dis­turb­ing in light of rumors of his poten­tial nom­i­na­tion as CIA direc­tor. Reports sur­faced this Novem­ber of a com­ing reshuf­fle that would move Mike Pom­peo, a long­time stooge of the Koch Broth­ers and evan­gel­i­cal Mus­lim bash­er, from CIA to Sec­re­tary of State, dis­lodg­ing the insuf­fi­cient­ly loy­al Rex Tiller­son, who Trump has trashed as “weak on every­thing.” While the Cot­ton appoint­ment may not hap­pen in the imme­di­ate future, he still appears to be next in line to take the helm at Lan­g­ley in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. If the move ever takes place, one of the key hubs of the nation­al secu­ri­ty state would fall into the hands of a mil­i­tant neo­con­ser­v­a­tive whose world­view was formed through pro­longed cul­ti­va­tion in a right-wing hot­house.

Cot­ton would hard­ly be the first ide­o­logue to take the helm at Lan­g­ley. Dur­ing the 1950s, Allen Dulles used the CIA as a vehi­cle to recruit a col­lec­tion of Nazi war crim­i­nals and mafia hench­men for covert anti-com­mu­nist cam­paigns across Europe, devel­op the failed mind con­trol pro­gram MK ULTRA and plot assas­si­na­tions and inter­na­tion­al intrigues in order to top­ple pop­u­lar gov­ern­ments. Then there was Bill Casey, who paint­ed the Sovi­et Union as the pup­pet mas­ter of inter­na­tion­al ter­ror­ism in order to jus­ti­fy secret­ly fund­ing Cen­tral Amer­i­can death squads through the world’s most unsa­vory third par­ties.

But Cot­ton is in a class of his own, not because he is an unbri­dled zealot, but because he would be the first ful­ly devel­oped prod­uct of the neo­con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment to rise to such a sen­si­tive posi­tion. If appoint­ed, he is almost cer­tain to mil­i­ta­rize intel­li­gence in the ser­vice of the Sau­di-Israeli axis and dri­ve their desta­bi­liz­ing anti-Iran­ian agen­da to ter­ri­fy­ing extremes.

The path to pow­er, from Har­vard to Iraq

Cotton’s groom­ing as a neo­con cadre began at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty, where he won a fel­low­ship from the Clare­mont Insti­tute, a right-wing think tank in Cal­i­for­nia that fused the anti-gay kul­turkampf with lib­er­tar­i­an “starve the beast” eco­nom­ics. At the Har­vard Crim­son, Cot­ton emerged as a pro­lif­ic voice of prep­py reac­tion, pro­mot­ing divorce-proof “covenant mar­riages” as a rem­e­dy for social decay, uphold­ing polit­i­cal apa­thy as a virtue and activism as a vice, and hail­ing the val­or of pro­fes­sion­al golfers. “With­out great sol­diers, we can receive such instruc­tion, for instance, from Justin Leonard, whose six­ty-foot putt on the sev­en­teenth hole after two-and-a-half days of poor play sealed the Amer­i­can vic­to­ry,” Cot­ton wrote in Sep­tem­ber 1999, liken­ing the Ryder Cup to the Bat­tle of Anti­etam.

Cotton’s senior the­sis at Har­vard was an ode to the most elit­ist, anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic themes con­tained in the Fed­er­al­ist Papers. “Inflam­ma­to­ry pas­sion and self­ish inter­est char­ac­ter­izes most men, where­as ambi­tion char­ac­ter­izes men who pur­sue and hold nation­al office,” Cot­ton wrote of the Found­ing Fathers. “Such men rise from the peo­ple through a process of self-selec­tion since pol­i­tics is a dirty busi­ness that dis­cour­ages all but the most ambi­tious.”

His own ambi­tion vault­ed him into the ranks of the U.S. Army as it bar­reled across Iraq and sent the coun­try spi­ral­ing into a sec­tar­i­an blood­bath. From inside armored per­son­nel car­ri­ers and behind the bar­rel of a gun, Cot­ton expe­ri­enced his only sub­stan­tive engage­ment with the peo­ple of the glob­al south. It was clear­ly a for­ma­tive peri­od that left him brim­ming with hos­til­i­ty. “One thing I learned in the Army is that when your oppo­nent is on his knees, you dri­ve him to the ground and choke him out,” he reflect­ed this Octo­ber. Though he failed to earn any spe­cial dis­tinc­tion on the bat­tle­field, Cot­ton resort­ed to opin­ion writ­ing to earn a bit of fame back home.

In Jan­u­ary 2006, New York Times cor­re­spon­dents Eric Licht­blau and James Risen revealed the exis­tence of a war­rant­less CIA pro­gram that exam­ined the finan­cial records of Amer­i­can cit­i­zens sus­pect­ed of ter­ror­ist involve­ment. The sto­ry appeared almost simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in sev­er­al oth­er papers, trig­ger­ing a pub­lic tantrum from Vice Pres­i­dent Dick Cheney. From his gar­ri­son in Iraq, Cot­ton saw a per­fect oppor­tu­ni­ty to ral­ly the con­ser­v­a­tive shock troops back in the States. He fired off an indig­nant email to the New York Times and cc’ed a right-wing blog, Pow­er­line, for good mea­sure. Cit­ing his cre­den­tials as a Har­vard Law grad and for­mer law clerk, Cot­ton demand­ed Licht­blau, Risen and their edi­tor, Bill Keller, be jailed under the Espi­onage Act: “By the time we return home, maybe you will be in your right­ful place: not at the Pulitzer announce­ments, but behind bars,” he thun­dered at the jour­nal­ists.

George W. Bush’s approval rat­ing was hov­er­ing around 30 per­cent by this point, pub­lic sup­port for the war had evap­o­rat­ed and Amer­i­cans were com­ing home by the thou­sands in wheel­chairs and coffins. But here was a young pla­toon leader—a Har­vard Law grad, no less—willing to defend the war on ter­ror against the trea­so­nous nabobs of neg­a­tivism. When Pow­er­line pub­lished the let­ter, Cot­ton became an instant folk hero among right-wing Iraq war dead-enders. Before he had even returned home to his family’s cat­tle farm in Arkansas, his polit­i­cal career had been made.

The great neo­con hope

Cot­ton first entered Con­gress in 2012 as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the for­mer­ly Demo­c­ra­t­ic Arkansas dis­trict that con­tained Bill Clinton’s home­town. Iran-bash­ing became his hob­by horse, prompt­ing him to intro­duce an extreme “Cor­rup­tion of Blood” bill that would have for­bid­den trade with the rel­a­tives of Iran­ian indi­vid­u­als who were under sanc­tions, from their great-grand­chil­dren to their nieces and uncles. Panned as an out­ra­geous vio­la­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion, the bill died on the House floor, an embar­rass­ing rebuke to the self-styled con­sti­tu­tion­al law expert. (Arti­cle III of the Con­sti­tu­tion for­bids pun­ish­ing the rel­a­tives of those con­vict­ed of trea­son, while the Fifth Amend­ment grants due process even to non-cit­i­zens charged with crimes.)

Cot­ton struck out the fol­low­ing year on a cam­paign to unseat incum­bent Demo­c­ra­t­ic Sen. Mark Pry­or. On the stump, he demon­strat­ed all the charis­ma of a fil­ing cab­i­net, com­pen­sat­ing for his life­less deliv­ery with incen­di­ary warn­ings that a coali­tion of ISIS ter­ror­ists and Mex­i­can drug car­tels would over­run the coun­try unless the south­ern bor­der was sealed off with a Mag­inot-style wall. Cot­ton won in a land­slide, sail­ing into the Sen­ate on the strength of surg­ing anti-Oba­ma sen­ti­ment and piles of cash from Likud­nik oli­garchs.

As Eli Clifton and Jim Lobe report­ed, the sec­ond largest source of fund­ing for Cotton’s sen­ate cam­paign was Paul Singer, the pro-Israel ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist who has bankrolled a who’s who of neo­con out­fits in Wash­ing­ton. Cot­ton also ben­e­fit­ed from near­ly a mil­lion dol­lars in sup­port­ive adver­tis­ing from the Emer­gency Com­mit­tee for Israel, a right-wing group found­ed by the face of the neo­con move­ment, Bill Kris­tol. ECI oper­at­ed for a time out of the offices of the Com­mit­tee for the Lib­er­a­tion of Iraq, the group that drummed up sup­port for regime change in Iraq. This office also housed Ori­on Strate­gies, the lob­by­ing firm that has rep­re­sent­ed the gov­ern­ments of Tai­wan and the Repub­lic of Geor­gia, two of the key US-backed bul­warks against Chi­na and Rus­sia.

A relent­less dri­ve toward war with Iran

In the Sen­ate, Cotton’s obses­sion with Iran deep­ened by the day. With­in weeks of his swear­ing-in, he orches­trat­ed an explo­sive let­ter signed by 46 Repub­li­can sen­a­to­r­i­al col­leagues and addressed to the “Lead­er­ship of the Islam­ic Repub­lic of Iran.” Pub­lished on Sen­ate let­ter­head, the mis­sive aimed to con­vince Iran­ian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to dis­re­gard the pow­er of Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma to imple­ment the inter­na­tion­al­ly bro­kered P5+1 nuclear non-pro­lif­er­a­tion nego­ti­a­tions. The arguably unprece­dent­ed stunt led to accu­sa­tions that Cot­ton had vio­lat­ed the Logan Act, which for­bade diplo­mat­ic free­boot­ing.

While the White House fumed, Cot­ton tweet­ed a trans­lat­ed ver­sion of his let­ter to Khamenei, For­eign Min­is­ter Javad Zarif and Pres­i­dent Has­san Rouhani. But in his haste, it appeared Cot­ton had act­ed with­out the help of a native Far­si speak­er and sim­ply run the let­ter through Google trans­late: “We hope while the nuclear nego­ti­a­tions are pro­gress­ing this let­ter enrich­ing your knowl­edge of our con­sti­tu­tion­al sys­tem and mutu­al clear under­stand­ing ele­vat­ing,” the con­clud­ing line read.

A day after the diplo­mat­ic fias­co, Cot­ton scram­bled off to a pri­vate event with the Nation­al Defense Indus­tri­al Asso­ci­a­tion, the lob­by­ing arm of America’s top arms mer­chants. Cotton’s rhetoric on Iran was music to the ears of the weapons indus­try. “The pol­i­cy of the Unit­ed States should be regime change in Iran,” he declared. “I don’t see how any­one can say Amer­i­ca can be safe as long as you have in pow­er a theo­crat­ic despo­tism.”

Iron­i­cal­ly, the sen­a­tor hasound a nat­ur­al ally in Riyadh, the polit­i­cal vor­tex of theo­crat­ic despo­tism. When Trump inked an unprece­dent­ed $150 bil­lion arms deal with Sau­di king­dom, Cot­ton chimed in with his effu­sive approval. “This arms deal sends the right mes­sage to both friend and foe alike,” Cot­ton stat­ed, describ­ing it as a step “to main­tain peace in the region.”

...

Trump’s open embrace of the Sau­di-Israeli axis has ele­vat­ed Cotton’s influ­ence, trans­form­ing him into the administration’s con­gres­sion­al Iran whis­per­er. While advis­ing efforts to whit­tle away at the Iran nuclear deal, he has co-spon­sored leg­is­la­tion to make it eas­i­er to reim­pose sanc­tions despite Iran’s faith­ful com­pli­ance with the agree­ment. Cotton’s pres­ence in the Sen­ate is so cen­tral to the neo­con agen­da that the Week­ly Standard’s Fred Barnes has argued against his pro­mo­tion to CIA direc­tor. But as Cot­ton made clear in his senior the­sis long ago, he views him­self as a man of des­tiny dri­ven to the heights of pow­er by lim­it­less ambi­tion. Before long, the world could become a lab­o­ra­to­ry for his own “inflam­ma­to­ry pas­sion.”

————

“Why the Mere Idea That Neo­con Sen­a­tor Tom Cot­ton Might Run Trump’s CIA Is Ter­ri­fy­ing” by Max Blu­men­thal; The Gray Zone; 12/17/2017

“Cot­ton told Willick he favored arm­ing Japan and South Korea with nuclear weapons to counter North Korea, an unprece­dent­ed esca­la­tion that would bring the region a stride clos­er to armaged­don. Chi­na, accord­ing to Cot­ton, is a “rival in every regard” that must be iso­lat­ed eco­nom­i­cal­ly and con­front­ed mil­i­tar­i­ly with aggres­sive free­dom of nav­i­ga­tion oper­a­tions in the South Chi­na Sea. (The sen­a­tor ignored a recent Rand assess­ment that found the US could eas­i­ly find itself out­matched in a duel with the Chi­nese mil­i­tary.) From east­ern Europe to Asia to the Mid­dle East, Cot­ton urged regime change oper­a­tions to replace gov­ern­ments that resist­ed Pax Amer­i­cana with “coun­tries that share our prin­ci­ples.” On Iran, Cot­ton would accept noth­ing short of war, imag­in­ing a cake­walk that would only require “sev­er­al days” of bomb­ing, as he has pre­vi­ous­ly said.”

Regime change across the world. That’s Tom Cot­ton’s for­eign pol­i­cy. You can’t say the guy isn’t ambi­tious. And nei­ther can he since his senior the­sis was a cel­e­bra­tion of polit­i­cal ambi­tion:

...
Cotton’s groom­ing as a neo­con cadre began at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty, where he won a fel­low­ship from the Clare­mont Insti­tute, a right-wing think tank in Cal­i­for­nia that fused the anti-gay kul­turkampf with lib­er­tar­i­an “starve the beast” eco­nom­ics. At the Har­vard Crim­son, Cot­ton emerged as a pro­lif­ic voice of prep­py reac­tion, pro­mot­ing divorce-proof “covenant mar­riages” as a rem­e­dy for social decay, uphold­ing polit­i­cal apa­thy as a virtue and activism as a vice, and hail­ing the val­or of pro­fes­sion­al golfers. “With­out great sol­diers, we can receive such instruc­tion, for instance, from Justin Leonard, whose six­ty-foot putt on the sev­en­teenth hole after two-and-a-half days of poor play sealed the Amer­i­can vic­to­ry,” Cot­ton wrote in Sep­tem­ber 1999, liken­ing the Ryder Cup to the Bat­tle of Anti­etam.

Cotton’s senior the­sis at Har­vard was an ode to the most elit­ist, anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic themes con­tained in the Fed­er­al­ist Papers. “Inflam­ma­to­ry pas­sion and self­ish inter­est char­ac­ter­izes most men, where­as ambi­tion char­ac­ter­izes men who pur­sue and hold nation­al office,” Cot­ton wrote of the Found­ing Fathers. “Such men rise from the peo­ple through a process of self-selec­tion since pol­i­tics is a dirty busi­ness that dis­cour­ages all but the most ambi­tious.”
...

And note that Cot­ton pre­deed­ed that the­sis pas­sage with the state­ment, “Ambi­tion char­ac­ter­izes and dis­tin­guish­es nation­al office­hold­ers from oth­er kinds of human beings.” He real­ly seemed to view polit­i­cal ambi­tions as some­thing that sets him apart from the rest of human­i­ty. So his sense of self-worth is tied up in his polit­i­cal ambi­tions. Ambi­tions that appear to involve glob­al dom­i­na­tion, includ­ing war against his polit­i­cal oppo­nents at home. And now he’s an influ­en­tial sen­a­tor. Great.

And note the warn­ing from 2017 that could eas­i­ly come to fruition if Trump wins reelec­tion: Tom Cot­ton is on the short-list to be a Repub­li­can head of the CIA. He clear­ly wants the job and in 2017 it looked like he might get it. Tina Haspel — who has a his­to­ry with the Bush admin­is­tra­tion’s tor­ture pro­gram — got the job instead. But as Blu­men­thal warns us, Cot­ton is still on Trump’s short-list to head the CIA at some point. So if Trump wins reelec­tion, the raw pow­er of the CIA to covert­ly wage war against domes­tic polit­i­cal ene­mies will be in the hands of some­one like Cot­ton:

...
Cotton’s remarks are espe­cial­ly dis­turb­ing in light of rumors of his poten­tial nom­i­na­tion as CIA direc­tor. Reports sur­faced this Novem­ber of a com­ing reshuf­fle that would move Mike Pom­peo, a long­time stooge of the Koch Broth­ers and evan­gel­i­cal Mus­lim bash­er, from CIA to Sec­re­tary of State, dis­lodg­ing the insuf­fi­cient­ly loy­al Rex Tiller­son, who Trump has trashed as “weak on every­thing.” While the Cot­ton appoint­ment may not hap­pen in the imme­di­ate future, he still appears to be next in line to take the helm at Lan­g­ley in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion. If the move ever takes place, one of the key hubs of the nation­al secu­ri­ty state would fall into the hands of a mil­i­tant neo­con­ser­v­a­tive whose world­view was formed through pro­longed cul­ti­va­tion in a right-wing hot­house.

Cot­ton would hard­ly be the first ide­o­logue to take the helm at Lan­g­ley. Dur­ing the 1950s, Allen Dulles used the CIA as a vehi­cle to recruit a col­lec­tion of Nazi war crim­i­nals and mafia hench­men for covert anti-com­mu­nist cam­paigns across Europe, devel­op the failed mind con­trol pro­gram MK ULTRA and plot assas­si­na­tions and inter­na­tion­al intrigues in order to top­ple pop­u­lar gov­ern­ments. Then there was Bill Casey, who paint­ed the Sovi­et Union as the pup­pet mas­ter of inter­na­tion­al ter­ror­ism in order to jus­ti­fy secret­ly fund­ing Cen­tral Amer­i­can death squads through the world’s most unsa­vory third par­ties.

But Cot­ton is in a class of his own, not because he is an unbri­dled zealot, but because he would be the first ful­ly devel­oped prod­uct of the neo­con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment to rise to such a sen­si­tive posi­tion. If appoint­ed, he is almost cer­tain to mil­i­ta­rize intel­li­gence in the ser­vice of the Sau­di-Israeli axis and dri­ve their desta­bi­liz­ing anti-Iran­ian agen­da to ter­ri­fy­ing extremes.
...

So that’s all some­thing to keep in mind as Pres­i­dent Trump con­tin­ues to pub­licly play with the idea of invok­ing the Insur­rec­tion Act: the guy who is most like­ly to be Trump’s next head of the CIA should he win reelec­tion real­ly wants to see fed­er­al troops polic­ing US streets and he’s not afraid of shar­ing those views. Quite the con­trary, he’s work­ing on main­stream­ing them with opin­ion pieces that describe the invo­ca­tion of the Insur­rec­tion Act as a con­sti­tu­tion­al duty to the states. That New York Times piece prob­a­bly won’t be his final words on this top­ic. This is going to be one of those right-wing memes going for­ward. The nor­mal­iza­tion of the idea has already start­ed. Whether or not the cur­rent protests end next week or go on for months we can be sure there’s going to talk on the right-wing about call­ing in the mil­i­tary to deal with ‘the left’ and that’s what going to make the main­stream­ing of this idea with Repub­li­can audi­ences almost inevitable. The tan­ta­liz­ing prospect of mil­i­tar­i­ly crush­ing ‘the left’ — a far right fever dream for decades — has been offi­cial dan­gled by Trump, Cot­ton, and the rest of the peo­ple voic­ing sup­port for this move. The mar­tial law genie is out of the bot­tle.

Will Sen­a­tor Cot­ton suc­ceed in con­vinc­ing the pub­lic that the Insur­rec­tion Act needs to be invoked and the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment needs to send the mil­i­tary in to states whether or not gov­er­nors request it? We’ll see, but win­ning the pub­lic over in sup­port of that idea is clear­ly one of his many, many polit­i­cal ambi­tions. Ambi­tions that, accord­ing to his Har­vard the­sis, sets him apart from the rest of human­i­ty. Yikes.