Author Archives: BrettBible

Why Trump Can’t Come Clean on Russia

by BrettBible Posted on February 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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There is an old chestnut that gets tossed out whenever a scandal hits: It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up. The saying traces back to Watergate. Sen. Howard Baker, the top Republican on the Senate Watergate committee, once noted, “It is almost always the cover-up rather than the event that causes trouble.” This week, following the resignation of national security adviser Michael Flynn, NBC News’ Chuck Todd was one of many who quipped, “It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.” And that was certainly a significant element of the Flynn imbroglio: Flynn had lied about his December conversation with the Russian ambassador, concealing the fact that they had discussed the sanctions President Barack Obama had just levied on Russia as punishment for its covert efforts to swing the 2016 election to Trump. But in this case the bigger scandal at hand is not a cover-up. It is the thing itself: the connections between the Trump camp and Moscow during the campaign, when Vladimir Putin was trying to subvert American democracy.

Certainly, the Trump campaign has strived mightily to smother this potentially explosive scandal. Here’s a partial account.

* Days after the election, Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said in an interview that “there were contacts” between the Trump team and the Kremlin. He noted, “Obviously, we know most of the people from his entourage.” Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks immediately said the campaign had “no contact with Russian officials” before the election.

* At Trump’s January 11 press conference, a reporter asked him, “Can you stand here today, once and for all, and say that no one connected to you or your campaign had any contact with Russia leading up to or during the presidential campaign?” Trump did not reply. But after the press conference ended and Trump was leaving, he did answer that query with a firm “no.”

* On January 15, on Face the Nation, John Dickerson asked incoming Vice President Mike Pence, “Did any adviser or anybody in the Trump campaign have any contact with the Russians who were trying to meddle in the election?” Pence declared, “Of course not. And I think to suggest that is to give credence to some of these bizarre rumors that have swirled around the candidacy.”

* On February 14, at the daily White House briefing, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl asked press secretary Sean Spicer whether any Trump associates were in touch with the Russian government prior to the election. Spicer replied, “There’s nothing that would conclude me that anything different has changed with respect to that time period.” That contorted statement was clearly meant as a no.

The drift is clear. Whenever queried about this highly sensitive matter, Trump and his minions have said there were no contacts between anyone in his crew and the Putin regime during the 2016 campaign. This is a cover-up.

There is evidence that Trump associates did interact with Russian officials during the campaign. The Washington Post story that broke open the Flynn affair a few days ago also reported that the Russian ambassador had told the newspaper he had been communicating with Flynn during the campaign. At that point, Flynn was Trump’s senior national security adviser. (As such, Flynn attended in mid-August the first briefing Trump received as the GOP nominee from the US intelligence community, during which Trump and Flynn were told that US intelligence agencies had concluded Russia was behind the hacking and leaking that targeted Democrats.) And on Tuesday night, the New York Times reported that intelligence intercepts indicated that several Trump associates had “repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.”

In late October, I reported that a former foreign counterintelligence officer had sent memos to the FBI indicating that the “Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years” and that Trump “and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals.” The memos also claimed that Russian intelligence had “compromised” Trump during his visits to Moscow and could “blackmail him,” and that Russian intelligence had compiled a dossier on Hillary Clinton based on “bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls.”

On Tuesday, I bumped into a prominent Republican consultant, and he said that Trump had to “get out in front of” the burgeoning scandal and disclose all the facts because “the cover-up is always worse.” The Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza offered similar advice to the president on Wednesday morning: “What is really needed at this point is a full and complete debrief for the American people from Trump himself. Why was his campaign in ‘constant’ contact with Russian officials? Who in the campaign—or the broader Trump organization—was involved? Are they still with the campaign or the business? What was discussed on these calls?…Why is Trump so reluctant to condemn Russia and Vladimir Putin in particular?”

But the cover-up here may not be worse than the actions being covered up.

At a minimum, it seems that Trump associates—at least Flynn—were secretly interacting with the Putin regime as it was plotting to subvert American democracy to help Trump win the White House. A key question is obvious: What did they discuss? The darkest possibility is that they talked about the Kremlin assault on the US election. Short of that, might Flynn or others have encouraged Putin’s clandestine operation by signaling that Moscow would have an easier time with a Trump administration than with a Clinton administration? Were there any winks or nods? After all, in late July, Trump called on Russia to hack Clinton. Whatever was discussed, any Trump associate who spoke with Russian officials during the summer or fall of the campaign had reason to know that he or she was interacting with a member of a regime that was actively attempting to undermine the election in a manner beneficial to Trump.

How can Trump and his crew concede that they were hobnobbing with a foreign government that was waging political warfare against the United States? The “full and complete debrief” that Cillizza advocates would require Trump to acknowledge that he and his team have covered up these contacts and explain why. This “full and complete debrief” could well show that Trump’s camp cozied up to a repressive government that was seeking to destabilize US politics to help Trump. It could reveal that Trump associates directly or indirectly encouraged Putin’s attack on the 2016 election.

Trump would lose all legitimacy as president were he to admit that anything of this sort transpired. There are some deeds that cannot be acknowledged. Expecting Trump and his lieutenants to confess that his campaign or business associates were networking with the Kremlin or Russian intelligence is not realistic—especially after their months of denial. (Trump also for months refused to accept the US intelligence assessment that Russia was behind the hacking and leaking aimed at Democratic targets, and when he finally bent on this point, he downplayed Moscow’s meddling in the election.) Trump cannot continue to present himself as the triumphant winner of a fair election if it turns out his own people were palling around with Moscow.

Another famous line is this: You can’t handle the truth. Further revelations about contacts between the Trump camp and Russia could pose an existential threat to the Trump White House. The clear choice for him and his gang is to deny, to stonewall, to distract, to lie. Trump doesn’t explain the pre-election contacts; he complains about leaks. He casts all interest in this controversy as merely the revenge of the Clinton losers. He calls reporting on the Russia connection “fake news” and slams journalists pursuing the Flynn story as “fake media.” This is not shocking. He might not be able to survive a full accounting. The poison of the cover-up may be less deadly than the poison of the event itself. Only Trump and the people involved can know for sure. But investigations of the Russian contacts now being conducted by the FBI and the congressional intelligence committees—if they are mounted effectively and yield public results—may eventually allow us to see the full calculation. In the meantime, the public can justifiably conclude that when it comes to Trump-Russia connections during the campaign, the Trump team has been covering up for very good reasons.

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Why Trump Can’t Come Clean on Russia

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Irradiated Food Sounds Like a Terrible Thing. It’s Actually Really Good.

by BrettBible Posted on August 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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Mattias Mackler

In 2002, the East Coast supermarket chain Wegmans introduced a line of packaged ground beef that had been irradiated with an electron beam to kill bacteria. Company executives expected the product to do well; a series of foodborne illness outbreaks had rendered Americans’ confidence in food safety dismally low. The launch came at the start of grilling season, and executives thought it would be a hit with people who liked their burgers rare but didn’t want to get sick from undercooked meat. The slogan: “Cook it the way you like it!”

But to their surprise, sales were unimpressive—and they remain so today, says Wegmans’ meat merchandising manager, Mark Spagnola. One reason might be the higher price: Irradiated beef can cost as much as 80 cents more per pound. But Wegmans’ customers are willing to pay a premium for other special foods, like organics. So more likely, it’s irradiation itself that put shoppers off. Many consumer surveys have found that people consider irradiation—which the federal government approved for some foods as early as the 1960s—creepy and unsafe. “Some people even think their food is going to be radioactive,” Spagnola says, “which is just totally not how this works.”

Here’s how it does work: At a special irradiation plant—there are just a handful in the United States—workers zap food with a machine similar to the kind that administers radiation to cancer patients. Most facilities use electron beams, but some irradiate with X-rays or gamma rays. While the dose of radiation is high, it doesn’t stay with the food—and workers are protected from it with safety gear and massive concrete walls. The result, says Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota foodborne illness expert who has studied irradiation extensively, is that it kills as many bacteria as cooking at high temperatures—but without any loss of taste. “Food irradiation shows absolutely no detrimental impact on the food,” he says.

Hundreds of studies have proved that irradiation neither adds compounds to food nor takes nutrients away—and that it can help prevent the foodborne illnesses that sicken 48 million Americans and kill 3,000 every year. The World Health Organization and the US Department of Agriculture have deemed the technology safe for food, as has the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which asserts that in addition to eliminating dangerous bacteria in human food, the technique could also be used to prevent the spread of disease in livestock through its feed.

Yet some food advocacy groups have campaigned vociferously against the technique. Food and Water Watch, for example, argues that it might induce manufacturers to zap food instead of maintaining a clean plant. “This could be a gateway to faster line speeds at meat facilities and sloppier handling practices,” says Patty Lovera, the organization’s assistant director. But Rick Holley, a food microbiologist and irradiation expert at the University of Manitoba, sees the technique as an extra tool, rather than a crutch; irradiation, he points out, doesn’t get rid of all bacteria, just most. “You can’t make bad food good using irradiation,” he says. “If your plant is dirty and not inspected and overtaxed, the food is going to be bad in a way that irradiation can’t fix.”

In fact, you’re probably already eating irradiated products. About a third of dried herbs and spices are irradiated to prevent salmonella, and imported fruits like mangoes and papayas are sometimes zapped to kill invasive insects. The technique is also used to sterilize medical equipment like gloves, bandages, and syringes, as well as personal-care products like contact lens solution and baby bottle nipples. Several European countries regularly irradiate all kinds of food; the French even do it to Camembert cheese so as to cut down on pathogens from raw milk. In South Africa, safari operators eat irradiated meat because it has a long shelf life, even in hot climates.

To be sure, the technology isn’t cheap—but that, says Harlan Clemmons, who runs an irradiation facility in Sioux City, Iowa, is mostly because it costs a lot of money to ship all that meat to the special plants. Although the equipment is expensive (about $18 million up front), Clemmons calculates that if meat processors did irradiation in-house, over time they could bring the cost down “to next to nothing.”

But that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon unless consumers start embracing the technique—which might require more public attention. In a 2005 study, 484 shoppers at grocery stores in four Texas towns were asked about their opinion of irradiated foods. Then they read material about how an electron beam works and watched a short video on the topic. Initially, about 18 percent of the shoppers described themselves as “doubters” or “rejecters” of irradiation. But after the statements and video, that number dwindled to just 3.8 percent. Osterholm likens the public mistrust of irradiation to the anti-vaccine movement. “We know that we could eliminate many food safety problems with this technique,” he says. “And yet people are still fighting it.”

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Irradiated Food Sounds Like a Terrible Thing. It’s Actually Really Good.

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