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NBC’s weak climate questions help make the case for a climate debate

the youth doth protest just enough

Climate activists protest at the DNC headquarters ahead of the first primary debate

Ten candidates will take the stage at the first official Democratic National Committee debate tonight in Miami, Florida. But a question already looms over the festivities: Should the DNC host a climate-themed debate?

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NBC’s weak climate questions help make the case for a climate debate

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What’s on Iowans’ minds going into the 2020 caucuses? Climate change

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What’s on Iowans’ minds going into the 2020 caucuses? Climate change

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Democratic National Committee to Jay Inslee: No climate-focused debate

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Democratic National Committee to Jay Inslee: No climate-focused debate

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Climate activists have their next target: The DNC debates

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This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

No city better embodies the challenges of climate change than the setting for the first Democratic debate in June. At least 10 candidates who meet the DNC’s set of polling and grassroots fundraising criteria will take the stage in Miami, a city that will face the threat of encroaching seas on a daily basis in the next 25 years. Many of the climate activists who have spent their time recently urging presidential hopefuls to embrace the Green New Deal and reject donations from fossil fuel industries are preparing for their next battle: pushing for a future presidential debate focused entirely on climate.

Environmental and progressive groups including 350.org, Greenpeace, Sunrise movement, Credo Action, and Friends of the Earth plan to ramp up campaigns in the coming weeks and months calling on the Democratic National Committee, as well as the major networks and individual 2020 candidates, to dedicate one of the dozen official debates to a subject that has never gotten its due in primetime.

“We’re seeing a shift in people’s consciousness,” Janet Redman, Greenpeace USA’s climate program manager, told Mother Jones. “We need to see that starting to be reflected in our politics—that it’s not an isolated set of incidents or phenomenon. The public is craving politicians to have a conversation on this. They want to know real solutions.”

It’s not the first cycle activists have tried to persuade the DNC to give climate change some attention in the debates. The DNC itself doesn’t control the questions that are asked—that’s up to the networks that wind up partnering with for the events—but there have been debates focused on broad themes like national security and the economy. But through a combination of bird-dogging, protests, online campaigning, and the increasing prevalence of climate in the national conversation—not to mention burgeoning scientific evidence of its severity and grave consequences—activists have become more ambitious, seeking to have a full 90 minutes focused on the finer points of climate action.

The hyperpartisan nature of the climate debate tends to obscure the fact that there is a huge spectrum of proposed solutions for addressing the problem. “It’s like saying we shouldn’t have a debate on health care because all Democratic candidates agree more people should have access to health care,” says Evan Weber, political director of Sunrise Movement. In the past, when candidates are asked about this at all, the questions tend to be about whether a candidate believes in climate change, thinks of it as a priority, or has any plan for action.

Even now, it’s easy to imagine how candidates will express their commitment to a Green New Deal and deflect specifics with some applause line about climate change as an existential threat, a national security threat, or an opportunity to show American leadership. Moderately talented politicians could avoid addressing the many challenges and paths forward on climate. For instance, beneath the generally universal enthusiasm for the Green New Deal vision, there are huge fractures about whether the traditional gold standard of a carbon tax championed by economists should be included, or how to handle nuclear power, or how to handle fracking and the continued leasing of lands for fossil fuels.

“My fear is there will be some softball climate questions that aren’t specific, aren’t digging deep, [and] therefore make it hard for us to make any candidate who is elected accountable,” Redman says. “What we’re trying to do by focusing on primaries is pulling the entire field of candidates to bolder positions.”

One of those bolder positions would be to force candidates to take a clear stand on where fossil fuel leasing and production fits into their climate plans. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have taken definitive positions saying they would reject new leasing on public lands, but Beto O’Rourke, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris have not shared their opinion on the future of natural gas despite voicing their support for the Green New Deal. Another question would be how climate fits into the candidates’ priorities. Should Washington Governor Jay Inslee make the stage, he is likely to ask other candidates to demonstrate that this is a priority by promising specific action during their first 100 days in office.

Climate has always faced an unnaturally high bar to make it to the debate stage, considered in the past as a niche issue rather than a central concern, despite tens of thousands of Americans losing their homes to fires, mudslides, and floods. That was clear in 2012 when Mitt Romney and Barack Obama appeared at the CNN debate and its moderator replaced a question “for all you climate change people” with one about the national debt. There were no direct questions on solving the climate crisis that cycle, nor were there any questions in the general election debates in 2016 (the Democratic primary featured a little more debate centered around fracking).

But this year is likely to be different. After another year of record wildfires and extreme weather, capped off by alarming headlines from the normally staid Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Democratic primary voters have never been more concerned about climate. According to a Des Moines Register, CNN, and Mediacom poll in March, 80 percent of those polled said candidates should spend “a lot” of time talking about climate change, placing this issue only second to concerns about health care. And the vision for the Green New Deal, when stripped of partisan context, has polled at astoundingly high rates across partisan lines.

Thus far, the DNC has no plans for any issue-specific debates, other than providing a “platform for candidates to have a vigorous discussion on ideas and solutions on the issues that voters care about, including the economy, climate change, and health care,” DNC spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa emailed Mother Jones. Unlike Republicans stuck in climate denial, “Democrats are eager to put forward their solutions to combat climate change, and we will absolutely have these discussions during the 2020 primary process.”

Greenpeace’s Redman counters that promise “absolutely falls short.”

“I think it’s night and day,” says Brandy Doyle, climate campaign manager for the progressive advocacy organization Credo Action. Grassroots activists and climate campaigners “worked really hard to inject the idea of climate change in the conversation in 2016, to even push for a question on climate change in the debates.”

For activists, the key to forcing these debates is to be able to hold the nominee accountable if he or she wins, which becomes impossible within a general election that will be entirely about drawing a contrast to Trump. “If you can’t articulate the urgency of the climate crisis and your vision for addressing it,” Doyle says, “you’re not qualified for president.”

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Climate activists have their next target: The DNC debates

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Hacks, Leaks, and Tweets: Everything We Now Know About the Attack on the 2016 Election

Mother Jones

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The drumbeat of revelations over the past several weeks has been overwhelming. So we’ve created this timeline—from the hacking of the Democratic National Committee through the aftermath of Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey—to help you follow this scandal threatening the presidency.


April 2016: The Democratic National Committee contacts the FBI about suspicious computer activity and hires cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which ties the hacking to Russian intelligence.

June 15: Guccifer 2.0, a persona later connected to the Russians, takes credit for the DNC hack and begins posting documents.

Mary Altaffer/AP

July 5: FBI Director James Comey announces the bureau found no evidence to support criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server as secretary of state. But he adds that Clinton and her staff were “extremely careless” in their handling of classified information. Donald Trump tweets, “No charges. Wow! #RiggedSystem.”

July 22: Three days before the Democratic convention, WikiLeaks publishes nearly 20,000 hacked DNC emails. Some indicate that party officials favored Clinton over Bernie Sanders, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who resigns as party chair. Spread in part by Twitter bots, the emails further pit Clinton and Sanders supporters against each other.

July 24: Trump’s future CIA director, Rep. Mike Pompeo, tweets, “Need further proof that the fix was in from Pres. Obama on down? BUSTED: 19,252 Emails from DNC Leaked by WikiLeaks.” (Pompeo later deletes the tweet.)

July 27: Trump calls for Russia to hack Clinton’s email: “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

Late July: The FBI begins to investigate contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.

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Aug 8: Longtime Trump confidant and political dirty trickster Roger Stone boasts to a GOP group in Florida about WikiLeaks’ founder: “I actually have communicated with Julian Assange…There’s no telling what the October surprise may be.”

Aug 21: Stone tweets about Clinton campaign CEO John Podesta: “Trust me, it will soon be the Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary.”

#CrookedHillary #WikiLeaks #LockHerUp Seth Wenig/AP

Aug 27: After being briefed on classified information, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid sends a letter to Comey urging an investigation: “The prospect of individuals tied to Trump, WikiLeaks and the Russian government coordinating to influence our election raises concerns of the utmost gravity.”

Sept 9: Guccifer 2.0 communicates online with Stone about voter turnout and Democratic strategy.

Sept 15: Guccifer 2.0 posts stolen Democratic Party documents strategizing about battleground states.

Sept 26: In the first presidential debate, Trump suggests the DNC hack could be the work of China or “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”

Oct 1: Stone tweets, “Wednesday @HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks.”

Oct 3: Stone tweets, “I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon #LockHerUp.”

Oct 7: US intelligence agencies announce they are “confident” the Russian government aimed to interfere in the election and collaborated in the DNC leaks. Later in the day, a 2005 Access Hollywood video emerges in which Trump brags about sexually assaulting women. Within an hour, WikiLeaks begins releasing several thousand emails stolen from Podesta.

Oct 10: “I love WikiLeaks!” Trump declares at a campaign rally.

Oct 11: The Obama White House announces it is considering retaliation against Russia for cyberattacks.

Oct 12: The Wall Street Journal reports the FBI suspects Russian intelligence hacked Podesta’s emails. Stone tells a Miami TV station that he has “back-channel communications” with Assange.

Oct 19: During the final debate, Clinton says Trump would be Putin’s “puppet” if elected and rebukes his call to hack her email. “You encouraged espionage against our people.”

Oct 28: Comey notifies Congress that the FBI is reopening the Clinton matter, after a criminal probe into disgraced Rep. Anthony Weiner reveals his laptop contains emails between his wife, Huma Abedin, and Clinton, her boss.

Oct 31: At a campaign rally, Trump says, “It took guts for Director Comey to make the move that he made…where they’re trying to protect her from criminal prosecution…What he did was the right thing.”

Nov 8: Trump is elected president.

Nov 15: National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers remarks about Russia and WikiLeaks, “This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.”

Jan 4: Trump tweets, “Julian Assange said ‘a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta’—why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!”

Jan 6: The CIA, the FBI, and the NSA concur Russia tried to help Trump win via hacking operations involving Guccifer 2.0, DC Leaks, and WikiLeaks.

Jan 10: At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Comey declines to say whether the FBI is investigating Trump campaign ties to Russia. He notes that Russian hackers also attacked the Republican National Committee but that none of that material was released.

Jan 11: Trump acknowledges the Russians hacked the DNC: “I think it was Russia.”

Jan 14: Rep. John Lewis tells NBC’s Chuck Todd that he does not consider Trump to be “a legitimate president,” and he says he won’t attend Trump’s inauguration: “I think the Russians participated in helping this man get elected. And they helped destroy the candidacy of Hillary Clinton.”

Jan 15: Incoming White House chief of staff Reince Priebus says Trump has confidence in the FBI director: “We have had a great relationship with him over the last several weeks. He’s extremely competent.”

Jan 20: Trump is sworn in as president.

Jan 22: At a White House event, Trump greets Comey: “Oh, there’s Jim. He’s become more famous than me.”

Andrew Harrer/CNP/ZUMA

Jan 24: The FBI interviews national security adviser Michael Flynn about his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Jan 26: Acting Attorney General Sally Yates warns the Trump White House that Flynn lied about his conversations with Kislyak and is vulnerable to blackmail by the Kremlin.

Jan 27: Trump and Comey have a one-on-one dinner at the White House, where, it is later reported, Trump asks Comey to swear his political loyalty. Comey declines.

Jan 30: Trump fires Yates after she refuses on constitutional grounds to defend his travel ban targeting seven majority-Muslim countries.

Feb 13: After the Washington Post reveals Flynn lied about his conversations with Kislyak, Flynn resigns.

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Feb 19: Following a meeting with Comey, the Senate Intelligence Committee sends letters to more than a dozen agencies, groups, and individuals asking them to preserve all communications related to Russia’s 2016 election interference.

March 2: In the wake of revelations that Attorney General Jeff Sessions failed during his confirmation hearings to disclose two conversations with Kislyak, Sessions announces, “I have now decided to recuse myself from any existing or future investigations of any matter relating in any way to the campaigns for president of the United States.”

March 4: Based on no evidence, Trump tweets, “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”

March 7: In the wake of intense media coverage of Trump’s wiretapping claim, WikiLeaks releases more than 8,000 CIA files, code-named “Vault 7.”

March 8: Former NSA Director Michael Hayden says, “I’m now pretty close to the position that WikiLeaks is acting as…an agent of the Russian Federation.”

March 20: During a public hearing held by the House Intelligence Committee, Comey confirms the FBI is investigating possible “coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russia. He debunks Trump’s claims of surveillance by Obama: “I have no information that supports those tweets.”

March 27: “Trump Russia story is a hoax,” Trump tweets.

April 12: Asked if it’s “too late” for him to request Comey’s resignation, Trump tells Fox Business, “No, it’s not too late, but you know, I have confidence in him. We’ll see what happens. You know, it’s going to be interesting.”

April 30: Trump again casts doubts on the election attack, telling CBS News’ John Dickerson, “Could’ve been China. Could’ve been a lot of different groups.”

May 2: Trump tweets Comey is “the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton” and the “Trump/Russia story was an excuse used by the Democrats as justification for losing the election.”

May 3: Comey tells the Senate Judiciary Committee, “It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we may have had some impact on the election,” but says he reopened the Clinton probe because Abedin had forwarded “hundreds and thousands of emails, some of which contain classified information.”

First week of May: Comey seeks more resources for the Trump-Russia investigation.

May 8: Trump tweets, “The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?” Former National Intelligence Director James Clapper tells Congress that by sowing doubts, Trump “helps the Russians” damage the US political system.

May 9: The FBI corrects Comey’s testimony: Only “a small number” of Abedin emails were forwarded, few contained classified information, and none were new. The same day, Trump fires Comey via a letter delivered to FBI headquarters. Comey, in Los Angeles, learns of the news via a TV screen and initially thinks it’s a prank. Trump’s letter says he was prompted by Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who wrote a three-page memo critical of Comey’s handling of the Clinton probe. Trump’s letter also claims Comey personally absolved him on three separate occasions.

May 10: Trump unleashes a tweetstorm, including, “Comey lost the confidence of almost everyone in Washington, Republican and Democrat alike. When things calm down, they will be thanking me!”

Alexander Shcherbak/TASS/ZUMA

Meanwhile, at Putin’s request, Trump greets Kislyak and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office, where a Russian state-sponsored photographer is the only media allowed in. Trump tells them Comey was “a real nut job” and that firing him took “great pressure” off Trump with regard to Russia.

May 11: Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe testifies that, contra White House statements, the Russia probe is “highly significant” and “Comey enjoyed broad support within the FBI and still does to this day.” Trump tells NBC’s Lester Holt a new version of why he fired Comey: “I decided to just do it. I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.'”

May 12: Trump tweets, “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”

May 15: The Post reports that Trump disclosed highly classified intelligence on ISIS to Lavrov and Kislyak during their Oval Office meeting. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker says the White House is “in a downward spiral” and “has got to do something soon to bring itself under control and in order.”

May 16: The Times reports that Comey kept detailed memos on his interactions with Trump—including when Trump pressured him at an Oval Office meeting in February to shut down the FBI investigation into Flynn. “I hope you can let this go,” Trump told Comey.

May 17: Amid rising turmoil on Capitol Hill, including talk of possible impeachment of Trump for obstruction of justice, the Senate Intelligence Committee seeks Comey’s memos and invites him to testify. Rosenstein appoints former FBI Director Robert Mueller to serve as a special counsel overseeing the continuing FBI investigation.

See our entire updated Trump-Russia timeline dating back to the 1980s.

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Hacks, Leaks, and Tweets: Everything We Now Know About the Attack on the 2016 Election

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Trump Is Already Guilty of Aiding Putin’s Attack on America

Mother Jones

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The Trump-Russia scandal is the subject of multiple investigations that may or may not unearth new revelations, but this much is already certain: Donald Trump is guilty.

We don’t need additional information about the Russian covert scheme to undermine the 2016 campaign, or about the curious interactions between Team Trump and Russia, or about Trump pressuring and then firing FBI Director James Comey, to reach the judgment that the president of the United States engaged in wrongdoing.

From the start, Trump and his crew have claimed they had nothing to do with the hack-and-leak operation mounted by Russian intelligence to help Trump nab the presidency. They have dismissed the matter as fake news, and they have insisted there is no issue because there has been no proof that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia. In May, for instance, Trump proclaimed, “Believe me, there’s no collusion.” Nothing to see; move along.

Explicit collusion may yet be proved by the FBI investigation overseen by special counsel Robert Mueller or by other ongoing probes. But even if it is not, a harsh verdict can be pronounced: Trump actively and enthusiastically aided and abetted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plot against America. This is the scandal. It already exists—in plain sight.

Did Team Trump conspire with the Kremlin? Here’s a timeline of everything we now know about the attack on the 2016 election.

As soon as the news broke a year ago that the Russians had penetrated the Democratic National Committee’s computer systems, Trump launched a campaign of denial and distraction. For months, he refused to acknowledge the Kremlin’s role. He questioned expert and government findings that pinned the blame on Moscow. He refused to condemn Putin. Far from treating these acts of information warfare seriously, he attempted to politicize and delegitimize the evidence. Meanwhile, he and his supporters encouraged more Russian hacking. All told, Trump provided cover for a foreign government’s attempt to undermine American democracy. Through a propaganda campaign of his own, he helped Russia get away with it. As James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, testified to Congress this spring, Trump “helps the Russians by obfuscating who was actually responsible.”

On June 15, 2016, the day after the Washington Post reported that the DNC had been hacked and that cybersecurity experts had identified two groups linked to the Russian government as the perps, Trump’s campaign issued a statement blaming the victim: “We believe it was the DNC that did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate and failed party leader.” The intent was obvious: to impede somber consideration of the Russian intervention, to have voters and reporters see it as just another silly political hullabaloo.

Help us dig deep on Trump’s ties to Russia. Make a tax-deductible monthly or one-time donation to Mother Jones today.

In the following weeks, Trump continued to claim the Russia story was fiction. After WikiLeaks dumped nearly 20,000 DNC emails—a move that nearly blew up the Democratic convention—Trump tweeted, “The new joke in town is that Russia leaked the disastrous DNC e-mails, which should never have been written (stupid), because Putin likes me.” Two days later, he proclaimed at a news conference, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” Trump supporters including Rep. Mike Pompeo, who would become Trump’s CIA director, and Roger Stone, the longtime political dirty trickster, cheered on WikiLeaks.

By midsummer, numerous cyber experts had bolstered the conclusion that Russia was behind the hacks. And President Barack Obama echoed those findings. So anyone paying attention to the facts—say, a presidential candidate and his advisers—would have been aware of this fundamental point. Indeed, in August, during his first intelligence briefing as the Republican presidential nominee, Trump was reportedly told that there were direct links between the hacks and the Russian government.

Still, he didn’t change his tune. During a September 8 interview with RT, the Kremlin-controlled broadcaster that has been accused of disseminating fake news and propaganda, Trump discounted the Russian connection: “I think maybe the Democrats are putting that out. Who knows, but I think it’s pretty unlikely.” (Yes, he did this on RT.) He repeated a similar line at the first presidential debate at the end of that month, with his famous reference to how the DNC hacker “could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds, okay?”

The Spy Who Wrote the Trump-Russia Memos: It Was “Hair-Raising” Stuff

Private experts and US intelligence had already determined that Russia had pulled off this caper. Trump had been told this. Yet he continued to deny Russia’s culpability, actively protecting Moscow.

Many Republicans followed his lead. Trump’s stance—treating a widely shared conclusion as controversial speculation—essentially foreclosed a vigorous and bipartisan response to the Moscow intervention. It is hard to imagine how this did not embolden Russian intelligence and reinforce Putin’s belief that he had backed the right horse.

On October 7, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence blew the whistle on Moscow, issuing a statement that the DNC hack and related cyberattacks had been authorized by “Russia’s senior-most officials.” Yet Trump remained on the side of the enemy. That same day, the now notorious grab-them-by-the-pussy video surfaced—and less than an hour after that story broke, WikiLeaks began releasing thousands of stolen emails from John Podesta, the Clinton campaign’s chairman. Trump’s response, at the second presidential debate: “I notice, anytime anything wrong happens, they like to say ‘the Russians.’ Well, Hillary Clinton doesn’t know if it’s the Russians doing the hacking. Maybe there is no hacking.” The next day at a campaign rally, Trump, citing some of the Podesta emails, exclaimed, “I love WikiLeaks!”

What could be better for Putin? The US government had called him out, yet the GOP presidential candidate was discrediting this conclusion. Trump made it tougher for Obama and the White House to denounce Putin publicly—to do so, they feared, would give Trump cause to argue they were trying to rig the election against him.

At the final debate, Clinton accurately summed up Trump’s position: “It’s pretty clear you won’t admit that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people.” Trump replied, “Our country has no idea” who pulled off the hacks.

Read about the disturbing Trump-Russia dossier, whose existence was first reported by MoJo’s David Corn.

After the election, he maintained this stance. “It’s time for the country to move on,” he said in December. Two weeks later, after the US intelligence establishment released a report concluding Putin had implemented this covert op to install Trump in the White House, the president-elect compared the intelligence community to Nazi Germany. Though he did at one point concede Russia was the culprit, Trump continued calling the Russia story a hoax whipped up by Democrats and eventually reverted to form, asserting that the hacks might have been waged by China or others. And he still showed no signs of confronting Putin. At the Russian leader’s request, he jovially hosted the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in the Oval Office—and then disclosed top-secret information to them. Moreover, he did this the day after brazenly ousting Comey, who was overseeing the bureau’s probe of Moscow’s meddling and links between Trump associates and Russia.

It’s been common for political observers to say the Trump-Russia controversy has generated a great deal of smoke, but the amount of fire is yet to be determined. It’s true that the various links tying Trump and his associates to Russia have yet to be fully explained. Many questions remain: Was there any specific coordination? If not, did the Trump camp privately signal to Moscow that Russia would get a better deal if Trump were elected? That alone would have provided encouragement for Putin to attack.

This country needs a thorough and public investigation to sort out how the Russian operation worked, how US intelligence and the Obama administration responded, and how Trump and his associates interacted with Russia and WikiLeaks. But whatever happened out of public view, the existing record is already conclusively shameful. Trump and his crew were active enablers of Putin’s operation to subvert an American election. That is fire, not smoke. That is scandal enough.

See our entire updated Trump-Russia timeline dating back to the 1980s.

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Trump Is Already Guilty of Aiding Putin’s Attack on America

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Keith Ellison Is Everything Republicans Thought Obama Was. Maybe He’s Just What Democrats Need.

Mother Jones

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Chris Visions

Last May, as Donald Trump was locking up the Republican nomination, a prophetic clip began circulating among portions of the left. It was a nearly one-year-old segment of ABC’s Sunday show This Week, featuring Rep. Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat then on the verge of winning a sixth term. “Anybody from the Democratic side of the fence who’s terrified of the possibility of a President Trump better vote, better get active, better get involved,” Ellison warned, “because this man has got some momentum and we better be ready for the fact that he might be leading the Republican ticket.”

Ellison made his prediction in July 2015, shortly after Trump had launched his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists.” His fellow panelists laughed along with moderator George Stephanopoulos, who offered Ellison a lifeline. “I know you don’t believe that,” he said. But Ellison insisted, “Stranger things have happened.”

Now, Trump is president, and Ellison, who saw it coming, is after a new job: running the Democratic Party. He announced his candidacy for Democratic National Committee chair in mid-November, and he and former Labor Secretary Tom Perez are the front-runners for the position, which the nearly 450 members of the DNC will vote on in late February. Ellison, an early and vocal supporter of Bernie Sanders who campaigned hard for Hillary Clinton last fall, is running to unify a fragmented party. Sanders backs him. So do Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader. So does the AFL-CIO. Win or lose, the 53-year-old Ellison, a Muslim, African American co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is poised to hold a position of influence in the party during one of the darkest moments in its history. Democrats are out of the White House and in the minority in Congress, and they’ve lost their window to reshape the Supreme Court. They control both the governor’s mansion and legislature in just six states; with another round of redistricting looming, the electoral map is only poised to get worse.

The role of the DNC chairman is to run a political machine that helps to elect Democrats throughout the country, not to dictate the party’s policy priorities. But Ellison’s blueprint for defeating Trumpism is nonetheless rooted in the anti-establishment politics of Sanders. The DNC has become the “Democratic Presidential Committee,” he argues; short-sighted focus on big-dollar fundraising and swing states has weakened the party on a county-by-county level. Change starts with shifting the party apparatus toward assembling a multicultural army of organizers, focused on the communities likely to bear the full brunt of the new president’s policies. Ellison says the proof that this can work is in his district. Emphasizing door-to-door engagement over TV advertising, Ellison boasts he’s juiced turnout in his safe Democratic seat to some of the highest levels in the country. Even as the Upper Midwest goes red, Minnesota Democrats have scored victories at the state level, bolstered by Ellison’s Minneapolis machine.

Republicans are eager to take him on, because in many ways, the story of Keith Ellison is the story conservatives wanted to believe about another cerebral African American community organizer from the Midwest—Barack Obama. Raised Catholic in Detroit, Ellison converted to Islam, dabbled in black nationalism, and marched with the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan—all before his first bid for Congress in 2006. His past dogged him in that run, and it has continued to be an issue in the DNC race: Billionaire Haim Saban, one of the Democrats’ biggest donors, has trashed him as an “anti-Semite.”

As a young activist in Minneapolis, Ellison learned to build coalitions outside the scope of party politics. He also learned the limits of what such activism could achieve without political power. For Ellison, it was a time of experimentation, education, and sometimes radical dalliances that ultimately imbued in his politics a hard-edged pragmatism. Many Democrats underestimated the extent to which Trump’s religious intolerance and ravings about “inner cities” would appeal to broad, largely white swaths of the electorate. They banked on the arc of progress to knock him back. Ellison, who built his career battling racist institutions, knew better than to make that mistake.

Ellison was the third of five boys raised in a big brick house in a mixed-race enclave of Detroit known as Palmer Woods. His father, Leonard Ellison Sr., was a psychiatrist, an atheist, and a hard-ass who quizzed his sons on current events and drove them to Gettysburg to walk the battlefield every Easter. Leonard was a Republican, not an activist. While he once helped to integrate a sailboat race run by an all-white Detroit yacht club, he mostly believed in nudging a racist system through relentless achievement. The Ellison boys were expected to become either doctors or lawyers. They all did.

If his trajectory was ordained by his father, Ellison’s worldview bore the imprint of his mother, Clida, a devout Catholic from a Louisiana Creole family. The congressman’s maternal grandfather was a voting rights organizer in Natchitoches. Clida was sent to a boarding school for safety; the Ku Klux Klan once burned a cross outside their house. Clida’s family tree—with roots in the Balkans, France, Spain, and West Africa—was a prism for understanding the absurdity of the South’s racial caste system. Ellison’s younger brother, Anthony, now a lawyer in Boston, recalled Ellison struggling with their mother’s revelation that some of their Creole ancestors had owned slaves. During visits to a family cotton farm in Louisiana, Ellison brought notebooks and a tape recorder and spent hours interviewing relatives.

Ellison’s political awakening, which he credits to reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X at age 13, came during a period of racial turmoil in Detroit. When riots started after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Ellison, then five, hid under his bed as National Guard personnel carriers cruised past his block. Over a two-and-a-half-year period in the early 1970s, one Detroit police unit that formed after the riots was accused of killing 21 African Americans. Ellison feared crime and the people tasked with stopping it. After graduating from high school in 1981, he majored in economics at nearby Wayne State University, moving out of his leafy neighborhood and into a one-bedroom apartment in the city’s crack-ravaged Cass Corridor.

Ellison’s first brush with controversy came a few months into his freshmen year. After joining the student newspaper, the South End, he persuaded the editor to publish a cartoon featuring five identical black men dribbling a basketball alongside a man in a Klan robe who was clutching a club. Above it was a question: “How many Honkies are in this picture?” It was meant to poke fun at racial caricatures, but students didn’t see the humor. An African American classmate stormed into the newspaper’s office to confront him—a scene Ellison breezily recounted in a follow-up column mocking the outcry. His critics were “still living in the Jim Crow era,” Ellison wrote. The firestorm made the pages of the Detroit Free Press.

In the months to follow, friends noticed a change in Ellison. “He seemed to be a little more introspective, a little more circumspect,” says Mary Chapman, a Detroit writer who worked on the South End. “Maybe he grew up.”

Or maybe he found religion. Ellison had drifted from his mother’s Catholic church, but it had left a void. In his 2014 memoir, My Country, ‘Tis of Thee, Ellison writes that he began attending a mosque when he was 19—drawn by a billboard he passed on his commute. Clida Ellison described the reveal as more confusing than shocking. “He announced one day that he was going to mosque,” she said, “and my next question was: ‘What’s mosque?'”

Increasingly, he devoted his energy to anti-apartheid activism, and his columns took on a new urgency. When Bernie Goetz was acquitted of attempted murder after shooting four black men on a New York City subway, Ellison warned, “It won’t be long before police officers, old ladies, weekend survival gamers, and everyone else considers it open season on the brothers.”

He read a lot of Frantz Fanon, the Marxist anti-colonialist writer from Martinique, and in 1985 he attended a campus speech by Louis Farrakhan, the controversial Nation of Islam leader who blended calls for black empowerment with lengthy diatribes against Jews, gays, and other groups. “I remember talking to him and being surprised at how far left he had gone,” says Chuck Fogel, an editor at the South End who lived next door to Ellison. But there was an air of experimentation to everything he did. In high school, Ellison had formed a short-lived ska and thrash-metal band called the Deviants. Now, Ellison would fiddle with his guitar incessantly, studying different variations of “Johnny B. Goode,” Fogel recalls. Sometimes it was the Chuck Berry version. Sometimes it was Jimi Hendrix. “He was trying on things and searching.”

Many democrats view Ellison as the kind of organizer the moment demands, capable of harnessing the resurgent movements of the left—racial justice and economic populism. But critics have flogged a consistent narrative about his past, one that has haunted him since his first run for Congress in 2006. The case against Ellison has its roots in his time at the University of Minnesota Law School, where he began making a name for himself as a fierce critic of police and a Farrakhan defender. It was a radical identity he outgrew, one that friends insist doesn’t represent the Ellison of today, but one that fundamentally changed his idea of how politics worked.

Detroit had been a hub of black culture and political power. The Twin Cities were not. When Ellison arrived in the fall of 1987, the University of Minnesota had few tenured black professors. The state had just one black legislator. In an interview at the time, a young Ellison described the climate as “extremely isolating.”

When the Africana Student Cultural Center sponsored speeches by Farrakhan and one of his associates, tensions erupted on campus between Jews and African Americans. Ellison, who had taken to calling himself “Keith Hakim,” published a series of op-eds in the student paper, the Minnesota Daily, defending the Nation of Islam leader. The center also invited Kwame Ture, the black-power activist formerly known as Stokely Carmichael, to give a speech, during which he called Zionism a form of white supremacy. Ellison, then a member of the Black Law Student Association, introduced him.

In the hopes of mending fences, the university organized a series of conversations between black students and Jewish groups. Ellison could be deferential at these meetings. He thanked Jewish students for sticking up for black students’ right to host controversial campus speakers—even if they had denounced those speakers—and suggested working together on common political causes. But he also insisted the charges that Ture was racist were unfounded. Michael Olenick, a Jewish student who clashed with Ellison and who was the opinions editor at the Daily, recalled Ellison maintaining that an oppressed group could not be racist toward Jews because Jews were themselves oppressors. “European white Jews are trying to oppress minorities all over the world,” Olenick remembers Ellison arguing. “Keith would go on all the time about ‘Jewish slave traders.'” Another Jewish student active in progressive politics recalled Ellison’s incredulous response to the controversy over Zionism. “What are you afraid of?” Ellison asked. “Do you think black nationalists are gonna get power and hurt Jews?” (Ellison has rejected allegations of anti-Semitism. “I have always lived a politics defined by respecting differences, rejecting all forms of racism and anti-Semitism,” he wrote recently. He declined to be interviewed for this story, and his office did not respond to detailed questions from Mother Jones.)

Ellison addresses the Democratic National Convention. Mark Kauzlarich/Reuters

At law school, Ellison was already laying a foundation for his shift to politics. He was becoming known as an organizer, with a flair for publicity. At the beginning of 1989, two incidents solidified his growing reputation. On January 25, as part of a series of raids on suspected crack storehouses, police tossed a stun grenade through the window of an apartment building in North Minneapolis. Two elderly black residents died in the resulting blaze. No drugs were found, and none of the men arrested at the building were subsequently charged. A grand jury declined to indict the offending officers.

Ellison and a few students organized a protest over the lack of prosecutions, but the day before their rally, another incident happened at the downtown Embassy Suites. The hotel was a hangout spot for college students, and on that night two parties were happening on the same floor. One was a kegger hosted by a group of white students. The other was a birthday party attended by African American students. It was a low-key gathering; one woman had brought her toddler. But when police responded to a noise complaint about the kegger, they busted up the birthday instead.

Partygoers alleged that the cops had called them “niggers.” One student at the party, a Daily reporter named Van Hayden, told me an officer had dangled him over the edge of the sixth-floor railing. He left in handcuffs, with a broken nose and a few bruised ribs.

The next day, after the students were released, they joined Ellison at the demonstration against police brutality. A few days later, Ellison led about 75 people in a march to City Hall, where they stormed a City Council meeting, forcing officials to yield the floor to Ellison for a 10-minute speech. By then, Ellison was organizing several protests a week and holding press conferences to pressure Minnesota’s attorney general to launch a state investigation into the raid. Ellison demanded “public justice.” “It was a mini-Ferguson before anyone had heard of Ferguson,” Hayden told me.

Ellison and his chief collaborator, an undergraduate named Chris Nisan who was active with the Socialist Workers Party, attracted the attention of Forward Motion, a small socialist journal. Their interview ran with a photo of Ellison clutching a megaphone, a headband wrapped around his forehead. “People are coming face-to-face with their own oppression,” Ellison said. He was alarmed by the rise of white supremacist David Duke. “Eight years of mean-spiritedness of the Reagan era have encouraged fascist and racist forces to come out again. A Ku Kluxer was just elected in Louisiana. We see a rise in police brutality all over the country.” Ellison envisioned a unified front of young black people, white progressive students, organized labor, and American Indians pushing back against the evils of capitalism and white supremacy. “The more the right attacks, the more we have to respond.”

Ellison and Nisan’s protests did win a victory, albeit a limited one. Four of the five students arrested at the hotel were acquitted of their misdemeanor charges, and Minneapolis set up an independent, if weak, review board to investigate police brutality claims. In 1990, Ellison helped launch the Coalition for Police Accountability, which organized community meetings and published a quarterly newspaper, Cop Watch.

As the city’s crime rate soared in the early ’90s, some residents took to calling it “Murderapolis.” Black residents found themselves in the crosshairs of anti-crime initiatives and city politics. Ellison was still leading protests against the police, but he was not just on the outside. Two years out of law school, he ran for a seat on a city commission that controlled $400 million in development funding. Ellison’s slate stunned observers with its organization, bringing in three busloads of Hmong residents to vote in a race few people knew existed. North Minneapolis now controlled seven of eight seats.

Around this time, Ellison began attending a book club led by a prominent history professor at Macalester College who placed an emphasis on reclamation—the idea that whatever gains African Americans made would have to come through their own efforts. “The same way that our ancestors laid something down for us, we got to lay something down for the people who come next,” is how Resmaa Menakem, a friend of Ellison’s who was also in the club, described the theme. In practice, this meant building institutions—schools, civic groups, nonprofits—capable of boosting and protecting the community.

During Black History Month in 1993, Menakem and Ellison guest-hosted a segment on the black community radio station KMOJ about James Baldwin and Malcolm X. It evolved into a weekly show called “Black Power Perspectives” that lasted for eight years. The callers forced Ellison to think and argue on his feet and at times keep his emotions in check. Islam was a particularly volatile subject. White supremacists frequently called in, and Ellison once got so agitated he had to leave the studio.

Ellison’s fiery disposition sometimes got him into trouble. Bill English, a longtime Twin Cities activist, recalled almost coming to blows with Ellison during a nonprofit board meeting in the early aughts. “We went down to nose-to-nose, and people walked up to us and separated us, and a day later he called me and apologized profusely,” he says. English was nearly 70 years old at the time. During his 2012 race, Ellison and his ex-Marine Republican opponent got into an exchange on a radio show so heated that the moderator interrupted to call for a commercial break.

In 1993, after a pit stop at a white-shoe law firm, Ellison landed a job as executive director of the Legal Rights Center, a nonprofit focused on providing indigent defense in the city’s African American, Hmong, and American Indian communities. (One of the group’s founders represented Russell Means and Dennis Banks after their 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee.) Ellison still didn’t shy away from controversy. He partnered with a former Vice Lords gang leader named Sharif Willis to tackle police brutality—an effort that fell apart when Willis held 12 people up at gunpoint at a gas station. (Ellison has called the alliance “naive.”) But he made a name for himself on tough cases. His aggressive legal tactics were a lot like his approach to political organizing. “Some lawyers will spend most of their time in the back room trying to convince not only their client but also the prosecutor to make a deal—Keith was kind of the opposite,” says Bill Means, Russell’s brother and an early supporter of the Legal Rights Center. “He’d be filing motions five, six at a time on a traffic case.”

Ellison’s aspirations as a community leader led him into an alliance with the Nation of Islam. If reclamation was the idea animating Ellison as he entered his 30s, Farrakhan was black America’s leading evangelist for it, commanding huge crowds for speeches that could last hours. In 1995, Ellison and a small group of pastors and activists he’d worked with on policing issues (including the leader of the local NOI chapter) organized buses to take black men of all religions from the Midwest to attend Farrakhan’s Million Man March.

In his book, Ellison describes the event, held in October 1995, as a turning point in his flirtation with Farrakhan. After filling those buses and attending the march, he was struck by the smallness of Farrakhan’s message compared with the moment. The speech was rich in masonic conspiracies and quack numerology about the number 19. What was the point of organizing if it built up to nothing? Ellison says he was reminded of an old saying of his father’s, which is attributed to former House Speaker Sam Rayburn: “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.”

Ellison has said that he was never a member of the Nation of Islam and that his working relationship with the organization’s Twin Cities study group (the national organization’s term for its chapters) lasted just 18 months. He has said that he was “an angry young black man” who thought he might have found an ally in the cause of economic and political empowerment, and that he overlooked Farrakhan’s most incendiary statements because “when you’re African American, there’s literally no leader who is not beat up by the press.” In his book, Ellison outlines deep theological differences between the group and his mainstream Muslim faith. But his break from Farrakhan was not quite as clean as he portrayed it. Under the byline Keith X Ellison, months after the march that he described as an epiphany, he penned an op-ed in the Twin Cities black weekly Insight News, pushing back against charges of anti-Semitism directed at Farrakhan. In 1997, nearly two years later, he endorsed a statement again defending Farrakhan. When Ellison ran (unsuccessfully) for state representative in 1998, Insight News described him as affiliated with the Nation of Islam. Two organizers who worked with him at the time told me they believed Ellison had been a member of the Nation. At community meetings, he was even known to show up in a bow tie, accompanied by dark-suited members of the Fruit of Islam, the Nation’s security wing.

Minister James Muhammad, who in the 1990s led the Nation of Islam’s Twin Cities study group, confirms that Ellison served for several years as the local group’s chief of protocol, acting as a liaison between Muhammad and members of the community. He was a “trusted member of our inner circle,” says Muhammad, who is no longer active in the Nation of Islam. Ellison regularly attended meetings and sometimes spoke in Muhammad’s stead, when the leader was absent. An Ellison spokesman declined to answer questions about the congressman’s role in the study group and instead replied in an email, “Right wing and anti-Muslim extremists have been trying to smear Keith and distort his record for more than a decade. He’s written extensively about his work on the Million Man March, and has a long history of standing up against those who sow division and hatred.”

It was only in 2006, as his run for Congress floundered, that Ellison repudiated Farrakhan. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come up,” he told the Star Tribune, when pressed. In a letter to a Jewish community organization, he conceded that Farrakhan’s positions “were and are anti-Semitic, and I should have come to that conclusion earlier than I did.” Now he considers the matter settled. Last fall, his aides canceled a scheduled interview with the New York Times when they were told that questions about Farrakhan would be raised.

Critics in the Twin Cities view the relationship in cold political terms—Farrakhan was a useful affiliation for Ellison up until he wasn’t. “Keith was able to climb up some steps by talking about his respect and love for the honorable minister,” says Ron Edwards, a Minneapolis media fixture and a former director of the radio station where Ellison co-hosted his show. “People don’t forget that.” Spike Moss, an organizer who worked with Ellison on the Million Man March, called his reversal “the ultimate betrayal.” Farrakhan even recorded a Facebook video responding to Ellison this past December. “If you denounce me to achieve greatness,” he said, “wait until the enemy betrays you and then throws you back like a piece of used tissue paper to your people.”

Menakem attributes the various identities that his book club buddy and radio co-host adopted over the years—Keith Hakim, Keith X Ellison, Keith Muhammad—to “him becoming conscious and him trying on different ways of being before he settled on who he is,” he says. “He’s always remaking himself,” says Anthony Ellison, the congressman’s younger brother. “The Keith Ellison from 20 years ago is not the Keith Ellison today.”

After a decade mostly working outside elected politics, Ellison says he decided to run for the state House after testifying at a hearing on sentencing reform and seeing no black legislators. “We oftentimes had these debates and discussions about ‘out of the streets and into the suites’—that was the term that was used to describe the swan song of the civil rights movement,” says August Nimtz, one of the few black professors at the University of Minnesota and a longtime acquaintance of Ellison’s. “He made a decision and thought he could make a difference by being on the inside.” After a false start in 1998, he won election as a state representative from North Minneapolis on his second try in 2002. A few years later, he jumped into the race to succeed retiring Democratic Rep. Martin Sabo in 2006.

In a field that included a former state party chair and a candidate supported by Emily’s List, Ellison had to find his own base amid a steady trickle of stories about his past. One Minnesota political newsletter declared him a “dead man walking.” Ellison labored to show Jewish progressives he’d turned a page. He picked up the endorsement of the American Jewish World, the Twin Cities-based newspaper, and he addressed voters’ concerns about Farrakhan at the state’s largest synagogue. Ellison’s years of organizing and legal work formed the basis for a coalition. Fashioning himself as a lefty in the mold of progressive icon Paul Wellstone, Ellison adopted the late senator’s spruce-green campaign colors and railed against the “Republican lite” leaders of his party. He ran against the Iraq War and pushed for single-payer health care. Also critical was the mobilization of a new constituency in the Twin Cities—Muslim Somali Americans, who had begun settling in the area in the 1990s.

In that first primary, Ellison embraced the old-school tactics he aims to bring to the DNC. He ran no campaign ads; instead, he invested in paid community organizers who started their work early, months before a traditional campaign might lumber to life. Ellison often accompanied his organizers on their rounds. They targeted apartment buildings housing immigrants—Russians, East Africans, Latinos—who had little history of political engagement, and they recruited organizers who came from these communities. “You go to Keith’s campaign office and it looks like the United Nations,” says Corey Day, the executive director of the state Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. The Minneapolis City Pages called his coalition “the most diverse crayon box of races and creeds a Minnesota politician has ever mustered.”

Ellison’s district is so blue he hardly needs to campaign to ensure reelection. But he views constant voter contact, during the election and afterward, as essential to his agenda. He cites research showing that just 58 percent of self-identified liberals vote, versus 78 percent of self-identified conservatives. If a state party can juice that 58 percent just a little, he argues, it can defeat ballot initiatives and keep its grip on statewide offices. Day credits Ellison’s organizers with beating back a Republican voter ID initiative in 2012. Michael Brodkorb, a Republican operative who unearthed some of the most damaging stories about Ellison in 2006, views Ellison’s get-out-the-vote machine with awe: “He turned political organizing into what I think most people think political organizing is.”

Heading to Washington marked another change in Ellison’s political identity. In St. Paul, “I don’t think more than a handful of close friends of his even knew he was Muslim,” Dave Colling, who managed his first congressional campaign, told me. Ellison shied away from discussing his religion during the race, telling reporters it was “not that interesting.” But as the first Muslim representative ever elected to Congress, a rising tide of conservative religious nativism ensured that his faith would remain front and center.

After Ellison told a Somali American cable-access host that he intended to be sworn into office on a Koran (he used Thomas Jefferson’s personal copy), Rep. Virgil Goode, a Virginia Republican, warned there would “likely be many more Muslims elected” unless his colleagues “wake up.” Glenn Beck asked the congressman-elect during an interview to “prove to me you are not working with our enemies.” The innuendo did not go away with time. In 2012, after they had been representing neighboring districts for five years, then-Rep. Michele Bachmann accused Ellison of working with the Muslim Brotherhood. When Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) held hearings on Muslim “radicalization” in the United States in 2011, Ellison testified in defense of his faith, crying as he recounted the story of a Muslim paramedic who died in the World Trade Center attack only to be posthumously smeared as a terrorist accomplice.

Ellison was thrown into another maelstrom when, in the fall of 2015, Minneapolis police shot and killed Jamar Clark, a 24-year-old unarmed black man, as he lay handcuffed on the ground. After Black Lives Matter protesters began an occupation at the fourth police precinct headquarters, Ellison flew home to meet with them. At first, he backed the encampment. With the city on edge, he moved easily between different groups, negotiating a meeting between Clark’s family and the Democratic governor, Mark Dayton.

For more than a week, Ellison hung with the BLM organizers, even as the Minneapolis Star Tribune published a photo of Ellison’s middle son, Jeremiah, with his hands up while a policeman pointed a gun in his direction. (Ellison called the photo “agonizing.”) But after several white men opened fire on the mostly black protesters, injuring five people, Ellison finally broke with the demonstrators and supported the mayor’s call to relocate the encampment for public safety. Debating with activists on Twitter, he insisted he was merely proposing a change in tactics; the goal had stayed the same. Minneapolis NAACP President Nekima Levy-Pounds, filling the role Ellison once played of the organizer chipping away at the system from the outside, dismissively referred to him as “the old guard,” and protesters held signs calling him a “sellout.” When Ellison showed up at a North Minneapolis community meeting to explain himself, Levy-Pounds refused to give him the floor and Ellison left without speaking. “It was essentially the establishment versus the community,” Levy-Pounds says. Ellison had crossed over.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Ellison recognized the Democratic Party was at a crossroads. With a message that foreshadowed his DNC campaign, he traveled the country imploring Democratic groups to get back to organizing. Toting a voter-turnout manifesto called “Voters First,” he barnstormed places where the party was desperate for a jump-start, like Utah and Nebraska. But he also made his pitch to party insiders at the DNC’s summer meeting in 2015, just as the Democrats were powering up their 2016 election machinery, led by a network of allied super-PACs. Implicit in his message was a critique rooted in his experience in Minneapolis: Democrats focus too much on fundraisers and not enough on organizers. They provide lip service to the working class while fêting elites. The party’s losses in November have reinforced Ellison’s belief.

Clara Wu

In laying out his platform, Ellison, who has promised to step down from Congress if he wins, acknowledges a rot within the party. It has lost more than 900 state legislative seats since 2008, and the problem is self-perpetuating; those losses mean Republicans control redistricting, which means Democrats lose even more seats, which means they have fewer candidates to run for higher office, and so on. Former DNC Chair Howard Dean, facing a similar quandary, proposed a 50-state strategy; Ellison is offering “a 3,143-county strategy.”

Party chairs reflect the ethos of their time. Dean followed the wave of the progressive Netroots; Tim Kaine mirrored the hope and dad jokes of Barack Obama. Ellison’s candidacy and the intensity of the progressive groups backing it are in many ways a continuation of the last war, between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, who the Vermont senator’s supporters claim was unfairly aided by the Democratic establishment. Ellison’s closest rival, Perez, is backed by Clintonites. But the frame elides the similarities between the two. Perez, like Ellison, was a civil rights lawyer, and he retooled the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to refocus on voting rights and police abuses. They aren’t far apart politically, and their prescriptions for healing the party aren’t too different either. When it comes to the DNC, their biggest difference may be that Ellison supports a ban on accepting money from lobbyists and Perez doesn’t. (But Ellison says he won’t press the issue if DNC members oppose it.) Ellison wants the DNC to get a greater share of its funds from small-dollar donors, and he has committed to acquiring Sanders’ historically lucrative email list for the party if he wins. Perez would like that list, too, of course, but Ellison, by virtue of his close relationship with Sanders and trust among the party’s left wing, might stand a better chance of both getting it and knowing how to deploy it.

He is pledging to bring voters who have not been active in Democratic Party politics into the fold, just like he’s done in Minneapolis. “We’ve got to give Black Lives Matter a place where they can express themselves electorally,” he said in December, while in the same breath urging the party to cast aside tired assumptions about voters in the Midwest: “Can we not say ‘Rust Belt’ anymore? Look, I’m from Minnesota—I don’t feel rusty.” Rep. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona, who co-chairs the progressive caucus with Ellison, says his colleague’s strength is in rallying diverse factions around a common narrative. “He can talk about his life experience. He can talk about what it’s like to represent and be part of a multicultural, multiracial, multi-issue kind of a political activism.”

Choosing Ellison to lead the Democratic Party would be a gamble. It would mean going all in on a diagnosis that says the party’s shortcomings in recent years are not due to a rejection of liberalism by voters, but because the party has not been liberal enough. It might alienate a small but influential faction of Democratic leaders, such as Haim Saban. (At a debate featuring DNC candidates in January, Ellison said he and Saban had spoken and “we’re on the road to recovery.”) Still, Ellison is betting big on his hands-on formula. If Democrats do the work, he reasons, they just might be able to reverse their losses and usher in a new era of post-Trump progressivism. In the first days of the Trump administration, it looks like a long shot. But stranger things have happened.

Additional reporting by Ryan Felton.

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Keith Ellison Is Everything Republicans Thought Obama Was. Maybe He’s Just What Democrats Need.

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Why Tom Perez Is a Strong Competitor Against Keith Ellison in the Democratic Party Race

Mother Jones

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Progressive Democrats gazing upon the fight for the leadership of their party ought to be delighted. The two leading candidates for chair of the Democratic National Committee—Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Labor Secretary Tom Perez—are each battle-hardened and experienced progressives with much to offer their partisan comrades. Yet the contest for the DNC’s top post has widely been cast as a clash between wings of the party, with Ellison as the champion of the insurgent left and Perez as the candidate of the establishment. That depiction misrepresents the face-off and fixates on the wrong question: who has better progressive street cred? With the Democrats deep in the hole—a minority in both houses of Congress, out of the White House, holding only 16 governor slots and merely 31 of 99 state legislative chambers, and lacking a deep bench or a flock of rising stars—the tussle for DNC chief ought to focus on who can best do the nuts-and-bolts job of rebuilding the party from the ground level.

It’s tempting to view this contest as mostly symbolic. The Democratic primary battle of 2016 pitted Bernie Sanders’ revolution against Hillary Clinton’s pragmatic centrism. Many of Sanders’ supporters saw her as a corporate Democrat out of touch with—but eager to exploit—the party’s progressive grassroots. Many of Clinton’s supporters regarded him as an insurgent who was no true Democrat but happy to trigger tension within the party for his own political advancement. And since Election Day, there has been much jabbering about the rift that remains, with this talk concentrating on the resentment festering among Sanders fans who believe party insiders conspired to sink his candidacy.

So Ellison, one of the few House Democrats to endorse Sanders’ presidential run, has been seen as something of a consolation prize—or an offering that can help heal the fractured party. His early entry earned him a rash of key endorsements, including from Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Sen. Chuck Schumer. For a few weeks, Ellison, with support from both ends of the Democratic spectrum, seemed like a unity candidate on an easy path to victory.

Then Perez joined the race. He was not a last-minute contestant shoved into the contest by Democratic establishmentarians looking to thwart Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the House—though some Obama loyalists within the party were clearly not keen on Ellison. Perez, who has been busy finishing up at the Labor Department before handing over the keys to Trumpsters, merely needed more time to make his decision, according to his camp. Yet when Perez, who had endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race, announced his bid, several unions, including the AFL-CIO, which have worked closely with him, were already on the Ellison Express. (Perez has since been backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers, the United Farm Workers, and the International Association of Fire Fighters, and the Democratic governors of Colorado, Louisiana, Rhode Island, and Virginia.) And with Perez’s entrance, some Sanders folks started claiming that the Evil Empire—that is, the poohbahs of the party—was once again seeking to crush a progressive insurgency. (Ellison backers have been ticked off that his Democratic opponents have pointed to a handful of Ellison’s remarks and his associations with radical black Muslims in the 1990s to undermine his bid.)

This wing-versus-wing dust-up is unfortunate for the party. The vote for DNC chair—the person who will be stuck with a mountain of mundane but important tasks and responsibilities—probably should not be predicated on symbolism. Nor should it necessarily be a contest over competing issue platforms—unless the issue divide truly defines the future course of the party. And that’s not what is at stake here. Certainly, Perez, while serving in President Barack Obama’s cabinet, did not oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was backed by the president, and Ellison was a critic of the trade pact. But there’s truly not much ideological distance between the two. They are both grassroots-minded progressives. Ellison, before being elected to the House, was a community activist and operated a civil rights, employment, and criminal defense law practice in Minneapolis. Perez, the Buffalo, New York-raised son of two parents exiled from the Dominican Republic, was once the head of CASA de Maryland, an organization advocating for and providing services to immigrants.

And there’s no big difference in their big-picture approaches to what must be done within the DNC. Ellison’s website declares, “We must energize Democratic activists across the country and give them the tools to build the Party from the bottom up. Beyond a 50-state strategy, we need a 3,143-county strategy…We must also reclaim our history as the Party that stands with working people.” Perez’s website says, “In the years ahead, we must strengthen our team, and our bench, from the ground up. And we must stand up to protect President Obama’s accomplishments. But most of all, we need to listen. We need to listen to Democrats at every level, empowering them to fight for progressive values and a vision of opportunity and optimism. And we need to listen to voters, up and down the ballot, who are asking us to stand behind them.” You could transpose these statements and not notice it.

At this point, the Democratic Party needs much rebuilding—which entails fundraising, strategizing, candidate recruitment, messaging, organizational development, and more—from local precincts to the national level. So it might be best if the selection of the DNC chief was more job interview and less political wrestling match. Yeah, right. But many of the 447 members of the Democratic Party’s national committee, who are the only voters in this contest, might actually view the race in such a way. (This group includes state chairs looking for a national chair who will get them the help and resources they need to succeed at home.) And for them, Perez’s resumé could hold strong (and progressive) appeal. (Association declared: Perez is a neighbor, and several times I have socialized in groups with him.)

Perez has had multiple successes overseeing large organizations. After a career that included a stint as a civil rights attorney in the Justice Department (during the George H.W. Bush years) and as a special counsel to Sen. Ted Kennedy on civil rights, criminal, and constitutional issues, Perez was appointed by Obama to run the civil rights division of the Justice Department. As Mother Jones reported a few years ago,

During the George W. Bush years, the division had been marred by partisan politics and declining civil rights enforcement. But since Perez took the helm, the division has blocked partisan voting schemes, cracked down on police brutality, protected gay and lesbian students from harassment, sued anti-immigrant Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio for racial profiling, stood up against Islamophobia, and forced the two largest fair-housing settlements in history from banks that discriminated against minority homeowners.

While Perez was heading the civil rights division, it mounted a record-breaking number of probes into police abuse, and it achieved wide-ranging agreements to clean up police forces accused of misconduct.

After taking charge of the Labor Department in 2013, Perez fired up that agency. As Politico noted,

It was one of the federal government’s sleepier outposts for most of the dozen years that preceded Perez’s arrival just over one year ago. But Labor has been newly energized under Perez. “Enforcement activity is up,” Alfred Robinson Jr., who was an acting wage and hour administrator for the Labor Department during the George W. Bush administration, noted earlier this month in a blog post. The department has also raised its public profile on issues like minimum wage and paid medical leave and lavished favorable attention on companies that give employees what Perez calls “voice.”

At Labor, Perez was in charge of an organization with 17,000 employees, a multi-billion dollar budget, and offices throughout the nation. And he pocketed a number of policy wins. He expanded the overtime rule for millions of workers. He helped resolve the Verizon strike and achieved protections for Verizon’s retail workers. On his watch in 2016, the department collected $266 million in back pay owed to workers. He pushed for expanded paid sick leave. The department issued a new rule to protect workers in construction and manufacturing from exposure to dangerous levels of silica dust, which can cause disease and cancer. It raised the minimum wage and and provided extended overtime protections for 2 million home health care workers. The department issued an important conflict of interest rule forcing retirement advisers to place clients’ interests ahead of their own, an Elizabeth Warren-like measure that could save Americans billions of dollars per year.

Perez has had an impressive run at Labor, overseeing a big bureaucracy and achieving results. He has put his values into practice. Ellison has done similar as a member of Congress, mounting grassroots campaigns, raising money for Democrats across the country, and pushing pro-consumer financial reform legislation as a member of the House financial services committee. If DNCers want to send a welcoming signal to aggrieved (rightly or wrongly) Bernie-ites when they vote on February 24—and avoid possible further acrimony between Party HQ and progressive activists—Ellison is the obvious choice. But if there is more to the vote than that—and this race is removed from the never-ending conflict between the party and its progressive base—Perez is a strong contender. He is a solid progressive with a record of getting stuff done. His prospects will be shaped by whether party officials (they are the only ones who have a vote) consider this contest an act of atonement and reconciliation or a hiring decision.

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Why Tom Perez Is a Strong Competitor Against Keith Ellison in the Democratic Party Race

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NSA Chief: WikiLeaks Hacks of Democrats’ Emails Were a “Conscious Effort by a Nation-State”

Mother Jones

The WikiLeaks release of internal emails from the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign constituted a “conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect,” the head of the National Security Agency said Tuesday.

“There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s mind,” NSA Director Michael S. Rogers said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. “This was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance. This was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily.” Rogers acknowledged in October that Russians were behind the hacks.

News that the DNC had been compromised broke earlier this June, when hacker Guccifer 2.0 released a trove of documents containing campaign emails and memos—most notably emails implying that the committee favored Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary. The release of the emails led to the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

WikiLeaks also published thousands of emails from John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair. Though Russia was long suspected of being behind the hacks, US officials did not formally accuse the Russian government of orchestrating the cyber attacks until October. In November, just four days before the election, DNC officials told Mother Jones they had found evidence that the DNC headquarters may have been bugged and had submitted a report to the FBI.

Watch the video of Rogers’ full remarks above.

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NSA Chief: WikiLeaks Hacks of Democrats’ Emails Were a “Conscious Effort by a Nation-State”

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Exclusive: The Democratic National Committee Has Told the FBI It Found Evidence Its HQ Was Bugged

Mother Jones

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In an episode reminiscent of Watergate, the Democratic Party recently informed the FBI that it had collected evidence suggesting its Washington headquarters had been bugged, according to two Democratic National Committee officials who asked not to be named.

In September, according to these sources, the DNC hired a firm to conduct an electronic sweep of its offices. After Russian hackers had penetrated its email system and those of other Democratic targets, DNC officials believed it was prudent to scrutinize their offices. This examination found nothing unusual.

In late October, after conservative activist James O’Keefe released a new set of hidden-camera videos targeting Democrats, interim party chairwoman Donna Brazile ordered up another sweep. There was a concern that Republican foes might have infiltrated the DNC offices, where volunteers were reporting to work on phone banks and other election activities. (For some of their actions, O’Keefe and his crew have used people posing as volunteers to gain access to Democratic outfits.)

The second sweep, according to the Democratic officials, found a radio signal near the chairman’s office that indicated there might be a listening device outside the office. “We were told that this was something that could pick up calls from cellphones,” a DNC official says. “The guys who did the sweep said it was a strong indication.” No device was recovered. No possible culprits were identified.

The DNC sent a report with the technical details to the FBI, according to the DNC officials. “We believe it’s been given by the bureau to another agency with three letters to examine,” the DNC official says. “We’re not supposed to talk about it.”

A Democratic consultant who has done work for the DNC, who asked not to be identified, says he was recently informed about the suspected bugging.

The DNC officials will not say what countermeasures were subsequently taken. “As a general policy, we don’t talk about such efforts,” the other DNC official says. But this official adds, “You have to take all of this incredibly seriously.” The first DNC official notes, “We are the oldest political party in this country, and we are under constant attack from Russia and/or maybe others.”

Adam Hodge, a spokesman for the DNC, says, “The DNC is not going to comment on stories about its security. In all security matters, we cooperate fully with the appropriate law enforcement agencies and take all necessary steps to protect the committee and the safety and security of our staff.”

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

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Exclusive: The Democratic National Committee Has Told the FBI It Found Evidence Its HQ Was Bugged

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