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The US Brings Up the Rear When it Comes to Reducing Carbon Emissions

by KariGutteridge Posted on June 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump just finished up his speech about pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, and it was garden variety Trump bluster. Other countries are playing us for a sucker. It’s already cost us ONE BILLION DOLLARS. It’s crippling the American economy. They’re all laughing at us. Etc. The usual.

I was more interested in what EPA chief Scott Pruitt had to say afterward. His remarks were a seemingly endless tribute to the amazing foresight and singular vision of Donald Trump. It was really over the top, although I don’t know how many people noticed it since Pruitt has a fairly bland speaking style. Here’s a taste:

Your decision today to exit the Paris accord reflects your unflinching commitment to put America first….fulfilling yet one more campaign promise….fortitude, courage, steadfastness….America finally has a leader who answers only to the people….fighting for the forgotten men and women across this country….champion of the hardworking citizens all across this land….historic restoration of American economic independence….it takes courage, it takes commitment to say no to the plaudits of men while doing right by the American people. You have that courage.

Mussolini could hardly ask for better. But there was a tiny bit of substance in Pruitt’s remarks. In particular, he said that America had reduced its carbon emissions by 18 percent between 2000 and 2014. That’s actually not right: emissions have gone down about 8 percent over that period. Pruitt must have been talking about per-capita emissions or something. He also said that carbon emissions were now lower than 2014 levels, and he actually got that part right. But take a look at what caused this decline:

Every time the economy goes into recession, carbon emissions decline. When the economy goes into a massive recession, carbon emission decline a lot. That explains most of the reduction, which happened between 2008 and 2012.

But there are other things at work too. More fuel-efficient cars. More solar and wind. Replacement of coal by natural gas. Less heavy manufacturing.

So was Pruitt right to say this was accomplished “not through government mandate, but through innovation and technology of the American private sector”? Not really. Fracking lowered the price of natural gas, and that was certainly a triumph of innovation. But that was about it. The decline of heavy manufacturing was mostly a result of globalization. The recession was the result of an unsustainable housing bubble. Cars got more fuel efficient largely because of tighter CAFE standards. Solar and wind were the beneficiaries of improving technology, but also various tax credits and incentives.

What about Pruitt’s claim that we “do it better than anyone in the world,” “the rest of the world does little,” and “other nations talk a good game” while we lead by action? Compared to other industrialized economies, this is just wrong. Here are reductions in carbon emissions since 1990 for a representative assortment of peer countries:

The only country we beat is Japan. All the rest have reduced their carbon emissions more than us. Of course, this only shows reductions in percentage terms. In absolute terms it’s even worse: the United States emits carbon at nearly double the level of Japan and three times the level of most European countries. The other countries started at lower levels and still managed to cut emissions more than we did.

On the bright side, we’ve done pretty well at reducing our carbon intensity. In 1990, it took 0.8 kg of carbon to produce a dollar of GDP. Today it takes only 0.3 kg:

Sadly for our egos, the other advanced countries have done even better than us. Despite our reliance on private enterprise, we remain one of the least efficient producers of goods and services among our peers.

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The US Brings Up the Rear When it Comes to Reducing Carbon Emissions

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Some Actual Good News After Trump’s Paris Agreement Fiasco

by DieterYamada Posted on June 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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Just hours after President Donald Trump announced that he intends to withdraw the United States from Paris Climate Agreement, three state governors announced the formation of the United States Climate Alliance, a union that will work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even as national leadership on climate change falters.

For now, the alliance includes California, New York and Washington State. The governors of those states, Jerry Brown, Andrew Cuomo, and Jay Inslee, respectively, released a statement on Thursday describing how the new alliance will build state-level partnerships to continue aggressive American action on climate change and uphold the goals and standards of the Paris Agreement.

“The president has already said climate change is a hoax, which is the exact opposite of virtually all scientific and worldwide opinion,” said Governor Brown in the statement. “I don’t believe fighting reality is a good strategy—not for America, not for anybody. If the president is going to be AWOL in this profoundly important human endeavor, then California and other states will step up.”

Governor Cuomo echoed that sentiment. Trump’s “reckless decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement has devastating repercussions not only for the United States, but for our planet,” he said. “This administration is abdicating its leadership and taking a backseat to other countries in the global fight against climate change.”

California, New York, and Washington combined are home nearly 70 million people, about 20 percent of the US population. And their governments have already begun to take action. For example, the California State Senate passed legislation on Wednesday that mandates California to develop 100 percent of its electricity from renewable resources by 2045.

So far, no other states have signed on to the alliance, though 61 American mayors also pledged on Thursday that their cities will uphold the tenets of the Paris Climate Agreement.

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Some Actual Good News After Trump’s Paris Agreement Fiasco

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Obama Slams Trump’s Withdrawal From Paris Deal

by AlRyriekyiro Posted on June 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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As President Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement on Thursday, former president Barack Obama released a statement denouncing the move as one that “rejects the future” and reduces American leadership on the international stage.

He also expressed hope that cities and states would take the lead in the fight against climate change, even without the administration’s support.

“I believe the United States of America should be at the front of the pack,” Obama said. “But even in the absence of American leadership; even as this Administration joins a small handful of nations that reject the future; I’m confident that our states, cities, and businesses will step up and do even more to lead the way, and help protect for future generations the one planet we’ve got.”

The statement, which was released as Trump was speaking from the White House Rose Garden, was a rare rebuke from the former president, who has largely avoided criticizing his successor.

Trump defended his decision to pull the country out of the historic accord, claiming the treaty was “very unfair to the highest level” to Americans. He said he was “elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”

Trump’s exit from the Paris accord is his most consequential move so far to undo his predecessor’s legacy in combating global warming. The decision adds the United States to a group of just two countries, Nicaragua and Syria, that have rejected the landmark agreement.

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Obama Slams Trump’s Withdrawal From Paris Deal

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Trump Has No Idea What He Just Did or the Backlash That Awaits

by EulahWhitfeld Posted on June 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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The negotiations leading up to the Paris climate accord involved years of delicate diplomacy and thousands of voices offering guidance. President Donald Trump’s handling of the decision to leave was the polar opposite.

Despite claiming that he’s been “hearing from a lot of people,” Trump doesn’t appear to have any more detailed knowledge of climate change or the 2015 deal now than when he first pledged to cancel it on the campaign trail. The “lots of people” he’s heard from include a disproportionate number of climate change deniers, even though there are far more leaders in industry and on both sides of the aisle advocating for the US to remain in the agreement. They have argued that the Paris deal is important to the US, not just for its environmental merits, but also so that the country is not excluded from the rest of the world, both economically and politically.

His months of hints and delays on a decision have drawn more than one comparison to The Bachelor reality show, but one with the highest of stakes. He recently went to the strongest US allies at the G-7 without a clear answer, leading the G-6 to isolate the US when it issued its communiqué that reaffirmed the agreement. As Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent noted, Trump’s nationalist case to exit Paris “does not allow space for recognition of what the Paris deal really is, which is constructive global engagement that serves America’s long term interests, as part of a system of mutually advantageous compromises.”

Trump doesn’t have any sense of the backlash that’s coming for him and the US now that he’s kickstarted the process of pulling out, which won’t be official for another three years. Two factors will especially hurt the US: First, the world has been dealing with the US as an unreliable partner on climate change for more than two decades, and leaders still well remember the other times the US reversed course on its promises; second, the world has never been more aligned in favor of action, making climate change a much bigger factor in the US relationship with its allies in non-climate related issues—from trade to defense to immigration—than it once was.

Trump officials might have taken note of the consequences of US inconsistency with the 1997 Kyoto climate treaty. President Bill Clinton signed the treaty, which had binding targets, but never submitted it to the Senate for ratification. In 2001, Bush officials declared Kyoto dead and withdrew the US from the agreement. International backlash ensued. Some in the Bush administration, which like Trump’s was split on how to handle Kyoto, came to regret how it was handled for the damage it did to the standing of the US in the world.

“Kyoto—this is not talking out of school—was not handled as well as it should have been,” Bush’s Secretary of State* Colin Powell said in 2002. “And when the blowback came I think it was a sobering experience that everything the American president does has international repercussions.”

In her 2011 memoir, then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice detailed the reaction Bush faced in meetings with European leaders. Because of the way the administration handled the abrupt withdrawal, “we suffered through this issue over the years: drawing that early line in the sand helped to establish our reputation for ‘unilateralism.’ We handled it badly.” Rice called it a “self-inflicted wound that could have been avoided.”

US withdrawal also shifted the power dynamics across the world and gave Russia, which signed the agreement, greater leverage in international affairs. Russia’s ratification became pivotal to the treaty entering into force, and in turn, it used its ratification to gain Europe’s backing to enter the World Trade Organization, even while the US still had outstanding concerns. President Vladimir Putin noted in 2004 that the “EU has met us halfway in talks over the WTO and that cannot but affect positively our position vis-a-vis the Kyoto Protocol.” Paris has already met the threshold needed to go into effect, but Russia is still pursuing a similar role and reaffirmed its commitment to the Paris accord today, seasoned with some light trolling: “Of course the effectiveness of implementing this convention without the key participants, perhaps, will be hindered,” a Kremlin spokesperson told CNN. “But there is no alternative as of now.”

We’re decades away from the Kyoto treaty now, but many experts expect a US exit from Paris not to weaken the world’s resolve in addressing climate change as much as it will create a power vacuum other countries might be eager to fill. Andrew Light, a senior fellow with the World Resources Institute, says it is “definitely going to hurt the US with respect to other countries sitting down and negotiating on anything the US is interested in.” Light, who was a State Department climate official in the Obama administration, argued, “We’re creating a vacuum in parts of the world where we have very clear security interests, not just climate, but security in North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. It creates an opening that China, the EU, and even India can step in and fill.”

Conservatives have issued similar warnings.

In a New York Times op-ed earlier this month, George Shultz, a former Cabinet member of the Reagan and Nixon administrations, and Climate Leadership Council’s Ted Halstead wrote, “Global statecraft relies on trust, reputation and credibility, which can be all too easily squandered. The United States is far better off maintaining a seat at the head of the table rather than standing outside. If America fails to honor a global agreement that it helped forge, the repercussions will undercut our diplomatic priorities across the globe, not to mention the country’s global standing and the market access of our firms.”

It’s little surprise that Trump’s own secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, agrees, preferring the US to retain a seat at the table.

To find the kind of momentum it eventually gained to enter into force in record time, negotiators in Paris had to bridge differences between developing and industrialized nations. “One of the great achievements of Paris, but sometimes overlooked, is it gave a very strong signal that climate change is no longer an isolated area of diplomacy,” Light says. For example, climate change and renewable energy became building blocks in the US relationship with India, leading eventually to a bilateral commitment on climate change in the run-up to Paris.

While the US retreats, other nations are going to be building bridges with China as it curbs its sizeable greenhouse gas footprint. That’s already happening: This week, the EU and China engaged in a climate summit where they signaled their “highest political commitment” to Paris, just as Trump pulls out. This will also not help the US president in his much-vaunted fight against terrorism. He’s losing goodwill not just with Europe, but with partners in developing nations that stood to benefit from the $3 billion commitment the US had made to climate finance—another commitment that Trump won’t deliver on. That means losing one of the main ways the US has built friendly relationships with countries that can otherwise be fraught with tension. Former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy offers China as an example: “The South China Sea. Human rights. Trade. Currency manipulation. When U.S.-China relations are discussed we often ascribe these issues some level of tension. However, our countries’ cooperation has historically been more cordial and productive in one area: environmental protection.”

Union of Concerned Scientists’ Director of Strategy and Policy Alden Meyer, a longtime expert on the UN climate process, compared the US to the cartoon character Lucy in the Peanuts comic strip, always taking away the football from Charlie Brown at the very last moment. The rest of the world is likely to become weary of the US constantly taking away the ball when it comes time to negotiate tough issues like trade and terror, which Trump has sought to champion.

Or as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres put it this week, countries all over the world have only two options on climate: “Get on board or get left behind.”

* Corrected

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Trump Has No Idea What He Just Did or the Backlash That Awaits

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Elon Musk Threatens to Ditch Trump’s Advisory Council Over Paris Climate Treaty Withdrawal

by MarylynAnders Posted on May 31, 2017

Mother Jones

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Amid news reports that President Donald Trump is preparing to pull the US out of the Paris climate treaty on Wednesday, Tesla CEO and member of Trump’s economic advisory council, Elon Musk, threatened to step down as an adviser if the president went through with the withdrawal.

Musk took to Twitter to insist he had done all he could to convince Trump to remain in the accord. When asked what he would do if his efforts went unheeded, the Tesla CEO said he would have no choice but to leave:

Musk is among a growing list of executives, Republicans, and oil industry leaders urging Trump to remain in the treaty that 195 countries have signed.

In December, Musk attracted widespread criticism for his decision to serve on Trump’s advisory team, which includes other heads of powerful companies such as Disney and Walmart. While he previously expressed reservations regarding Trump’s fitness for the Oval Office, Musk would later rationalize his decision to advise Trump as his effort to provide a “voice of reason” in the increasingly erratic administration.

On Wednesday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer refused to confirm mounting reports of Trump’s plan to pull out of the agreement. When asked specifically about Musks’ threat, Spicer told reporters, “Let’s wait and see what the president’s decision is.”

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Elon Musk Threatens to Ditch Trump’s Advisory Council Over Paris Climate Treaty Withdrawal

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Brandi Is Terrified That She’ll Fall Back Into Addiction if Obamacare Is Repealed

by LQVDeangelo Posted on May 31, 2017

Mother Jones

Brandi, 30, depends on Medicaid expansion for opioid addiction medication. Courtesty of Brandi

For much of her twenties, Brandi was in a bad place: staying up all night to sniff OxyContin and dealing marijuana from her apartment in a dingy Rochester, New York, housing project to feed her insatiable painkiller addiction. Drug users were always coming in and out of her place, a nearly empty one-bedroom that smelled of cat pee. Dinners consisted of instant noodles or McDonald’s, where a friend would trade chicken nuggets for a gram of marijuana. “Any money would go directly into buying pills,” said Brandi, who requested to go by her first name.

A 30-year-old with piercing green eyes, Brandi hasn’t used drugs since January of 2015, when she started taking buprenorphine, a medication that treats opioid addiction. She lives in a townhouse with her fiancé, also a former drug user, and their cats. Thanks to the medications, she says, “both of our lives are a total 180 from what they used to be.” She works the night shift at the supermarket during the week, visits family on Sundays, occasionally splurges at Bonefish Grill or TGI Friday’s. Each day, the couple takes their medications: buprenorphine for her, methadone for him. She’s been reading the news about the potential repeal of Obamacare and Trump’s budget proposals, and she finds it “all terrifying”—because if Obamacare is repealed and Medicaid expansion is cut, she, like hundreds of thousands of Americans, could lose her ability to pay for buprenorphine. Without the medication, she worries, she’ll fall back into the cycle of drug abuse.

She’s been there before. Brandi first got her life back on track when she went on buprenorphine as a 22-year-old straight out of rehab. She did well for a few years: She got a job as a cashier, moved into a nicer place, started buying groceries and brushing her hair. But when she was 26, just before New York expanded Medicaid, she was kicked off her mom’s health insurance. Knowing she didn’t make nearly enough to be able to pay for her own coverage, she stretched out her buprenorphine supply as long as she could, stockpiling what she had in the months before her 26th birthday and weaning her dose down. But eventually there was none left, and within two weeks, she says, “I found pills and it was just done and over with.” She used for nearly two years before going back to rehab and realizing that, with Medicaid expansion, she could pay for the medication once again.

On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump promised to “spend the money” to tackle the nation’s opioid epidemic. Yet drug policy experts fear that passage of the American Health Care Act, also known as Trumpcare, would cut off former drug users from their addiction medications, making an already devastating epidemic even worse. That’s largely because the AHCA would dramatically cut funding for Medicaid—the federal program that provides health insurance to poor Americans and the largest federal funder of addiction services. It would also phase out Medicaid expansion, which expanded the eligibility requirements of the publicly-funded insurance program to include those who earn up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level in the 31 states that opted to expand it. Cuts to Medicaid would hurt most in many of the states that helped vote Trump in: in places like Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky, Medicaid pays for at least forty percent of buprenorphine prescriptions.

“People talk about being committed to doing something about drugs,” says Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University psychiatry professor who advised the Obama administration on drug policy. But “their Medicaid cuts would swamp anything else they could do.”

Nearly three million Americans with a substance use disorder, including more than 200,000 who were addicted to opioids, would lose some or all of their insurance coverage if Obamacare is repealed, according to an analysis by researchers Richard Frank of Harvard Medical School and Sherry Glied of New York University. In a report released last week, the Congressional Budget Office found that if the AHCA passes, addiction treatment services “could increase by thousands of dollars in a given year” for those who aren’t covered by insurance through their employers.

Both Humphreys and Frank worry that many politicians don’t understand just how critical addiction medications can be. Indeed, last month, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said addiction medications were “substituting one opioid for another,” contradicting years of research by the agency he now runs. Buprenorphine and methadone, the two most common such medications, work by binding to the brain’s opioid receptors and decreasing craving for more harmful opioids like painkillers or heroin—without inducing the high. They come with some side effects: It’s still possible to abuse the medications, and coming off of them too quickly can result in a painful process similar to withdrawing from other opioids.

But a wealth of research has found that addiction medications like buprenorphine help curb opioid addiction and prevent relapse and overdose. Organizations from the Centers for Disease Control to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration to the World Health Organization support access to the medications for opioid users. “I don’t think that there are any areas where the data is shaky,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, the head of the National Institutes on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, to STAT news. “It clearly shows better outcomes with medication-assisted therapy than without it.”

Brandi may be lucky: If the AHCA does pass, there’s still a chance that her home state of New York would find a way to fund treatment for people in her position. But many Americans may not be so fortunate. As Humphreys told me this spring, without Obamacare, “We’re back where we were before: bad access, low quality of care, and a lot of patients being turned away.”

For now, Brandi plans to keep taking the medication for as long as she can. “People I work with right now would never in a bajillion years picture me as a drug addict—ever.” The impact of the medication is “like night and day,” she said—and going back to the days without coverage would amount to “a nightmare.”

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Brandi Is Terrified That She’ll Fall Back Into Addiction if Obamacare Is Repealed

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Chart of the Day: The Sean Spicer Show

by AWJCheri40066421 Posted on May 30, 2017

Mother Jones

Here’s a fun chart from Media Matters:

(Note: I have switched the colors in the graph to the correct red-state-blue-state representation.)

The remarkable thing here is not that President Obama’s press secretary was televised so little. That’s normal. The remarkable thing is that President Trump’s press secretary is televised so much. This is, pretty obviously, not because Spicer is singularly transparent and produces loads of news. It’s because the guy is a train wreck and we can’t look away.

But here’s a question: the standard excuse for this is that Spicer gets great ratings. But does he? I know he did in his first few weeks, but are his ratings still higher than ordinary news? I can’t seem to find any evidence one way or another.

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Chart of the Day: The Sean Spicer Show

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The Police Officer Who Killed 12-Year-Old Tamir Rice Has Been Fired

by IngeborgSharpe1 Posted on May 30, 2017

Mother Jones

The police officer who fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland park in November 2014 has been fired, Cleveland’s police chief said at a press conference on Tuesday. The decision comes two and a half years after Rice was killed. Officer Timothy Loehmann was fired not for shooting Rice but for lying on his job application about his disciplinary record at a previous police department, according to the termination documents. (Another officer who had been on the scene of the shooting was suspended for 10 days.)

Loehmann, who started working for the Cleveland Police Department in early 2014, failed to disclose that although he voluntarily left his job at another department, he was allowed to resign after a series of incidents in which supervisors deemed him unfit for duty, according to Cleveland.com. He also did not disclose that he had failed a written exam for employment at a second police department.

Loehmann shot Rice after he and his partner responded to a 911 call about a person in a park waving a gun. His death became an early touchstone for the Black Lives Matter movement. Video of the shooting showed that Loehmann shot the child, who was holding a toy pellet gun, within two seconds of arriving on the scene. A grand jury declined to charge the officers involved.

A dispatcher who took the initial 911 call was suspended in March for failing to tell the responding officers that the caller had said the person with the gun might be a juvenile and that the gun could be fake. A June 2015 Mother Jones investigation revealed how that failure contributed to the child’s death.

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The Police Officer Who Killed 12-Year-Old Tamir Rice Has Been Fired

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Senate Intelligence Committee Gets Ready to Start Dishing Out Subpoenas

by PQYJeanett Posted on May 30, 2017

Mother Jones

Michael Cohen is in the news again. Not for this:

But because he’s been “invited” to testify before the Senate committee investigating the Trump-Russia connection:

“I declined the invitation to participate, as the request was poorly phrased, overly broad and not capable of being answered,” Cohen told ABC News in an email Tuesday.

After Cohen rejected the congressional requests for cooperation, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to grant its chairman, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, and ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, blanket authority to issue subpoenas as they deem necessary.

Martin Longman didn’t expect this:

It’s still a bit premature to be effusive or unreserved in my praise here. But I have to give credit where it is due. The Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee have shown courage here and real indications of seriousness. I wouldn’t have predicted it but I’m willing to acknowledge it now.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has historically been more serious and bipartisan than most committees, so this is probably not quite as surprising as it seems. Nonetheless, it’s good to see some confirmation that there are still a few redoubts of integrity in Donald Trump’s Washington DC.

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Senate Intelligence Committee Gets Ready to Start Dishing Out Subpoenas

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

by RFAKarlibdb Posted on May 30, 2017

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.

See the original article here – 

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

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