Cuomo

[Morrissey Breen]

WATCH: Andrew Cuomo's Full Testimony To Sexual Harassment Investigators Just Released By New York AG (Nov. 30, 2021)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC1cNbKZG80
New York Attorney General Letitia James has released the full video testimony of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) during the sexual harassment investigation into him.

[Morrissey Breen]

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/12/hunter-biden-is-painting-his-truth

“I JUST WANTED PEOPLE TO SEE THAT NOT ONLY WAS I OKAY, I WAS GREAT”: HUNTER BIDEN IS PAINTING HIS TRUTH
The president’s son has lived his misfortunes and missteps in the public eye. Now he feels like he’s come out the other side, spending his days listening to philosophy podcasts and mounting exhibits of the art to which he has devoted his new life.
BY EMILY JANE FOX
DECEMBER 9, 2021
Hunter Biden son of President Joe Biden at his art studio in Los Angeles Nov. 1 2019.
Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, at his art studio in Los Angeles, Nov. 1, 2019.PHOTOGRAPH BY ELIZABETH WEINBERG / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX.

This is where Hunter Biden keeps the light, up here, many minutes up the turns of a hill outside of Los Angeles, behind gates and past Secret Service, through the white, open house he is renting with his wife and young son away from everything and everyone. It’s on the floor of the garage where he spends most hours of most days, hunched over the hundreds of paintings he’s created, leaving his palms and fingernails and jeans and Chelsea boots and the silver bracelets up his wrists stained with blues and reds and yellows and greens. For the last few days, he’s set his attention on a 26-foot piece of Japanese Yupo paper, a nonabsorbent synthetic that behaves more like a plastic than a paper or a canvas. He usually starts by tinkering with the colors, in this case, an almost DayGlo orange and yellow so bright they could exist only in a sunrise at a rave. He uses alcohol ink—a strange medium, he jokes, for a recovering addict who has publicly documented his struggles with drugs and alcohol, both by choice and because of a near-daily onslaught by his dad’s opponents and the right-wing media. But he chose the alcohol ink because he can forever manipulate it. He could change the whole thing right now if he wanted to. He could wash it away with more alcohol ink, and then once he was done, he could wash that away too. For this painting, though, he let the ink develop and layered more on top. This makes for hours of repetition, standing over the paper like Jackson Pollock to keep the ink from running and because it gives him a different perspective than if he were to hang something vertically. Sometimes he pours the ink directly on the paper, then uses sponge brushes to mix it around. Other times he sprays it or manipulates it by blowing through a straw.

Against the concrete floor, next to the president’s son, the painting glows. “Almost all great art, and I’m not saying my art is great, though it’s great to me, comes from tension,” he says, crossing his arms over the work at his feet. “It comes from a kind of innate anxiety that you need to express, and it’s never suppression for me anymore. It’s not therapeutic in the sense that I’m not thinking about it, or that it’s a way to run away from it. It’s a way to jump into it. The gift that they have given me,” he says, referring to the right-wingers obsessed with him, “is their constant pursuit. It’s kept me moving. It’s a need to express myself. It’s like that tension that we need to be as creative and expressive as you possibly can, to pour yourself into it. I mean, what an incredible gift.”

Hunter sees his work as creating a universal image that can look like something you see under a microscope, or from a satellite millions of light-years away, not unlike the way he himself is watched. He has been examined and scrutinized for what feels like forever, in photos as a grieving child, on television screens with his dad at swearing-in ceremonies, and on tabloid front pages in the throes of his addiction. There have been hearings on Capitol Hill, and his name has fluttered out of the White House, coming from its former and current occupants, if in wildly different tones. You can all probably recite his misfortunes and grief and mistakes by heart, because they’ve been relentlessly splashed, publicly lived, and, for the most part, pretty radically addressed by Hunter himself over the last year: There was his board seat at Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company owned by an oligarch mired in charges of corruption, and his investment in a private-equity firm linked to the Chinese government; his addiction and his relationships after his divorce from his first wife; the alleged stolen laptop that Rudy Giuliani quite literally melted down over. Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial centered around whether the then president abused his powers by pressuring the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on the youngest Biden son to saddle and sideline Joe Biden’s campaign. Hunter Biden recounted it all, in his own words and on his own terms, in a memoir released this past spring, less than three months after his father took office. And now some of it, intentionally or otherwise, is showing up in his art, which he recently displayed publicly for the first time.

It is very easy to imagine a scenario in which Hunter did not write that book and did not publish it so early into his father’s administration. Same, too, with showing his art. Certainly, it would have shaved down both the number of questions the White House press secretary gets about conflicts of interest and the volume of New York Post front pages with his photo splashed across them. But there is no such thing as a private Biden, not in 2021, anyway, but probably not ever in modern political times. There is surely no version in which Hunter Biden would be able to or want to slink away into the hills. So here he is, out loud, writing the story, painting the paintings, making a choice day in and day out not to wash it all away with alcohol ink.

Georges Bergès, the gallerist who put on Hunter Biden’s show, titled “The Journey Home,” in New York and Los Angeles, had to hire a team of private security after he received death threats and his gallery was vandalized over the summer. “It is crazier than I ever could have imagined,” he told me. “Everyone has lost their minds.”

If it’s not threats, it’s the paparazzi trailing Hunter on the way to the galleries, like they did Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan coming out of a nightclub in the early 2000s. In October, when he went to New York for his show’s opening at a two-story space in SoHo, there they were, waiting outside the gallery, all day and most of the night. They waited outside of his hotel too. (He had seen Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Schumer, and Emily Blunt at the hotel having lunch and assumed the paparazzi were there for them, but the trio left without fanfare, while the photogs were still waiting for him and shouting questions about the laptop when he left to get coffee with his daughter and son later in the day.)

Bergès snuck in some of his big-name collectors and art-world friends who wanted to view the exhibit in New York—but not be photographed—after dark, sending his staff home and keeping the lights dim so the shutterbugs would go home. He wouldn’t name names. “If I say who, all of a sudden the right-wing press is going to run with it, and I would be doing these people a disservice,” he told me.

People showed up regardless, privately and otherwise. At the beginning of October, around 200 people showed proof of vaccination to enter Milk Studios in L.A. for the show, including the city’s mayor and President Biden’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti, Moby, former Stockton mayor Michael Tubbs, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Shepard Fairey, the artist best known for his iconic “Hope” posters used by the Obama campaign. About 95% of the people in the room were people he knew, Hunter told me that night. A hundred percent of them were people who had one degree of separation from him. Many of them had the last name Biden, including his daughters and sister Ashley and lots of aunts and uncles and cousins. Through the crowds, the waiters passed trays of Champagne and sushi, as a videographer friend gathered B-roll and a violinist played in front of projected images of his process and the art in progress.

The artwork itself was saturated with color: Malibu blues, rich rust, aquas and greens, and a common thread of gold leaf throughout. In a review of his paintings for Whitehot, well-known critic Donald Kuspit wrote that “Biden plays the keyboard of colors as deftly as [Kandinsky] does, however different his abstract music, for it has a more urgent sense of purpose.” Hunter says he was influenced by Joseph Campbell’s lectures, in which the famed professor talked about sharing a common mythology, with symbols repeating themselves across civilizations, across times, across religions. Which is why, even though there were different kinds of work in the show—from more abstract paintings laid over photographs he took around Los Angeles to works that featured thousands of meticulously painted dots or blocks of solid color—you could see a repetition of certain symbols: snakes, birds, a solo male silhouette. Some pieces quoted philosophers—not surprising, given that, on most days that he paints in the garage, Hunter listens to philosophy podcasts. Fairey, the artist, told me after the show that the works were “graphic and painterly at the same time,” and that they were really solid, especially for someone who was earlier in their career: “There are plenty of artists that have been making work for decades whose work I like less than what I saw at Hunter Biden’s show.” Even The New York Post managed to compliment him. The New York Times was not cruel. “They have the generic smoothness of the art you might see in a posh hotel room, or the end papers of a first edition,” a review of the New York show read. “Certainly they display a command of the fluid medium that reflects a seriousness of purpose, even if you forget them days or minutes later.”

In the way the works were painted and the way they were hung, they appeared as though they were backlit even though they were not. They looked aglow from within. Hunter, in a denim button-down and jeans, at the center of it all, did too. Everyone there—his daughters, his friends—kept asking him if he was nervous leading up to the event; they waited for a panic that never came. “Everybody I know, when they have some sort of public performance, especially if there’s, like, a lot of attention being paid to it, panics,” the singer Moby told me after the event. He and Hunter have been close friends for years. “The number of times I’ve gone with friends of mine who are painters to openings, and before the show they’re gobbling Xanax and beta-blockers and doing shots of vodka just to keep the anxiety from making their brain melt. And so I walked in and I assumed, like, Uh-oh, Hunter’s going to be a nervous wreck. So I walked up to him, asking, ‘Are you okay?’ But he was so calm. The work has a lightness to it, a sweetness to it. So did he. He’s the only artist I know who on his opening night actually seems happy.”



It’s not that Hunter never gets nervous. It’s that he wasn’t nervous there, because it was exactly how he imagined it. “I wasn’t there to sell my art. I wasn’t there to talk about my art. I wasn’t there to explain myself, or explain what my art represented. All I had to do was watch people go, ‘Wow,’” he told me. “And I knew that that’s what they would do, not because I was overly confident about it. I’m sure some people didn’t like some paintings, or some people thought that that was too abstract, or some people thought that that was too figurative. But I didn’t care. I truly didn’t care. I was excited for my daughters to see the work. I was excited for my family to see the work. I was excited for my friends to see the work. But what I was really excited about was going back to work. I had three gigantic canvases being delivered at seven o’clock the next morning, and that’s the thing that was on my mind as I walked out of that room that night.”

“In one of my paintings, I picked this Nietzsche quote,” Hunter Biden tells me, paraphrasing, as he sits behind the desk where he now sits for 10 or so hours every day. “‘What I wish most upon the people that I love most in the world is the trauma and suffering that I’ve experienced in life.’ What he was really saying is that the greatest motivating factor, and the thing that gave him the most strength and allowed him to reach so deep inside, to be able to express the completely novel thoughts that he was able to do, which truly changed the way the world looked at itself and humanity looked at itself—the way in which Nietzsche changed the entire kind of course of thought, he credited all that to his suffering. And if you think about it, it’s that nothing of value is born from anything other than pain and suffering. All humanity has in common throughout all time is pain and suffering. And for a long, long time in my life, I attempted to escape that pain and suffering through the way which was the most economical, the most direct—through a substance. And when I finally came to a place where I had a choice to make, where I knew the suffering that at first was my savior was causing not just me but more importantly the people around me to suffer, I had to figure out a way. And what I was left with was what I’ve found is the most true thing that I’ve ever done, which is to paint.”

So the work starts before the sun does. Hunter wakes up with his 20-month-old son, baby Beau, whom he and his wife, Melissa, named after his late brother, and they have bananas and tea at the counter in their open kitchen before heading into the garage by 7:30. Baby Beau has his own workstation next to his dad’s desk, a little table scribbled with layers of toddler delights in a dozen different colors. “There are way too many pen marks on that table that Melissa doesn’t know about, so don’t say anything,” he tells me as he shows off the work. They’re in there together until 10:00, and then Hunter keeps working alone. Sometimes he’ll listen to music or the Philosophize This! podcast, or turn on the beginning of Morning Joe or Deadline: White House with Nicolle Wallace. But mostly, he zones out on the work. He’s always in the process of at least one painting. Sometimes it’s two at a time, one that he works on at his desk and another, larger-scale one like the 26-footer he showed me when I first walked in, because those dry differently, and he has to wait hours before he decides if it’s time to add another layer or make a small tweak or scratch it all and start over again. The shelves and cabinets and walls and desks in there are stacked with canvases and Yupo paper—hundreds and hundreds of pieces of art that he’s been working on for years.

Hunter has no formal training, though he has been making art since he was seven years old. He always carved out little spaces and studios to create, but he got serious about it after he met Melissa and got sober. They married after a weeklong courtship, and several months later, she was pregnant, the two residing in a little house in the hills above Hollywood, trying to live a quiet, happy life in the midst of his father’s presidential hopes, following Hunter’s years in the throes of addiction. “We were basically being stalked wherever we went,” Hunter recalls. “I was trying to figure out whether or not I was going to be called to testify in front of Congress; Rudy Giuliani and every one of those guys was accusing me of being a criminal over and over and over; the story of my crack addiction was fully explained in 15,000 words in The New Yorker; and you couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing my face.” Of course, it was his choice to participate in the New Yorker story. As he described in his memoir, he did so while still on drugs and without his dad’s campaign knowing about it. But he wanted to talk for himself, and he wanted to move on. So he spent more and more time at a tiny little desk in their guest bedroom, painting with some supplies he’d picked up at a small art store down on Ventura Boulevard, on Melissa’s urging.

He met Bergès a few months later through a friend of a friend. Sometimes Hunter would text him photos of his work, and Bergès would respond with honest feedback. The texts became more frequent. The feedback became more serious. Bergès liked the work, and he liked Hunter.

“Anytime I’m working with an artist, I look at three things: Do I like their work? Do I feel they’re working in their full potential? And if they are, then I don’t work with them, because I feel like I can’t go any further. And do I like them personally? Do I feel that we can work together? Because ultimately, it’s like a marriage. So when I met him, it just—we clicked.” A year and a half later, Bergès started to push him toward doing a show.

Like most things surrounding Hunter Biden, this did not come without public complications. The act of a member of the first family selling anything is an ethical minefield in the best of circumstances. Just ask Billy Carter and his peanut farm. The most recent former first family operated as if ethical standards and legal statutes were optional—optics games that, if they were really clever and really quiet, they could skirt. But the Trumps’ regular flouting of all moral standards, coupled with the heightened attention on all things Hunter Biden pertaining to his businesses, raised red flags, particularly in an arena as opaque as the art world. In the months leading up to the “Journey Home” opening, the White House Counsel’s Office developed guidelines for Bergès to follow to help avoid the appearance of, and actuality of, a conflict of interest. The gallery would keep the identities of any buyers secret from both the White House and Hunter. Bergès would set the prices and communicate with any interested parties; Hunter couldn’t himself talk to them about the art or the sales. At the time, Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, told reporters, “The president has established the highest ethical standards of any administration in American history, and his family’s commitment to rigorous processes like this is a prime example.”



The arrangement did little to quell concerns from ethics watchdogs and Murdoch-owned media properties, particularly when Bergès set prices in the six figures, with some that reached above $300,000. “We’re breaking records,” Bergès said. “I compared some of my other artists, but I also—because, in some ways, he’s also a historical figure whether he likes it or not. He’s an important person doing authentic art. The market has responded in kind.” Of course, this historical importance is the stickiness of it. By all accounts, Hunter Biden is doing good work that is selling for high prices by virtue of his profile and his blood, and regardless of his intentions or the processes put in place to safeguard the sanctity of it all, malicious forces could squeeze all of the juice out of those intentions to try and get what they want, even if they are unsuccessful.

“When I looked at some of the prices on the work, I thought, There are a lot of very established artists whose work isn’t this expensive, but it is so subjective that art pricing is not something that there’s some sort of easy evaluation for,” Fairey told me after the show. “And so I was like, Hey, good for him if he can get these prices for the work. But he’s clearly put a huge amount of effort into it so that this is a substantial body of work. He’s not messing around.”

As the noise around these concerns grew, one of Hunter’s friends asked him why he needed to make a career out of art now. His dad had waited so long for this moment. Hunter had for years just made a soft hobby of it. Wouldn’t it just be easier to take a lower-profile job? Maybe he could be an EMT and paint on the side for fun. “Well, for starters, I don’t want to be a fucking EMT,” Hunter tells me. “If you’re going to make a painting that’s five feet high and 22 feet long, you’re going to want to show it to somebody. And if you’re going to want to show it to somebody, you’re going to want to show it to them in a place and in a way that brings to life what you are attempting to express. And if you do that, then you have to find a gallery in order to be able to do that. And if you find a gallery, the reason that galleries stay in business is because they sell the fucking art. I don’t know of anybody else that has figured out a way to be able to share their art at that scale without having to be in the business of it somehow. And I respect that incredibly. So that’s why I’ve turned over the entire business of it to somebody who has a track record, who’s a professional and somebody I trust, somebody I think is a good person.”

Bergès wouldn’t talk specifics about sales—either who is buying or how much is selling. He confirmed that the art is, in fact, selling. “We are overachieving,” he told me.



Hunter doesn’t want to talk sales when asked. “I wanted to have a show because I just wanted people to see that not only was I okay, I was great. I am doing great. Because I think that there’s an enormous message of hope in that. Through all of this meanness, through all of it, and through all of my own failings, and through all of what everybody’s gone through, and through everything that seems so ugly and depressing, and just the weight of it, to be able to walk into that room and see that. My art is so deeply infused with the message and meaning.”

A few weeks later, after Hunter had gone to the party at the SoHo gallery, after there was a round of press reviewing the work, and after the New York Post had slapped a photo of him on its front page and called him “Vincent van Dough,” he texted me a Marcel Duchamp quote. “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone,” it read. “The spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists and let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on the one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity.”

“This is why artists show their art,” he added to me. “This is why we have exhibitions. This is why we have galleries. And this is why art is also a business. So to all the people who say, ‘Why do I have to exhibit and sell my art?’, talk to Duchamp.”

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Emily Jane Fox is a national correspondent at Vanity Fair.
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Mueller Report: Glenn Greenwald vs. David Cay Johnston on Trump-Russia Ties, Obstruction & More
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yLx_wDq1Wo

[Morrissey Breen]

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/4/19/the_mueller_report_glenn_greenwald_vs

The Justice Department has released a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report detailing Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia and President Trump’s attempts to impede the special counsel’s investigation. The report states the campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts,” but Mueller concluded, “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Mueller also outlined at least 10 instances where Trump attempted to impede the special counsel’s investigation, but Mueller came to no definitive conclusion on whether Trump broke the law by obstructing justice. In the report, Mueller suggests that this is a decision for Congress to make. We host a debate on the report’s findings between two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists: Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept and David Cay Johnston, who has covered Donald Trump since the 1980s. His most recent book is “It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America.”

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, the Justice Department released a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report detailing Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia and President Trump’s attempts to obstruct justice in the special counsel’s investigation. The report states, quote, the campaign expected to “benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts,” but Mueller concluded, “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

Mueller also outlined at least 10 instances where Trump attempted to impede the special counsel’s investigation, but Mueller came to no definitive conclusion on whether Trump broke the law by obstructing justice. In the report, Mueller suggests this is a decision for Congress to make. The report states, quote, “With respect to whether the president can be found to have obstructed justice by exercising his powers under Article II of the Constitution, we concluded Congress has authority to prohibit a President’s corrupt use of his authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice,” unquote.

But many questions remain about the Mueller report. About 10% of the report was redacted. Mueller has yet to speak publicly about his findings.

On Thursday, Attorney General William Barr held a news conference before the redacted report was released. Barr defended the president’s actions, claiming Trump had a, quote, “sincere belief” that Mueller’s probe was undermining his presidency.

ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM BARR: In assessing the president’s actions discussed in the report, it is important to bear in mind the context. President Trump faced an unprecedented situation. As he entered into office and sought to perform his responsibilities as president, federal agents and prosecutors were scrutinizing his conduct before and after taking office, and the conduct of some of his associates. At the same, there was relentless speculation in the news media about the president’s personal culpability.
Yet, as he said from the beginning, there was in fact no collusion. And as the special counsel’s report acknowledges, there is substantial evidence to show that the president was frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents and fueled by illegal leaks. Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the special counsel’s investigation, providing unfettered access to campaign and White House documents, directing senior aides to testify freely, and asserting no privilege claims.
AMY GOODMAN: Democratic lawmakers are accusing Attorney General Barr of mischaracterizing some of Mueller’s findings. House Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler has announced plans to issue a subpoena for the full, unredacted Mueller report and to request Mueller testify before the committee. Nadler spoke in New York Thursday.

REP. JERROLD NADLER: Even in its incomplete form, however, the Mueller report outlines disturbing evidence that President Trump engaged in obstruction of justice and other misconduct. Contrary to the attorney general’s statement this morning that the White House, quote, “fully cooperated,” unquote, with the investigation, the report makes clear that the president refused to be interviewed by the special counsel and refused to provide written answers to follow-up questions, page 13 of volume two; makes clear that his associates destroyed evidence relevant to the Russian investigation, page 10, volume one. The report concluded there was “substantial evidence,” in quotes, that President Trump attempted to prevent an investigation into his campaign and his own conduct, page 76, page 78, page 90, page 157, volume two.
AMY GOODMAN: While Democrats urged further congressional probes into the findings of the report, some went further, turning to talk of impeachment, in the hours after the report was released.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, founding editor of The Intercept, leading critic of the media coverage of alleged Russian collusion, he joins us from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. And David Cay Johnston is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, previously with The New York Times, now founder and editor of DCReport.org. He has covered Trump for years. His most recent book on him, It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America.

We welcome you both back to Democracy Now! for this rematch. Today let’s begin with Glenn Greenwald in Brazil. As you read through the 448-page report, Glenn, your overall response and what you thought was most significant about what Robert Mueller and his team found?

GLENN GREENWALD: I don’t think there can be any question that the most significant finding has to be about the allegations that kicked off the entire saga almost three years ago, which was the two-pronged conspiracy theory that Donald Trump worked with, coordinated, collaborated and conspired with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election and that Donald Trump is captive to Vladimir Putin as a result of a variety of blackmail, leverage and other forms of links that allow the Kremlin to dictate to the White House what it is that they’re supposed to do.

And I think it’s very important to point out from the outset that this was no ordinary investigation. The Democrats, the CIA, their allies in the media, who believed in this conspiracy theory, got exactly the prosecutor that they wanted, who everybody agreed was the man of the highest integrity and competence. He assembled a vast team of very aggressive prosecutors, FBI agents, forensic accountants, intelligence analysts. He had unlimited resources, the entire apparatus of the U.S. surveillance state at his disposal and 22 months to dig as deeply as he could dig to find out the answers to whether those conspiracy theories were or weren’t true. You can’t get a more sweeping or comprehensive investigation than that.

And he went through systematically each of the prongs of the conspiracy theories and found either that the evidence did not establish that they were true, or, in some cases, found the opposite, that in fact there was no evidence to support the theory at all and that the theory was simply false. One example of that is, for example—I think David mentioned this the last time we talked about it, as evidence that there was something sinister going on between the Russians and Trump—was the change to the GOP platform in mid-2016 to make it more favorable to the Russians by diluting the language about U.S. support for Ukraine. And at the time, I had always said, and said on the show the last time, that that was totally consistent with both Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s foreign policy, not to provoke Vladimir Putin by arming the Ukrainians. Mueller said this is done by some low-level aide, acting alone; there’s no evidence he coordinated it with even Donald Trump, let alone with the Russians or Vladimir Putin; and that it was just an attempt to conform the GOP platform to what Trump’s stated foreign policy was. And over and over and over, from the Trump Tower meeting to all of the post—Russian connections after both the convention and the election, Mueller used the same language over and over and over again, which is that there’s no evidence, or the evidence does not establish that these conspiracy theories actually happened.

Now, you can continue to believe in them. It sort of feels almost like arguing with people who have adopted religious beliefs, that they’re going to believe in their view of how the world works, no matter how much evidence you present them that it didn’t happen. But Democrats and proponents of this theory got what they wanted, which is the Mueller investigation, and now most of the Mueller report and his findings. And his findings are that he looked for 22 months as hard as he could and didn’t establish that these theories were true. And we already knew that because not one American was indicted or charged for conspiracy. But he went even beyond that and said the evidence doesn’t establish it.

On the obstruction issue, I think there’s a lot of evidence that Donald Trump is what we knew he was, which is an amoral liar, somebody who is willing to corruptly abuse his power to protect himself. But at the end of the day, the Democrat leaders in the House have already said they’re not going to impeach him over this. And the reason is, is because the question always was: Was Trump trying to stop the investigation because he genuinely believed that they were—it was based on a false conspiracy, or was he trying to stop the investigation because he knew he had done what people were accusing him of doing with the Russians and wanted to cover that up? And the Mueller report concluded it was the first instance: He was try to stop the investigation because he thought it was a sham all along, and therefore, even though he lied and acted improperly, it doesn’t rise to the corrupt intent needed to charge him with obstruction, which is stopping an investigation to prevent your own wrongdoing from being uncovered. And so, I think even Democrats know this is the end of the line with this entire three-year scandal that has drowned our politics in discourse.

AMY GOODMAN: David Cay Johnston, your takeaway from this report that was released, oh, about 20 hours ago, as of this broadcast?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, Amy, I agree with Glenn that Donald Trump is utterly unfit to hold office. But I think he is misreading what’s in the report. Mueller was charged with investigating to the standard of beyond reasonable doubt, a criminal standard. What he shows in the report is numerous contacts by the Russians trying to develop a relationship with the Trump campaign, the willingness of the Trump campaign and the eagerness of the Trump campaign to benefit from anything the Russians could do for them, including numerous contacts, some of them with known Russian spies. And Mueller writes something Glenn didn’t mention, that is very significant, near the top of his report: A statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean that there was no evidence of those facts. There’s lots of evidence here of improprieties. Does it rise to the standard of a criminal conspiracy charge under federal law? No. Mueller says this is properly the duty of Congress. And the standard in our Constitution is that the president takes an oath to faithfully execute the laws. We have to expect our president to be totally and completely loyal to the interests of the United States. That’s why the word “emoluments” appears three times in our Constitution. And the standard is abuse of power, or, in the words of our Constitution, high crimes and misdemeanors.

Now, I don’t think Donald Trump is going to be impeached, because there aren’t the votes to convict him. But that Donald Trump was eager, and his son Don Jr. and others in his campaign were eager, to get help from the Russians, the report explicitly states. That the Russians were eager to make sure that Hillary Clinton didn’t win, that they help both Trump and Bernie Sanders, is clearly stated in the report. So, to suggest that there’s nothing here and we should forget all this and it’s corrupted our politics, Glenn and I just fundamentally disagree about that. I think this report makes very clear that Donald Trump behaved in ways that are not loyal to the United States. He urged his staff, contrary to what Attorney General Barr said about complete cooperation, to lie, to deny, to cover up, to destroy records. He would not sit for an interview. He would not respond to further questions. And the answers in writing that he provided are artful, lawyerly-like arguments that evade. That we can’t close the loop on a conspiracy between the very best Russians at intelligence and spying, with the head of a third-generation, white-collar crime family who spent his entire life lying and denying; has been found by judges, after testifying in trials, to give testimony that wasn’t incredible; that he had convenient lapses of memory—and let’s remember Donald Trump claims to have the best memory of any living human being—all of that points to simply the fact that Mueller found lots of evidence, but nowhere near enough to meet the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt. That’s why he specifically refers to Congress and that this falls under the duties of Congress to look into.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, your response to David?

GLENN GREENWALD: So, first of all, just as reminder, the Democrats control the House of Representatives, which is the body charged with impeaching President Trump. It’s the Senate that determines whether he ought to be convicted. So, in both of the cases of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, when impeachment charges were brought, there was a lot of uncertainty about whether convictions could be obtained. But the House did its duty, anyway, under the Constitution, which is, if you really believe that Donald Trump committed serious crimes, it’s the constitutional duty of the Democrats in the House to impeach Donald Trump and then present the arguments and the evidence to convince the public that he ought to be removed from office. And they’ve made clear they’re not going to do that. And I think that’s pretty revealing.

I also want to say that David actually mischaracterized both what I said and what the Mueller report said. So, I made very clear that, in some instances, Mueller did what he was charged to do, which is to say whether there was enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt in order to indict Trump and his family members and aides on the issue of conspiracy and collusion, and he found that there wasn’t. That’s incredibly significant. You can just brush that aside if you want, but we all know that everybody spent the last three years saying Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner are inevitably about to be arrested, and then none of that happened. But the reality—so, I didn’t leave that out. I specifically said that there was parts of the report where Mueller simply said there’s not enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

But in other areas of the report, on collusion, Mueller went much further than that, to say not just that there’s not enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, but that there’s no evidence at all that this happened. And the language that he used, which I’m going to have to read, since David claims that it isn’t in there, is that Mueller himself said, “in some instances, the report points out the absence of evidence … about a particular fact or event.” For example, he says the Internet Research Agency, the Russia-based trolling farm, used Facebook posts and tweets to try and disrupt the election. And he says, “The investigation did not identify evidence that any U.S. persons knowingly or intentionally coordinated with the IRA’s interference operation.” As I said, he made the same exact claim about the change to the GOP platform regarding Ukraine, that there was no evidence—not that it didn’t rise to the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt, that there was no evidence this was anything other than a low-level aide acting on his own to change the platform, without even the knowledge of Trump, let alone Putin, to conform it to Trump’s stated foreign policy. And the same is true with all of the attempts after the convention, once Trump was nominated, by Ambassador Kislyak to try and talk to the foreign policy officials within the Trump campaign. Mueller says, “The Office did not identify any evidence” in those interactions of coordination between the campaign and the Russian government. And I could read 10 more examples like that.

So, Mueller was not only charged with this cramped, narrow, legalistic, prosecutorial duty to say whether evidence rose to a standard of a beyond a reasonable doubt—which, again, even if he had only done that and concluded that not one American—not Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, not one American—was an agent of the Russian government while working for Trump, coordinated or conspired with the Trump—with the Russian government over the campaign, that would be incredibly fatal to everything the media has been doing and saying over the last three years. But he went well beyond that, as I just read, in multiple instances, and said that so much of what we were told just didn’t happen.

The BuzzFeed story about Michael Cohen telling Mueller that Trump told him to lie, BuzzFeed now admits that never happened. Paul Manafort visiting Julian Assange three times in the Ecuadorean Embassy, as The Guardian reported, that didn’t happen. Virtually the entirety of the Steele dossier, that there were these overwhelming, year-long contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia to plan the dissemination of disinformation—the fact that they were using Roger Stone, three weeks before the WikiLeaks release, to try and find out what was in those documents that WikiLeaks has, as Mike Isikoff himself, one of the proponents, the earliest proponents, of this conspiracy theory admitted, by itself proves that the Trump campaign wasn’t doing what the Steele dossier said, since had they been in bed with the Russians all year, they wouldn’t have needed Roger Stone, two weeks before the WikiLeaks release, to find out what was in the emails. They would have been a party to it. But they weren’t. The whole thing was false. It was a scam. It was a hoax.

And again, as I said, you can just throw up your hands and say, “Well, maybe Mueller just didn’t find the evidence.” I mean, how do you argue with somebody like that? Yeah, of course, I mean, maybe Robert Mueller, after 22 months, didn’t find all the smoking guns that are out there. But we can only deal with the reality that we have, which is the reality that was produced after an incredibly comprehensive investigation, a sweeping, invasive, powerful one, that was exactly what the Democrats said they wanted. And that evidence simply did not produce the evidence to substantiate the conspiracy theories we’ve been hearing for three years. And that reality will never, ever change.

AMY GOODMAN: David Cay Johnston, we’re going to let you respond, but after this music break. David Cay Johnston and Glenn Greenwald debate the Mueller report. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Tina Turner, covering The Beatles’ 1969 song “Come Together.” This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue our debate for the hour, the rematch of two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, David Cay Johnston and Glenn Greenwald.

David Cay Johnston, it’s your turn, up next, but I wanted to also throw in another part of the Mueller report, where he wrote, “We recognized that a federal criminal accusation against a sitting President would place burdens on the President’s capacity to govern and potentially preempt constitutional processes for addressing presidential misconduct.” The report went on to say, Mueller’s team, quote, “determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes.” So, if you could respond to the numerous points Glenn Greenwald just raised and also that approach, which he says is going along with Department of Justice rules?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, let’s deal with that part first. I think it’s pretty clear from the report that Mueller has problems with the Office of Legal Counsel position that you can’t indict a sitting president. Lots of people do. I do. Laurence Tribe of Harvard, who’s a great constitutional scholar, and others do. But it’s the policy. And Robert Mueller is a straight-arrow guy, so he followed the policy. And that’s partly why his report says these are matters for Congress to take up.

This is not a black-and-white situation. I think Glenn has overstated the facts by suggesting there’s absolutely nothing here, it’s completely wrong, it’s been a scam, he calls it. In fact, there is an enormous amount of evidence in this report, damning evidence, that Donald Trump’s campaign was eager to get help from the Russian government. We know that they were eager to do so, for a variety of reasons, among them, Don Jr.'s “love it” email and the subsequent efforts to lie, deny and cover up about that; Donald Trump's refusal to sit for an interview; his directing people to behave inappropriately, through either not cooperating, destroying records, etc. I mean, imagine if a previous president, let’s say Barack Obama, had had a meeting with the head of the government in Iran and had only gone with a translator from the Iranian government, or, on another occasion, with a translator from each side and had the American translator destroy their notes. I think we’d all say, “Woah! What is going on here?”

The report is clear that the Russians, through Konstantin Kilimnik, were provided with very sensitive, confidential information about polling data, that was then used to use targeted ads on Facebook. And let me explain. On Facebook, they can slice and dice stuff so that if you said, “We only want the ads to be seen by white males in the state of Wisconsin between the age of 55 and 65 who lease a Chevrolet vehicle that is not a sedan,” you can buy that ad. And so, they were able to highly target these ads. Now, that doesn’t rise to the level of a criminal conspiracy in Mueller’s view, and I totally accept that. I don’t question what’s in Mueller’s report. But the fact that they couldn’t close the loop on contacts and what was going on here, as the report says, the statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean that there is no evidence of those facts. And that’s why Mueller referred this to Congress.

That Donald Trump repeatedly lied, that the Mueller report shows that things Donald Trump called fake news he knew to be true news, and is in the Mueller report, goes to the issue Glenn and I agree on about, which is that Donald Trump is a morally corrupt, totally unfit person to be president. So, I think the report is damning as to the willingness of the Trump people to receive information, the eagerness of the Russians—and notice the report talks about the Russian government, not so much the oligarchs. Vladimir Putin, we know from this report, meets regularly with about 50 of the oligarchs and works through them. And they are not the Russian government, but they are certainly the agents of the Russian government. And that all of this material went on during the campaign and Trump lied, denied and covered up is evidence that he had a guilty mind. He had mens rea.

And so, I think that we need to recognize that while there is, without question, not the material to sustain, even if you could indict a sitting president, any kind of indictment for conspiracy—which is the word I’ve generally used, by the way—the fact is there’s a ton of damning evidence here of inappropriate conduct for a president. You take an oath of office to faithfully execute the laws. Your loyalty should be entirely to the United States. The Russians are dangling multimillion-dollar opportunities in front of Donald Trump. He lies about them. They approach—that they didn’t close deals is not—is important, but they approached them, and they were willingly embraced in a meeting by Don Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner. And this report shows extensive contacts that are very troubling. Some of them are not. Some of them turn out to be insignificant, passing conversations and things. And I agree with Glenn, some of them—and I thought so at the time—were blown up to be too big of a deal. But to say, as I think Glenn is fundamentally arguing, that there’s nothing here—he just called it a scam—I think that goes way beyond the facts and way beyond Mueller’s point that this should go to Congress and that, as he said, the statement that the investigation did not establish facts, particular facts, does not mean there was no evidence of those facts.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald?

GLENN GREENWALD: So, I think this—first of all, if you notice, everybody who was behind this conspiracy is starting, very bluntly, to try and conflate obstruction with collusion and, essentially, forget about the whole conspiracy and collusion part of the story and focus on obstruction, because the reality is the Mueller report—and not just the Mueller report, but the Mueller investigation—destroyed all of the predictions and hopes about what it would result in and what it would find. And that’s why there’s now this almost monomaniacal focus on the obstruction part of this story, at the expense of the collusion part.

Let me just say a couple things. This fixation on this legalistic language that Mueller included in his report, which is that a finding that we didn’t establish something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, or doesn’t mean there’s no evidence for it, is incredibly irrational. Let me just give you an example. I can conduct an investigation and then come back and say, “My investigation did not establish that there are Martians who are controlling all of our thoughts and all of our actions using mind control methods.” That would be true. I would conduct an investigation. The evidence wouldn’t establish that. But it would also be true, I would add, that just because I didn’t find evidence to establish that doesn’t meet it didn’t happen. That’s because you can’t prove a negative. That’s all Mueller is saying. Just because our investigation didn’t demonstrate that these things took place doesn’t mean they didn’t happen, doesn’t mean that you can’t look at some events in certain ways and say that there’s some evidence for it. But, as I said, in many cases he said there was no evidence, and in many cases he says, “Our investigation did not establish.” And to try and minimize that, after three years of everything that has been dominating the news, I think, is very disingenuous.

On the question of whether or not there are disturbing aspects of Trump’s behavior, I agree that the obstruction part of the report, again, reveals some things that Donald Trump did that are, for me, utterly unsurprising, but nonetheless showing his utter lack of ethics, which is something I’ve known for 30 years living in New York. But on the part of the report that deals with everything that kicked this all off, which was Trump’s relationship with Russia, the only thing that is in the report, that David keeps harping on, is the idea that Trump and his campaign was willing to accept help from the Russians. And that’s true. When the Russians called and said, “Hey, we have some dirt about your adversary, Hillary Clinton, that shows her to be really corrupt and criminal, and we would like to give it to you,” the Trump campaign said, “Yeah, we’d love to get that.” Now, you can say, “Well, that’s just an unethical thing to do.” It’s clearly not illegal, according to Robert Mueller, because it doesn’t even rise to the level under the statute where you can make it a crime under campaign finance law, let alone conspiracy. But you can say it’s unethical, if you want.

But then you have to deal with this fact: The DNC had contractors working for it, collaborating, coordinating and working with the Ukrainian government, to dig up dirt on Paul Manafort and Donald Trump’s finances. And they succeeded in doing it. They got dirt about Paul Manafort from the Ukrainian government, because the Ukrainians wanted to help Hillary Clinton win the election, because they thought that she would be better for them than Donald Trump would be. The Steele dossier was built by someone being paid by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, Christopher Steele, going through Moscow, working with his contacts within the Russian government, to try and get dirt about Donald Trump.

So, if you really believe that it’s so nefarious for a political campaign to try and get dirt about your opponent if you work with a foreign government to do it, why isn’t the outrage just as high when it comes to the DNC’s efforts to work with the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt about Manafort and Trump, or the use of Christopher Steele to get dirt from his contacts within Russian intelligence about Donald Trump, much of which turned out to be, if not all of it, utterly false? So, I think that that’s the most you can say, and then the question becomes: Why doesn’t that apply equally to the Democrats?

And then, I would finally add, I mean, if I were David Cay Johnston and people who thought like him, my focus now would be on demanding to know why people like Steny Hoyer and Adam Schiff and, up until now, Nancy Pelosi have pretty much said impeachment is off the table. Like, if you really believe that this is a grave threat to the republic, that these are serious crimes and misdemeanors that Donald Trump has engaged in, in abusing his power, how can you not be protesting in the streets against the leaders of the House of Representatives for failing in their constitutional duty to initiate impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump? How can it be justified, if it were really as egregious as is being suggested by David and others, for them not to do that?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, David Cay Johnston, do you think the House should move to impeach President Trump?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, I don’t think they’re going to, because there aren’t votes in the Senate to convict. And so it would be pointless. You need 67 votes. And the Republican senators are simply not going to vote, even though, in private, many of them have made it clear, in conversations with people, that they are deeply disturbed and think Donald Trump is unfit to serve.

But, you know, Glenn said something a moment ago that is absolutely false, and I don’t want to let it slide. The Steele dossier, that was first paid for through Fusion GPS, run by a former excellent reporter for The Wall Street Journal, was initially financed by Republicans. Only after Donald Trump got the nomination did a front for Hillary Clinton, a law firm, then come in and start paying for additional work. And so, to suggest this was a DNC project is just false.

As to foreign governments, I think it’s totally inappropriate that we have these foreign—

GLENN GREENWALD: Just to be clear, I agree. Just to be—let me just interject. I agree with that. I didn’t—all I said was that the Democrats paid for that report.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: OK, fine.

GLENN GREENWALD: I didn’t say that they initiated the project.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Fine, fine.

GLENN GREENWALD: You’re absolutely right about that. But the Democrats did pay for Christopher Steele’s work.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: They paid for part of it later, that’s correct.

GLENN GREENWALD: Yeah.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: I mean, I think this whole episode has brought to light serious shortcomings. And I’m somebody who has exposed spies and foreign agents here, going back many decades. There are real serious shortcomings in our laws. We should not be having a lot of these international contacts. But Donald Trump—the reason I think the obstruction issue is in fact highly relevant here is: Why would you lie and deny, if you haven’t done anything wrong? Lying and denying is evidence of a guilty mind. And Donald Trump lied and denied, directed other people to lie. He is essentially an unindicted co-conspirator, individual one in the criminal charges that were pled to as campaign violations by Michael Cohen.

Mueller concluded that the help that was provided couldn’t be valued, and it would be a very difficult thing to do and to suss out in terms of our campaign finance laws. But that the Trump campaign provided sensitive information that helped the Russians in their efforts to make sure that Hillary Clinton didn’t get in the White House—and, remember, the Russians also tried to help the Bernie Sanders campaign for the same reason. They did not want Hillary Clinton, because she had made it clear she was going to do everything she could, short of war, to make Vladimir Putin give up Crimea and other actions. To suggest there’s nothing going on here is, I think, just wrong. There’s lots of evidence of it. And you don’t lie, deny, obstruct and cover up, unless you know you’ve done something wrong. It may not be wrong to a criminal standard, and Mueller has said it’s not—we can’t prove anything to the criminal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt. But they show an enormous amount of conduct that is improper. If you get a call from a hostile foreign power, as Don Jr. did when he got his email, and you don’t pick up the phone and call FBI counterintelligence, I think—and I would hope that Glenn would agree with me—that that is not an act of a patriot or a loyal person or even one with a fundamental sense of decency and morality.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to break. I know that Glenn is chomping at the bit, and you’ll get your response in a minute, Glenn. We’re speaking with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists David Cay Johnston and Glenn Greenwald on the release of the Mueller report—well, a part of it. It was redacted. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Putting Up Resistance” by Beres Hammond. This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. We’re conducting a debate, a rematch, between two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, Glenn Greenwald and David Cay Johnston, upon the release of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report that concluded that the Trump campaign did not collude, did not conspire with the Russians to win the election, but did say that on the issue of obstruction of justice, Congress should decide. Glenn Greenwald, if you want to pick up where Johnston left off: Why didn’t Donald Trump Jr. go directly to the FBI when he was reached out to by Russian agents to ask if they wanted damaging information about Hillary Clinton, and also why Donald Trump obstructed and lied about so much?

GLENN GREENWALD: So, on that issue of Donald Trump Jr., the main point I made in my prior answer, which was a question to David, was completely ignored by him, about what the Democrats did with the Ukrainian government. And I’m interesting in reposing that question to him in just a second. And before I do, I just want to address something he said—

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Not true, but go ahead.

GLENN GREENWALD: —that I think is really important—OK, which was—then maybe I missed it, so I’m interested in hearing again. But David said that Hillary Clinton made it clear that she was willing to confront the Russians in every conceivable way, short of war, to make sure that they gave up Crimea. I think that is a really important point. In 2012, the Russians were very clearly hoping that Barack Obama would win and Mitt Romney would lose, because Romney was going around saying the Russians were the number one geopolitical threat and we have to be much more belligerent in confronting them, whereas Obama was saying that’s Cold War thinking and that we actually should try and get along with them a lot better. In Russian elections in the past, like when Boris Yeltsin was running, the U.S. wanted Boris Yeltsin to win, because they knew he would privatize U.S. [sic] industry in a way that would help U.S. companies, so they meddled in their election to help Yeltsin win. They meddled in 2012 to agitate anti-Russian protesters.

So, I think David is right. Hillary Clinton’s agenda, she was very critical of Obama for not confronting Putin in Ukraine, for not confronting Putin in Syria, for not doing more to sanction Russian oligarchs. And Obama’s position was actually closer to Trump’s, which was, “No, we should try and get along with Russia. We don’t want to provoke Putin unnecessarily. He’s a nuclear-armed power.” And he’s not that powerful over things like Ukraine and Syria, which are distant to the U.S. So, of course I think it’s rational that the Russians preferred the candidate saying, “Let’s get along with Russia,” to the candidate saying, “Let’s confront Russia more belligerently than Obama did.” That’s what the U.S. does, too. They interfere in other countries’ elections, including Russia, to help the candidate that will most help them.

But I am interested, David, in hearing your answer directly to the question of whether you are also angry, as angry as you are about Trump Jr. taking that meeting with the Russians, about the efforts to work with the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt about Paul Manafort and Donald Trump, as well as the use of Christopher Steele to dig up dirt by using his sources within the Russian government, the same Russian government with whom you say Trump worked, to dig up dirt about Donald Trump.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, one of the differences between us, Glenn, is I’m not driven here at all by emotion. I don’t hate anybody. I’m not angry about anything. I deal in facts that I can prove and verify. And when the facts change, my view of events change. And, of course, we never have a perfect set of facts.

But I think that involvement—I said earlier—involvement by either party with foreign governments, we need better laws and rules about this. I don’t think the Foreign Agent Registration Act is sufficient. And I think it’s absolutely improper to be doing things that were done by—on both sides, by this. That’s one where I’ll agree with you about that. This Ukrainian information gathering is troubling. Opposition research goes on all the time, but there should be some rules and controls on that. And so, in all of this, let’s be very clear that Donald Trump was—

GLENN GREENWALD: So, does that mean that they’re not patriots?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Well, I think that Donald Trump Jr.’s behavior was absolutely unpatriotic. Yes, I think that his failure to pick up the phone and call the FBI—

GLENN GREENWALD: What about the Democrats in working with Ukraine?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: I don’t—to be honest, I don’t enough about—

GLENN GREENWALD: And what about the Democrats working with Ukrainian government? Was that unpatriotic?

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: Yeah, I don’t know enough about the details of that. I think that’s a very good question, Glenn. And I don’t know enough to give you sort of a definitive response to that. I’m very troubled by it on its face.

GLENN GREENWALD: Fair enough.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: OK?

GLENN GREENWALD: OK.

DAVID CAY JOHNSTON: So, but I think—you know, let’s remember here, Donald Trump was negotiating for a Trump Tower deal that would have put millions, maybe tens of millions, of dollars in his pocket, when he was running for president. He was lying and denying about various things. He publicly called for the Russians to hack—or, maybe that’s too strong a word—to find the, quote, “missing emails,” which weren’t missing at all. And within hours, Russian intelligence agents were working on doing that.

So, what we’ve seen, I think, is right in front of our eyes: inappropriate behavior, and behavior that shows that Donald Trump, in the most kind—as I’ve said before, the kindest thing you can say about Donald Trump is that he has divided loyalties. Donald Trump’s ultimate loyalty is only to Donald Trump. It is not to his oath of office. It is not to the country. At DCReport, we’ve been documenting all the things he’s doing that hurt the forgotten man, that he promised to be the champion of and who he is actively, aggressively working against in his administration. And you don’t lie, deny and cover up, unless you know you did something wrong.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn, do you think that President Trump should be impeached over obstruction of justice? You have, what, Don McGahn quitting rather than firing Mueller, and, of course, President Trump fired Comey. But do you think, despite, you’ve always said, that this is not about collusion? You have 30 seconds.

GLENN GREENWALD: No, I don’t. And the reason I don’t is because—yeah, I don’t, because I think that the question was whether he was acting as a president in his right to stop an investigation that he knew was based on false allegations or whether he was trying to cover up his own wrongdoing. And once Mueller concluded that there was no evidence to establish the wrongdoing, I don’t think he had a corrupt motive. I think his motive was: “I think this investigation is garbage, and therefore I’m very open about the fact that I want to stop it.” And I don’t think that’s obstruction of justice. I think that’s just Donald Trump wanting to stop an investigation he believes never should have been launched in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: And in five seconds, your thoughts on Donald Trump today?

GLENN GREENWALD: I mean, I think Donald Trump is a huge danger and menace to the republic for a lot of reasons that David is very adeptly covering, and I really hope that we can now turn our attention to those things, now that we’re done with this espionage thriller that has dominated us for three years. I hope we can focus on the things that matter.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there. Glenn Greenwald and David Cay Johnston, thanks so much.

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Up Next

As Mueller Finds No Collusion, Did Press Overhype Russiagate? Glenn Greenwald vs. David Cay Johnston

[Morrissey Breen]

How Western elites exploit Ukraine

Posted by Ken Waldron on March 10, 2022, 2:57 am

"In each case, a narrative is constructed and transposed over the reporting, reinforced by sensationalist imagery that could rationalise an intervention and perhaps military action."

-This piece was published five days ago, and its relevance becomes increasingly self evident. Todays "narrative transposed over the reporting":

Yesterday I posted a link to a video where Victoria Nuland was asked directly if Ukraine had biological weapons and she admitted that they did: https://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/msg/1646794128.html
She went on to give a senseless backpedalling opinion at Rubio's prompting that if such were used in Ukraine it would be the Russians that did used them.
Every single paper today has the story. Do they headline her factual admission of Ukraine's biological weapons culpability? No: not one. Instead they headline her subsequent fact-free claim about future Russian culpability: a claim contradicted by the actual evidence of her previous statement.

- We are in a frightening place.


How Western elites exploit Ukraine

Reality is manipulated to strengthen their regime
BY ARTA MOEINI
March 5, 2022

The war in Ukraine poses a palpable threat to Western democracies, but this has little to do with Russia posing an inherent strategic threat to the United States or its European allies. No — more so than the Russian state, the threat to the West comes from within, a consequence of our congealing perceptions towards the conflict.

Bombs are not raining down on our cities; instead, what we are experiencing is the psychological weaponisation of war — and its exploitation as a tool of indoctrination and statecraft in the hands of the establishment.

The Ukraine crisis is undoubtedly a tragedy, but it is merely the latest in a series of geopolitical events stretching back at least 20 years in which the media coverage has been biased, one-sided, and ideological. All of these instances — Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the Afghanistan Withdrawal — were riddled with “structural information traps” that we ignored at our peril.

With each of these conflicts, the coverage gets worse, and the traps become ever more luring and incendiary. In each case, a narrative is constructed and transposed over the reporting, reinforced by sensationalist imagery that could rationalise an intervention and perhaps military action. But none compares to Ukraine. Here, we have witnessed the media of the Free World disseminating dishonest or otherwise uncritical coverage, fake news, Ukrainian disinformation, and propaganda aimed at conditioning the public to internalise the establishment’s Manichean narrative of a deranged madman’s random war of aggression.

Not only has the Ukraine coverage been highly charged, morally self-righteous, and plainly political, it actively demands a collective suspension of disbelief as it cultivates and redirects a natural reaction of sympathy felt by all into a moral outrage that insists on certain retaliation. Some, such as the former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, have irresponsibly vilified the entire Russian population. Others, such as The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, have begun to senselessly demonise prescient realist American academics for daring to shed light on Russia’s basic national security interests and the possibility of a confrontation if they go unrecognised.

So far as the Western legacy media is concerned, we really do live in the post-historical age Francis Fukuyama triumphantly proclaimed in 1989, with liberal internationalism the only acceptable paradigm through which to understand the world. Alternative views are now tantamount to championing tyranny. In each instance, the dictator comes to personify internationally Hegel’s thymotic, if savage, primitive man — the inhumane antithesis of the “last man” — fighting maniacally against liberal democracy, the march of modernity, and progress itself. Assad, Ghaddafi, the Taliban, and Vladimir Putin all fit this archetype as reactionary actors par excellence necessitating a holy alliance to confront and civilise.

Such a melioristic framing of international politics justifies and indeed privileges a Manichean narrative of good and evil. In this context, rationality itself is bound to the good, defined as effective conformity with liberal hegemony.

This is how the permanent members of the ruling class view the world. The former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, has made the enlightening observation that the years-brewing war in Ukraine was a result of Putin simply becoming “unhinged”, suggesting he might be suffering from neurological problems. Not to be outdone, Condoleezza Rice, one of the architects of the Iraq War and the ill-advised 2008 Bucharest declaration (which affirmed Nato’s “open door” towards Ukraine and therefore helped to spark this most recent conflict), bemoaned Putin’s “delusional rendering of history” and “erratic” behaviour.

Perhaps, given the profound crisis of meaning in the West and the gap in solidarity and social cohesion, we should not be surprised. Living under the conditions of rootlessness, spiritual emptiness, and angst, every crisis is an opportunity for mythopoesis. Tragedy is reborn, and we are easily enthralled by the periodic cycles of worship and hero-making. Our faith in the cult of expertise, meanwhile, blinds and lulls us to the potential dangers of such black and white thinking.

As good Straussians, American neoconservatives were among the first to intuit this fact: that owing to disenchantment and the dissolution of our “sacred canopy”, the myth — or the Platonic “noble lie” — can be used to strengthen the Regime. Through their co-option, they would ensure the inherent power of the “noble lie” would be harnessed to regularly generate casus belli for global liberal imperialism. After all, what better unifying force than the “grand American project” of war to energise one’s desire for national greatness and the need for the regimentation of life in a disordered, chaotic Zeitgeist. Led by America, the grand mission of the Anglosphere would therefore have to be “to advance civilisation itself”. Not to mention, heroes also need villains, and it does help that in the Ukrainian archetype, ‘evil’ is not an intangible virus but can be personified onto an ‘other’ — in this case, Vladimir Putin.

This is the fake, performative, and internationalist nationalism of the American elite class: they use emotional triggers to rally the people behind the flag of the state in the name of lofty humanitarian causes which mask their own self-importance and narcissistic greatness. In fact, the systematic and periodic milking of tragedy to sow mass hysteria and manufacture support for the liberal imperium and its rulers has become the modus operandi in Washington. The consequence is not only further empowerment of the martial state, but also the enabling and even the ennobling of America’s war machine.

But so what? So what if our information ecosystem in the West is substantively flawed and prejudiced? Is this kind of systemic information bias, unbalanced coverage, and outright favouritism not endemic to all culture-complexes, prevalent also across state-run media in China, Iran, and Russia? The answer is certainly yes, but with an important qualification: the latter are not liberal democracies.

Some might say the foreign policy hawks have not learned from their catastrophic regime-change wars in the Middle East. But they have. They learned the importance of narrative control and information warfare targeting domestic audiences: consolidating the media, tightening their hold on information, marginalising the few investigative journalists that remain, and nullifying scepticism as examples of appeasement or Putinism. Undoubtedly, the situation seriously endangers civil liberties and freedom of thought in the Anglosphere, undermining the very foundation of Western democracy.

But wedded to a disturbing, yet ascendant, neo-McCarthyism, the homogenisation of the Western media environment could ultimately prove more ominous than simple government censorship à la North Korea or Iran. At its core, the phenomenon aims to condition public opinion into “correct” acceptable speech patterns in the service of the “noble lie” — using the good heart of most ordinary citizens and their repulsion at human suffering as bait.

This noxious development, unless fully defanged and neutralised, could yet tear the very fabric of Western society, unleashing the dystopia of internalised totalitarianism, wherein the public-private boundaries disappear and citizens — even informed ones — can hardly distinguish between planted or socially-reinforced information and their own views. In such a world, the only choice is to virtue signal and self-censor.

Gone unchecked, it could amount to mass indoctrination around key national security questions and spell the end of democracy — in spirit if not procedurally. This is the ultimate fog of war.

Despite their litany of failures, the lesson drawn by the foreign policy establishment from their calamitous interventionism under the banner of democracy and freedom (“democratism“) was not to abandon their evangelical crusades for empire and to affirm restraint, moderation, and prudence. It was, instead, a desire not to be caught in the lie, as they were with their patently false claim about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). To achieve this, the military-industrial-congressional complex and the professional-managerial class that runs it had to dominate a new battlespace: information. Not for foreign audiences, in which Western intelligence has had a long track record, but to domesticate, intellectually sterilise, and effectively neutralise their own citizens.

To guarantee the continuation of its globalist misadventurism, the establishment had to control and limit the political discourse at home. It has done so largely in two ways. The first was to claim monopoly over ‘truth’, and to discredit anyone who might not go along with the endorsed narrative by doubting their patriotism and brandishing them as appeasers, apologists, and/or outright traitors. The second was to ensure a total consolidation of national security narratives — so that even when instances of falsehood and misinformation are discovered, this would not receive much exposure but be shunned to the darkest corners of the internet.

Any war is a tragedy. We should work to de-escalate and see it end in Ukraine. But there are always at least two sides to a conflict: two agendas, not counting the designs of external actors. War does not occur in a vacuum. It often betrays (and is the culmination of) a long history of grievances and distrust.

Having claimed over 14,000 lives since 2014, the conflict in Ukraine is not about Vladimir Putin and his character but realpolitik, national interest, and great power rivalry. Countries have genuine security interests, some of them existential. They have real red lines.

“No Russian leader could stand idly by,” Putin told William Burns, now the director of the CIA, and accept Nato membership for Ukraine, Georgia, or Belarus, or allow Western weapons systems into these countries. As one of American greatest strategists and the architect of “containment” against the Soviet Union, George Kennan’s reaction to the Clinton administration’s insistence on Nato’s enlargement is particularly telling: “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”

Almost 25 years on, such sober-minded analysis is increasingly rare. And this sidelining of neutral, dispassionate scrutiny in the Russo-Ukrainian War is particularly alarming because this is not America’s war. The North Atlantic has little vital geostrategic interest in Ukraine other than in trying to avoid a refugee or energy crisis. Yet many in Washington, London, or Brussels have goaded and encouraged, and are now revelling in, the conflict — convinced as they are that an extended quagmire there could become the kind of vulnerability for Russia that Afghanistan was for the Soviet Union, a malignant tumour metastasising to the whole of the Russian body politic and instigating regime change.

While diehards may desire a West-East clash packaged under the tired rubric of Democracy versus Autocracy to prove their machismo, the situation in Ukraine is boiling over — and it is still early days. Things are about to get far more dreadful. Ukraine is a small state neighbouring a great power, a historical buffer and bridge between Russia and the West. “To Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country,” wrote Henry Kissinger in 2014. “Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus,”. The sooner we heed and accept this fact, the sooner we can sensibly gauge the situation as is and review our commitment critically.

Statesmanship is the art of not letting emotions drive policy. Sentimentality is the enemy of reason, all sense of proportion, and limits: in short, it kills realism and breeds wishful thinking. Such utopianism is senseless and dangerous: it will prolong the conflict and get lots of innocent civilians needlessly killed. Meanwhile, fomenting false hope in the public domain could further fan the flames of war, entangling Europe and the US in a confrontation with nuclear Russia — an Armageddon the tale of which we will likely not live to tell.

War is not sports-betting, where one can feel good about siding with the underdog from the comfort of a couch or a bar. It is geopolitics in its most visceral, existential form: wagers have real costs involving human lives, and they are settled only with power and political will.

The point is that this tragedy was entirely predictable and avoidable. We invited (if not compelled) conflict with our politics of intrigue and meddling in Eastern Europe, our disregard for Moscow’s security interests, and our moral grandstanding over items like Nato’s eastward expansion, Ukrainian neutrality, and demilitarisation. Any seasoned diplomat of the Cold War would be left utterly mystified. This was and remains political and strategic malpractice.

The question now is whether we want to put millions of Ukrainian lives in jeopardy simply to keep it as a Western Bulwark on Russia’s frontier and a dagger at Moscow’s throat. The Russo-Ukrainian War must be condemned and brought to an end using diplomacy, but the West must accept a degree of culpability for leading the Ukrainians “down the primrose path” and egging on their showdown with their giant neighbour to the east. Any attempt to escalate and prolong this conflict by giving false hope to the Ukrainian people with tough rhetoric, moralistic bluster, lethal arms, and economic sanctions, the brunt of which will be felt by civilians on both sides, is irresponsible and callous. It would only ensure more death and suffering.

As former US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor contended in a recent television interview: “I see no reason why we should fight with the Russians over something that they have been talking about for years, [and] we simply chose to ignore… We will not send our forces to fight, but we are urging Ukrainians to die pointlessly in a fight they can’t win. We’re going to create a far greater humanitarian crisis than anything you’ve ever seen if it doesn’t stop.” Only this time, our liberal conceit and messianic delusion could potentially spiral a regional conflict into a global maelstrom that would exterminate humanity in a nuclear apocalypse.

The road to hell, as the wise aphorism has it, is paved with good intentions. Unless we course-correct now, we could soon find ourselves in a Huxleyan Brave New World that exploits the illusion of freedom while normalising the sophistic manipulation of public discourse to manufacture consent around the establishment’s liberal internationalist foreign policy.

When all roads lead to interventionism and war, pause, think, and consider how we got to where we are. Ask yourself who designed this dystopian city of lies and to what purpose — before it is too late.

https://unherd.com/2022/03/how-western-elites-exploit-ukraine/

[Morrissey Breen]

‘Cackling’ Kamala Harris cements herself as the ‘worst vice president in US history’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPaBR3GNVe4

[Morrissey Breen]

OPEN WAR: Kamala THROWS FIT Over WH Aides Refusing To Stand |Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
171,544 viewsMar 25, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEy9D0LWYAI

[Morrissey Breen]

Idi Amin of Uganda 🇺🇬 very funny man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDYikvBWp-w

On Friday, March 18, 2022 at 10:31:16 PM UTC+13, Morrissey Breen wrote:
> ‘Cackling’ Kamala Harris cements herself as the ‘worst vice president in US history’
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPaBR3GNVe4
> On Thursday, March 10, 2022 at 8:32:11 PM UTC+13, Morrissey Breen wrote:
> > On Tuesday, March 1, 2022 at 12:12:48 AM UTC+13, Morrissey Breen wrote:
> > > On Tuesday, March 1, 2022 at 12:04:20 AM UTC+13, Morrissey Breen wrote:
> > > > On Thursday, February 17, 2022 at 10:34:35 PM UTC+13, Morrissey Breen wrote:
> > > > > https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/12/hunter-biden-is-painting-his-truth
> > > > >
> > > > > “I JUST WANTED PEOPLE TO SEE THAT NOT ONLY WAS I OKAY, I WAS GREAT”: HUNTER BIDEN IS PAINTING HIS TRUTH
> > > > > The president’s son has lived his misfortunes and missteps in the public eye. Now he feels like he’s come out the other side, spending his days listening to philosophy podcasts and mounting exhibits of the art to which he has devoted his new life.
> > > > > BY EMILY JANE FOX
> > > > > DECEMBER 9, 2021
> > > > > Hunter Biden son of President Joe Biden at his art studio in Los Angeles Nov. 1 2019.

Idi Amin of Uganda 🇺🇬 very funny man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDYikvBWp-w

[Morrissey Breen]

General Idi Amin Announces His Intention To Expel South Asians From Uganda | Kampala | August 1972
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD0CTrUlNI4

[Morrissey Breen]

REVEALED: How BLM FLEECED Donors, Sold Out To Corporations | Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoP6DEbBids
Krystal and Saagar dive into the investigative reporting over the past few months documenting the rampant fraud, corruption, and lies at the heart of the Black Lives Matter organization that has become a vehicle for Clintonworld & corporate America.

[Morrissey Breen]

> General Idi Amin Announces His Intention To Expel South Asians From Uganda | Kampala | August 1972
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD0CTrUlNI4

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/01/mexico-drugs-anabel-hernandez-narcoland

Mexico
Interview
'Mexico's war on drugs is one big lie'
Ed Vulliamy
Anabel Hernández, journalist and author, accuses the Mexican state of complicity with the cartels, and says the 'war on drugs' is a sham. She's had headless animals left at her door and her family have been threatened by gunmen. Now her courageous bestseller, extracted below, is to be published in the UK
Anabel Hernández
Journalist and author Anabel Hernández, photographed for the Observer in Parque Mexico, Mexico City. Photograph: Adam Wiseman for the Observer
Ed Vulliamy
Sun 1 Sep 2013 00.04 BST
249
During January 2011, Anabel Hernández's extended family held a party at a favourite cafe in the north of Mexico City. The gathering was to celebrate the birthday of Anabel's niece. As one of the country's leading journalists who rarely allows herself time off, she was especially happy because "the entire family was there. There are so many of us that it's extremely difficult to get everybody together in one place. It hardly ever happens."

Anabel Hernández had to leave early, as so often, "to finish an article", and it was after she left that gunmen burst in. "Pointing rifles at my family, walking round the room – and taking wallets from people. But this was no robbery; no one tried to use any of the credit cards – it was pure intimidation, aimed at my family, and at me." It was more than a year before the authorities began looking for the assailants. And during that time the threats had continued: one afternoon last June, Hernández opened her front door to find decapitated animals in a box on the doorstep.

Hernández's offence was to write a book about the drug cartels that have wrought carnage across Mexico, taking some 80,000 lives, leaving a further 20,000 unaccounted for – and forging a new form of 21st-century warfare. But there have been other books about this bloodletting; what made Los Señores del Narco different was its relentless narrative linking the syndicate that has driven much of the violence – the Sinaloa cartel, the biggest criminal organisation in the world – to the leadership of the Mexican state.

Her further sin against the establishment and cartels was that the book became, and remains, a bestseller: more than 100,000 copies sold in Mexico. The success is impossible to overstate, a staggering figure for a non-fiction book in a country with indices of income and literacy incomparable to the American-European book-buying market. The wildfire interest delivers a clear message, says Hernández: "So many Mexicans do not believe the official version of this war. They do not believe the government are good guys, fighting the cartels. They know the government is lying, they don't carry their heads in the clouds."

Hernández's book will be published in English this month with the title Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and their Godfathers, so that we in the English-speaking world that consumes so much of what the cartels deal, and which banks their proceeds, might learn the lie of "cops and robbers", of "upright society versus the mafia" – the received wisdom that still contaminates coverage of drug wars and the "war on drugs".

Two writers in particular have been pioneering the struggle to counter this untruth: one is Hernández, and the other is Roberto Saviano – author of Gomorrah, about the Camorra of Naples – who writes in a foreword to Hernández's English edition: "Narcoland shows how contemporary capitalism is in no position to renounce the mafia. Because it is not the mafia that has transformed itself into a modern capitalist enterprise, it is capitalism that has transformed itself into a mafia. The rules of drug trafficking that Anabel Hernández describes are also the rules of capitalism."

By the year 2000, Anabel Hernández had made a name for herself in Mexican journalism, on the daily paper Reforma. But in December of that year, she found herself personally caught up in the murky crossover between state and criminals when her father was kidnapped: a crime the family believes to have been unconnected to his daughter's work.

The police in Mexico City said they would investigate only if they were paid; the family refused, figuring – as sometimes happens – that the police would take the money without taking any action. When Mr Hernández was murdered, Anabel Hernández's resolve to nurture her craft – fearless of, and without illusions about, the establishment – was deepened by the outrage.

Within a year, Hernández had broken a scandal about the extravagance with which the winning presidential candidate, Vicente Fox, had decorated his personal accommodation using public funds – while campaigning on a ticket of economic austerity. Two years later, she was honoured by Unicef for her work on slave labour and the exploitation of Mexican girls entrapped in agricultural work camps in southern California. Before long, Mexico's drug war erupted, and Hernández turned her attention to this most perilous of subjects, and the most powerful man involved: Joaquín "El Chapo'" Guzmán, leader of the Sinaloa cartel. In the depth of its depiction of the world's richest and most influential criminal, Hernández's book leaves every other account far behind.

puente grande 2
Puente Grande State prison in Mexico, in which El Chapo ("Shorty") Guzman, head of the Sinaloa cartel was nominally incarcerated, but which he actually ran. Photograph: Getty Images
When Zulema Hernández (no relation) entered Puente Grande prison, convicted of robbery, she cannot have thought herself in for a happy time. But she could never have imagined the consequences of attracting the attention of the jail's most famous inmate, Guzmán, and becoming one of his lovers. The attentions of El Chapo ("Shorty") led Zulema to have two abortions, to being prostituted around the warders like "a piece of meat" and – once released – to her corpse being found in the boot of a car with the letter Z, epigram of Guzmán's main rivals, Los Zetas, carved into her buttocks, breasts and back.

If this appalling tale, past midway through Hernández's narrative, captures the squalidness of Mexico's drug war, another passage illustrates the way Guzmán ran the jail in which he was supposedly incarcerated, inviting his extended family in for a five-day Christmas party. Hernández also recounts the mysterious murders of the one senior public official who tried to expose the corruption at the jail at government level and the only warder who testified to it. And, most important, the fact that Guzmán did not "escape" from Puente Grande, as the lore has it, in a laundry truck – he walked free in police uniform, with a police escort, long after the chief of the prison service and deputy minister for public security arrived in response to the "news" of his escape.

Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman
A 2001 photograph shows druglord Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman in jail in Mexico. Photograph: Corbis
For this is a book about, to use one of Anabel Hernández's best words, the "mafiocracy", rather than the mafia – about the mafia state. It is about how the old Guadalajara cartel of the 1980s was protected by the Mexican government just as its heir, Guzmán's Sinaloa syndicate, is now. It is about the rise of Genaro García Luna, whom Hernández accuses of being El Chapo's protector at the apex of government. "At first, I thought it would be difficult," she says. "I didn't think people would be ready to believe that the government is lying. That this is all one big lie."

A character appears throughout the book, called simply "The Informant" – one among many Hernández found during her five-year odyssey through the criminal world, and those supposedly fighting it. "And he told me when I started this in 2005: 'Don't do this. You're a woman and it's too dangerous.' But I had to – because of what had happened in my life, and because only when people understand what is going on can they change it."

The threats began when Hernández's book was published in Mexico in 2010 – and their story is interwoven into the book she has since written, Mexico in Flames. By this time she had become a mother of two children. "I received initial warnings that someone in the government wanted to sanction me," she says. "Even that someone wanted to have me killed. I didn't want to believe it, but I was told this on good authority – 'they want to kill you'. I'd come to know official cars well over the years, and one day when I was fetching my little child from school, there it was, one of them, an official one."

Whatever the motive of this menace, "I reported it immediately to the government's human rights commission. They opened a file, and I was allocated 24-hour protection." But then, earlier this summer, a sinister move: the authorities announced their intention to remove the escort, forcing her to cancel a number of trips to afflicted areas of the country to promote the new book.

"I fought the decision," says Hernández, "and they gave me back the escort – but beheaded animals continued to appear on my doorstep even after this, as recently as last June."

Rafael Caro Quintero
A 2005 picture of Rafael Caro Quintero, who was released last month on a technicality. Photograph: Getty Images
When Hernández visits Britain this month, she will be drawing attention not only to the agony of her country, but to the intimidation she has suffered and the murder of scores of her colleagues. This pogrom against the press is no "sideshow" or media obsession with itself – it is strategically integral to Mexico's drug war, and the taking of territory by the cartels.

One of Hernández's friends is the veteran reporter Mike O'Connor, who spent much of his childhood in Mexico, has covered conflict since America's "dirty wars" in Central America during the 1980s and now works full-time on behalf of Mexico's menaced reporters, based in Mexico City for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

"The silencing of the press and killing of journalists is integral to the reality, the big story, of what is happening here," explains O'Connor. "The cartels are taking territory. The government and authorities are ceding territory to the cartels and, for the cartels to take territory, three things have to happen. One is to control the institutions with guns – basically, the police. The second is to control political power. And, for the first two to be effective, you have to control the press."

Furthermore, he says, underlining the theme of his friend's book, "The inability of the government to really solve any of the crimes against journalists during the four years I've been here is a metaphor for its inability to solve crimes against common citizens. They simply cannot do it. And you wonder: if they can't solve these crimes, why not? Is it because they don't want to?"

What does Hernández feel about her less prominent colleagues on local papers, often compromised and threatened by cartels? It is a problem, she says, that "our reporters are not united in the face of these threats and murders", and she intends to "form a federation of solidarity, to build a group, a community, to make us stronger against the cartels and authorities".

"Many of these murders of my colleagues have been hidden away, surrounded by silence – they received a threat, and told no one; no one knew what was happening," she says. "We have to make these threats public. We have to challenge the authorities to protect our press by making every threat public – so they have no excuse."

The timing of this English edition of the book is fortuitous, feeding into the current news like a hand into a glove. The release last month of the cartel boss Caro Quintero by a Mexican federal court made headlines across the world; Quintero had been convicted of a part in the torture to death of a US Drug Enforcement Administration agent, Enrique "Kiki" Camarena in 1985. It's a murder which, in Hernández's account, throws light on both Mexican government and CIA complicity in drug trafficking, a narrative that exposes a deep root of the present drug war.

The court released Quintero on a legal technicality, but Hernández says now: "Mexico's government did nothing to prevent his release. On the contrary, they contributed cover for the release. The one thing nobody wants is Quintero talking about the roles of the Institutional Revolutionary Party [returned to power, and in government during Camarena's murder] and the CIA in the origins of Chapo Guzmán's cartel."

Another major item of news was the capture in July of the Zetas leader Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, and the killing last year of the man he replaced, Heriberto Lazcano. These successes for the Mexican military speak to Hernández's theme: it has long been speculated that any Mexican government's best chance for peace is to return to the so-called "pax mafiosa", a conviviality with – a blind eye towards – the biggest cartel, Guzmán's, whereby the drugs keep flowing in exchange for a cessation of violence, while the official "war on drugs" is fought against his opponents. Of these, the Zetas are by far the most formidable.

"Sadly, I think this is what is happening," says Hernández. "Mexico is exhausted. People will pay anything to live in peace. And this is the strategy; a sponsorship of the Sinaloa cartel, which makes the so-called 'war on drugs' one big lie."

Señores del Narco is not flattered by its English translation, which is sometimes colloquial to the point of inelegance (agent Camarena is described as "a goner", and the mysterious killing of a compromised government official, Edgar Millán, is "a shocker"). That is a shame given the importance of the book and the availability of excellent translators from Spanish. The English edition is, furthermore, regrettably tardy (though hats off to Verso for publishing it), illustrating the Anglophone world's baffling detachment from the death toll of the drug-taking to which it feels entitled.

Hernández is "very pleased my book is being published in English, so it can be read in London and New York where drugs are being sold and taken on every corner, and people can know where every gram of cocaine comes from – corruption and death. I want it published in Britain and America, where the profits are laundered. In your country, where HSBC took Chapo Guzmán's money to 'look after it', and then said they didn't know where it came from. I have studied the laundering networks in depth, and I cannot believe them."

Hernández insists – and this is what places her among the political heretics with regard to the "war on drugs"– that "the violence and the cartels are not the disease. They're a symptom of the disease, which is corruption. The cartels cannot operate without the support of officials, bureaucrats, politicians and police officers – and bankers to launder their money. These people let the narcos do what they do and they are the issue, this is the cancer. I met these people, the narcos. They have no scruples, they're cruel – but in the end, they're just businessmen, all they can see is money. Life, they cannot see."



Anabel Hernández will be speaking at the Frontline Club, London, on 11 September and at Bristol festival of ideas on 13 September

EXTRACT
puente grande 3
Mexican Federal Police patrol the surroundings of the Puente Grande State prison (background) in Zapotlanejo, Jalisco State, Mexico. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
The passages below, extracted from Anabel Hernández's book, describe prison life for Mexican drug barons


El Chapo's women
During his detention in Puente Grande, Joaquín Guzmán killed time with sex, alcohol, drugs, volleyball, and push-ups. Like Hector "El Güero" Palma and Arturo "El Texas" Martínez [two other prisoners], he was well supplied with Viagra and other prowess-enhancing products. Given their age, it seems unlikely they would have been prescribed Viagra, unless of course they suffered from some dysfunction. Witnesses among the prison commanders and warders say the obsession with sex was so great that the three held competitions to see which of them could keep going the longest.

Prostitutes came and went from Puente Grande unimpeded; prison managers referred to them pejoratively as "las sin rostro," the faceless females. They would be brought in official cars, wearing blonde wigs. Prisoners received them in the psychological care section, in the conjugal visit rooms, or in their own cells. If ever there was a shortage, they would get their hands on female staff or inmates, with the connivance of warden Beltrán. These women didn't have much choice. Any who dared to resist the sexual demands of the drug barons had a rough time.

Of all the women El Chapo had at Puente Grande, three stood out: Zulema Yulia, Yves Eréndira and Diana Patricia. Each learned what a hell it is to be the current favourite of a gangster. Their desperate stories blow apart the myth of the "love-struck drug baron".

On 3 February, 2000, Zulema Yulia Hernández, a young woman just 23 years old, was incarcerated in Puente Grande for robbing a security van. Even if she deserved to go to jail, the maximum security facility seemed an excessive punishment. There was no separate wing for women. They were kept in the observation and classification centre, where they had neither the appropriate medical services nor adequate physical protection in the midst of an overwhelmingly male population.

Guzmán's family visits coincided with those of Zulema. She quickly caught El Chapo's eye. The drug trafficker's obsessive nature and the young woman's vulnerable situation were to shape their dark tale. Through one of the members of the Sinaloas, known as El Pollo, Guzmán sent "love" letters to Hernández. The almost illiterate drug trafficker dictated these letters to an unidentified scribe, who embellished them with a dose of drama. Of course, writing to a female inmate was one of the thousands of forbidden things that he was allowed to do quite freely. Very soon, Guzmán began to have intimate relations with the young delinquent barely more than half his age. Their meetings took place in the communications area, aided and abetted by female guards and by the prison management.

The last Christmas in Puente Grande
It was after 10pm on Christmas Eve. The silence hanging over the broad freeway between Guadalajara and Zapotlanejo was broken by the roar of a convoy of SUVs, speeding towards the prison. At the junction outside the gates, there was a temporary checkpoint where perimeter guard José Luis de la Cruz stood watch with a colleague. He'd had specific orders from the deputy director for perimeter security not to let anybody in; he'd even been told to park a pick-up truck across the road to block access to the jail.

When De la Cruz saw the vehicles approaching without switching off their lights, he nervously swivelled his weapon and chambered a round, thinking it could be an attack. The driver of the lead vehicle suddenly slammed on the brakes, opened the door and jumped out. The guard's fears vanished when he recognised the smiling face of prison commander Juan Raúl Sarmiento. "It's us," he shouted jovially, like someone arriving at a party. De la Cruz moved his truck to let the line of vehicles pass. Joaquín Guzmán's relatives were travelling in some of them; Héctor Palma's in others. There was also a big group of mariachis and 500 litres of alcohol for the Christmas party. The sumptuous feast arrived a few minutes later. It had been prepared at the last moment, but the menu was first-class: lobster bisque, filet mignon, roast potatoes, prawns, green salad, and trays of nibbles, with canned sauces to spice up the dishes after reheating.

El Chapo and El Güero had been planning the celebration for weeks. They sent for a brighter yellow paint than that usually used in the prison; the prison guards themselves worked overtime painting the walls. The corridors and cells of units three and four were hung with Christmas lights and decorations. Guzmán's outside gofer, El Chito, had been entrusted with organising the banquet and buying the family gifts, as well as getting special food and drink for the ordinary prison inmates.

Corruption had been rife in Puente Grande for the past two years, but this cynical display of power was unprecedented. The party went on for three days. El Chapo and El Güero's relatives stayed until 26 December, taking advantage of the authorities' extreme laxity. Although it had looked as if the change of government might mean the drug barons would lose their privileges, they were acting with extraordinary confidence. In fact, one of the guests at the party was the prison warden himself; Leonardo Beltrán never let go of the briefcase full of wads the traffickers had given him for Christmas.

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