Trumpgate

Dear White House, Get Your Stories Straight: In a Thursday interview with NBC news, President Trump did a complete 180 on the narrative provided by his spokespeople as to why he fired FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday. In his version of the story (are they really that hard to sync up?), Trump said that he had already made up his mind before asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his deputy Rod Rosenstein to write up memos justifying the firing. But just the day before, deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it was Sessions and Rosenstein who brought up Comey’s incompetence in a Monday meeting with Trump: “They had come to him to express their concerns. The president asked that they put their concerns and their recommendation in writing.”

Trump did stick to the White House narrative which posited that FBI employees were glad to see Comey go. This point was emphasized by Sanders on Thursday when she said she had personally spoken to “countless” FBI officials who were frustrated with Comey’s leadership. When asked if she had really spoken to countless FBI officials, Sanders said she had, but declined to elaborate further. “We’re not going to get into a numbers game,” she snapped. The purported dissatisfaction with Comey by his now former staff was flatly denied by acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe when he spoke before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday. He said that Comey enjoyed “broad support within the FBI and still does to this day.”

Additional statements made by Trump in the NBC interview seemed so obviously self-damaging that it defied explanation as to why he would admit them. First, in defending Comey’s firing, the president said he was “thinking of this Russia thing,” explicitly citing the FBI’s investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia. Trump went on to say that “in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.’”

We Know Who Was Coming to Dinner, but That’s About It: As was mentioned in his dismissal letter to Comey, in the NBC interview Trump reiterated the fact that on three occasions, Comey assured him he was not under investigation. According to The New York Times, Trump and Comey had one dinner together, seven days after Trump was inaugurated. But that’s the only fact agreed upon by both the White House and Comey’s aides. Trump said that it was Comey who requested the dinner: “[W]e had a very nice dinner, and … he told me, ‘You are not under investigation.’’’ However, Comey told associates a very different story–it was Trump who asked him to dinner at the White House, during which Trump, more than once, asked Comey if he would have his loyalty. Comey demurred, instead assuring the president he would have his honesty.

Then came two phone calls, one made by Trump, another by Comey. The president admitted: “I actually asked him, yes. I said, ‘If it’s possible would you let me know, am I under investigation? He said: ‘You are not under investigation.’” Trump asking whether he was under investigation would not be illegal (as he is not subject to Justice Department internal rules), but highly irregular. Matthew Miller, a former spokesman for the Department of Justice, told MSNBC: “It’s completely inappropriate for [Trump] to ask that question … It would also be a violation of DoJ rules for James Comey to answer it.”

Speculation has been swirling ever since Thursday’s interview about whether, as Comey’s employer, Trump’s admission of a desire to shut down the Russia investigation amounted to intimidation and obstruction of justice, the latter an impeachable offense. Perhaps, but proving it is the problem.

World War II Wounds Still Raw in East Asia: New South Korean President Moon Jae-in has questioned a landmark agreement made with Japan over Korean sex slaves, known as “comfort women,” during World War II. Under the 2015 deal, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe offered his “most sincere apologies and remorse” to all former “comfort women,” and the Japanese government donated $8.7 million to a fund to help victims. But victims’ groups said the apology did not go far enough in acknowledging the government’s responsibility for the tens of thousands of women forced into sexual slavery during the war. The issue of “comfort women” has caused rifts between the two countries for decades.

“The reality is the majority of our people cannot emotionally accept the comfort women agreement,” Moon told Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday. However, he emphasized that the controversy should not weaken the South Korea-Japan relationship, saying the two countries should address the “comfort women” dispute and “work independently in order to respond to the North Korean nuclear and missiles issues.”

Your Antivirus Software Could be a Spy: The US might not be in a Cold War with Russia, but it’s starting to feel like a Digital War, with many sources saying Russia has done its best to hack elections in the US, France, and Germany. Now many leading intelligence officials in the US are expressing concern as to whether or not Kaspersky Labs is a security threat. These officials are skeptical of the company and its products because of possible ties to Russian defense and intelligence groups. Kaspersky is one of the top five antivirus programs for computers. Its founder vehemently denies any Kremlin connection.

More Reads:

• Did the 2016 election emotionally, mentally, and physically fatigue you? Well, apparently it also affected people’s dating lives (People). But get ready for 2020 because already 129 people have filed to run for president and that includes President Trump (NPR). GQ proposes that The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, could even be President.
• Ever since the election, there’s been a great awakening of Americans trying to better understand their country. The LA Times explores “How Houston has become the most diverse place in America.” And the Atlantic examines how cultural anxiety “drove white, working-class voters to Trump,” while the NYT argues that “homeownership” isn’t as American as apple pie and motherhood is actually an “engine of American inequality”
• Yuval Noah Harari, the famed author of Sapiens and Homo Deus, is a prolific writer whose popularity right now equals what Malcolm Gladwell’s was a few years ago after the publication of The Tipping Point and Blink. Two of his more recent essays address core issues around the intersection of technology, work-labor, and the future of homo sapiens. In one essay he argues that technology is creating a “useless class” of people who “are not just unemployed but unemployable.” (The Guardian) Harari also muses on a future in which biometric data is captured by devices that far outclass today’s Apple watch, Fitbit, or pacemakers and can “understand what’s going on in my body and in my brain much better than me.” (Bloomberg)
• As consumers, one of our first questions when considering purchasing a product or service is asking what is the price. Two recent articles discuss the topic of cost disease. One approaches this topic from the perspective of an obituary of the originator of the idea, and explains the concept and why “in a world of of rapid technological progress, we should expect the cost of manufactured goods” to greatly fall while the “cost of labor-intensive services” to rise. (Vox) The second piece approaches cost disease by diving into the numbers showing just how much the costs of education and health care have shot up over the past decades (dectupled) and how we should all worry how the “cost of basic human needs” are drastically rising “faster than wages do” because even if “you’re making twice as much money, if your health care and education…cost ten times as much, you’re going to start falling behind.” (Slate Star Codex)
• We live in a consumer society of mass consumption that is resulting in a “looming environmental crisis” as a result of “each person in the thirty-four richest nations consum[ing] over 220 pounds of stuff every day.” (NYRB) One of the most fascinating notions of our consumer society is planned obsolescence and how this impacts how companies roll out new products ranging from updating smartphones to newer versions of textbooks. (NYT)
• Aeon, one of our favorite publications, has published a couple insightful essays. The first essay tackles the subject of human capital and how this theory has not more to “divest people” via the “Uberisation of the workforce functions.” The second essay covers a topic near and dear to your editors and that is what is the news all about?

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