White House and National Sec. Corresp., New York Times. Author of "Confront and Conceal," "The Inheritance," and “The Perfect Weapon." April 16: "New Cold Wars"
So thrilled to hear that “New Cold Wars” was an instant NYT bestseller on its first week. Grateful to all who made that possible, from the fabulous team that helped me and
@Mary_K_Brooks
report and write the book, to the many who we discussed it with this week, on TV, blogs, news…
For those keeping score at home: In the months since the Administration knew about these bounties, the President invited Putin to join the G-7 summit, planned for pulling troops out of Germany and failed to act against growing Russian cyber action in the U.S.
Big story: US officials have quietly discussed a Russian military intel unit offering bounties to Taliban & other Afghans to kill US, UK & allied troops. Some have collected. Trump likes Putin. What'll he do? By
@charlie_savage
@EricSchmittNYT
@mschwirtz
.
No one saw this coming, the President often says. Except the medical professionals in his own administration. The National Security Council. His top trade adviser. The remarkable story of warnings delayed, dismissed and ignored.
In my six years in Japan as a correspondent and
@nytimes
bureau chief the only shootings I covered involved yakuza, arguing over territory. Even those were rare. For political assassinations you have to go back to the ‘30’s. Prayers for Abe Shinzo.
NEWS: The United States has quietly floated to Turkey a proposal that it transfer its Russian-supplied S-400 anti-aircraft systems to Ukraine to use against....Russian planes. A double play: It would give Ukraine a capability far beyond.... 1/2
Trump leans on his attorney general to investigate his campaign challenger before the election in two weeks. "He's got to act fast." Not to state the obvious, but this is not normal in America, or at least it never used to be.
@maggieNYT
I hate being beaten on a big story by the
@washingtonpost
and the
@WSJ
. But I have to say it was pretty cool being clobbered by the undergrad editor of the Arizona State college paper. Congrats.
This is a remarkable answer. The President never mentions Khashoggi’s name, condemns his murder or even offers assurances, as US did seven months ago, that those responsible will be held accountable. Instead he turns to the business implications of a breach with KSA.
Chuck Todd asks Trump about holding Saudi Arabia accountable for Jamal Khashoggi's murder, and Trump responds by citing Saudi's billions of $$'s in business with the U.S.
Struck by fact that for 6 weeks now
@realDonaldTrump
and 100+ Republican members of Congress have been talking about a hack that never happened - of the vote. Total silence on the one that did happen: Russian hackers inside the Fed. govt.'s own agencies.
A history update for
@JHoganGidley
: We have had presidents continuously since 1789. Facebook was founded in 2004. Twitter in 2006. Somehow every President from George Washington to George W. Bush found a way to communicate to the American people.
I can't believe I'm writing this. Campaign spokesperson Hogan Gidley claims on Fox News President Trump can't denounce Capitol attack more because he doesn't have a platform.
"(He) can't say anything because the platforms have removed him," Gidley says.
Scene in DC instructive. Demonstrations were peaceful. Police and secret service and Guard pulled way back, which suggests their heavy-handed presence earlier in the week may have escalated confrontations, rather than de-escalated. Feel today: mix of protest and civil discourse.
I’ve covered national security over four presidencies. This is the first in which a written intelligence product sent to the President didn’t constitute a “briefing.”
Several intelligence veterans have advised me to beware administration officials parsing the word “briefed”, as in whether they mean orally briefed or contained in briefing documents.
We don’t have precedent for a President ordering top cabinet members to use the power of the state, at this scale, against political adversaries 24 days before an election. The best comparisons are to the authoritarian states the US condemns. An analysis.
For those keeping comparative stopwatch readings on what happened in Hawaii: If a missile was ever fired from North Korea to Honolulu, elapsed time to impact: 32 to 37 minutes
This morning, elapsed time to correct false alert: About 38 minutes...
The President's repeated insistence that no one ever thought this could happen is false. Not only did they think so, they simulated it -- in his own administration. This was not a failure of imagination. It was a failure of execution. Read our story. Then read the two reports.
Trump keeps saying again today from the White House that nobody every thought this could happen. That is false. His own administration knew it could happen and likely would. And they also knew they were unprepared.
Can’t emphasize enough
@maggienyt
point here. We asked to interview Dr. Birx repeatedly for story that described her role in recent months. We sent questions; most , went unanswered. You can’t have it both ways: Ignore or deflect questions, then complain you were not asked.
Hawaii false alert should be an early warning sign of what happens when the nuclear age collides with the digital age. Panic precedes confirmation; decision-times shrink. In Cold War we had more than a few false alarms, but they were detected before someone hit the panic button.
“The president veers off on tangents and getting him back on topic is difficult... He has a short attention span and rarely, if ever, reads intelligence reports, relying instead on conservative media... He is unashamed to...riff based on tips or gossip.”
For those keeping score at home, this means Putin asked the President to let him get his hands on a former US ambassador to Russia,
@McFaul
, and man who successfully lobbied for one of the primary sanctions against Russia. And the WH can’t say how POTUS responded. Remarkable.
.
@maggieNYT
asks
@WHPressSec
abt Russia’s call to intv
@Billbrowder
&
@McFaul
: “Pres will meet w/ his team & we’ll let you know when we have an announcement on that front.” Acknowledges the topic was discussed privately bween Trump & Putin.
"We have it totally under control ... It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine." -- President Donald Trump on hearing about coronavirus spreading in China and if it poses any pandemic threat to the U.S.
The Russians just cleaned out sensitive American data in one of the boldest cyber intrusions in years. Natl sec adviser returns to US, FBI and Intel community announce jt task force tonight, secdef says urgent investigation underway. Here is what
@realDonaldTrump
says:
Chris Krebs was totally excoriated and proven wrong at the Senate Hearing on the Fraudulent 2020 Election. Massive FRAUD took place with machines, people voting from out of state, illegals, dead people, no signatures—and so much more!
...what it now possesses, and would be a way out of a three-year-long, quite nasty argument over whether a NATO nation should be buying Russian defense systems. If Turkey agrees, it could pave the way to resume shipments of its F-35's. No comment, yet, from Turkey.
Notable in
@realDonaldTrump
comments about CIA report to reporters on AF1 is that he falls back immediately on # of jobs Saudis create in US. Taken to extreme, that argument suggests that as long as you contribute to the American economy all else - murder included - is forgiven.
As evidence of MBS’s role in the Khashoggi killing piles up, Trump has dropped any pretense of faulting the Saudi prince. He once called it “the worst cover-up ever.” Now, after CIA judgment, he says, “we were told that he did not play a role” & calls Saudis a “spectacular” ally
As everybody is aware, the past Administration has long been asking for three hostages to be released from a North Korean Labor camp, but to no avail. Stay tuned!
For those keeping score at home: The announcement by
@realDonaldTrump
said forces would be withdrawn in 30 days. That means Jan. 18. After uproar, POTUS said he never said US would rush out. Then State said no fixed date. Now Bolton says won’t leave until assurances from Turkey.
Trump's national security adviser John Bolton told reporters traveling with him in the Middle East today that the U.S. will not withdraw troops from Syria unless Turkey offers assurances that it will not target Kurdish fighters.
Until a few days ago, this election security bill looked like an easy vote for Dems and Repubs. The White House has not really explained its objections. But it also hasn’t explained why it eliminated the job of cyber security coordinator.
President and staff keep repeating that US has now conducted more tests than South Korea did. Neglect to mention that South Korea is a sixth of the population. Tests per capita are what matters.
DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz issued a statement of support for MIchael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general Trump fired late last night:
Also acknowledged that he shaded his comments on Saturday--dodging questions about if Trump had been on oxygen--because he wanted to keep optimistic tone that Trump also embraces. In other words, the president's physician was not forthright with the American public, on purpose.
I’m puzzled by the use of the word “leak” here. There was no leak, at least in the normal journalistic sense. This was an unclassified, public letter from an oversight committee to a government agency.
When we look back at the roots of this desperate moment, I suspect there will be a commission - as there was after Pearl Harbor, the Challenger disaster and 9/11 - to ask not only how did we miss the signals, but why were we so underprepared.
News Analysis: "Had the president acted sooner, thousands of new ventilators would probably be coming off production lines next month, when they are likely to be desperately needed."
The last time I recall Pres. Trump told us he was awaiting the results of a foreign investigation, it was when the Saudis assured him they would investigate who was behind the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
Trump, who keeps harping on China hiding information, doesn't clearly answer the q of what he wants from China now. "They said they're doing an investigation," he said. "We'll see what happens."
Thank you,
@BeschlossDC
. This is always a notable day in our house: My dad, Lt. (JG) Ken Sanger was fighter director on the destroyer Robert H Smith, and ran air cover over the fleet during the battle. Dad, now 98, is quite ill & could use prayers. But he remembers Iwo vividly.
Two observations: 1) This is why past presidents established process in the White House, so that actions lined up with goals. When no policy process you get chaos and reversals. 2) China and Russia just got green light to undercut existing sanctions, since there are no penalties.
It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!
Whenever we interviewed Sec Pompeo on NK, he said the “mission set” was clear: complete, verifiable dismantlement of nuclear and long-range missile programs.They dismantled zero and produced fuel for about 1 additional bomb each month after negotiations began, US intel estimates.
To summarize: The Iranians lied about “mechanical failure” when they knew the truth. They bulldozed the wreckage to hide the evidence. Missile remnants were found anyway. They said the plane went off-course toward a military site - it didn’t. via
@NYTimes
The chart behind POTUS shows that significantly less than 1 percent of the US pop. has been tested. Which is why
@KristinFisher
asked a pertinent, important question. Nor is it the press’s role to congratulate or condemn the Administration’s actions. We’re there to get answers.
Health experts say there is no responsible way out of this without widespread testing.
@KristinFisher
’s question was on point. When will there be widespread testing? What is the plan?
Amen to that,
@BeschlossDC
. Our press is hardly perfect, as all of us at work in daily journalism know. But these four years have demonstrated, more than any in our lifetime, why the First Amendment is first.
Pres. Trump was a 22-year-old New Yorker when Gen William Westmoreland first used this same phrase to describe progress in Vietnam. He spent the next 15 years denying he said it (see Times story about the CBS libel trial, written by great M.A. Farber)
Some highlights from our NYT team:
The NSC office responsible for tracking pandemics received intel in early Jan. predicting the spread of the virus and warned that shutting down cities could be on the table. Mr. Trump avoided those steps until March.
1/9
When historians look back at 2020, big questions will be how so many elected leaders openly chose party over the Constitution, willing to overturn a vote without evidence of any significant fraud, and to invalidate the top of the ballot - but not votes for themselves.
A story about the Japanese surrender aboard the Missouri, 75 years ago today, as relayed by my Dad, Lt. (Jg) Kenneth Sanger, who is about to turn 97. Dad was the fighter director on a destroyer, and was in the thick of the battles at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. A thread:
Translation of today’s actions on NK and Iran: if you are building nuclear weapons and the President likes you, no sanctions necessary. If you want to build nuclear weapons but there is no evidence you are currently doing so, and President dislikes you, sanctions are appropriate.
Wow, this statement from
@PressSec
in Florida with the president: “President Trump likes Chairman Kim and he doesn’t think these sanctions will be necessary.”
Nothing is surprising in today’s Washington, I guess, but in a qtr. century here I have not previously seen an official WH account or press release questioning the competence of an official currently working in that WH. If they had concerns about his judgment, why was he there?
As obit ledes go, this is one for the history books: “Aleksander Doba, a Polish adventurer who kayaked alone across the Atlantic at the age of 70 while subsisting on his wife’s fortifying plum jam...died on Feb. 22 on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro.”
We can now measure, in concrete timelines, the cost of Pres. Trump’s decision to dismiss coronavirus in Jan, Feb., and the first weeks of March. Those lost weeks now translate to getting ventilators in June that might have been available in April.
My overwhelming thought after reading the Nunes memo was: "We spent the whole week talking about this?" Virtually nothing in it we had not heard/read before. But lots missing -- including some of the most relevant facts.
Of the many talented Times reporters and editors who shared in this year’s Pulitzer for public service, the team included our great colleague on the White House beat,
@shearm
. Naturally he was writing at the G/7 summit when the announcement came. We interrupted him.
McCain at sunset: a touching
@jmartNYT
profile of a senator’s goodbyes. When I arrived in Washington 24 years ago, No one taught me more about how the city worked, and didn’t work. And no one was better-natured when chewing me out about critical stories.
Worth reading, re-reading, and pinning up on the fridge. “Our duty as a Party is not to our Party alone, but to the nation, and, indeed, to all mankind. Our duty is not merely the preservation of political power but the preservation of peace.”
My colleague
@DLeonhardt
has put together the comprehensive list of missed opportunities, denials of the impending crisis, and of mocking those who were sounding the alarm. Must read.
POTUS reaction is fascinating. When
@maggieNYT
and I interviewed him in campaign he was still admiring of “the generals” because he thought they conveyed toughness. Now he is focused on whether they are Dems or Repubs. Reminder: Obama kept Bush’s defense secretary for 2 years.
A year ago, the hint of Mattis leaving the administration would have set off shock waves of alarm. Now, there's been barely a ripple as it's become clear over weeks he may not stay much beyond the midterms
I can’t recall a previous case where the President’s national sec. adviser urged Americans to patch a newly discovered vulnerability. Didn’t happen in NotPetya, or more recently in SolarWinds. More evidence of how cyber has moved to center of nat sec strategy.
@JakeSullivan46
We are closely tracking Microsoft’s emergency patch for previously unknown vulnerabilities in Exchange Server software and reports of potential compromises of U.S. think tanks and defense industrial base entities. We encourage network owners to patch ASAP:
“This is a manufactured crisis,” said
@BeschlossDC
. “It is a president abusing his huge powers in order to stay in office after the voters clearly rejected him for re-election. This is what many of the founders dreaded.”
A power grab, likely to fail.
The reason that this official was not named in our story is that the White House press office insisted that its briefing -- for hundreds of reporters -- was on background. Best way to alleviate the President's concern about anonymous sources would be for WH to name the official.
I have traveled tens of thousands of miles on the Secretary of State’s plane with
@michelekelemen
. Like
@NPRKelly
, she is a consummate pro, a superb reporter. The State Dept. may try, childishly, to pick who fills the seats but it won’t be able to pick who covers US diplomacy.
NPR reporter Michele Kelemen was notified that she was being removed from the press pool covering Mike Pompeo's upcoming trip to the UK, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan — just a few days after Pompeo responded angrily to an interviewer from NPR
When Putin put his nuclear forces on a high alert — in response to “aggressive comments” by the West - Biden had a choice. He could have gone to DefCon 3. Instead, his aides chided Putin, and some questioned his state of mind. W/
@WilliamJBroad
If the White House or US senators think the intel agencies and Justice Dept got it wrong, why haven’t they called for the withdrawal of the 2018 indictment of 12 Russian officers for masterminding DNC hack? I’ve asked this question of the admin. several times. No answer yet.
The conspiracy theory that won’t die. We did an entire episode about this. The fact that several sitting US Senators keep saying Ukaine interfered in the US election doesn’t make it true.
What is the long-term impact of the leak of classified Pentagon documents about the Ukraine war? How does it compare tothe Pentagon Papers, Wikileaks and the Snowden disclosures? Listen to The Daily, where I discuss this with the great
@stavernise
Trump once again seeks to absolve Russia amid allegations of hostile action, contradicting Pompeo and other US officials by saying Beijing not Moscow may have been behind cyberattack and insisting it was not as a big a deal as reported.
@SangerNYT
Of the many things to be thankful for this Thanksgiving - our national resilience in the face of pandemic and tragedy, our health workers, the scientists leading us out of the darkness- let me add one more: the inspiring strength of our democracy. It faced one... 1/2
..and it took them more than two weeks to come up with this story, with no reference to their previous account that he walked out of the Consulate unharmed.
The Saudis want you to believe a reporter in his 60s got in a fight in a consulate with more than two dozen men who were, apparently, wielding a bone saw.
Thanks to
@BeschlossDC
for this chilling image of President Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas, a minute or so before the moment that changed our world. That banner you see on the right marks the old Sanger’s Department Store, started by my great-great-grandfather and his brothers.
For four years, the United States government has been turning out confidential “lessons learned” reports & running simulations like “Crimson Contagion” to warn top leaders of what pandemics look like. We take you inside those clarion warnings — and examine how little was done.
JUST POSTED: Months before President Trump downplayed concerns that coronavirus would spread widely in the US, his own agencies had conducted a chilling exercise anticipating a respiratory virus that begins in China and kills as many as 586,000 in U.S.
Thanks to
@kaitlancollins
for holding firm and refusing to comply with a White House side seeking to oust her from
@CNN
’s assigned seat. As a former WH correspondent, I can attest that for as long as anyone can remember seating is the purview of the WH correspondent’s assoc.1/4.
Astonishing. A White House official threatened to bring in the Secret Service to force
@cnn
reporter
@kaitlancollins
to move to the back of the briefing room. This is not the Secret Service's job. Via
@farhip
It’s a rare night here in Washington when you feel like you have to go back to the founding documents of the nation to process what you have just seen. But after the SecDef said we must “dominate the battlespace” on America’s streets, and after peaceful demonstrators...1/4
A look at the mixed emotions inside the State Depart. today: Anger at how experienced diplomats have been treated, pride that they have stood up as truth-tellers about what happened. via
@NYTimes
Almost everything Mr. Kudlow says here about the Trump administration’s response to coronavirus is demonstrably wrong, misleading or deeply in dispute. Looking for some facts? Our investigation, published 3 weeks ago.
Sometime the news is in the news, and sometimes it is in the silences. Here, the silence from the President, the White House, the Pentagon, DHS, NSA and the State Dept. speaks volumes. w/
@nicoleperlroth
.
I understand
@marty_lederman
’s concern. But Khashoggi case, like the Iraq War justifications in 2003, is an example of leaks designed keep policy makers honest. Were it not for a free press doing its job, the administration would have buried the conclusions about MBS.
There's really no excuse for this leak, which at a minimum compromises SIGINT. There'd never be an incentive for those in the IC to do it, however, if the POTUS weren't publicly contradicting what he's being told by his intel experts.
@jacklgoldsmith
@just_security
In this piece, worth reading to the end,
@RichardHaass
describes difference between a declining power - which we are not - and one that voluntarily abdicates power out of a different, narrower, almost 19th century view of sovereign interest. Don’t miss it.
The Pres. is upset w/ the prevalence of anonymous sources. So are we. So here’s a practical 1st step. Over the past week I’ve sat through 5 or 6 “backround briefings” by admin officials. Can we put those on the record? And by exec. order put all past admin briefings on record?
When we published this story in March the White House dismissed it, saying that it envisioned a flu, not a coronavirus. Yet the scenario uncovered a govt unprepared, with big shortages. Now it is question is what the WH did with the knowledge gained.
The FBI and DHS warned today to beware of foreigners who claim mail-in ballots lead to fraud, risk of cyberattack, or trigger chaos and double voting at the polls. Hard to imagine where they got ideas like that... w/ the great
@KannoYoungs
The Trump defense is that he never read the intelligence report. The Trump problem is that he doesn’t have a Russia strategy - or rather, that his admin. has two Russia strategies, diametrically opposed to each other. W/
@EricSchmittNYT
Myanmar just sentenced two of our
@Reuters
colleagues to seven years in jail for exposing this massacre. Please share the work of Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo.
Something went horribly wrong in the testing of a new, nuclear-propelled missile in Russia. At least seven people died and Moscow’s story about what happened keeps changing. We explored the disaster, with the great
@AndrewKramerNYT
via
@NYTimes
On a cold afternoon in Feb., 1986 — 35 years ago — I reached Allan McDonald, an engineer at Morton Thiokol, and convinced him to go public with the story of what led to the disastrous launch of the space shuttle Challenger, just three weeks before. He made a split-second...
Memories at this White House are a little short. We wrote about their planning at length in March, when there were just a few hundred Americans dead. The exercise the
@PressSec
waved envisioned 110 million cases, 7.7 million hospitalized, 586,000 dead. 1/2
I’m a bit stunned to learn that the President didn’t know Brett McGurk, who worked for Presidents Bush and Obama and was the Trump admin.’s point-man on the counter-iSIS campaign. If he wasn’t listening to Brett, he should have been. He’s no grandstander.
Brett McGurk, who I do not know, was appointed by President Obama in 2015. Was supposed to leave in February but he just resigned prior to leaving. Grandstander? The Fake News is making such a big deal about this nothing event!
Three weeks after its discovery, the Great Hack of the US govt. and corps. is generating more mysteries than answers. Was it espionage? Something more nefarious? And why is it’s scope broadening? W/
@nicoleperlroth
&
@julianbarnes
5) This will sort out. The state is small. The caucus workers are well intentioned. There is paper backup. But it may take so long to untangle that the import of the result is vastly diminished. And some people will never trust the result. Conspiracy theories love a vacuum.
We all have a lot of things to worry about these days. Not on that list: whether
@jonkarl
is going to “make it.” A total pro, he made it long, long ago.
My colleagues
@jakesNYT
and
@ewong
look at the tough sell for American diplomats defending democratic process around the globe. This is what happens when a nation squanders it’s own soft power.
@Joe_Nye
Secretary of State Pompeo finds himself at the most perilous moment of his political life as veteran diplomats testify to Congress and his building erupts with cries that career officials doing their job have gone undefended. With
@ewong
.