Some personal news: I'm writing narrative history of Chinese exclusion for
@doubledaybooks
. Much thanks to them and
@dblackagency
. I'd love to hear from Chinese Americans who can trace their family histories back to the 19th century and have stories to tell. (My DMs are open.)
A neutral observation: arguably, no other news org in the world could invest as much time/resources into Trump tax investigations as
@nytimes
has. Maybe
@washingtonpost
@propublica
too? 3 reporters; unlimited time. Support investigative journalism as a bulwark of democracy.
Remnick from December: As Obama left his swearing in, Lewis approached him with a sheet of paper and asked the new President, the first black President, to sign it. And he did. He wrote, “Because of you, John. Barack Obama.”
1/ THREAD: In his column on
@ronanfarrow
,
@benyt
, whom I have respect for, does the same thing he accuses Ronan of––sanding the inconvenient edges off of facts in order to suit the narrative he wants to deliver.
.
@JaneMayerNYer
"they say her short-term memory has grown so poor that she often forgets she has been briefed on a topic, accusing her staff of failing to do so just after they have. They describe Feinstein as forgetting what she has said & getting upset."
At middle school basketball game at the Barclays center, the girls behind us are cheering for the opposing team. One bursts out: “If we lose, I’m going to smack one of those Chinese girls.” I talk to her. She denies it. Her mother comes over and gets in my face.
#thisis2023
NEW from
@JaneMayerNYer
: Kimberly Guilfoyl's assistant said that she was frequently required to work at her apartment while the Fox News host displayed herself naked, and showed her photographs of the genitalia of men with whom she’d had sexual relations.
David Remnick sent a note to staff this morning abt the worrisome news on Mosab Abu Toa, the Palestinian poet and essayist from Gaza, whose work we have been publishing. We had lost touch w/ him and learned he was arrested in central Gaza. Here's a thread of his
@newyorker
work.
NEW: Luke Mogelson’s remarkable video footage of the Capitol invasion, from breaching the first barricades to rummaging through desks on the Senate floor. Stunning, frightening, revolting.
The Washington Post has been inundated with messages and phone calls from people on the verge of losing their homes and cars and going hungry this holiday who are stunned that President Trump and Congress cannot agree on another emergency aid package.
NEW:
@kadirnelson
has produced one of the most powerful covers in
@newyorker
's history. It'll be on newsstands tomorrow, but here it is in interactive form online. Scroll down and zoom in on every portrait.
I wrote this on the anniversary of Columbine. Something has shifted. “At the time of the incident, Columbine ranked as the fifth-deadliest mass shooting in the United States since the Second World War. Today it is not even in the top ten.”
NEW from
@RonanFarrow
: on Larry Rendall Brock, Jr., a former Air Force lieutenant colonel and Air Force Academy graduate who was one of the invaders walking around inside the Capitol in tactical gear and carrying zip ties.
.
@laurenzcollins
was on the roof of Notre Dame just a few weeks ago, reporting on the renovation. This quote from one of the workers tonight is devastating: “In wanting to give her a second youth, we have perhaps destroyed her.”
Horrifying story by
@stillsarita
. A 5-year-old girl, separated from her family, signed away her right to a hearing that would have hastened her release and reunification.
“In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number,” according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security.”
.
@RonanFarrow
is up w/ new
@NewYorker
story on Black Cube operatives, the same ones who worked for Harvey Weinstein, targeting former Obama Administration officials who supported Iran nuclear deal.
They’re kids. Where is this coming from? Just shows how people who seem foreign, alien, different…are perceived in America. It’s embedded in our history.
Dexter Filkins: In a meeting in the Oval Office, Trump expressed a desire to quell the protests by sending forces...into American cities. Milley resisted. “They got into a shouting match,” the senior military official told me. Trump finally backed down.
2/ We provided detailed responses to Ben that contradict the narrative he wants to tell. They didn’t make it into the column, so I’ll outline some of them here.
NEW from
@praddenkeefe
: While opioid deaths have surged during the pandemic, the Sackler family has been quietly staging an end game in which it will keep most of its fortune—and be released from all future liability.
It’s why I got up early this morning, as I have for the last year-plus, working on this book—the story of the first Asian Americans, Chinese immigrants who came to “gold mountain” and endured bigotry and violence and were driven out of dozens of towns in the American West.
In early 80s, Roy Moore was a frequent and troubling presence at Gadsden mall, where teens hung out.
@charlesbethea
interviewed more than dozen people who said he was banned for his behavior.
NEW from next week’s issue of
@newyorker
: Luke Mogelson, who has been reporting on MAGA protesters for months, provides a firsthand account of the Capitol invasion.
.
@sbg1
: "America is now a country that has to build a wall around its Capitol to defend its Congress, not from some foreign threat but from fellow-Americans. Which, whatever the outcome...is quite a Presidential legacy indeed."
4/This is just not true. I’d encourage ppl to read thru the court file on Pacer. It doesn’t contradict Ronan’s piece. Our story accurately reflects what was known at the time. And, after reviewing the records that are now available, it still holds up. We continue to stand by it.
One final, ironic note: I actually had the latest draft of my book in my lap when this happened! I suppose I could have handed the folder over to the mother and asked that she read it. Happy to come to the girl’s school to talk about AAPI history.
SIREN
@JaneMayerNYer
: a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump’s claims of fraud in order to promote alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in 49 states, 18 of which have passed new voting laws in the past 6 months.
"When I think about USA Gymnastics, I think it’s just, like, rotten from the inside out,"
@Aly_Raisman
tells
@erenorbey
. "The United States Olympic Committee is a disaster, too."
On the man
@RonanFarrow
helped to identify.
“He means to take hostages. He means to kidnap, restrain, perhaps try, perhaps execute members of the U.S. government.”
.
@huahsu
wrote one of the most thoughtful pieces on the recent anti-Asian attacks. "It’s difficult to describe anti-Asian racism when society lacks a coherent, historical account of what that racism actually looks like."
.
@rachmonroe
writes about
@UvaldeNews
, who had to cover their own tragedy. Reporter Kimberly Rubio lost her daughter, Lexi. She texted her boss, asking if she could write her obituary: "Can I have two pictures?" He said: "You can have a full page."
6/ It was not “minimized.” We say in the 4th graf the reports might be restricted, not deleted or removed. We describe the views of 7 former gov officials/experts we interviewed on whether the docs were missing or restricted. This was 200 of the story’s first 500 words.
Forty-four years to the day of the release of the smoking gun tape that ended Nixon presidency,
@realDonaldTrump
makes a startling admission in a tweet.
@adamdavidson
provides some useful clarity.
Some promising news: Just spoke to editor David Remnick, who told me that, according to two Israeli military officials, the poet Mosab Abu Toha, who lives with his family in Gaza, has been released.
.
@sbg1
: "Sooner or later, the vote on Capitol Hill will be called, and every single member of Congress will have to say once and for all whether they stand with Trump or against him."
Monterey Park is a suburb of LA. I can't help but think about the Chinese massacre of 150 years ago, when 18 were killed. A lot has changed, of course. But much hasn't. We're still viewed as alien by many; unassimilable. Bracing myself for the motive...
Lots of news in latest from
@JaneMayerNYer
: the killing of the Stormy Daniels story before the election; ordering Gary Cohn to pressure DOJ to file lawsuit to block AT&T-Time Warner deal; possible tipping off Trump on debate question; more.
“The Times began looking into Mr. Trump’s draft record anew when an anonymous tipster suggested that a podiatrist who was a commercial tenant of Fred Trump’s had provided the medical documentation.”
I wrote a long piece about the profusion of news in the digital age, what’s driving it, and whether we’re really any better informed from it. The current system is broken. Journalists and readers need to work together to find a new one.
.
@newyorker
now has a food department!
@hels
joining as roving food correspondent;
@hannahgoldfield
becoming our food critic. Welcome to both. Stand by for plenty of delicious writing.
.
@clairecmc
tells
@sbg1
for
@newyorkerradio
what Republican members think about Trump: "...he should hear the way these guys talk about him behind his back."
Utterly harrowing, devastating
@jonathanblitzer
story for
@newyorker
on a Honduran woman in ICE detention who has not seen her 5-year-old son in 6 weeks.
Moving piece by
@newyorker
's Roger Angell, 98 years young and legally blind, exhorting people to get out and vote. "What I said I would die for I now want to live for."
3/ Ben relies on a 2018
@newyorker
piece on an IRS analyst John Fry to frame his case against Ronan, arguing “two years after publication, little of Mr. Farrow’s article holds up, according to prosecutors and court documents.”
NEW
@ronanfarrow
@jiatolentino
investigation on the conservatorship that stripped Britney Spears of her rights, and the pop star’s fight to regain control of her life.
14/ We disclosed that the friend could not confirm specifics, except that she had witnessed the meeting between Weinstein and Evans. That the friend later said something different to prosecutors does not make our reporting any less diligent.
“Born the year Eleanor Roosevelt became First Lady, Ginsburg bore witness to, argued for, and helped to constitutionalize the most hard-fought and least-appreciated revolution in modern American history: the emancipation of women.”
7/ In Fry's sentencing hearing, his lawyer even said that “Mr. Fry learned that those SARs may have been walled off when the New Yorker wrote the article by Ronan Farrow who had talked to others who said it's possible that the SARs had been walled off.”
This story will outrage you. “Betty Ann had borrowed twenty-nine thousand dollars in federal loans. Today, she owes $329,309.69 in student debt. She is ninety-one years old.”
.
@adamdavidson
: “The day had a feeling, on one level, of history ... At the same time, the day felt small and shabby, as we learned more details about the crude crimes of those who surround the President.”
5/ Ben writes: the records never went “missing...the records were simply put on restricted access...a possibility Mr. Farrow briefly allows for in his story, but minimizes. And Mr. Fry’s leaks had been encouraged and circulated by...Michael Avenatti.”
8/ Ben seems to suggest that Fry lied about his motivations for leaking the SARs. But that’s not established in the court record. The judge came to no conclusion about Fry’s motivation.
.
@sbg1
spoke w/ Sally Quinn, who recounted in her memoir an attempted rape by Sen John Tower. Years later, she refused to talk to FBI years when he was nominated for Defense Secretary. Who would believe her?
Heather Ann Thompson, of "Blood in the Water" fame, is writing a new book on the MOVE bombing. She has a powerful, news-making essay about recent revelations that remains from the event had been kept at a museum at the University of Pennsylvania.
13/ Re: Lucia Evans and Harvey Weinstein, Ben acknowledges that her friend did not say anything to us that contradicted Evans’ account, that Weinstein had raped her, and generally supported her story.
One aide to another senator described what he called a “Kabuki” meeting in which Feinstein’s staff tried to steer her through a proposed piece of legislation that she protested was “just words” which “make no sense.”
“Most of us knew he was a fake,” Braun told me. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.”
10/ This is a bit in the weeds, but the weeds are important here. The complaint establishes Fry searched for restricted SAR 8133 prior to showing any of the docs to Avenatti and came up empty.
9/ The timeline that can be constructed from the court docs support what Fry told us: he realized that a SAR wasn’t in the database where, in his experience, it should have been, before leaking the records.
I share this every mass shooting. This
@nytimes
investigative series I did with
@mmcintire
after Newtown illustrated so starkly the influence of gun lobby.
New from
@ronanfarrow
: Six additional women are now accusing Leslie Moonves of sexual harassment or assault. They include claims that he forced them to perform oral sex on him, that he exposed himself to them, and that he used intimidation against them.