november 2011

The financier Bill Browder has emerged as an unlikely central player in the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Sergei Magnitsky, an attorney Browder hired to investigate official corruption, died in Russian custody in 2009. Congress subsequently imposed sanctions on the officials it held responsible for his death, passing the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government retaliated, among other ways, by suspending American adoptions of Russian children.

Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who secured a meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, was engaged in a campaign for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act, and raised the subject of adoptions in that meeting. That’s put the spotlight back on Browder’s long campaign for Kremlin accountability, and against corruption—a campaign whose success has irritated Putin and those around him.

If Anthony Scaramucci is conducting an experiment in radical transparency at the White House, then things are going well. Otherwise, his tenure as communications director might not be off to a great start.

Thursday began with Scaramucci giving a preposterous interview to CNN—cutting off a segment with New Yorker journalist Ryan Lizza—in which he accused White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus of leaking to the press, suggested he is trying to “save America from this president,” and likened his own relationship with Priebus to that of the biblical figure Cain and to Abel, the brother he slew.

The day closed with Lizza writing his own, devastating account of a deranged conversation he’d had with Scaramucci Wednesday night, after Lizza reported on a dinner Scaramucci had with Fox News personalities past and present. Politico had also published Scaramucci’s financial disclosure, obtained by a routine public-records request, but which Scaramucci was for some reason convinced had been leaked. (One fascinating lesson of Scaramucci’s appointment is how fast the debilitating paranoia of this White House can infect a new hire.)

This week, as Donald Trump publicly attacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an assault one restrained observer described as “a multitiered tower of political idiocy, a sublime monument to the moronic, a gaudy, gleaming, Ozymandian folly,” even David Horowitz, the anti-Leftist intellectual and author of Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America, felt compelled to admit something to his Twitter followers: “I have to confess, I'm really distressed by Trump's shabby treatment of Sessions.”

Trump has always been vehemently opposed from the left and distrusted on the right by Never Trump conservatives, who continue to be dismayed by his behavior. But this week as never before, public doubts surfaced among Trump boosters and apologists, prompting Jay Cost to quip, “at the end it's just gonna be Sean Hannity huddled in a corner, quietly whispering to himself that Trump is a great American.”

The world’s best Donald Trump impersonator is now in charge of White House communications—and if nothing else, it’s making for great television.

For evidence, look no further than Anthony Scaramucci’s mesmerizing Thursday morning interview with CNN. “The Mooch”—as he is known among his friends and admirers (a group that seems to include a growing number of reporters)—was coming off a late night spent waging a bitter and outrageously public battle against White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, when he called in to CNN’s morning show New Day. For the next 30 minutes, he put on a compulsively watchable performance that so precisely captured his boss’s style that it seemed designed to demoralize Alec Baldwin.

Updated on July 27 at 10:23 p.m. ET

Is the “skinny repeal” of the Affordable Care Act that is nearing a vote in the Senate a means to an end, or the end itself?

That is the crucial question that GOP senators are facing as they consider Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s latest—and likely final—proposal for rolling back Obamacare. Shortly before 10 p.m. on Thursday, just hours before a scheduled vote, McConnell introduced what Republicans are calling the Health Care Freedom Act, a bare-bones, eight-page bill that the majority leader said would “repeal the core pillars of Obamacare.”

The proposal might be small in size, but it would have a significant effect on the health-care system. It would eliminate the ACA’s individual insurance mandate permanently and its employer mandate for eight years, defund Planned Parenthood for a year, and allow states at least some flexibility to opt out of Obamacare’s requirement that insurers cover certain essential health benefits. It also delays implementation of an excise tax on medical devices, and in a win for conservatives, it increases contribution limits for health-savings accounts.

Let’s get something straight: The Magnitsky Act is not, nor has it ever been, about adoptions.

The Magnitsky Act, rather, is about money. It freezes certain Russian officials’ access to the stashes they were keeping in Western banks and real estate and bans their entry to the United States. The reason Russian (and now, American) officials keep talking about adoption in the same breath is because of how the Russian side retaliated to the Magnitsky Act in 2012, namely by banning American adoptions of Russian children. The Russians vowed they were punishing Americans who violated the human rights of Russians, after an adopted Russian toddler died of heat stroke in a Virginia family’s car. But the only Americans the bill directly targeted were the ones involved in putting the Magnitsky Act together.

Brighton Park is a predominantly Latino community on the southwest side of Chicago. It’s a neighborhood threatened by poverty, gang violence, ICE raids, and isolation—in a city where income, race, and zip code can determine access to jobs, schools, healthy food, and essential services. It is against this backdrop that the Chicago teacher Xian Franzinger Barrett arrived at the neighborhood’s elementary school in 2014.

Recognizing the vast economic and racial inequalities his students faced, he chose what some might consider a radical approach for his writing and social-studies classes, weaving in concepts such as racism, classism, oppression, and prejudice. Barrett said it was vital to reject the oft-perpetuated narrative that society is fair and equal to address students’ questions and concerns about their current conditions. And Brighton Elementary’s seventh- and eighth-graders quickly put the lessons to work—confronting the school board over inequitable funding, fighting to install a playground, and creating a classroom library focused on black and Latino authors.

More than two years ago, soon after Donald Trump entered the presidential race, I noted online that no one like him—with no political, military, judicial, or public-service experience, with no known expertise on policy matters, with a trail of financial and personal complications—had ever before become president. Therefore, I said, it wasn’t going to happen this time.

Quite obviously that was wrong. Penitent and determined to learn from my errors, I’ve avoided any predictions involving Trump and his circles ever since.

But a few days ago, I edged back into the danger zone, after my very first look of the just-named White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, on TV. Via the ever-perilous medium of Twitter, I observed that he seemed more at ease on camera than Sean Spicer ever had, and less committed to flat-Earth stonewalling denials than Kellyanne Conway or Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Maybe his smooth-schmoozy approach would be what the Trump team needed? Maybe the press should get ready to be handled by a pro?

Updated on July 27 at 1:22 p.m. ET

It’s arm-twisting time in the Senate as Republicans close in on a decisive health-care vote, and the arm President Trump has decided to wring hardest belongs to Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Murkowski, a former member of the party leadership now beginning her third six-year term, angered the president by defying him on a key procedural vote to begin debate on Tuesday. Along with Senator Susan Collins of Maine, she was one of two Republicans voting against the motion, which succeeded only when Vice President Mike Pence broke a 50-50 tie. Trump ignored Collins but assailed Murkowski in a tweet on Wednesday morning, saying she “really let the Republicans, and our country, down yesterday.”

There’s an interesting minor furor going on over a statement that the wonderfully named Admiral Scott Swift made Thursday. Would he comply if President Trump ordered a nuclear strike on China?

“The answer would be yes,” Swift said.

It was clearly the right answer, if a scary one. Many people are nervous about the prospect of Donald Trump controlling nuclear weapons—Marco Rubio, for example—and everyone should be scared of a nuclear war with China, but the idea that the military follows orders from civilian leadership is appropriately sacrosanct. (The equally well-named Captain Charlie Brown, a good man, conceded dolefully that perhaps Swift should have questioned the premise of the question more aggressively.)