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Translation: For among times of arms, the laws fall mute. But is this true?
Much opposition was forced on President GW Bush for his actions by executive order and presidential findings directly after the 9/11 attack. Bush ordered countless legal authorities inside and outside government for legal decisions on every step he took including that of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.
We have a major debate that will not be solved any time soon on the legality of the President Trump executive order on the refugee question which has caused major protests and legal action already as we see detentions of foreign nationals at airports. All executive orders are subject to judicial review. Presidents have been given the option of using extraordinary power and in many cases that is a good condition, yet in the matter of law, there have been without question many abuses.
This post is not meant to form any conclusion on the legal veracity of this executive order, rather it is designed to add it more facts and additional questions moving forward. President Trump has a mess to clean up left by Barack Obama, of this, there is no dispute. The White House did take action at the stroke of the pen to begin to make America safer, however was this action taken too soon and without legal opinions including that of the Office of Legal Council? That has not been answered.
So, here are some items that must be included in this debate that extends the whole view and argument.
These are not in any specific order so the reader can individually prioritize.
Should President Trump have set an effective date of this Executive Order?
How was TSA, DHS and all other associated agencies briefed on those already in transit and with validated travel documents in hand?
Did the White House consider exemptions or waivers for those that have been vetted previously that worked or work for the USG in some capacity?
Why were some countries on this list while others were not? The San Bernardino shooters were from Pakistan, but do we need Pakistan for the war in Afghanistan?
The majority of the terrorists on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia and yet Saudi was omitted from the list, why? Could it be that Trump had/has business interests there or because some that were formally in the Kingdom did aide often the United States when it came to terror like in the case of kidnapped CIA operative William Buckley in Beirut of which the Saudis helped finance his recovery? It is without question the Saudis dislike Iran as much as the United States.
We have seen millions of refugees enter all parts of Europe in recent years and yet they can enter the United States under the ‘visa waiver’ program. Did the Trump White House take this under full consideration? The answer is a ‘kinda, yes’ they did but that review has been ordered and not yet deployed.
We have countless refugees and asylees entering the United States from our southern border, but was Mexico on the list? No, yet we don’t know either if the phone discussion President Trump had with President Nieto, this topic was addressed.
There are in fact limitations to who can be accepted into the United States under 8 U.S. Code S 1182 and applying those restrictions remain in the authority of the President while waivers can be issued and it is germane to ask if this law has been considered.
Refugees too have rights and legal protections which was in fact determined after WW II and we have witnessed millions in the Middle East that are forced to live outside their homeland in camps that are simply inhumane. So when it comes to the ‘huddle masses’, the United States does have a responsibility however, the genesis of the current refugee/asylee issue remains with Susan Rice, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The solution in the long term is almost impossible for President Trump and his team to solve unless the hostilities and conflicts in the Middle East are solved.
The protests of those standing against the Trump executive order was not spontaneous, nor were those immediate lawsuits against this temporary refugee ban. Following the money and the continued chaos will not soon go away. What is the proper counter-measure going forward? A question that remains without an answer.
In 2011, Obama did ban Iraqis wanting to enter the United States and this was in fact the exact year the United States pulled out in total from Iraqi. Obama did however issue some selective waivers. The concern for Obama at the time was the matter of two people in Kentucky plotting a terror attack. This alone is a single great argument for Trump’s action and Senator Schumer should be reminded as should Nancy Pelosi. But it is not the full argument as noted by the items above.
There are historical events that do offer President Trump great legal standing that is unless courts will rule otherwise in upcoming cases.
ABC: Over the veto of President Woodrow Wilson, Congress passed the 1917 Immigration Act amid social outcry over national security during World War I. According to the Office of the Historian of the U.S. Department of State, the legislation extended to barring most Asian nation immigration overall, with the exception of Japan, which was protected by a prior bilateral diplomatic agreement, and the Philippines, then a U.S. colony.
The act was officially repealed by the Magnuson Act in 1943, in the context of the U.S. alliance with China against Japan during World War II. Still, actual Chinese immigration to the U.S. remained capped at 105 persons a year until 1965.
National Origins Formula
For the first time in the 1920s — through the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924, or the Johnson-Reed Act — the U.S. further restricted immigration by establishing a wide-scale quota system based on national origins. According to the Office of the Historian of the U.S. Department of State, in addition to putting a blanket ban on immigration from Asian countries, now including Japan in the case of the Johnson-Reed Act, the national origins immigration policies also had the effect of reducing immigration from southern and eastern Europe.
According to a 2015 report by the Pew Research Center about 20th century U.S. immigration, the impact of the system was intended to “try to restore earlier immigration patterns by capping total annual immigration and imposing numerical quotas based on immigrant nationality that favored northern and western European countries.”
The U.S. immigration system remained based on the national origin of would-be immigrants until the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.
“It was designed for racist reasons,” said Steve Legomsky, professor of law at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, referring to the national origins system as well as the prior exclusion of Asian immigrants. “Today, I don’t think that’s what’s driving the immigration ban [proposed by Trump]. I think it’s more a fear of terrorism and a concern for national security.”
Legomsky, who was also formerly the chief counsel of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, added that “the impulses are different [now], but the effect is the same.”
In summary, this article is hardly complete with all the facts and laws, rather it is meant for the reader to consider a wider range of moving parts while inviting the reader to individually research more before an ‘all in’ as full support of Trump’s executive action be assumed.
The Forgotten Holocaust: The Films of Boris Maftsir
An Israeli filmmaker works to revive the neglected, terrible history of Shoah victims in the Soviet Union
Tablet: In a series of spellbinding documentaries, Boris Maftsir, an Israeli filmmaker, has been racing to prevent the last traces of the Holocaust in the USSR from vanishing for good. He went deep into the forests of Belarus to film the remnants of Tuvie Bielski’s partisans’ camp and document instances of Jewish resistance that have not been widely known until now. While it is hard to imagine anything remains to be said about the Shoah, that, says Maftsir, is because we keep retelling half the story—the story of the destruction of the Western European Jewry, from ghettos to gas chambers and everything those stand for: the merciless, mechanized, industrial-scale killing machine that organized the murder of millions into a precise, assembly-line-like operation.
While half of all the Shoah victims died in the Soviet Union, they died very different deaths. Here, people died in mass executions in ravines, forests, and village streets, at the hands of Germans or local collaborators. They perished right where they lived, in front of people who had been their neighbors.
Because the Nazis put Soviet Jews, whom they called Judeo-Bolsheviks, in a separate category and viewed them as particularly dangerous (and because they expected a quick victory here) with a few notable exceptions, they almost never bothered with organizing the Jews into long-term ghettos or transporting them to faraway places. Jews began dying the moment Germans invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.
“By the end of 1941,” writes Timothy Snyder in Holocaust: The Ignored Reality, “the Germans (along with local auxiliaries and Romanian troops) had killed a million Jews in the Soviet Union and the Baltics. That is the equivalent of the total number of Jews killed at Auschwitz during the entire war. By the end of 1942, the Germans (again, with a great deal of local assistance) had shot another 700,000 Jews, and the Soviet Jewish populations under their control had ceased to exist. … By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete.”
A different set of numbers throws this into even sharper relief. An estimated 25 to 27 percent of Amsterdam Jews who found themselves under occupation survived—the lowest rate in Western Europe. In France, 75 percent of Jews survived the Nazi occupation. By contrast, of the conservatively estimated 2.61 to 2.75 million Soviet Jews who found themselves living under Nazi occupation, an estimated 103,000 to 119,000 survived, for a survival rate of between 2.7 percent and 4 percent. (Estimates of victims include only those who died as a result of direct anti-Jewish actions by the Nazis; they do not include hundreds of thousands of Jews who fell in battle while serving in the Red Army or died during sieges of Leningrad and Odessa from bombings, hunger, illness, and other causes. These are estimated to constitute several hundred thousand.)
Maftsir doesn’t mince words when he talks about the near-erasure of the eastern half of the Holocaust. “The place of memory of the Holocaust is already taken up,” he says. “There is the Victim—Anne Frank. There is the Saint—Janusz Korczak. There is the Villain—Adolf Eichman. There is Hell, it’s Auschwitz. There is heroism—the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And that’s it.”
***
I met Maftsir in September 2016 in Kyiv, where I was attending a series of events commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre. At one of the events, Maftsir showed the first film of his Holocaust in the USSR project, Guardians of Remembrance. It was the first time in my life that I, who grew up in the Soviet Union, saw people I could recognize and relate to—survivors from Belarus, Russia, Ukraine—speaking to me from the screen, in Russian, about the horrors of the Holocaust. They told the story of a Holocaust that happened in places where my family had lived.
Maftsir has been working on his project since 2013, but its roots go back to his time at Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, where for seven years he headed up the effort to recover the names of the Soviet victims of the Shoah. When he took the job in 2006, he was shocked to discover how many were still missing.
“I knew that in Soviet times, for ideological and political reasons, there was neither documentation, nor memorialization, nor the study of the Holocaust,” he told me. “But I couldn’t imagine that out of the 1.5 million Jews we believe died in Ukraine, we had only 10 to 15 percent of the names.” This figure stood in contrast to the names of Western European Jews who died in the Holocaust, 90 percent of which were known at the time.
Maftsir spent the next several years traveling to some 160 Shoah sites in the former Soviet Union, a mind-boggling number that is nevertheless only a fraction of the total of 2,000 sites connected to the Holocaust. Today, these sites are spread out across several post-Soviet states. Step by step, he built a network of local volunteers who sought out Holocaust survivors, non-Jewish witnesses, and local memory activists—the so-called guardians of remembrance. “We did not work with archives,” Maftsir emphasized. “We were looking for living memory.”
His team collected hundreds of thousands of names. And at the end of his seventh year on the project, Maftsir realized that he needed to bring this story before a larger audience. As a professional filmmaker, he chose film as his medium. In 2012 he resigned from the project at Yad Vashem to make Guardians of Remembrance.
“What does it mean to shoot almost everyone or to destroy nearly 3 million people across a span of a given territory?” asks Maftsir. The question is only partly rhetorical. In the USSR, it meant there were virtually no survivors left to tell their stories. Those who had managed to evacuate before the German invasion or who had served in the Red Army came back to find empty homes and mass graves. Their grief was suppressed under the blanket Soviet policy of silence and denial of the specificity of the Jewish nature of the Holocaust.
The Soviets, of course, knew exactly what had happened to the Jews in their territory. Even before the war ended, a special state commission began investigating German crimes, including those against the Jews. A group of Soviet Jewish writers began collecting witness testimony and preparing it for publication in a work that became known as the Black Book of Soviet Jewry. Some of these materials became evidence in the Nuremberg trials.
But the findings of the commission were never published in the USSR. Many of those who worked on the Black Book were executed a few years later, charged with disloyalty, as the campaign against “rootless cosmopolitanism” unfolded. It would have been ideologically uncomfortable for Stalin to emphasize Jews as a particular target, for doing so could have detracted from the special status of the USSR as a whole as a target of Hitler’s aggression. It could also have given credence to Hitler’s propaganda about the Judeo-Commune and reinflamed anti-Semitic tendencies among the local populations that needed to be reintegrated—and reindoctrinated—after prolonged periods of living under the German occupation.
In the vast majority of cases, there were no monuments or other works commemorating the execution sites. In the few cases with some sort of memorial, the inscriptions referred to the victims as “peaceful Soviet citizens.” Relatives were not permitted to gather at the memorial sites. Those who did were often arrested. Western scholars were denied access to the archives to conduct research.
“What do deniers of the Holocaust say?” asks Maftsir. “They say: Look at the USSR. Show us the corpses. But everything there is burned down, everything is ground down, everything is destroyed. The forgetting by the Soviet power for 40-50 years has led to the fact that there is no direct connection anymore. And that is how memory goes away.”
***
As Dr. Inna Gerasimova, the founder of the Museum of Jewish History and Culture of Belarus, tells her story in one of the opening scenes of Guardians of Remembrance, the camera pans across a square garden in the center of Minsk, where she and Maftsir are discussing the events of November 1941.
“This is where the gallows stood,” she tells him, motioning with her hand. Around them is a street scene that is unremarkable in its normalcy. Passers-by are going about their business, some with the habitual urgency of a city-dweller, some just strolling. Most are oblivious to the cameras. It’s a gray, rainy afternoon in late November, and pedestrians are studiously avoiding the puddles. You can almost feel the chill in the air.
“It is precisely here that once in a while they hanged people,” Gerasimova continues, and the growing dissonance between her words and the humdrum, quotidian reality on the screen sets off a barely detectable alarm bell of internal discomfort in the viewer.
“The people began to panic from the very beginning. They felt frightened because right away they realized the most scary thing—the complete permissiveness that was indulged in by those who kept them here. They raped women, they raped girls, and they did it openly.” As she speaks, the camera cuts over to a well-dressed young woman with two school-age sons. The boys look back at the camera, giggling the way preteen boys anywhere might do. Gerasimova’s narrative of the horror that took place in these very streets clashes with the visual of the weirdly normal, peaceful scene playing out on-screen.
And suddenly it hits you. It was people just like these—regular, ordinary residents whom any one of us could identify with—who became swept up in the horrible events she is describing. Suddenly you can visualize and feel in your gut the shock and horror of seeing the gallows erected in the heart of your city. It could have been anyone who happened to be a Jew. It could have been you.
It is Maftsir’s ability to create this presence that makes his films so powerful. To achieve this, he films on location, at the same time of year when the events his informants describe took place. This means that he’s had to film in 1 degree F in Sukhari in Belarus, 104 degrees F in Zmievskaya Balka in the south of Russia, and in the pouring rain in Minsk. His films are based entirely on witness and survivor testimony, and he takes his witnesses to the places where they experienced the events. He asks them to tell their stories in the language they spoke in their childhood, whether it be Russian, Yiddish, Ukrainian, or Romanian.
This produces a lot of difficulties. “Physically, it’s very hard,” he told me. “You come to Berezhany in Western Ukraine with a witness. He is over 80, he is afraid of getting sick. And the rain starts, and he thinks, naturally—what will happen to me? And you have to work with people so they don’t cry, so they can tell the story.”
And they do tell their stories. They tell their stories all over the Holocaust country of the former Soviet Union, from Nalchik to Khatyn to Lubavichi, the birthplace of Chabad. The relentless narrative of Maftsir’s films, in which each episode of annihilation unfolds chronologically as one story builds on another, paints a picture of what he refers to as “the organized chaos” of the Holocaust in the USSR. In many ways, it can be said that it was here that the Nazis invented, practiced, and perfected techniques of mass executions; learned to manipulate and control crowds of future victims to prevent panic from setting in too early; learned what incentives worked to supply them with streams of local collaborators. It was out of the chaos of these early months of the Holocaust that the well-oiled extermination machine of later years arose.
To be sure, Germans had their orders to annihilate Soviet Jews, but, in Maftsir’s view, there wasn’t an organized plan.
“Take the example of the Romanians,” he says. “Why is it that in Zhmerinka you have an ‘exemplary’ ghetto, and in Bershad hundreds are dying each day? That one is run by Romanians and this one is run by Romanians. In Bogdanovka there are executions taking place locally, but in the northern part of Vinnytsa region people are basically told to live or die any way they wish.”
This lack of organization and preplanning, in his view and that of many historians, extended even to such massive events as Babi Yar.
“Babi Yar was a horrible tragedy,” says Maftsir. “But it wasn’t the first. And it wasn’t even unique in its scale.” He rattles off several notorious mass execution sites. Kamenets-Podolsk: two days, 23,600 people, a full month before Babi Yar. The Rumbula massacre in Riga: 25,000 Jews over two nonconsecutive days in late November and early December 1941. By then, he says, “they already knew how to do it.”
How reliable are the accounts he presents? Witness testimony is a contentious issue among historians. One problem is that people’s memories can be unreliable, especially many decades later. Bystander testimony can be particularly problematic, Dr. Kathleen Smith, a professor at Georgetown University focusing on issues of memory and historical politics, told me: “Bystanders are people who perhaps weren’t specifically targets of repression. They were there, and one might ask, well, what were you doing? Were you a collaborator or were you just someone who was scared? Were you someone who tried to help the victims? It’s much more messy when you try to pull information out of people who were bystanders.” In fact, it is well known that neighbors often benefited from the Jews’ misfortune.
When I put these questions to Maftsir, he is careful to emphasize that his witnesses were children or teenagers when the events took place. “Each of them talks about what they saw. And they do it sometimes very honestly,” he says. “It was a terrible time. It was occupation. I don’t know how people lived and how they survived. Even the righteous who saved people did not do it for free: they had to get food for the people. Those who saved themselves had to pay for it.”
Not a single historian who has viewed his films has ever raised objections about the veracity of testimonies, says Maftsir. “I don’t make things up and I don’t uncover anything new,” he stresses. “All the events that are described are well documented. I simply recreate these events. Each witness talks only about what she saw.”
In fact, a number of organizations in Israel use his films in their Holocaust education programs, including the Ghetto Fighters’ House museum.
“To what extent are these testimonies history? I don’t know,” he says. “It’s memory. And my entire project is about the restoration of memory about the Holocaust in the USSR. I collect imagery to convey the scale, the prevalence, the uniqueness, the systematic nature of what happened through personal stories.”
In a strange way, Maftsir’s films give one a sense of hope. After all, these are the stories of survival and resurrection of memory; stories that defied the intended triple annihilation of death, burial in mass graves, and forgetting.
One of the most emblematic scenes in the film is one of a Soviet World War II veteran, Emil Ziegel, who now lives in Israel, coming back to Mineralny Vody, Russia, with his Israeli grandson to show him where he came from and tell him the story of losing his family in the Shoah. “By the time you have children, I probably won’t be alive,” he says to him. “You bring them here, tell them what I told you today.”
***
To read J. Hoberman’s Tablet magazine review of a series of Holocaust movies made in Communist countries, click here.
The Holman rule (Rule XXI clause 2), which had its inception in
the 44th Congress, underwent various modifications between 1876 and
1911. At times it was dropped completely. The full text is here.
House Republicans this week reinstated an arcane procedural rule that enables lawmakers to reach deep into the budget and slash the pay of an individual federal worker — down to $1 — a move that threatens to upend the 130-year-old civil service.
The Holman Rule, named after an Indiana congressman who devised it in 1876, empowers any member of Congress to propose amending an appropriations bill to single out a government employee or cut a specific program.
The use of the rule would not be simple; a majority of the House and the Senate would still have to approve any such amendment. At the same time, opponents and supporters agree that the work of 2.1 million civil servants, designed to be insulated from politics, is now vulnerable to the whims of elected officials.
It’s interesting that the Post frames this move in a way that’s sympathetic to federal workers, as if being “vulnerable to the whims of elected officials” is unduly threatening. Most Americans in the workplace are, in fact, vulnerable to the whims of their employers, and it takes a lot less than a literal act of Congress to have their pay cut or lose their job for poor performance.
And there can be no question that federal workers have far too many civil service protections. After the IRS held a press conference admitting that they had improperly targeted conservative groups, Lois Lerner, the IRS official deemed most responsible, didn’t face any meaningful consequences. Instead it was revealed that she recently received $129,000 in bonuses and retired with an annual pension that could possibly exceed $100,000.
Even after Lerner left, John Koskinen, the new interim head of the IRS, ignored congressional subpoenas as the IRS destroyed evidence relating to the investigation of Lerner and engaged in egregious stonewalling. It’s pretty clear that the IRS was in no way fearful of suffering any consequences for persecuting thousands of ordinary Americans and flouting Congress.
And last year, the New York Times reported that “at most three” Department of Veterans Affairs employees lost their jobs after it was revealed that widespread incompetence at the VA was killing sick veterans. There are several other examples of intolerable behavior by federal workers going largely unpunished, and tolerating malfeasance has broad policy implications for Republicans specifically and good governance generally:
Democrats have long understood personnel is policy. For decades, the administrative state has continued to extend its reach. So long as the people enforcing our laws and regulations are union liberals with broad immunity, the rule of law will depend on those individuals’ views and choices.
To address the systemic problem, the GOP has to reclaim Congress’s oversight power and push for sweeping civil service reforms. Without them, no significant conservative policy overhaul will ever be implemented, and Americans will be increasingly subject to a complex web of unaccountable and unconstitutional administrative fiefdoms.
For ordinary Americans, the only thing controversial here that federal workers are essentially impossible to punish or fire, even though the average federal compensation is $123,160, or 76 percent more than the private-sector average of Joe Taxpayer at $69,901. Reviving the Holman Rule was a smart move by House Republicans, and we should hope they start using it, because there are lots of federal workers who aren’t worth paying a dollar, let alone 123,160 of them.
****
Ethics questions for two sets of government employees:
Members of Congress
The ethical conduct of the elected members of Congress is prescribed by either the House Ethics Manual or the Senate Ethics Manual, as created and revised by the House and Senate committees on ethics.
Executive Branch Employees
For the first 200 years of U.S. government, each agency maintained its own code of ethical conduct. But in 1989, the President’s Commission on Federal Ethics Law Reform recommended that individual agency standards of conduct be replaced with a single regulation applicable to all employees of the executive branch.
In response, President George H.W. Bush signed Executive Order 12674 on April 12, 1989, setting out the following fourteen basic principles of ethical conduct for executive branch personnel:
Public service is a public trust, requiring employees to place loyalty to the Constitution, the laws and ethical principles above private gain.\
Employees shall not hold financial interests that conflict with the conscientious performance of duty.
Employees shall not engage in financial transactions using nonpublic Government information or allow the improper use of such information to further any private interest.
An employee shall not, except as permitted … solicit or accept any gift or other item of monetary value from any person or entity seeking official action from, doing business with, or conducting activities regulated by the employee’s agency, or whose interests may be substantially affected by the performance or nonperformance of the employee’s duties.
Employees shall put forth honest effort in the performance of their duties.
Employees shall not knowingly make unauthorized commitments or promises of any kind purporting to bind the Government.
Employees shall not use public office for private gain.
Employees shall act impartially and not give preferential treatment to any private organization or individual.
Employees shall protect and conserve Federal property and shall not use it for other than authorized activities.
Employees shall not engage in outside employment or activities, including seeking or negotiating for employment, that conflict with official Government duties and responsibilities.
Employees shall disclose waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption to appropriate authorities.
Employees shall satisfy in good faith their obligations as citizens, including all just financial obligations, especially those—such as Federal, State, or local taxes—that are imposed by law.
Employees shall adhere to all laws and regulations that provide equal opportunity for all Americans regardless of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, or handicap.
Employees shall endeavor to avoid any actions creating the appearance that they are violating the law or the ethical standards set forth in this part. Whether particular circumstances create an appearance that the law or these standards have been violated shall be determined from the perspective of a reasonable person with knowledge of the relevant facts.
Over the years since 1989, some agencies have created supplemental regulations that modify or supplement the 14 rules of conduct to better apply to the specific duties and responsibilities of their employees.
In addition to the above 14 rules of conduct for executive branch employees, Congress, on June 27, 1980, unanimously passed a law establishing the following
general Code of Ethics for Government Service. Signed by President Jimmy Carter on July 3, 1980, Public Law 96-303 requires that, “Any person in Government service should:”
Put loyalty to the highest moral principles and to country above loyalty to persons, party, or Government department.
Uphold the Constitution, laws, and regulations of the United States and of all governments therein and never be a party to their evasion.
Give a full day’s labor for a full day’s pay; giving earnest effort and best thought to the performance of duties.
Seek to find and employ more efficient and economical ways of getting tasks accomplished.
Never discriminate unfairly by the dispensing of special favors or privileges to anyone, whether for remuneration or not; and never accept, for himself or herself or for family members, favors or benefits under circumstances which might be construed by reasonable persons as influencing the performance of governmental duties.
Make no private promises of any kind binding upon the duties of office, since a Government employee has no private word which can be binding on public duty.
Engage in no business with the Government, either directly or indirectly, which is inconsistent with the conscientious performance of governmental duties.
Never use any information gained confidentially in the performance of governmental duties as a means of making private profit.
Few appear to remember the brazen, corruption and deceptive operation when pro-Russian separatists invaded Crimea. The world was in shock and now Ukraine is falling victim to the same operation as NATO fights against this.
If you want to understand the Russian operation in Eastern Europe and how the Kremlin game is played, one must begin with the twisting of information, news and propaganda.
Much has been debated as to the penetration of Russia into the U.S. election system. This is not a new phenomenon for the Kremlin.
The survival of Ukraine as a sovereign, democratic nation was at stake. And the presidential election needed to go smoothly—thus making it a prime target for a Russian cyberattack.
Four days prior to the election, on May 21, 2014, a pro-Russian hacktivist group called CyberBerkut launched a cyberattack against Ukraine’s Central Election Commission computers. According to Ukrainian news reports, the attack destroyed both hardware and software, and for 20 hours shut down programs to monitor voter turnout and tally votes.
On election day, 12 minutes before polls closed, CyberBerkut hackers posted false election results to the election commission’s website. Russia’s TV Channel One promptly aired the bogus results. More here.
Newsweek: Ukraine’s former top security official has gone from tracking down Russian spies to fighting what he perceives to be the country’s greatest threat—corruption.
“The question is, are we going to survive or not?” Valentyn Nalyvaichenko told The Daily Signal from his offices in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital.
Nalyvaichenko, 50, is the former head of the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, which is Ukraine’s successor agency to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic’s branch of the KGB, the Soviet Union’s main security agency.
“At stake is survival of the country,” Nalyvaichenko said. “At stake is whether we’ll finally get rule of law and a functioning state instead of chaos, corruption, weakness and [being] not capable to defend our territory and the country. So, at stake is the country, its independence.”
During his interview with The Daily Signal, Nalyvaichenko wore a well-appointed suit and tie. He spoke fluent English, evidence of his university degree in linguistics.
His affable demeanor and emotive manner of talking hinted more at his background as a diplomat and member of parliament than his years in charge of Ukraine’s successor agency to the KGB.
Nalyvaichenko led the SBU for the first time from 2006 to 2010. He took over the security agency for a second time on Feb. 24, 2014, two days after deposed former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych fled to Russia in the closing days of the revolution.
Nalyvaichenko has also served as a member of parliament and as Ukraine’s deputy minister of foreign affairs.
Nalyvaichenko’s 2015 departure from the SBU was controversial. In June 2015, while the security agency was investigating high-level Ukrainian officials for financial crimes, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko sacked Nalyvaichenko from his leadership post at the SBU.
Today, Nalyvaichenko is the leader of two upstart anti-corruption political platforms: the Justice Civil-Political Movement, and the Nalyvaichenko Anti-Corruption Movement.
“Our people, our common people, are suffering because of corruption, corruption at the top,” Nalyvaichenko said, pounding his fist on the table for emphasis.
“I really like what [Winston] Churchill said in the Second World War,” Nalyvaichenko said. “‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’ If we’re corrupt, it doesn’t mean we have to say, ‘OK, we’re a failed state.’ No, it’s not true.”
Purge
True to his diplomatic roots, Nalyvaichenko recently traveled to Washington to present evidence to Congress about Russia’s involvement in the war in eastern Ukraine and to press for U.S. assistance in anti-corruption efforts.
As part of his anti-corruption platform, Nalyvaichenko has called for the FBI to investigate the financial crimes of Ukraine’s current and former political leaders.
He also wants U.S. and EU prosecutors to oversee the adjudication of corruption investigations, and for the U.S. to press Ukrainian officials to make Ukraine’s newly minted National Anti-Corruption Bureau independent from the executive and judicial branches.
People look out over the Maidan, or Independence, Square on May 22, 2014, in Kiev, Ukraine. Nolan Peterson writes that corruption still taints almost every aspect of Ukrainian life. University students in Kiev, for example, say it’s still common practice to pay their professors a bribe to pass exams. Dan Kitwood/Getty
Nalyvaichenko said Ukraine has a chance to “show for the whole world, especially to the Russian people, that there is an opportunity, there is a plan B, to such nations after the Soviet Union time to be democratic, to be not corrupt, to live in a not corrupt state, to be independent.”
“Ukraine belongs to the Western world,” he added.
Nalyvaichenko added that Ukraine has “several months, two or three months” to show real progress in anti-corruption measures before Western partners begin to break ranks on measures such as maintaining punitive sanctions against Russia.
“It will be no tolerance from the new administration in the United States,” Nalyvaichenko said. And next year, “there might be many changes in the European Union,” he said. “That’s, I think, what is at stake when we’re talking about the European Union and the United States.”
Within Ukraine, Nalyvaichenko’s strategy is to reach out to civil society leaders working at the grassroots level. He wants to convince Ukrainians to believe in the democratic process, despite a quarter-century of oligarchic thug rule after the fall of the Soviet Union.
To that end, Nalyvaichenko’s two anti-corruption organizations—which comprise 10,000 activists across Ukraine—have provided pro bono legal assistance to more than 3,000 Ukrainian citizens involved in court cases against allegedly corrupt government officials.
Nalyvaichenko’s groups have also given free medical care to more than 9,000 civilians in the war zone.
“If you would like to stop Russian aggression, if you would like to get back not only territories but people…we have to show them what?” Nalyvaichenko said. “Believe me, not Kalashnikovs and not tanks. We have to show them a better life.”
Lifestyle
That better life has not yet materialized for many Ukrainians.
For one, the hryvnia, Ukraine’s national currency, is currently less than one-third its value against the dollar than it was before the revolution. Wages have not concurrently risen to match the falling currency, dramatically reducing Ukrainians’ spending power.
Also, corruption still taints almost every aspect of Ukrainian life. University students in Kiev, as an example, say it’s still common practice to pay their professors a bribe to pass exams.
According to an October 2016 public opinion poll conducted by the International Republican Institute, and funded by the government of Canada, 30 percent of Ukrainians surveyed who had visited a doctor in the previous 12 months said they paid a bribe for service.
Among those who interacted with the police, 25 percent said they paid a bribe.
A large part of Ukraine’s economy is off the books—what Ukrainians refer to as the “shadow economy.” Ukraine’s Economic Development and Trade Ministry said the shadow economy was 40 percent of the country’s gross domestic product in 2015.
This black market economy robs the government of valuable tax revenue. It also leaves many returning combat veterans, many of whom were drafted, no legal recourse to recover their jobs at the conclusion of their military service.
Many veterans previously worked off the books and were paid in cash so their employers could skirt payroll taxes.
According to the 2016 International Republican Institute study, 72 percent of Ukrainians surveyed said the country was moving in the wrong direction, while 11 percent said the country was on the right track.
As a point of comparison, a year prior to the revolution in May 2013, 69 percent of Ukrainians surveyed said the country was moving in the wrong direction, and 15 percent said the country was moving in the right direction.
According to the same poll, 73 percent of Ukrainians disapprove of Poroshenko’s performance as president, and 87 percent of Ukrainians have an unfavorable opinion of their parliament.
Nalyvaichenko said he no longer has faith in Poroshenko.
“For me this is not personal,” he said. “Whoever becomes president or prime minister is immediately part of a corrupt and not transparent system. Immediately they are reproducing the same Soviet or simply corrupt practices and environment…. So, to get rid of that, to dismantle, to change the system, to reboot the country [we need to] get new people with absolutely different minds and mentality into the governmental offices.”
A New Fight
Nalyvaichenko is among a new breed of Ukrainian reformers who have emerged after the 2014 revolution.
Among Nalyvaichenko’s allies is former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who resigned as governor of Ukraine’s Odessa Oblast in November. The move was a protest against what Saakashvili claimed was stonewalling by Poroshenko and the majority of Ukraine’s political class in implementing anti-corruption reforms.
Saakashvili has since launched his own anti-corruption, opposition party called Wave.
“We had a revolution with lots of casualties,” Saakashvili told The Daily Signal in an earlier interview. “And every time a revolution happens, people have a right to expect revolutionary changes.”
One bright spot for Ukraine is its budding civil society. Across the country, political activists and humanitarian workers, including many millennials, have enabled the spread of democratic norms and are pushing for government accountability at the grassroots level.
“Across the country there is real willingness at the local level, at the grassroots level to stop corruption,” Nalyvaichenko said. “Fifteen or 20 years ago it was unimaginable that Ukraine would have such a powerful civil society.”
He continued:
I remember my parents and how modest the family used to be. How we young, young kids in Zaporizhia and other regions dreamed about another life. And to really have a chance with a free market, with the rule of law … for our children to create a new country with more opportunities. Our better future is here, and we should fight for that. I will not take no for an answer—from anyone.
Sacked
As head of the SBU, Nalyvaichenko endeavored to purge the security agency of its Soviet KGB past. He booted many personnel who had served in the SBU when it was the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic’s branch of the KGB.
Nalyvaichenko spearheaded an effort to open up the SBU’s KGB archives, launching fresh investigations into Soviet crimes in Ukraine, including Joseph Stalin’s organized mass famine in the 1930s known as the Holodomor.
He also hunted down and expelled Russian spies in Ukraine who were working for Russia’s successor agency to the KGB, the Federal Security Service of Russia, or FSB.
“With SBU, what I started with was to stop KGB practices,” Nalyvaichenko said. “I was the first and only chief of the SBU who actually started to detain FSB officers in Ukraine.”
The intent of Nalyvaichenko’s personnel scrub at the SBU went beyond security concerns. He wanted to shed the agency of its “Soviet mindset.”
To fill out the SBU’s thinned ranks, Nalyvaichenko tapped young political activists and reformers who had no living memory of life in the Soviet Union.
“That is my approach and my understanding of how it could be done in all the country,” Nalyvaichenko said, explaining how his SBU scrub could be used as a model for nationwide reforms.
The solution to beating corruption in Ukraine, according to Nalyvaichenko, is to elevate a new generation of political and business leaders.
“Let the generation shift happen in Ukraine,” Nalyvaichenko said. “For the new generation to be in the offices, to let them finally rule the country … it’s high time to finally stop with old practices.”
Nalyvaichenko’s second term as head of the SBU came at a tumultuous time for Ukraine. In the months following the February 2014 revolution, Russia launched a hybrid invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, ultimately annexing the territory.
Russia followed up the seizure of Crimea with a proxy war in the Donbas. A combined force of pro-Russian separatists and Russian regulars was on the march in eastern Ukraine in 2014, and there were worries then that Ukraine could be cleaved in two, or that Russian forces massed on Ukraine’s borders might stage a large-scale invasion.
In Kiev, the post-revolution government was at the time trying to establish its legitimacy and follow through on the pro-democratic promise of the revolution.
Meanwhile, officials were piecing together a military campaign out of the remnants of Ukraine’s armed forces, which had been gutted by decades of corruption and purposeful neglect.
Amid all of this, Nalyvaichenko pushed to prosecute corrupt government officials.
A New Fight
In Ukraine, opinions diverge about the hierarchy of threats facing the country.
A nearly three-year-old war between Ukrainian troops and a combined force of pro-Russian separatists and Russian regulars continues to simmer in the Donbas, Ukraine’s embattled eastern territory on the border with Russia.
About 10,000 Ukrainians have so far died in the conflict, which has also displaced about 1.7 million people. The war cost Ukraine an equivalent 20 percent of its gross national product in 2015, according to a 2016 report by the Institute for Economics and Peace.
The February 2015 cease-fire has failed. Military and civilian casualties still occur almost every day from landmines, artillery fire, rocket attacks, and small arms gun battles.
Ukraine’s military has rebuilt itself since 2014, but many front-line soldiers complain that after nearly three years of combat, they still aren’t getting basic supplies.
Despite the war’s cost in blood and treasure, Nalyvaichenko said the greatest threat facing Ukraine today is not on the battlefields of the Donbas, but within Kiev’s government halls.
“If you don’t understand how deep and how destroying the corruption is, you’ll never win the war,” Nalyvaichenko said. “This system, as I understand it, is not workable anymore. And because of war, because of Russian aggression, we now understand why. We simply, as a country, as a nation, have no time and no space anymore to continue with such corrupt practices.”
There is, however, a countervailing, quieter faction, particularly among Ukraine’s military brass, which says the war effort should take priority over any anti-corruption crusades.
Ukrainian military officials who spoke to The Daily Signal on background cautioned against ambitious anti-corruption agendas while the country is still at war.
And, according to the October 2016 International Republican Institute poll, most Ukrainians consider the war to be the biggest threat to the country.
Of the Ukrainians surveyed in the poll, 53 percent said the war in the Donbas was the country’s most important issue, compared with 38 percent who singled out corruption as the top issue.
“The tens of thousands of Russian soldiers, tanks, and artillery sitting along Ukraine’s southern and eastern borders are Ukraine’s sole existential threat,” Alexander Motyl, professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark, wrote in OZY. “If [Russian President] Vladimir Putin gives the command, they could invade and possibly destroy large parts of the country. Corruption, by comparison, could eviscerate Ukraine’s institutions, but only in the long term.”
Outsider
As SBU chief, Nalyvaichenko spearheaded an investigation into a June 8, 2015, fire at an oil depot near Vasylkiv, Ukraine. The investigation allegedly implicated government officials in financial crimes, according to Nalyvaichenko’s account of events.
The investigation also revealed the undisclosed involvement of a Russian company in the oil depot.
Nalyvaichenko said he personally presented Poroshenko with the evidence and pushed for the issuance of arrest warrants.
Then, on June 15, 2015, Poroshenko fired Nalyvaichenko as head of the SBU. And three days later, Ukraine’s parliament voted to approve Nalyvaichenko’s ouster.
“That’s why I decided to be outside the government,” Nalyvaichenko said. “I really understood and understand for sure that to be subordinated and to fight the corruption, which is above you, is impossible. You become a part of this corrupt group of people, or you are outside. Here’s a red line. For me it was a clear decision.”
The Poroshenko administration declined a request for comment for this article. But, in an emailed statement to The Daily Signal, the SBU defended its track record of investigating and prosecuting corrupt officials.
“After the Revolution of Dignity, state leadership gave a clear indication to law enforcement authorities to begin the real fight against corruption, regardless of position, party affiliation, and the number of stars on one’s epaulets,” the SBU wrote in its statement to The Daily Signal.
According to the SBU, the security agency investigated 673 Ukrainian officials for corruption in 2016, compared with 545 in 2015, and 359 in 2014. The SBU said its investigations led to 256 convictions in 2016, an increase from 184 in 2015, and 181 in 2014.
“This suggests an increase in the intensity of the intelligence agencies in this cause,” the SBU said in its statement.
Nalyvaichenko acknowledged that Ukraine has made some progress in fighting corruption, but he said the past few years of investigations have largely targeted mid- and low-level government officials.
“The worst thing, I think, is that no single person from the top of the previous government [has been] prosecuted,” Nalyvaichenko said. “No single trial, or public hearings, or other procedures were organized by this government, by these officials. That’s I think the worst thing for the country and for Ukrainians.”
Nolan Peterson, a former special operations pilot and a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, is The Daily Signal’s foreign correspondent based in Ukraine.
Donald J. Trump is the 45th President of the United States. He believes the United States has incredible potential and will go on to exceed anything that it has achieved in the past. His campaign slogan was Make America Great Again, and that is exactly what he intends to do.
Meanwhile. President Trump has a full calendar of actions on his calendar.
****
Reuters: Donald Trump is preparing to sign executive actions on his first day in the White House on Friday to take the opening steps to crack down on immigration, build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border and roll back outgoing President Barack Obama’s policies.
Trump, a Republican elected on Nov. 8 to succeed Democrat Obama, arrived in Washington on a military plane with his family a day before he will be sworn in during a ceremony at the U.S. Capitol.
Aides said Trump would not wait to wield one of the most powerful tools of his office, the presidential pen, to sign several executive actions that can be implemented without the input of Congress.
“He is committed to not just Day 1, but Day 2, Day 3 of enacting an agenda of real change, and I think that you’re going to see that in the days and weeks to come,” Trump spokesman Sean Spicer said on Thursday, telling reporters to expect activity on Friday, during the weekend and early next week.
Trump plans on Saturday to visit the headquarters of the CIA in Langley, Virginia. He has harshly criticized the agency and its outgoing chief, first questioning the CIA’s conclusion that Russia was involved in cyber hacking during the U.S. election campaign, before later accepting the verdict. Trump also likened U.S. intelligence agencies to Nazi Germany.
Trump’s advisers vetted more than 200 potential executive orders for him to consider signing on healthcare, climate policy, immigration, energy and numerous other issues, but it was not clear how many orders he would initially approve, according to a member of the Trump transition team who was not authorized to talk to the press.
Signing off on orders puts Trump, who has presided over a sprawling business empire but has never before held public office, in a familiar place similar to the CEO role that made him famous, and will give him some early victories before he has to turn to the lumbering process of getting Congress to pass bills.
The strategy has been used by other presidents, including Obama, in their first few weeks in office.
“He wants to show he will take action and not be stifled by Washington gridlock,” said Princeton University presidential historian Julian Zelizer.
Trump is expected to impose a federal hiring freeze and take steps to delay a Labor Department rule due to take effect in April that would require brokers who give retirement advice to put their clients’ best interests first.
He also will give official notice he plans to withdraw from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, Spicer said. “I think you will see those happen very shortly,” Spicer said.
Obama, ending eight years as president, made frequent use of his executive powers during his second term in office, when the Republican-controlled Congress stymied his efforts to overhaul immigration and environmental laws. Many of those actions are now ripe targets for Trump to reverse.
BORDER WALL
Trump is expected to sign an executive order in his first few days to direct the building of a wall on the southern border with Mexico, and actions to limit the entry of asylum seekers from Latin America, among several immigration-related steps his advisers have recommended.
That includes rescinding Obama’s order that allowed more than 700,000 people brought into the United States illegally as children to stay in the country on a two-year authorization to work and attend college, according to several people close to the presidential transition team.
It is unlikely Trump’s order will result in an immediate roundup of these immigrants, sources told Reuters. Rather, he is expected to let the authorizations expire.
The issue could set up a confrontation with Obama, who told reporters on Wednesday he would weigh in if he felt the new administration was unfairly targeting those immigrants.
Advisers to Trump expect him to put restrictions on people entering the United States from certain countries until a system for “extreme vetting” for Islamist extremists can be set up.
During his presidential campaign, Trump proposed banning non-American Muslims from entering the United States, but his executive order regarding immigration is expected to be based on nationality rather than religion.
Another proposed executive order would require all Cabinet departments to disclose and pause current work being done in connection with Obama’s initiatives to curb carbon emissions to combat climate change.
Trump also is expected to extend prohibitions on future lobbying imposed on members of his transition team.
‘THE HIGHEST IQ’
Washington was turned into a virtual fortress ahead of the inauguration, with police ready to step in to separate protesters from Trump supporters at any sign of unrest.
As Obama packed up to leave the White House, Trump and his family laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery and attended a concert at the Lincoln Memorial.
Trump spoke earlier to lawmakers and Cabinet nominees at a luncheon in a ballroom at his hotel, down the street from the White House, announcing during brief remarks that he would pick Woody Johnson, owner of the New York Jets of the National Football League, as U.S. ambassador to Britain.
“We have a lot of smart people. I tell you what, one thing we’ve learned, we have by far the highest IQ of any Cabinet ever assembled,” Trump said.
Trump has selected all 21 members of his Cabinet, along with six other key positions requiring Senate confirmation. The Senate is expected on Friday to vote to confirm retired General James Mattis, Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon, and retired General John Kelly, his homeland security choice.
Senate Republicans had hoped to confirm as many as seven Cabinet members on Friday, but Democrats balked at the pace. Trump spokesman Spicer accused Senate Democrats of “stalling tactics.”
Also in place for Monday will be 536 “beachhead team members” at government agencies, Vice President-elect Mike Pence said, a small portion of the thousands of positions Obama’s appointees will vacate.
Trump has asked 50 Obama staffers in critical posts to stay on until replacements can be found, including Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work and Brett McGurk, envoy to the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State.
The list includes Adam Szubin, who has long served in an “acting” capacity in the Treasury Department’s top anti-terrorism job because his nomination has been held up by congressional Republicans since Obama named him to the job in April 2015.
The Supreme Court said U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, who will administer the oath of office on Friday, met with Trump on Thursday to discuss inauguration arrangements.
The last circle of Washington DC for the Obama’s.
