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Top Legal Scholar: Trump Twitter Attack On Comey Could Be “Witness Intimidation”

Top Legal Scholar: Trump Twitter Attack On Comey Could Be “Witness Intimidation”

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

A top constitutional law scholar says President Donald Trump’s Twitter attack against former FBI director James Comey for sharing a memo recounting his meetings with Trump could be seen as “witness intimidation,” while also noting that there is no legal rationale for the president’s claims.

This morning, following Comey’s June 8 testimony before the Senate intelligence committee, Trump wrote on Twitter: “WOW, Comey is a leaker!”

“I think the claim is utterly frivolous and indeed could be characterized as a form of witness intimidation,” Laurence Tribe, a highly cited constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, said via email. “The memo in which Comey recorded his recollection of the meeting contemporaneously was not classified. And nothing in the DOJ’s rules or the FBI’s rules barred disclosing that information inasmuch as the conversation wasn’t subject to executive privilege or attorney-client privilege or any other privilege.”

President Donald Trump's outside counsel will file a leak complaint regarding former FBI Director James Comey's leaked memos with the Department of Justice, a source close to the outside legal team tells NBC News. Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz will file the complaint with the DOJ's Inspector General and the Senate Judiciary Committee after Comey testified Thursday that he allowed a personal friend to leak unclassified memos of his conversations with the president to news outlets in hopes it would trigger the appointment of a special counsel.

At issue is Comey’s revelation during Thursday’s Senate intelligence committee hearing that he had passed on contents of a memo outlining meetings with Trump to a friend, who later gave it to a reporter.

Several conservative media outlets have claimed that such information sharing is illegal, even treasonous or a form of espionage. Trump’s lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, said he planned to file a formal complaint against Comey with the Justice Department, while Trump himself adopted the right-wing talking point today in his Twitter attack.

But Tribe and other legal experts balked at claims that Comey acted illegally.

“Nothing in it was classified,” Tribe said. “That decision plainly and strongly served the public interest and harmed no legitimate interest of any individual or government institution.”

Other legal experts agreed.

“There was nothing classified in any of the memos or the testimony given and there is no crime that rises from potentially revealing privileged material,” said Lisa Kern Griffin, a professor at Duke University Law School. “If someone wants to voluntarily reveal information, there is no criminal liability.”

Professor James B. Jacobs of New York University School of Law added, “I cannot see any [illegality] in Mr. Comey’s making public his own notes on his conversations with President Trump. There was no secret or classified information revealed.”

Geoffrey Stone, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, agreed: “As I understand the situation, there was nothing unlawful or inappropriate in that action. There was no classified information involved.”

Samuel Gross, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, also noted that the claims by some that it was privileged information are unfounded.

“Strictly speaking, that is a misnomer,” he said in an interview. “If this was privileged information, which seems unlikely to me, then the president would have the right to assert that privilege to prevent Comey from discussing that information. But he didn’t, his lawyer didn’t, nobody did. It strikes me that the statements that are being made have no basis in law.”

 

 

Unions Worry Sinclair Will Slant Tribune Media To Far Right

Unions Worry Sinclair Will Slant Tribune Media To Far Right

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s recent purchase of Tribune Media is drawing serious concern from Tribune employees and their union leadership, as well as broadcasting experts who fear the company will continue its long history of aggressively slanting local news coverage to the right.

Sinclair, now the nation’s largest owner of local television stations, announced earlier this month it will acquire more than 42 stations from Tribune Media, which will make the company more politically powerful than ever.

The purchase includes stations in numerous markets in key swing states, and also includes three of the biggest independent news stations in the country in the three largest markets: WPIX in New York City, WGN in Chicago, and KTLA in Los Angeles. All three have strong news operations, while WGN also includes WGN America, a super cable station that serves many markets. (Some observers have speculated that Sinclair could try to turn WGN America into a Fox News competitor.)

Sinclair’s well-established pattern of using its stations to boost Republicans politically was on display during the 2016 election, when the company reportedly cut a deal with the Trump campaign for increased access in exchange for more Trump-friendly coverage. (The recent Tribune purchase was made possible thanks to Trump’s FCC commissioner rolling back a regulation designed to prevent excessive media consolidation.)

Bob Daraio, a local representative for the NewsGuild of New York CWA Local 31003 — which represents most WPIX writers and producers — told Media Matters that Sinclair’s pattern of influencing coverage is worrisome to many of the union’s members.

“Sinclair is a very right-wing, conservative, almost alt-right in their political beliefs,” Daraio said. “This brings a concern about objectivity. The fewer companies that own media outlets, the less diversity in the point of view that viewers get to see.”

“Sinclair’s business model is going into a market, buying multiple stations, moving them all to one facility, and firing three quarters of the staff to get as much work with the fewest employees,” he added. “The concern about this media consolidation is it limits diversity. It also creates a barrier to entry into the business for smaller minority- and women-owned companies.”

David Twedell is a business representative in charge of broadcast for International Cinematographers Guild Local 600, which represents two Tribune Media stations slated for Sinclair takeovers: KTLA in Los Angeles and WJW in Cleveland

He said members are concerned about Sinclair’s past actions and how that might affect their work environment.

“Our employees are very nervous about the situation,” he said. “It is a combination of political influence and that Sinclair is extremely anti-union in dealing with its employees. What is it going to mean? It’s a concern and we will be scheduling a membership meeting to talk about it.”

Twedell knows Sinclair’s approach well as a representative for two current Sinclair stations, KATU in Portland and KOMO in Seattle.

Twedell has previously flagged concerns from union members about Sinclair’s practice of creating “must-run” videos with messages that the local stations are required to broadcast. As The Washington Post reported, in a “must-run” video from this March, Sinclair vice president for news Scott Livingston railed against members of the “national media” who “push their own personal bias,” and echoed Trump’s complaints about the mainstream media pushing “fake news stories.” (The New York Times did a larger look at Sinclair’s use of conservative “must-run” commentaries last week, including a 2016 video “that suggested in part that voters should not support Hillary Clinton because the Democratic Party was historically pro-slavery.”)

“It is a matter of supreme frustration amongst everyone in the newsroom,” Twedell told Media Matters. “When they have these must-runs dropped into the programming, it definitely affects the credibility of the product, and that is something our people are nervous about.”

Eric W. Chaudron, executive director of Chicago’s SAG-AFTRA local, which represents most WGN on-air employees, expressed concerns over excessive consolidation.

“We are watching the Sinclair/Tribune deal very closely. WGN TV is the flagship station of the Tribune Media Company, and it has always prided itself on locally focused news content. We are especially concerned that WGN TV continues to maintain its reputation as ‘Chicago’s Own’ station,” he said via email. “We have consistently expressed deep concern over the impact of deregulation and media consolidation on those who work in the industry. Moreover, we believe that professional broadcasters must always serve the public interest of maintaining a diversity of opinion and voices in the media.” Chaudron added, “We are encouraged by Sinclair’s statement that it plans to use the acquisition ‘to strengthen [its] commitment to serving local communities.’”

Broadcasting experts and veterans, meanwhile, offered their own concerns given Sinclair’s history and political agenda.

“They have an ideological position with news and they promote that in their local stations,” said Mark Effron, a clinical specialist in the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University and a former WPIX vice president of news.

He cited Sinclair’s hiring of Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump campaign adviser, as an analyst last month.

“During the campaign they ran stories that decidedly had a pro-Trump bent to them,” Effron said. “Some of the stations they are taking over have a proud history of reporting. Not only will they be the largest chain in America, but there is a focus and an ideological bent to what they are doing locally. That gives me great concern.”

Jeff Jarvis, a professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, a former TV Guide editor and BuzzMachine creator, called some of Sinclair’s past actions “overtly propaganda.”

“Yes, I worry about that,” he said in an interview. “In this case, when it is consolidated under a blatant or subtle ideological bent, I’m worried. It is influencing the world view of local reporting, how national agendas seep into local coverage; immigration, abortion, guns.”

Al Tompkins, a senior faculty member for broadcast and online at The Poynter Institute, pointed to Sinclair’s decision in 2004 not to air an episode of Nightline that included images and names of Americans who died in the Iraq War on its seven ABC affiliates. The move drew a harsh rebuke from Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).

“The Nightline episode was the flag in the ground, a really big shot that they are different. That’s a pretty big deal,” Tompkins said, later adding, “They do have some right-wing leanings, that’s for sure. … One of the telltale signs is if [Sinclair’s conservative slant] shows up in the mid-term elections, that may be a chance for them to differentiate themselves.”

One veteran television reporter at a Tribune Media station who requested anonymity said, “Anytime you’re bought by somebody, you wonder, you worry about what’s coming. You’d rather have the devil you know versus the one you don’t. I’ve read the press clippings about their style, their bent in some markets.”

A journalist at a separate Tribune Media station said the company’s conservative history is a “concern.” “You know about them,” the person added.

Header image by Sarah Wasko/Media Matters

 

Press Advocates Appalled By Trump’s Reported Call To Jail Journalists

Press Advocates Appalled By Trump’s Reported Call To Jail Journalists

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

Media law experts and journalism advocates are sounding the alarm about President Donald Trump’s reported call to jail journalists for publishing classified information, saying the move amounts to “threatening to take away the right of free speech.”

The New York Times reported that former FBI Director James Comey said Trump told him that he “should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information, according to one of Mr. Comey’s associates.” The request reportedly happened during the now-infamous February meeting where Comey also claims he was asked to shut down the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Trump’s alleged call to jail journalists is just the latest in his administration’s ongoing and vicious war on the press.

Several journalism veterans and legal experts expressed alarm over Trump’s reported comments, which they say go against decades of legal practice.

“We never like to hear words like that coming out of the mouth of the leader of our country. It is an attack against the freedoms that are guaranteed in our country,” said Lynn Walsh, president of the Society of Professional Journalists. “By saying you want to lock up journalists, you are threatening to take away the right of free speech, which is guaranteed in this country.”

George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center and former vice president and assistant general counsel for The New York Times, said such an action would be unprecedented.

“That would be a game changer because that has never happened before,” Freeman said. “That would change the whole balance between the government and the press in incalculable ways. It would be criminalizing behavior that goes on every day.”

Lucy Dalglish, former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and current dean of the journalism school at the University of Maryland, said most prosecution of reporters has related to their refusal to reveal sources rather than the content of what they publish.

“The government has never actually charged a journalist for publishing secrets, publishing national security information. They have always gone the route of charging the leaker, not the reporter,” Dalglish said. “It would have a dramatic and instant stifling effect on the flow of information about what is going on in that administration to the public. It would be almost instantaneous.”

Freeman cited two historic examples of previous administrations seeking to stop the publication of information in The New York Times over what they considered to be classified or protected, the 1971 Pentagon Papers and the 2005 warrantless wiretapping story.

“Bush and Cheney publicly said the Times should be prosecuted, but it never happened,” Freeman recalled of the 2005 issue. “It was so unprecedented.”

He also pointed out that in the case of the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that publishing the secret report on the Vietnam War was not a violation of law.

“The Supreme Court has said you can’t be punished for publishing something that’s truthful, that’s newsworthy, and that you did nothing illegal to obtain,” Freeman said.

Freeman and other journalism veterans said that distinction, between prosecuting reporters for what they publish and not just their failure to reveal sources, is a key element of journalistic protection that Trump’s suggestion would destroy.

“The uncertainty and the context in which these threats are made or attempted makes it a little more uncomfortable for journalists,” said Phil Bronstein, executive chair of The Center for Investigative Reporting and former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle. “We ought to pay close attention to anyone who threatens the ability of reporters to do their job.”

Bronstein recalled when two of his former Chronicle reporters, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, faced jail time in 2006 for failing to reveal sources in their exposé of BALCO, a Bay Area firm that was illegally distributing performance-enhancing drugs.

The duo had reported on leaked testimony from the secret grand jury testimony of former San Francisco Giant Barry Bonds in which he admitted using banned substances. They were held in contempt of court and faced 18 months in prison for refusing to reveal the source of the leak. But the order was removed when the source came forward.

Bronstein stressed that even in that case, the paper faced no punishment for reporting the leaked information, a standard Trump’s request would change drastically.

“I think we have to be prepared for those things to happen,” Bronstein said. “Have good lawyers. Have great lawyers.”

Bill Church, president of the Associated Press Media Editors, said Trump’s approach would actually hurt the public good: “Protecting the First Amendment shouldn’t be a felony. Jailing journalists for looking after the public’s interests makes as much sense as requiring Superman to get FAA clearance before saving the world.”

Trump’s suggestion also brought condemnation from Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, who issued this statement:

“The comments attributed to President Trump cross a dangerous line. But no president gets to jail journalists. Reporters are protected by judges and juries, by a congress that relies on them to stay informed, and by a Justice Department that for decades has honored the role of a free press by spurning prosecutions of journalists for publishing leaks of classified information. 

“Comments such as these, emerging in the way they did, only remind us that every day public servants are reaching out to reporters to ensure the public is aware of the risks today to rule of law in this country. The president’s remarks should not intimidate the press but inspire it.”

Two of the top newspaper editors in the U.S. also spoke out against Trump’s idea.

Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron told the Times, “Suggesting that the government should prosecute journalists for the publication of classified information is very menacing, and I think that’s exactly what they intend. … It’s an act of intimidation.”

Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet, meanwhile, told the Post that Trump “doesn’t understand our role. He wants ‘Fox & Friends’ coverage instead.”

 

How Trump’s New Federal Commission Could Be Used To Suppress Legal Voters

How Trump’s New Federal Commission Could Be Used To Suppress Legal Voters

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

 

President Donald Trump’s new commission on “election integrity” is drawing complaints from experts who continue to point out that no evidence exists for Trump’s ongoing claims of widespread voter fraud.

For years, conservative media have been overhyping evidence-free allegations of systemic voter fraud in the U.S., often as a pretense to argue for restrictive voter ID laws and other policies that inevitably suppress voting.

Following his surprising Electoral College win, Trump sought to explain away his popular vote loss by claiming he would have gotten the majority of votes had “millions” of illegal votes not been tallied for Clinton, a conspiracy theory that had been popularized by Alex Jones’ Infowars website.

This week, Trump signed an executive order forming a “Presidential Commission on Election Integrity,” in part to examine “improper voting, fraudulent voter registrations, and fraudulent voting,” as well as voter suppression. The vice chair of the commission is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has repeatedly been criticized for his crusade over the issue.

While the move was predictably cheered by the usual suspects in conservative media outlets, experts on the issue are sounding the alarm, saying the commission is a solution in search of a problem and that it could be used to suppress legal votes.

“In general I think the commission is unnecessary,” University of Kentucky College of Law professor Joshua Douglas said via email. “We already know there is not much fraud in the system, and certainly not to the level that Trump has suggested. And having Mike Pence and Kris Kobach lead it means it will have no credibility whatsoever.”

He added, “Trump will no doubt try to use this commission to support further voter suppression measures. Instead we should be focusing on ways to make it easier, not harder, to vote.”

Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers University professor and author of the 2010 book The Myth of Voter Fraud, said, “I think they want to try to create whatever kind of record they think they can create for a justification to propose amendments to tighten up and require nationwide what Kansas requires with proof of citizenship. And who knows what else they would dream up to make it hard to vote.”

She continued, “It is a pattern we have seen more flagrantly over the past 15 years to promote the idea that voter fraud is rampant in America. There are always some problems with a federal election, but there is just no evidence that voter fraud is rampant.”

Bill Schneider, a former CNN senior political analyst and current professor of public policy at George Mason University, said there “is just no evidence” to support claims of widespread voter fraud.

“What’s happening here is that Trump has an obsession,” Schneider said. “He can’t get over the fact that Hillary Clinton won a plurality. He wants to destroy that notion and establish the fact that he is the legitimate winner. He is taking every step he can to try to demonstrate that notion.”

Michael McDonald, director of the U.S. Election Project at the University of Florida — who has been involved in the ACLU’s legal action against Kobach – offered skepticism of the commission’s work.

“I’m skeptical given Trump’s recent statements, his firing of Comey,” McDonald said. “The integrity of this commission itself will be suspect because it likely won’t have the ability to look independently, or to look at Trump’s claims that there were 3 to 5 million illegal votes.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed several legal challenges in Kansas targeting Kobach’s efforts to limit voting rights and prosecute alleged fraudulent voters, said it has filed a Freedom of Information Act request “seeking information that the Trump administration is using as the basis for its voter fraud claims.”

“President Trump is attempting to spread his own fake news about election integrity,” Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, said in a statement about the commission. “Such claims have been widely debunked, but he is still trying to push his false reality on the American public. It is telling that the president’s choice to co-lead the commission is none other than Kris Kobach, one of the worst offenders of voter suppression in the nation today. If the Trump administration really cares about election integrity, it will divulge its supposed evidence before embarking on this commission boondoggle.”

 

 

Police Reporters And Experts: Sessions’ Consent Decree Criticism Has “No Basis In Fact”

Police Reporters And Experts: Sessions’ Consent Decree Criticism Has “No Basis In Fact”

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

Experts and reporters are criticizing Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recent comments opposing reform agreements the Obama administration reached with a handful of controversial police departments, saying Sessions’ opposition to the consent decrees has “no basis in fact.”

The Obama administration reached consent decrees with the law enforcement agencies of roughly two dozen cities including Baltimore, MD, Ferguson, MO, and Seattle, WA. The consent decrees were the products “of aggressive efforts by the Obama administration to improve relations between the police and the communities they serve,” as The New York Times noted.

Those actions are now under fire from the new Trump administration. Sessions has “ordered Justice Department officials to review reform agreements with troubled police forces nationwide, saying it was necessary to ensure that these pacts do not work against the Trump administration’s goals of promoting officer safety and morale while fighting violent crime.” And he has been criticizing them in the media, claiming the consent decrees “can reduce morale of the police officers” and “discourage the proactive policing that keeps our cities safe.”

Sessions’ actions have been applauded by conservative media such as The New York Post and Rush Limbaugh, who praised Sessions for unraveling “the extraconstitutional, extrajudicial behavior of the Obama administration.”

But experts say the opposition to the agreements from the Trump administration and its right-wing media cheerleaders is based on myths.

Vanita Gupta, the head of the civil rights division of the Department of Justice from 2014 to 2017 who oversaw investigations resulting in consent decrees, said she hasn’t seen any data “to back anything” Sessions has been saying about the orders.

“The attorney general has said a lot about his views on consent decrees, but I will confess that I have seen no data to back anything he says, either vis-a-vis police morale or crime upticks,” Gupta told Media Matters. “In fact, there is evidence to the contrary in places like Newark where they are entered into their second year of a consent decree. Crime has been going precipitously lower. And other places like Seattle and New Orleans where many crime rates have been going down even as their consent decrees are implemented.

“The other thing that seems striking to me about what is happening right now is that there are only 15 consent decrees in a country with anywhere between 16,000 and 18,000 police departments,” she added. “It seems a lot of hay is being made about a tool that is very judiciously used. It leads one to think about whether they are politicizing the program in a way that both undermines the push for constitutional policing and, frankly, at the end of the day, the rebuilding of trust in communities where there has been such a severe erosion of it, and where consent decrees have been really necessary at producing the kind of systemic reform that they do.”

Reporters on the ground in cities that have been under consent decrees say they have found positive results, with several city leaders warning that stopping the decrees now would get in the way of improvements.

“It doesn’t deter policing or result in additional harm to officers,” said Steve Miletich, a Seattle Times reporter who has covered that city’s consent decree that was implemented in 2012 to address excessive force and discriminatory policing. “The general feeling is that ours is pretty locked in place, largely because the city is fully on board. The police chief is part of that. She has made it clear she is committed to the reform process and finishing the consent decree.”

Asked about Sessions’ claims, Miletich said, “The city disputes that. They are taking the position that we are at a point where we can measure that crime has actually gone down some and police injuries have dropped a little bit.”

In Cleveland, which instituted a consent decree in 2015 to improve staffing levels, equipment, and training in the use of force, reporter Eric Heisig of Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer said, “I don’t think it has affected morale. I haven’t seen a lowering of morale as a result of the reforms.”

He also pointed to praise that Cleveland police received for their work during last year’s Republican convention in the city, which sparked some protests and heated rallies but no police problems.

“The way they were received — they were present, but they did not appear threatening,” Heisig said about the convention-related policing. “That went a long way to give them a morale boost.”

He said the consent decree “was a factor in that. There had been talk and stories weeks before about how police would handle this.”

As for Sessions’ attempts to change things, Heisig said, “The city, the monitor, the judge have said they do not want to see changes happen as a result of Trump. The judge said in January that he did not want to see a change.”

Among the most-watched consent decrees is in Ferguson, MO, where the shooting death of Michael Brown in 2014 sparked protests, as well as accusations of police abuse.

Since a court-ordered consent decree took effect there in early 2016, reporter Jeremy Kohler of the nearby St. Louis Post-Dispatch says he hasn’t seen public criticism of the agreement from either the city or the local police department.

“The city hasn’t complained about the consent decree. The department hasn’t said anything publicly about it making it hard to police,” Kohler said, adding that shortly after his 2017 re-election, Ferguson Mayor James Knowles said it would rip the fabric of the community if it were removed.

“I haven’t heard anyone say publicly Ferguson should back out of it or it is unfair since it has been in effect,” Kohler added. “I think it is far enough along that it would be difficult to get rid of it.”

In New Orleans, which has been under a consent decree since 2012, reporter Emily Lane of The Times-Picayune points to a citizens survey done each year that found satisfaction with police is up from 33 percent in 2009 to 64 percent in 2016.

“The [police] union spokespeople at least have been pretty receptive to the changes, most of the changes,” said Jessica Mazzola of The Star-Ledger in Newark, NJ, where a consent decree has been in place since March 2016. “Saying they are anxious to do better for the public. … They have cited a big reduction in crime and violent crime specifically, 2016 over 2015.”

Police experts, meanwhile, say the decrees are a positive tool in most communities that give police a way to improve themselves and work with residents.

“The consent decrees provide for a more direct connection that a change needs to be made,” said Steven Brandl, professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the author of two related books, including The Police in America.

Asked what could happen if they are removed, he said, “The negative is there is one less inducement for police departments to get better, to change.”

Christy E. Lopez, a Georgetown University Law Center professor and former deputy chief of the special litigation section that oversaw police practices for the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under President Obama, agreed.

She said of the attorney general’s comments, “There’s no actual data to support what Sessions is saying about consent decrees. … Sessions is, from everything I understand, behaving in an extremely emotional manner. He is making emotional decisions with no basis in fact and in doing that he is disrespecting people in the Department of Justice.”

Samuel Walker, a retired professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, said of Sessions: “He’s wrong on his basic assumptions. He ignores the positive benefits of consent decrees that have occurred. This is a lawful court order signed by a judge — the judge is in charge. One party can’t just walk away from it.”

 

Milwaukee Sheriff ‘Missing In Action’ As He Seeks Trump Limelight

Milwaukee Sheriff ‘Missing In Action’ As He Seeks Trump Limelight

Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee County in Wisconsin has become a fixture on Fox News and at conservative political events, regularly serving as a shameless advocate for President Donald Trump.

But local journalists who report on the 15-year sheriff of Wisconsin’s most populous county say his newfound national spotlight sharply detracts from his law enforcement duties. They note that he spends much of his time away from home, either promoting Trump or pushing his new book, Cop Under Fire: Moving Beyond Hashtags of Race, Crime and Politics for a Better America.

Wisconsin reporters also point out that his local approval ratings continue to fall as he ignores his responsibilities, as well as a string of troubling incidents that have occurred in the past few years. Chief among the concerns are four inmate deaths that occurred in his jails in 2016, which Clarke has failed to adequately explain, they say.

“It gives the impression that he is missing in action and that he is an advocate for the Trump administration,” Daniel Bice, a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel who has reported extensively on Clarke, said about his recent actions. “The perception is that he has gone from being the sheriff to being an advocate for Trump — that is his primary role right now.”

Clarke, a Democrat and African-American, is among Fox News’ favorite guests. A search of Fox News transcripts on Nexis since 2015 finds he has made prime time appearances more than 100 times, in most cases to discuss national issues, not his home county. (Nexis does not capture Fox News appearances on morning and daytime programming.)

In addition, a recent Journal Sentinel review of Clarke’s outside income disclosure statements found he had earned more than $220,000 in 2016 from speaking fees and related expenses, along with other gifts, during speeches to 34 different groups in 20 states outside of Wisconsin. These earnings outpace his sheriff salary which is $132,290.

“He’s not around and he’s not doing his job and not providing any leadership,” said Charlie Sykes, a longtime conservative Wisconsin talk show host now appearing on MSNBC and WNYC Radio in New York. “His approach has been to refuse to comment, refuse to be transparent in any way, and attack anyone who raises questions about it.”

And then there are the questionable incidents involving Clarke, ranging from his tweet calling CNN’s Marc Lamont Hill a “jigaboo” to his alleged harassment of a fellow airplane passenger.

Clarke also called for a boycott of a local Fox affiliate, claiming it presented “fake news” and “racist” coverage.

“He doesn’t talk to the local press except through the county sheriff’s Facebook page, but he does talk to Fox News, which is a contrast,” Bice said. “The assumption nationally among the conservatives is that he is beloved here, but even conservatives are frustrated with how long he is gone and not doing his job.”

Clarke was first appointed sheriff in 2002, winning re-election later that year and again in 2006, 2010 and 2014. He is up for re-election again in 2018.

But he didn’t gain national prominence until his last election, when groups of gun-safety advocates helped support an effort to have him voted out.

When he won that election, local reporters say, he started getting national attention as a gun-rights advocate and law enforcement voice. He drew further attention last year when he spoke out against the Black Lives Matter movement, calling it a hate group. He was also an early Trump supporter.

One of the misconceptions about Clarke, however, is his image as a crime-fighter, local journalists say. His office does very little in the way of policing, with most of its work focused on the county’s jails, highways, and parks.

“The county sheriff has almost nothing to do with crime. The police handle the crime,” said Bruce Murphy, editor of UrbanMilwaukee.com, former editor of Milwaukee Magazine and onetime Journal Sentinel reporter. “He’s the classic example of all hat and no cattle. He talks tough and he has the impression of being this guy who is taking care of crime, and he has very little to do with it.”

A January 31 report from Public Policy Polling found that Clarke had a 31 percent approval rating among local voters, and it noted that “voters consider him to be somewhat of a national embarrassment.” It also revealed that 65 percent believed Clarke has had a negative impact on Milwaukee County’s image.

PolitiFact, meanwhile, has deemed 75 percent of his statements that it reviewed false or mostly false.

“He’s very thin-skinned. He enjoys the limelight, likes the big checks and flying first class,” said Mike Crute, a talk show host on WRRD News Talk 1510 in Milwaukee. “It’s horrible. He’s got people dying in his own jails and he is nowhere to be found.”

Crute added: “He is a guy who undermines the office and the public service office. It’s all narcissism, building himself as a TV brand, following Trump’s example. The sheriff’s office and its duties are just tedious to him. He doesn’t do anything.”

James Wigderson, assistant editor of the conservative website RightWisconsin.com, called the outside appearances “a distraction.”

“The fact that he probably earns more from speaking fees than he does at his day job leads you to believe that his day job has to be suffering at some point in this process,” Wigderson said. “It’s a mixed bag in Milwaukee County when you are more frequently appearing on Fox News nationally than you are on the local news discussing what is going on in Milwaukee County.”

Journalists also say that he has not properly addressed the jail deaths or his constant trips out of town. When Media Matters approached him at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference in February outside Washington, D.C., Clarke declined to comment on either.

Most reporters who cover Clarke believe he will not run for re-election in 2018, due in part to his diminishing local image and popularity, but also because of his continued support for Trump, as many believe he still hopes to serve the president in some capacity.

“He’s become a Fox News commentator/Trump surrogate and at that point has become almost completely disconnected with the community,” said Sykes.

In response to a request for comment, Fran McLaughlin at Clarke’s office sent the following:

I spoke with the sheriff :

The left (Progressives, Democrats) doesn’t think a black guy is capable of handling many things at one time. Let me introduce them to Sheriff David Clarke. He’s added Tammy Baldwin to the list. He’s EVERYWHERE! He’s too busy to talk to you right now though. #MakeAmericaGreatAgain

Criminologists Rip Misleading Trump Immigrant Crime Office

Criminologists Rip Misleading Trump Immigrant Crime Office

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters for America.

Crime reporters and criminologists say President Donald Trump’s new federal office devoted to crimes committed by immigrants is unnecessary and that creating such an entity is misleading since foreign-born residents actually commit fewer crimes than most native citizens.

They also urged journalists covering the issue and the president’s claims that immigrant crime is a major issue to go beyond just reporting Trump’s anecdotal allegations and present the data that continue to prove his theories wrong.

During his Tuesday address to Congress, Trump announced that his administration is creating “an office to serve American victims,” dubbed VOICE (Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement). He announced the new office while claiming that cracking down on immigration will “make our communities safer” and characterizing those who will be deported as “gang members, drug dealers and criminals that threaten our communities and prey on our very innocent citizens.”

He punctuated his claims by inviting several guests impacted by crimes committed by undocumented immigrants to attend the speech.

But those who have covered and researched crime say Trump’s approach to the issue wrongly paints immigrants broadly as criminals when the facts don’t support that generalization.

“The general picture, as we have noted many times, is that immigrants commit fewer crimes than nonimmigrants and that is well-documented,” said Ted Gest, co-founder of Criminal Justice Journalists and a former crime reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and U.S. News & World Report. “He is obviously cherry-picking these cases where they have committed crimes.”

“He has made many more misstatements on crime, through the whole campaign, and it seems to me that, like a lot of people, he tries to pick out things that favor his views,” said Gest, who is also the author of the books Crime and Politics: Big Government’s Erratic Campaign for Law and Order and Understanding Crime and Justice Statistics (the latter a guide for journalists written with Daniel Lathrop). “I cannot understand myself how he can keep making these misstatements.”

Gest urged reporters on the story to “point out the total picture. I don’t know that a lot of journalists know that.”

Conservative media figures and nativist groups have fearmongered for years about a supposed undocumented immigrant “crime wave” that is not supported by data.

David J. Krajicek, another board member of Criminal Justice Journalists and a crime reporter since the 1970s — whose work includes writing for the New York Daily News — echoed Gest’s view.

“It’s statistically not true that immigrants commit more crimes than legal native residents of the U.S.,” he said. “I think journalists are having some difficulty trying to report the facts that countermand the many, many assertions that [Trump] and [Attorney General] Jeff Sessions are making about crime.”

Krajicek said one of the problems with Trump’s claims about immigrants and crime is that the far-right media pick them up without verifying that they’re true.

“We are living in a world where there are two media echo chambers,” he said. “Fox News, Breitbart and the like, and those of us who have a broader diet of news.”

He said reporters should “always be weary of policy that is made by anecdote. You can go out and find an anecdote to fit any policy narrative that you like. I hope that journalists ask the question of whether it is based in fact or just the worst-case example.”

Marisa Lagos, a criminal justice reporter at KQED Public Radio and TV in San Francisco, said that “there’s no evidence that shows immigrants commit as much crime as citizens.”

Her advice to reporters on the story: “Remind folks that the immigration system is a civil system, not a criminal system. Given the data and research, it is a dangerous narrative that there is more crime perpetrated by people who are immigrants, and we know it is not true.”

James Lynch, president of the American Society of Criminology and a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Maryland, also said Trump’s plan misrepresents the truth.

“The work I’ve done on immigrants and crime is pretty clear. … By and large the evidence in the last 20 years is that they have lower incidences of crime compared to the public at large,” Lynch said. “The immigrant population does nothing but good — they pay taxes, they do the work. It is pretty clear that immigrants are a positive force and a very low production of crime on their part.”

Asked how the media should cover the story, he said, “They should do due diligence. … I would be skeptical of anything that comes out of a political speech.”

Christina DeJong, an associate professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University, said one of the reasons for the lower crime rate among immigrants is that many came to the U.S. for a better life, leaving behind persecution or economic problems.

“When immigration goes up, crime goes down,” she said. “The reason that most immigrants end up in jail is related to their immigration status, not some other crime. They tend to come here looking for safety.”

Mai Fernandez, executive director of the National Center for Victims of Crime, said Trump’s new office is unnecessary because victims already have many options.

“I’m not really sure how this office is going to help victims of immigrant crime,” she said. “If someone is attacked, is hurt, is robbed by someone who is undocumented, they go to the police. If it evolves to federal crime, they go to the FBI.”

She also said there is already a federal Office for Victims of Crime at the Department of Justice.

“I don’t understand the need,” Fernandez added. “If you are a victim of a crime, you are a victim regardless of who the perpetrator is.”

She also urged reporters to take into account all of the data when reporting on the issue:

“There is no real data to say this is an enormous problem. You are taking resources that don’t need to be placed there. I have not seen data that says there is an overrepresentation of victims of crime by immigrants.”

IMAGE: U.S. President Donald Trump hands Chief of Staff Reince Priebus (R) an executive order that directs agencies to ease the burden of Obamacare, after signing it in the Oval Office in Washington, U.S. January 20, 2017. Also pictured is White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter (C). REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/Files

President Trump’s Chaotic And Bizarre First Month Is Unprecedented

President Trump’s Chaotic And Bizarre First Month Is Unprecedented

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters for America.

Presidential historians and veteran Washington correspondents say President Donald Trump’s first month in office — which has been marred by numerous scandals and vicious attacks on the press — is more “chaotic” and “bizarre” than any administration’s first month in history.

Trump put his anti-press venom on display again last Thursday in a wild press conference, during which he doubled down on claims that the press is out to get him and traffics in “fake news.”

“This is a new level of bashing the press,” Yale University history professor David Blight said shortly after the press conference ended. “It’s a complete disaster. All he is doing is daring the press to keep hunting.”

Blight is among several historians and veteran D.C. correspondents who spoke to Media Matters about how Trump’s first month in office compares to those of his predecessors. They painted a picture of Trump’s first weeks as an unprecedented mix of chaos and mounting scandals.

“In all the administrations I’ve observed, and all the ones I’ve studied, I’ve never seen such confusion and internal tension so early as in this one,” H.W. Brands, a presidential historian who has written books on Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Ronald Reagan, said via email. Referencing the recent resignation of national security adviser Michael Flynn, Brands added, “I can’t recall a top adviser being forced out so soon. The knives are out; more casualties seem likely.”

According to Brands, “This administration, with very little experience of Washington — and with often expressed contempt for Washington’s ways — has had a rougher start than any in living memory.”

William H. Chafe, a Duke University history professor and former president of the Organization of American Historians, called Trump’s early weeks “totally unprecedented.”

“There’s been so much instability, so many scandals, and no legislation,” Chafe said. “By this time, Obama had already passed his stimulus package in Congress. You are talking about a completely unprecedented situation.”

Patrick Maney, a Boston College presidential historian, said many presidents have started out with troubles, but not at this level.

“This is sort of like warp speed. What is amazing to me is that this has happened in such a short time,” he said, later pointing to Trump’s anti-press approach as “rawer than any I have ever seen. Even Nixon and Clinton at their angriest with the press, it wasn’t at the same level as Trump.”

Longtime Washington, D.C., journalists and former White House correspondents also say Trump’s first month is unprecedented.

“Everything about Trump is a whole higher level of confusion because of the way he operates,” said Ron Hutcheson, a former Knight Ridder White House correspondent and past president of the White House Correspondents Association. “The media part is truly unprecedented.”

He added, “There appears to be no effort at message discipline. I am sure the comms team has one, but the president keeps stepping on it. That’s a huge change. He has experienced comms people who get the concept of, ‘let’s figure out what we want to deliver our message.’ But inevitably it gets fouled up, and usually because of something the president does.”

Marilyn Thompson, a former three-year Reuters Washington bureau chief during the Obama Administration and 27-year D.C. journalist called the administration “a rudderless ship.”

“He feels like he has stumbled in a very short time into any number of serious national security and ethical breaches that are just uncustomary,” she said. “They are hostile to the press in a way that I have never seen before and it is not a good recipe for running the country.”

Andy Alexander, a former Cox Newspapers Washington bureau chief, echoed that view: “It’s nothing new for White House officials to spin stories, shade the truth, conceal information or intentionally mislead. But what we are seeing today is routine prevarication on a large scale, with frequent assertions that are demonstrably false.”

Marvin Kalb, a D.C.-based reporter from 1963 to 1987 and former Meet the Press host, pointed to the ongoing questions about the Trump administration’s alleged ties to Russia.

He called it a “thoroughly remarkable inability of Congress to launch a top to bottom investigation of the Trump-Russia connection. It’s one of the most important stories at the beginning of any administration that I have ever seen.”

Clark Hoyt, a former longtime Washington reporter for Knight Ridder who covered the Nixon White House and resignation, also ran its D.C. bureau from 1987-1993 and 1999-2006. He also found no past equal to Trump’s first weeks in office.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Hoyt said. “From the moment that you come in, I have never seen an inaugural address that failed to reach out. Then declaring you are at a running war with the media, then the disorganization from within, the chaotic nature of activity within the White House.”

Asked how the press should approach such an unusual administration that attacks them, lies constantly, and seeks to divert attention, presidential historians said journalists should dig in even deeper.

“You have to ask the toughest questions you possibly can,” said Duke University’s Blight. “The press should be asking for evidence, evidence, evidence, examples, examples, examples” when claims are made.

Maney of Boston College said reporters should not let every little item or tweet distract them from focusing on bigger, in-depth stories such as Russia or large-scale policy plans.

“One error the media has made is this across-the-board criticism and ignoring some more serious issues,” he said. “Some of this is just bizarre, some of it I don’t know how the press can handle it.”

Meg Jacobs, a presidential historian at Princeton and Columbia universities, also urged journalists not to back off, even when they are attacked.

“They have to continue to call him out where they see him fabricating and straying from the truth,” she said. “They have to cover his efforts to transform the relationship with the press as a story as well as the substance of what the administration is doing.”

IMAGE: U.S. President Donald Trump listens to a translation during a joint news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the White House in Washington, U.S., February 10, 2017. REUTERS/Joshua Roberts

Journalists Speak Out On How The Press Should Cover Trump

Journalists Speak Out On How The Press Should Cover Trump

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters for America. 

Facing the reality of President-elect Donald Trump’s impending inauguration, traditional media outlets can either band together in the face of Trump’s bullying anti-press tactics or risk being steamrolled by the incoming administration.

In interviews with Media Matters, journalists and other media experts argue that reporters need to be ready to recommit to solid, rigorous reporting to hold Trump accountable and to stand together in the face of the Trump administration’s inevitable anti-press crusade.

Since being elected, Trump has continued to lash out at critical media outlets through his Twitter account. At his long-delayed first press conference as president-elect last week, Trump berated CNN reporter Jim Acosta, refused to let him ask a question, and dubbed his network “fake news.” Other journalists who were gathered for the press conference essentially just watched.

Several experts told Media Matters that the Acosta incident highlights the need for journalists to stand up to Trump.

“Part of the problem here is the press is walking into a buzzsaw,” said Ken Auletta, media writer for The New Yorker. “There is a large percentage of the population that don’t believe us. Anytime a Jim Acosta raises his hand and tries to get the attention of the president-elect, there is a sizeable part of the population that says, ‘There they go again.’”

“You don’t get the public to pay attention by caving. We can’t be intimidated,” he said. “The fourth estate has a role to play. That role is we are representatives of the public — we are supposed to ask the question to better inform the public.”

In an open letter to Trump, Columbia Journalism Review Editor-in-Chief Kyle Pope argued that the days of Trump trying to pit journalists against one another “are ending. We now recognize that the challenge of covering you requires that we cooperate and help one another whenever possible.” He added, “So, when you shout down or ignore a reporter at a press conference who has said something you don’t like, you’re going to face a unified front.”

Pope elaborated on his proposal in comments to Media Matters, writing, “Working together at press conferences could mean not asking a question until a shunned organization has had a chance to be answered; it could mean actually jointly working on stories that are beyond the capabilities of a single news organization, much like ProPublica and the NY Times do now; it definitely means calling attention to good work from our competitors that may not otherwise get adequate notice.”

Adam Clymer, a former longtime New York Times political reporter, said press organizations need to unify and keep tabs on Trump’s anti-press treatment, recalling when the National Press Club once issued a report on President Nixon’s lack of press conferences.

“In a public setting, a little solidarity is probably called for,” he said. “In public, they should not tolerate his picking on one person. That is intolerable.”

Walter Shapiro, a Roll Call correspondent whose experience also includes stints at The Washington Post and Time, predicts, “It is going to be more anti-press. … It is really important for the press to stand together.”

Media Matters president Angelo Carusone recently launched a petition on MoveOn.org calling on news organizations to stand up to Trump’s attempts to blacklist or ban critical news outlets. (As of January 19, the petition has more than 285,000 signatures.)

Lynn Walsh, president of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), told Media Matters that her group has heard from journalists who “feel threatened” by Trump’s behavior, and they are “talking internally about how we respond.”

She also said reporters must support each other, citing Shepard Smith of Fox News’ quick defense of Acosta last week. SPJ is one of several journalism groups expected to co-sign a joint letter to Trump that raises concerns about his treatment of the press and his moves and plans to limit access, including possibly evicting journalists from the briefing room in the White House.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) and the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) issued a joint statement of concern last week about Trump’s press treatment following a meeting of 50 such groups last week.

It said, in part, “In discussing top priorities as the Trump administration takes shape, the group agreed that countering legal threats to reporters – such as leaks investigations, libel suits, and a disregard for the Freedom of Information Act – and promoting a public policy in support of the public’s right to know are crucial areas that require a unified response.”

The journalists Media Matters spoke to also highlighted Trump’s regular disregard for the truth and his complex conflict-of-interest entanglements as challenges media outlets need to overcome in order to properly cover a Trump administration.

“I think it is going to be very challenging. We have to develop new ways of getting around” attempts to limit access, said George Condon of National Journal, who has covered the White House since 1982 and served as WHCA president in 1993 and 1994. “We will see how much access we have, how the press conferences are and the daily press briefing. If something becomes a pattern, we’ll react. You have to do your job — find out what the president is proposing, what it will cost, who it will affect.”

During the campaign, several veteran political reporters and journalists told Media Matters that one of the main deficiencies of media coverage of then-candidate Trump was a routine failure to follow up on important investigative reporting on Trump in favor of latching onto his outrageous comment du jour.

Steve Scully, C-SPAN senior executive producer and political editor and a former WHCA president, urged reporters to pick and choose what is important to cover and not get drawn into the outlandish story: “Don’t necessarily go for the shiny object; cover the substance. Is it harder? It is harder because he is very adept at trying to redirect the news cycle. We’ve never had somebody quite like Donald Trump in the White House. It is a whole set of new standards.”

As Media Matters and others have noted, during the transition, outlets have routinely dropped the ball — especially in headlines — by parroting Trump’s spin on current events without providing necessary context.

Lynn Walsh argued that media outlets need to be aggressive about highlighting falsehoods from the administration.

“If he is saying something that is incorrect, we have to say that is not true,” she said. “If it is incorrect or false, we absolutely have to say that is not true. We have to be better than we’ve ever been. We have to be accurate in our reporting and don’t put information out there that is false or misleading.”

“This is, I’m sure, going to be the most difficult administration ever to cover because of Trump, because of the internet, because of his apologists,” said Walter Mears, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press political reporter from 1956 to 2001. “I don’t think there is any question.”

“All you can do is listen, write down what he says, and be as aggressive as possible in finding out what’s behind it,” Mears added. “He’s already demonstrated that he can misrepresent anything by simply saying his version of truth and he’s got a lot of people who will believe it.”

Several major news outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Politico, have already announced plans to increase White House staffing, doubling it in some cases.

David Folkenflik, NPR’s media correspondent, said it’s going to be “very important to follow his business entanglements and legislation. The important thing is not to let the Trump administration off the hook and keep your eye on the ball. We have not heard a full picture of Trump’s relationship with the Russians.”

He added, “News organizations are going to have to scrutinize and disentangle some of the business relationships, his foreign entanglements, and policy decisions.” Given the “combination of the lack of previous scrutiny of Trump and many of his most important figures and the skepticism to contempt he has for the roles the press plays in accountability and transparency,” media will “have to be willing to forgo access in order to serve the larger job.”

Will Trump Actually Sever Ties With His Business?

Will Trump Actually Sever Ties With His Business?

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters. 

Government ethics experts say President-elect Donald Trump needs to divest himself completely of his business holdings to avoid any conflict of interest, and that he should give reporters legal documentation of his plan when he unveils it in two weeks.

The president-elect has recently faced heavy criticism over a vast array of potential conflicts of interest between his business empire and his upcoming administration.

On Wednesday, Trump issued a series of tweets announcing a “major news conference” with his children in which he will “discuss the fact that [he] will be leaving” his business “in total.” Trump claimed that while he was not legally “mandated” to make this move, he felt it “is visually important, as President, to in no way have a conflict of interest with my various businesses.”

Many major media outlets responded to Trump’s announcement with headlines parroting Trump’s suggestion that he will be completely cutting ties to focus on the presidency and avoid conflicts.

But legal experts tell Media Matters that Trump’s vague announcement does little to address the potential conflicts, and any plan short of Trump completely selling his interests will leave the window open for an ethical mess. They also point out that Trump simply claiming to be separate from the business but leaving his children in charge is another major ethical red flag.

Geoffrey Hazard, professor of law and a government ethics expert at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and University of California Hastings Law School in San Francisco, said the president-elect should sell all of his business holdings: “Get it as far away from your personal control as you can. Legally, it is not too complicated.”

Hazard said the Trump children should “clearly not” be given control of the organization “because they are still his children. They can communicate with each other by nods and winks and they will.”

“He ought to be able to point to a set of legal documents and say about them, ‘Here’s what we’ve done,’” Hazard added. “He ought to turn over a stack of papers that [journalists] could give to their legal people to look at.”

Stephen Gillers, New York University Law School professor of legal ethics, also said complete divestiture is needed.

“To really cut the concerns he has to sell all of his interests in all of the Trump properties,” Gillers said. “The conflict concern is those might influence his decisions as president. He has to have no financial interest in the profit or loss of any of the Trump enterprises. Give no reason to question whether he made a decision because it’s good for the business.”

Gillers suggested reporters should directly ask Trump on December 15, “Will you divest yourself of any financial interest of any properties of Trump Enterprises? And if you don’t, how will we know that the decisions as president have not been influenced by business considerations?”

“To divest himself will require a lot of lawyering,” Gillers said. “It will not be easy but it can be done and proof of that should be made available to the public.”

(An illustration of one of the many potential conflicts of interest looming for the Trump administration, via The New York Times.)

Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, MO, said his tweets do not detail how far he will remove himself from the businesses. She said that needs to be asked by the press.

“That addresses whether he will focus on the presidency, but that does not address in any way the initial conflicts he has through his ownership interests,” she said of his tweets. “He needs to divest from his business interest. It means to sell it — that’s the only way that he can move forward in the government without people reasonably being concerned that his government decisions are motivated by his personal financial interests.”

As for reporters seeking answers, she said they “need to see the documents, we all need to see the documents because Mr. Trump has a habit of saying two things that are mutually exclusive and he does them at the same time. The focus has to be on whether he has actually divested or not.”

Richard Painter, a former ethics attorney for the George W. Bush White House, said via email that any separation from The Trump Organization “is not enough unless he is going to sell the businesses.”

Painter followed that with a long list of potential conflicts that could arise otherwise. Those include:

“Payments from foreign governments that violate the Emoluments Clause (foreign diplomats staying in hotels, parties thrown by foreign governments in hotels, loans from the Bank of China, rent paid by foreign governments and companies controlled by foreign governments in office buildings, etc.); appearances of quid pro quo (bribery, solicitation of a bribe or offering a bribe) every time ANYBODY working for either the government or the Trump business organization talks about both government business and Trump organization business in the same conversations or even with the same people; and litigation risk.”

“Under the Jones v. Clinton case the President can be sued in his personal capacity and presumably also can be required to testify in other lawsuits,” Painter explained. “If Trump owns the businesses it will be a lot easier for plaintiffs lawyers to sue him personally and even if they do not to require his testimony, than it would be if he sell the businesses.”

He said reporters need to ask, “Is he going to divest and if not how is he going to deal with these problems that I mention?”

IMAGE: Donald Trump (R) along with his children Eric (L), Ivanka (2nd L) and Donald Jr. attend a ceremony announcing a new hotel and condominium complex in Vancouver, British Columbia June 19, 2013. REUTERS/Andy Clark 

FBI Veterans, Historians See Leaks As ‘Dangerous’ And ‘Unprecedented’

FBI Veterans, Historians See Leaks As ‘Dangerous’ And ‘Unprecedented’

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters. 

The recent FBI leaks about the bureau’s investigations surrounding Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton are “dangerous” for democracy and “unprecedented,” according to FBI historians and former agents who tell Media Matters that the leaks harm the FBI’s reputation and unfairly influence the presidential election.

FBI Director James Comey has been widely criticized for his decision to send a vague letter last Friday to Congress announcing that the FBI had identified and planned to review additional emails “that appear to be pertinent” to its investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state.

In the wake of Comey’s letter, numerous leaks have emerged from the FBI. The Guardian reported that the leaks have been designed to hurt Clinton’s campaign, due to factions within the bureau that are “pro-Trump.” According to one agent quoted by the paper, “The FBI is Trumpland.”

Several historians and former agents spoke with Media Matters and said the unusual leaking of information and subsequent media reports can do damage not only to the current presidential election but also to the FBI’s effectiveness and the nation’s democracy.

“It is a big negative to the country. It pollutes the image of democracy. It is completely incompatible with democracy,” said Kenneth O’Reilly, the author of three FBI books and a professor emeritus at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. “In the good old days, [leakers] were either fired or sent to a field office and you didn’t have so much of that as an issue. You have renegade agents and they are a lot harder to control. You are having these factions and there is one faction in there and their whole life mission is to get the Clintons.”

Sanford J. Ungar, a scholar in residence at Georgetown University and the author of FBI: An Uncensored Look Behind the Walls, agreed.

“If the bureau is perceived as being partisan, it loses credibility. People are less willing to talk with them and it is a major setback. It is just a bizarre development in the past few days,” he said. “The bureau’s reputation is quick to be weakened and hard to recover.”

He later added, “Now I have to wonder if there is somebody in a very influential, well-placed position at the FBI who has some very particularly strong feelings about this election, who wants to leak as much as possible to affect this election.”

Douglas Charles, a Penn State Greater Allegheny associate professor of history who has written three books on the FBI, said this kind of activity is not the normal course of FBI business — and for good reason.

“Most people understand leaks like this don’t happen very often for the FBI,” Charles said, later adding, “These leaks say to me there is some rift of some kind. In one way or another, it is influencing the election, for good or bad, which is something the FBI is not supposed to do or be involved in. There is a danger of the FBI becoming too involved in politics like the Hoover era. It was behind the scenes and quiet [back then], not so up front and blatant as this is. The worst that happens is the damage to its reputation, and its reputation is maybe one of its most important things because if it is damaged that affects it going forward.”

Tim Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and FBI historian, echoed that view.

“Normally, [the Department of] Justice would not be bad-mouthing the director of the FBI and the director of the FBI would not be discussing an investigation that at the time had barely been hatched,” he said. “It’s the power of the information that is disclosed that makes readers spit out their coffee in the morning.”

Nancy Savage, executive director of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, said not only are such leaks unacceptable among agents, but they are often wrong.

“That is pretty unprecedented,” Savage, who spent 35 years as an agent, said of the leaks. “Leaks are leaks — they aren’t necessarily accurate and sometimes you can get people who have their personal ax to grind and their own view of it.”

James Wedick, a former FBI agent who served for over three decades, also offered concern about the accuracy.

“There are some leaks now and I am dubious exactly how good the leaks are,” he said. “You don’t know who is providing the information and you don’t know if it is good information and it may have some effect on the election. These agents take their oaths seriously. You are not going to find many agents willing to leak information, so I am suspect of it. If it does happen, it is dangerous, it is bad.”

Leaking “does damage to the reputation of the agency,” said Binny Miller, a former Justice Department attorney and a professor at American University Washington College of Law. “I haven’t seen this kind of thing in the press about any other things the FBI has investigated. The problem with leaks is the people who make the leaks, you cannot asses it. A government agency needs to speak with one voice. You could compromise an investigation.”

Athan Theoharis, a professor emeritus and FBI historian at Marquette University, said it’s simply “really dangerous.”

“The Clinton leaks are particularly egregious because they occur in the midst of a presidential campaign. You shouldn’t be doing anything that has political ramifications,” he said in an interview.

Former Prosecutors Criticize Media’s ‘Uninformed Speculation’ On FBI Email Letter

Former Prosecutors Criticize Media’s ‘Uninformed Speculation’ On FBI Email Letter

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters. 

Several former prosecutors are criticizing the wildly speculative and overblown media coverage of FBI Director James Comey’s Oct. 28 letter announcing that the bureau plans to review additional emails that “appear to be pertinent” to its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state.

Comey’s letter has been criticized by figures across the political spectrum due to its vagueness and apparent defiance of Justice Department precedent. This weekend, the Clinton campaign distributed a letter featuring several dozen former federal prosecutors and officials at the Department of Justice “expressing serious concerns over FBI Director Comey’s departure from long-standing department protocols.”

In interviews with Media Matters, several signatories of the letter were critical of the “firestorm of misinformation” and baseless speculation that has dominated media coverage of Comey’s actions since Friday.

“It’s a predictable result of what happens when you depart from well-settled DOJ practice regarding criminal investigations,” said Tony West, a former U.S. Associate Attorney General from 2012 to 2014. “Oftentimes it’s uninformed speculation. It created a firestorm of misinformation and misinterpretation and speculation from the media and political commentators.”

He later added, “There’s a tension between trying to be first and fast and trying to be accurate. I find that with stories like this, it’s not unlike what I experienced in the Justice Department – you would have an incident and early intelligence on that incident and oftentimes the early intelligence is incorrect. You see that play out with stories like this. It is very difficult to correct first impressions.”

Stuart M. Gerson, former acting U.S. Attorney General and a former Assistant Attorney General from 1989 to 1993, agreed.

“The problem with it is we are in an age of scoop journalism. Finding an accurate picture requires a lot more experience, judgment and perception,” Gerson said in an interview. “There is nothing in that letter that suggests there is a single culpable email, there is not even an indication of that. They should have dug further. There should have been tougher interviews of sources. There needed to be something more from the Justice Department itself. More real reporting.”

For Donald B. Ayer, a former deputy U.S. Attorney General from 1989 to 1990, there was “a lot of confusion surrounding” Comey’s letter that should have sparked caution.

“Who knew what?” he said. “The media is running around trying to pick up the story and examine it. The letter he wrote wasn’t a masterpiece of clarity.”

“To the extent the media reported they were emails from Hillary Clinton, no one ever said that,” he added, later saying of the media reaction, “there were people with their hair on fire, ‘oh my God,’ ‘the end of the world is upon us,’ there was a lot of alarm.”

Ayer also stressed that Comey’s letter said “he had no way to know that there was any information at all that they had that had any bearing. If the press was really trying hard, they could have deduced that they had come upon things to look at, but we don’t know anything about them. That would have been better than to put talking heads on TV to speculate on what it might be.”

Jamie Gorelick, former Deputy Attorney General of the United States, struck a similar note, saying Comey’s letter was “so unusual that it allowed kind of rank speculation.”

Timothy Heaphy, a former U.S. Attorney from 2009 to 2014, accused many in the press of being “more focused on the sensationalist headline of reopening the investigation and nefarious speculation. There could have been more careful reporting, going beyond the FBI’s letter. There were more questions raised than answered by that letter.”

Bill Nettles, former U.S. Attorney for the District of South Carolina from 2010 to 2016, said many in the news media should have just reported what was known and not guessed at what was not revealed yet.

“Just to report the letter and then let it speak for itself,” Nettles said. “You’ve got all of these people with opinions who would rather be in the media than be right. Do a little bit more in-depth reporting and let more facts come out.”

Donald Stern, former U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts from 1993 to 2000, said the letter’s vagueness and timing “led to the kind of rampant, unwarranted and purely speculative reporting of what the FBI had and what it meant. Some of it is uninformed speculation and some of it is speculation without knowing what to make of it.”

Asked what the press should be doing differently, he said, “put it in context, parse the language that Comey is saying, and make clear he is really not saying anything of substance, that they do not know what is relevant and they don’t even have [the emails] in their possession yet. That way, a much more restrained way, would have been the way to go.”

Election Experts: Roger Stone’s Exit Polling Plan Smacks Of ‘Intimidation’

Election Experts: Roger Stone’s Exit Polling Plan Smacks Of ‘Intimidation’

Election experts and polling veterans tell Media Matters that the plan by longtime Donald Trump adviser and friend Roger Stone to unleash hundreds of untrained “exit poll” watchers in search of vote theft on Election Day risks intimidating voters in the targeted communities. They also explain that unprofessional exit polling is a nonsensical way to discover alleged voter fraud and vote rigging, which is “extremely rare” in the first place.

Stone, an ardent conspiracy theorist and devoted Trump ally, has for months been warning that Democrats are planning to “rig” and “steal” the election for Hillary Clinton. (Trump has echoed this warning in numerous campaign rallies.)

Stone heads the 527 group Stop the Steal, which has announced plans to conduct “targeted EXIT-POLLING in targeted states and targeted localities that we believe the Democrats could manipulate based on their local control, to determine if the results of the vote have been skewed by manipulation.” The Guardian, in a piece that quoted several experts raising concerns about Stone’s proposal, noted that Stone and his group plan to “conduct exit polling in Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Fort Lauderdale, Charlotte, Richmond and Fayetteville – all locations in pivotal swing states.” Stone has been recruiting volunteers for the project from far-right sources like the audience of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ radio program.

After the Huffington Post raised concerns about plans listed on Stop the Steal to have election-watchers wear official-looking ID badges and videotape inside polling places, Stone said he “ordered them taken down” from the site and stressed that he would “operate within the confines of election law.”

But the underlying plan to conduct amateur exit polling is still extremely problematic, several election law experts and polling veterans told Media Matters.

“From what I’ve read about it, this doesn’t sound like exit polling of the traditional sense, it sounds to me as if there is a targeting of certain communities, primarily minority communities and we fear this is going to have an intimidating effect,” Ezra Rosenberg, co-director of the Voting Rights Project of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law said in an interview. “Voters are supposed to be free in their voting. This seems to be pointed in absolutely the wrong direction.”

He later added, “We certainly do have a fear of intimidation when they focus on areas of disproportionately large minority populations. It is just wrong. It has an intimidating effect.”

Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political science professor and author of Voice of the People: Elections and Voting Behavior in the United States, said he was “very skeptical about the accuracy of any exit polling conducted by Mr. Stone and his allies. He is a well-known right-wing provocateur and there is little doubt that any such ‘exit polling’ would be extremely biased.”

“The kind of vote fraud Trump and Stone have been warning about is, in fact, extremely rare. There are lots of real problems with the way elections are conducted in the U.S., but that is not one of them,” Abramowitz said.

Rick Hasen, a professor and political campaign expert at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, likened Stone’s plan to a “goon squad.”

”It does not sound like a sensible exit polling strategy,” he said. “Why target only these nine cities? Exit polling is best to get a snapshot of the electorate, not to ferret out supposed voter fraud. Impersonation fraud — the kind of fraud Trump and his allies have been talking about — is extremely rare and I can’t find evidence it has been used to try to sway an election at least since the 1980s.”

Richard Benedetto, professor of journalism at American University School of Public Affairs, disputed that any of Stone’s methods could wind up helping a legal challenge of the election results.

“It won’t be an admissible thing in court, you need to be able to prove real fraud, not hearsay stuff,” Benedetto said. “That the people who voted were not the actual people, you have to have evidence of that. There is a lot of exit polling that goes on and most of it is pretty bad, most of it is unscientific. You have to have a scientific sample.”

Lorraine Minnite, a professor of public policy at Rutgers University, Camden, conducted exit polls in New York as a political science professor at Barnard College. She said Stone’s lack of credibility hurts any such effort by him to examine the voting.

“It doesn’t sound like what they are doing is an exit poll,” she said in an interview. “He is not a credible person when it comes to elections and campaign tactics.”

As for claims of voter fraud, she said, “That’s not factually accurate and there is no evidence to support a claim like that. It doesn’t make any sense. If what is happening is voter imposters, I don’t understand how somebody doing an exit poll is going to uncover that.”

Nate Persily is a Stanford Law School professor and elections expert who also served as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration after the 2012 election. He called in person voter fraud “incredibly rare.”

“In person voter fraud at polling places … is a terribly inefficient (and easily discoverable) way to rig an election,” Persily said via email. “It would require enlisting hordes of voters to go from polling place to polling place pretending to be someone they are not.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Experts: Trump’s Legal Threat Against New York Times ‘A Pure Loser’

Experts: Trump’s Legal Threat Against New York Times ‘A Pure Loser’

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s threats to The New York Times for reporting allegations that he committed sexual assault are legally far-fetched and provide a troubling portrait of how a Trump administration would handle the press, according to experts interviewed by Media Matters.

In just the past 24 hours, outlets including The New York Times, Palm Beach Post, and People magazine have detailed accounts of Trump groping and making other unwanted sexual advances toward women.

Trump’s lawyers shot back with threats of legal action against the Times, claiming in a letter that its article was “reckless, defamatory and constitutes libel per se.”

Aggression toward media figures and outlets — especially those who have been critical of him and his candidacy — has been a hallmark of both Trump’s presidential campaign and his business career. In an “unprecedented” announcement, the Committee to Protect Journalists warned today that “a Donald Trump presidency would represent a threat to press freedom,” saying Trump has “consistently betrayed First Amendment values.”

Several experts tell Media Matters his latest threats of legal action against the Times are further evidence of what would likely be a problematic relationship between the press and Trump if he were to be elected president.

“It just confirms how difficult he would be with the press and how he would view the press as an enemy,” George Freeman, Media Law Resource Center executive director and former New York Times assistant legal counsel, said about the latest attack. “It would be a very contentious relationship in all probability, particularly in that his whole character is built on beating up anyone who attacks him.”

Mizell Stewart III, president of the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) and vice president of news operations for USA Today Network, agreed.

“I think it is clear he would take an adversarial position with the press as president,” Stewart said. “Mr. Trump has decided that an aggressive posture is his way of dealing with the media. We have seen that in him in dealing with news outlets and coverage.”

“From ASNE’s perspective, these are tactics that people employ when they choose to try to intimidate the press. We have watched as newsroom leaders across the country have chosen to oppose that intimidation.”

David Hudson, a Vanderbilt University law professor and First Amendment expert, said: “It is fair to say it would not be the coziest relationship between the press and the president.”

“These are not good signs,” Gregg Leslie, legal defense director at Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said about the legal threats. “It is certainly not positive. There have not been any positive signs of how he would interact with the press.”

Leslie and others also said Trump would have a nearly impossible time proving libel or slander for these news reports.

“It’s pretty clear that he would have a very difficult battle if he brought this as a libel suit. He is one of the biggest public figures and would have to prove they acted with malice, which is one of the toughest to prove,” Leslie said.

Hudson added, “As a public figure he has a very high standard to meet. He would have to show that not only are the statements false, but the media would have published them knowing they are false.”

“A lot of times people say they are going to sue as an intimidation tactic,” he explained. “I would not want to print allegations like that unless I had some concrete evidence of it. [The New York Times] is a very respected newspaper; I would assume they have their own attorneys and vet things like this.”

Lucy Dalglish, an attorney and dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, said the Times article seemingly went beyond what was necessary to avoid such litigation.

“Because he’s a public figure, he would have to show it put him in a bad light and [was done] with malice and with the knowledge it was false and reckless disregard,” she said. “It seems to me the Times went well beyond with people who remembered being told about these incidents virtually immediately or in an acceptable amount of time. … He has to prove that the statement that was made was false. The burden of proof is on him to show it is false.”

Freeman of the Media Law Resource Center called the legal claim “a pure loser.”

“I think it’s all bluster,” he said. “But it’s not surprising given that he is always threatening litigation. As a presidential candidate, he would have to prove actual malice. … It seems to me it would be virtually impossible for Trump to even come close to showing the Times had serious doubts about the claims of groping when the women seem so credible and it was confirmed and substantiated by many other people they had spoken to.”

The Times’ legal team responded to the lawsuit threat in a letter concluding that if Trump “believes that American citizens had no right to hear what these women had to say and that the law of this country forces us and those who would dare to criticize him to stand silent or be punished, we welcome the opportunity to have a court set him straight.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters for America.

IMAGE: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, Colorado, U.S., July 1, 2016. REUTERS/Rick Wilking

Legal Experts: “Fiduciary Responsibility” No Excuse For Tax Avoidance

Legal Experts: “Fiduciary Responsibility” No Excuse For Tax Avoidance

After The New York Times published tax documents from 1995 revealing that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump lost nearly a billion dollars and could as a result have avoided paying any federal income tax for “up to 18 years,” Trump and his campaign surrogates have claimed he had a “fiduciary responsibility” to reducehis personal tax liability to the smallest amount possible under law. Veteran tax law experts tell Media Mattersthis explanation is “silly,” “complete nonsense,” and “almost incomprehensibly incoherent.”

In a front page Sunday article, the Times reported, “The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.”

The Trump campaign issued a statement in response that said, among other things, that Trump “has a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required.” Leading campaign surrogates including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani have made similar claims during media appearances. Giuliani told CNN, “If you have a set of laws, you live by those laws. And the reality is, you are ignoring completely the fiduciary obligation he has to all the people around him to run his business at the lowest possible expense.”

But respected tax attorneys and others who teach tax law said this defense doesn’t pass the smell test.

“That’s nonsense,” said Rutherford B. Campbell, a corporate law professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law. “He has a fiduciary responsibility to reduce the corporation’s tax liability. … The notion that somehow he owes an obligation to the corporation to reduce his own taxes doesn’t make sense.”

Jeff Scroggin, a tax attorney with Scroggin & Co., P.C., of Roswell, GA, agreed.

“I don’t see that as a legitimate argument,” said Scroggin. “The only way I can see that argument working is to say he is going to take the dollars he saves and invest them back in the business and I doubt seriously he is doing that. I doubt seriously anyone is expecting him to do that, take the savings and put them back in the business.”

He later added, “If you lose a billion dollars can you really be a successful businessman? It has to raise questions about the viability of what he’s been doing over those years.”

Martin McMahon, co-author of law school textbook Federal Income Taxation of Individuals, said having the responsibility to pay as little corporate taxes as possible does not extend to personal taxes.

“I’ve never heard of any legal principle that the owner of a business has an obligation to the employees of the business or the directors to minimize the owner’s personal tax liability,” McMahon said, calling it, “complete nonsense, there is absolutely no legal principle to support that.”

Edward Kleinbard, a tax law professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, echoed that view.

“He owes no fiduciary duty to anyone else not to pay personal income tax. It is an almost incomprehensibly incoherent argument,” Kleinbard said via email. “No, it’s just plain silly. No one is under a fiduciary duty to lose nearly $1 billion of other people’s money. He made very bad investment decisions, he skirted with bankruptcy, his lenders forced him to unload several of his properties at pennies on the dollar, and as a result he claimed a $900+ million tax loss attributable to losing his lenders’ money. What’s hard about that?”

Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at The Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, called Trump’s claim “kind of odd.”

“It is his own tax return, he is the one who personally benefits from it,” Williams said. “He has this other income that normally people would have to pay tax on.”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters For America.

IMAGE: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump walks off his plane.  REUTERS/Mike Segar

 

 

 

 

Conservative Newspapers Explain Why They Refused To Endorse ‘Frightening’ Trump

Conservative Newspapers Explain Why They Refused To Endorse ‘Frightening’ Trump

Published with permission from Media Matters for America

Opinion editors at three major newspapers that have routinely endorsed Republicans for president — dating back more than a century in some cases — tell Media Matters they endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton because Republican nominee Donald Trump is “frightening” and potentially “dangerous.”

Political observers and veteran news experts, meanwhile, say such a dramatic move by longtime Republican-friendly publications could have a greater impact on the race than more expected endorsements.

“We have been traditionally considered a conservative newspaper, having endorsed Republicans for the last hundred years,” said Cindi Andrews, editorial page editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, which endorsed Clinton on September 23. “For me personally, the two biggest concerns come down to temperament; how he would be on the world stage, his demeanor, his language he uses about citizens in our own country of different races and genders, as well as immigrants. It is fundamentally what we’re about as Americans.”

The Enquirer, owned by Gannett Company, had last endorsed a Democrat in 1916 when it backed Woodrow Wilson. Andrews said the five-member editorial board was unanimous in their choice, adding that a non-endorsement was not an option.

“We felt that fundamentally not endorsing in any race we are looking at is a pretty lame approach,” she said. “Because somebody has to decide who the next president is and voters have to make a decision, it felt a like a dereliction of duty.”

The Enquirer wasn’t the first traditionally Republican paper to endorse Clinton. The Dallas Morning News ended 80 years of GOP presidential endorsements on September 7 when it backed Clinton.

“We had recommended John Kasich in the primary and were disappointed that his campaign didn’t catch more fire,” said Keven Ann Willey, Morning News editorial page editor since 2002 and a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. “Over that time Donald Trump just became more and more difficult to tolerate. The thought of him as the leader of our country just became anathema. On issues ranging from immigration to foreign relations to tax policy, it was hard to find much to align with him on. He is really not a conservative, he is a Republican of convenience.”

Willey said the nine-member editorial board was unanimous in their choice of Clinton, another unusual occurrence.

“It was a long and deliberative process,” she said, adding that opposition to Trump was based on many things such as his “name-calling of people and groups of people and the tone, the ramifications of that are just frightening.”

The most recent and perhaps most surprising case was the Arizona Republic, which gave Clinton the nod this week. That marked the first time it had endorsed a Democrat in its history, which dates back to 1890 went it launched as the Arizona Republican.

Editorial Page Editor Phil Boas said the nine-member editorial board began criticizing Trump nearly a year ago.

For him, the tide started to turn against Trump when Trump supporters “started kicking and punching” a protester at a rally in Birmingham, AL, in November 2015 and Trump yelled, “get him the hell out of here.” Trump later doubled down on his rhetoric in an interview the same week, telling Fox News, “maybe he should have been roughed up.”

“That’s when I sat down and wrote an editorial that these are sort of the ominous base notes of authoritarianism,” said Boas, an admitted lifelong conservative Republican. “It was a sign and alarm that this guy might be dangerous.”

Since then, the paper has routinely criticized Trump, endorsing John Kasich in the Arizona primary and hitting the businessman in numerous editorials.

“Because this is probably the most unusual election in our lifetimes, the process was different than what I’m used to and for us,” Boas explained. “It really evolved over a year on our pages, a conversation with our readers. I don’t think any loyal reader of our editorial pages are that surprised that we endorse Clinton. For a year now we have been writing scalding editorials about Donald Trump.”

Boas also cited Trump’s mocking of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski’s disability. “I was just appalled by it,” he said. “He made fun of a disabled man, he mocked him. … To behave that way is disrespectful of the office. This became bigger than party, bigger than team.”

Asked why they chose to endorse Clinton and not just decline to endorse a candidate, he said, “She conducts herself in a way that’s responsible, she is not going to scare off our allies and create an international incident.”

While newspaper endorsements are seen as having less impact in recent years, political and newspaper observers said such sharp changes in these normally conservative publications could be influential.

“This is hugely significant,” said Poynter Institute President Tim Franklin, a former editor and editorial board member of the Indianapolis Star, The Orlando Sentinel and Baltimore Sun. “Most newspapers develop a core set of beliefs and values and then they stick to those core beliefs and values for years. That is a covenant with the audience.”

Citing the key undecided voters, Franklin added, “These endorsements could have an impact on what seems to be a very small undecided group.”

Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, also saw the potential for an impact if more conservative papers go with Clinton.

“They are attracting lots of attention, for sure,” Sabato said via email. “If enough GOP papers endorse their first Democratic presidential candidate ever, that might cause some voters to ask a logical question: Why is this happening. The answer is obvious: Donald Trump.”

Matt Dallek, associate professor at the George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management, said the endorsement switch can be impactful.

“It is newsworthy that in some cases, like the Arizona Republic, it is the first time they haven’t endorsed a Republican and that I think generates additional stories, additional attention beyond the editorials themselves,” Dallek said. “Even voters who don’t necessarily see that headline, it gins up attention in subsequent stories and people hear about it.”

He added, “These endorsements from these newspapers will likely have more impact than, say, Henry Paulson writing an Op-Ed saying he’s voting for Clinton. I’m not sure that really penetrates with people in places like Ohio like it does coming from the hometown paper.

David Yepsen, former Des Moines Register political columnist, said, “One thing Trump has to do is get moderate and wavering Republicans to ‘come home.’ When Republican papers endorse Hillary Clinton, those endorsements become something that might continue to give those Republicans pause about him.”

David Boardman, a former Seattle Times editor and currently dean of the School of Media and Communication at Temple University, said, “It reflects something about how most opinion journalists see this election, clearly their level of distaste for Trump is compelling them to take positions different from what they did in the past.”

Among those known for a long history of Republican presidential support who have yet to offer their choice are The Indianapolis Star and The Orange County Register. The Wall Street Journal does not normally endorse in presidential races.

USA Today, which has “never taken sides” in a presidential race before, declared Trump “unfit for the presidency” in an editorial this morning.

Photo: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump reacts to supporters as he arrives to a campaign event in Radford, Virginia February 29, 2016. REUTERS/Chris Keane

Former George W. Bush Ethics Lawyer: Trump And His Family Need To Cut Ties With The Trump Organization If Trump Wins

Former George W. Bush Ethics Lawyer: Trump And His Family Need To Cut Ties With The Trump Organization If Trump Wins

Published with permission from Media Matters for America

Richard Painter: Trump’s Foreign Business Conflicts Are “A Serious Problem” Deserving Of Media Attention

Richard Painter, the former chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, says if Republican nominee Donald Trump becomes president, the only way to avoid serious conflicts of interest would be for Trump and his family to sell all of their holdings in the Trump Organization. Painter also stressed that the issue was a “serious problem” that warrants increased media attention.

The ethical mess presented by the Trump Organization is back in the news thanks to a Newsweek piece by reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who explained that if Trump and his family don’t cut ties to the family’s business conglomerate, Trump would “be the most conflicted president in American history, one whose business interests will constantly jeopardize the security of the United States” due to the Trump Organization’s relationships and financial entanglements with foreign interests.

Painter, who served as President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer from 2005 to 2007, said the conflicts are so vast and serious that Trump and his family should simply sell off the company’s assets if he becomes president.

“He needs to be out, he and his family need to be out,” Painter said in a phone interview Wednesday. (Trump has previously suggested that he would turn his business empire over to his children if he wins the presidency.)

“To deal with the conflicts of interest the answer is to have all of these holdings, put ‘em all into a holding company, one company. He assigns all of his personal interests in everything to a holding company, then does an initial public offering for cash on Jan. 20 with the registration statement and he takes the cash, puts it in treasury bills or something like that.”

Painter, who has publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton, points out that the criminal conflict of interest statute that bars such associations for federal employees does not apply to the president or vice president.

But he said that still does not make them acceptable and said previous presidents and vice presidents have divested themselves from such conflicts upon taking office.

In his article, Eichenwald explained the Trump Organization’s blatant conflicts of interest have been “largely ignored,” something Painter says the media should rectify.

“I think it needs media attention, I think it’s a serious problem,” he said. “The fact that he won’t even deal with it just like he won’t release his tax returns is a serious problem. The problems with Clinton is we just hear the same stuff over and over again, there is not a lot of stuff to talk about. … With Trump we’ve got this long list of problems.”

Painter said that the key danger is when U.S. economic or foreign policy affects a nation with which Trump has business dealings or a business relationship. He fears that would put the U.S. at risk.

“My number one concern is the amount of debt and the way he’s basically beholden to the banks. Like any real estate guy he has the support of loosey goosey credit regime and that means cronies in the banks keep throwing money at him,” he said. “What the Newsweek article does is flesh out another dimension of this particularly with respect to the international holdings and I very much suspect that they’ve only uncovered the tip of the iceberg.”

He continued, “He has holdings all over the world, financial relationships all over the world. These are people who would be directly impacted by United States foreign policy. He makes money abroad because he has friends and if he has enemies he’s going to lose money abroad. This is a very serious problem for the United States from the vantage point of our foreign policy and our national security to have a president with significant economic exposure outside of the United States.”

Painter stressed that for Trump to simply turn over control of The Trump Organization to his children would not be enough.

“Just turning it over to his son and say his son is going to manage it, or his daughter, that doesn’t solve the problem,” Painter said. “I don’t think that if he has these financial interests and turns it over to his son, he knows what’s there. He knows who they’re dependent on outside the United States. He knows which foreign governments and which organizations, which business consortiums he’s dependent on. If the statute applied to him, the criminal conflict of interest statute, that solution would never work.”

Painter has also — while explaining “there is little if any evidence that federal ethics laws were broken” by Clinton and those working for her — urged the Clintons to further distance themselves from the Clinton Foundation.

Photo: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 9, 2016.  REUTERS/Mike Segar