The rift between President-elect Donald Trump and Sen. John McCain has been apparent for a long time.
But did McCain really drop that intelligence bomb on Trump this week, just before the inauguration?
It appears not.
The report has been commonly referred to as a “dossier” on Trump’s alleged links to Russia and was compiled by an ex-intelligence officer from Great Britain. Though other news outlets had had the report for months, it didn’t become public until Tuesday when Buzzfeed posted it online.
The report alleges Trump and his campaign have had a long-standing relationship with the Russian regime, which supplied his campaign with intelligence information on Hillary Clinton in exchange for the Trump campaign minimizing Ukraine as an issue and criticizing NATO’s alliances in Eastern Europe. It also says Russia has compromising information about Trump that it could use to blackmail him.
Trump angrily denounced the leak of the report at a news conference Wednesday, calling it “fake news” and saying American intelligence agencies are responsible, though apparently the report was widely distributed. The report is unverified, which is the reason nobody published it till this week. But reports came out Wednesday and Thursday defending the author as reliable, and, the truth be told, nobody really knows how much of it is true or false.
One thing we do know, thanks to several news reports, is how McCain was involved with the dossier. He heard of it in November, while at an international security forum in Halifax, Nova Scotia, reported The Guardian, which has the most detailed account of McCain’s involvement. This is how the rest of it reads:
Senator John McCain, a hawkish Republican, was there and was introduced to a former senior Western diplomat who had seen the documents, knew their source and thought him highly reliable. McCain decided the implications were sufficiently alarming to dispatch a trusted emissary, a former U.S. official, to meet the source and find out more.
The emissary hastily arranged a trans-Atlantic flight and met the source at the airport as arranged. (The Guardian has agreed not to specify the city or country where the meeting took place.) The meeting had a certain Cold War tradecraft to it, as he was told to look for a man with a copy of the Financial Times. Having found each other, the retired counterintelligence officer drove the emissary to his house, where they discussed the documents and their background.
Despite the detail in this Guardian report, McCain said Thursday through spokesmen that he did not send anyone overseas to get the report. My reading is that a meeting like the one described probably did take place but that McCain denies he sent anyone to it. In any case, the report goes on:
The emissary flew back within 24 hours and showed McCain the documents, saying it was hard to impossible to verify them without a proper investigation. McCain said he was reluctant to get involved, lest it be perceived as payback for insulting remarks Trump had made about him during his rambunctious campaign.
However, on 9 December, McCain arranged a one-on-one meeting with (FBI Director James) Comey, with no aides present, and handed them over.
The New York Times identified McCain’s emissary as David J. Kramer, a former top State Department official who works for the McCain Institute at Arizona State University.
While it appears McCain took the allegations very seriously, he wasn’t even the first person to pass them on to the FBI, the Times reported. What pushed the story onto the front pages was the fact that, in intelligence briefings to the president and president-elect last week, the FBI included a summary of the dossier. CNN reported that on Tuesday, followed soon after by Buzzfeed’s posting of the report.
TUSD board
picks officers
Power has shifted at 1010 E. 10th St.
The election of relative unknown candidate Rachael Sedgwick in November raised questions as to whether the three-member bloc that had run the TUSD board for years would remain intact. It hasn’t.
On Tuesday, the board elected Michael Hicks as president and Mark Stegeman as clerk. Board member Kristel Foster, who was in the three-member majority bloc, nominated Hicks, who had been in the minority, because she knew neither she nor ally Adelita Grijalva would win, she said.
“Of the three people I get to choose from, I think he’s the best,” Foster told me. “We haven’t worked well together. I acknowledge that. But he’s on the board because of our kids and teachers.”
When the election of a board clerk came up, Hicks nominated Stegeman. Grijalva and Foster objected, with Foster saying she couldn’t vote for Stegeman because “I have seen him break the law, taking information out of our executive session that I found up here on the dais. I think he broke the confidentiality of so many of our happenings, the superintendent search. I do not have trust or faith in his leadership.”
Stegeman responded, “I’m very surprised to hear these comments. I have not broken the confidentiality of executive session. I appreciate the opportunity to move forward, and hopefully the board will become more united and more civil than it has been in the last several years.”
Ducey hearts defense
In Wednesday’s column, I quoted Gov. Doug Ducey as saying in his State of the State speech, “The federal government makes a mess out of everything it touches,” and added my own pithy comment: “apparently ignoring the military bases and contractors that are the life blood of Southern Arizona.”
But, sigh, I had forgotten Ducey qualified his broadside this way: “Whether it’s Common Core, or Obamacare, or the border, or the VA, or 20 trillion dollars in debt. On nearly every issue other than national defense, we know how the story ends: The federal government makes a mess out of everything it touches.”
So he had exempted “national defense” from criticism. My bad. But I still contend it’s a silly insult that he threw out to cheer up the ideologues after bringing them down with his focus on fixing the state’s social problems.
