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Comment from very dear and long time friend and fellow memo reader regarding my previous ADL posting, to which I replied in total agreement: "ADL strayed into political territories that were never part of their mandate. That's what happens when you appoint a political apparatchik...R-----"
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On Monday, President Trump granted credence to Vladimir Putin’s account of the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, as well as Hillary Clinton’s campaign servers, had nothing to do with Russia. In doing so, he threw his own intelligence agencies under the bus. He has no evidence whatsoever to suggest that his intelligence agencies are wrong — but he does have a question he frequently posits, and that has been repeated ad nauseum by those on the right who question the official story: if the DNC was hacked by the Russians, why didn’t they turn over their servers to the FBI?
Trump explained:
You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server — haven't they taken the server. Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee? I've been wondering that, I've been asking that for months and months and I've been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know where is the server and what is the server saying?
But there’s one problem: the DNC did apparently cooperate with the FBI, according to the FBI. And they didn’t have to “turn over” their servers in order to provide the FBI with the information on the hacking, as is obvious from the Mueller indictment of 12 Russian hackers. How could the FBI have gathered information on those hackers without access to information from the DNC servers?
The Daily Beast has a good look at the underlying information from Kevin Poulson today. Here’s the relevant section:
When cyber investigators respond to an incident, they capture that evidence in a process called “imaging.” They make an exact byte-for-byte copy of the hard drives. They do the same for the machine’s memory, capturing evidence that would otherwise be lost at the next reboot, and they monitor and store the traffic passing through the victim’s network. This has been standard procedure in computer intrusion investigations for decades. The images, not the computer’s hardware, provide the evidence. Both the DNC and the security firm Crowdstrike, hired to respond to the breach, have said repeatedly over the years that they gave the FBI a copy of all the DNC images back in 2016.
So the DNC didn’t turn over its physical servers because they were still using those during the campaign — and the FBI had access to the imaging. Former FBI Director James Comey said he wanted direct access to the DNC servers for purposes of accessing the live network — and that’s where the DNC turned the FBI down. That’s not uncommon, apparently:
When the computers belong to a cooperating victim, seizing the machines is pretty much out of the question, said James Harris, a former FBI cybercrime agent who worked on a 2009 breach at Google that’s been linked to the Chinese government. “In most cases you don’t even ask, you just assume you’re going to make forensic copies,” said Harris, now vice president of engineering at PFP Cyber. “For example when the Google breach happened back in 2009, agents were sent out with express instructions that you image what they allow you to image, because they’re the victim, you don’t have a search warrant, and you don’t want to disrupt their business.”
So the DNC wasn’t covering for a leak of material to the Russians. This is all apparently misdirection. And if it’s not, it would behoove those theorizing that it is to explain how the FBI got access to all the information they needed to indict those 12 Russian citizens.
1a) Russian collusion...reality v. perception...
Someone posted this on the White House Facebook page as a comment 
Remember when Donald Trump was business partners with the Russian government and his company got 53 million from the Russian government investment fund called Rusnano that was started by Vladimir Putin and is referred to as "Putin's Child?
Oh wait, that wasn't Trump it was John Podesta.
Remember when Donald Trump received 500 thousand for a speech in Moscow and paid for by Renaissance Capital, a company tied to Russian Intelligence Agencies?
Oh wait, that was Bill Clinton.
Remember when Donald Trump approved the sale of 20% of US uranium to the Russians while he was Secretary of State which gave control of it to Rosatom the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation?
Oh wait, that was Hillary Clinton.
Remember when Donald Trump lied about that and said he wasn't a part of approving the deal that gave the Russians 1/5 of our uranium, but then his emails were leaked showing he did lie about it?
Oh wait, that was Hillary Clinton and John Podesta.
Remember when Donald Trump got 145 million dollars from shareholders of the uranium company sold to the Russians?
Oh wait, that was Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.
Remember when Donald Trump accepted millions in donations from Russian Oligarchs like the chairman of a company that's part of the Russian Nuclear Research Cluster, the wife of the mayor of Moscow, and a close pal of Putin's?
Oh wait, that was the Clinton Foundation.
Remember when Donald Trump failed to disclose all those donations before becoming the Secretary of State, and it was only found out when a journalist went through Canadian tax records?
Oh wait, that was Hillary Clinton.
Remember when Donald Trump told Mitt Romney that the 80s called and it wanted its Russian policy back. The Cold War is over?
Oh wait, that was President Obama.
Remember when Trump got caught on a hot mic telling the Russian ambassador he’d have much more flexibility after the elections, and the ambassador said he’d pass it on to Putin?
Oh wait, that was Obama."
Emails, IG, server. They tell it all.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++2) Oil is back down to $68, and it might go lower as Trump pushes the Arabs
and threatens to open the reserve. Pump prices will fall, inflation will
remain in line around 2%. Voters will feel better about gas prices as
the summer progresses. The rate on the ten year also remains lower by a
few basis points, keeping mortgage rates in line. Earnings season is on
and the results will be excellent.
Regulators are now making a big push for all new Libor contracts to be
written using the new replacement for Libor. The transition will take a
few more years, but so far it seems to be going reasonably smoothly.
Too early to know yet. To get the picture on the yield curve, one year
ago the difference between the 2 yr and 10 yr was 100 basis points, now
it is 23, the difference of the 2 yr and 30 yr one yr ago was 160 BP,
now it is 37. That is what they are talking about re the flattening
yield curve.
It appears the markets are fairly confident China and the US will
resolve the trade issues over the next few months. The EU should get
resolved sooner. The big issue there is farm products. Much more
difficult for the EU politicians to work out since farmers are a big
force in France, Germany and some others. Xi is trying to use N Korea in
the trade talks, but it is not going to play. Kim can't risk his chance
to do a deal, and will have to figure out how to move ahead with Pompeo
while still not angering China. If Trump pulls off N Korea denuke, plus
a China trade deal on IP, he will have accomplished a huge win. It would
almost guarantee he is reelected. Barring some very unforeseen event,
the stock market could go much higher after this earnings season and GDP
report. Stay invested in equities.
Asians are now dropping their reticence to push back and are suing
Harvard over admissions discrimination which has been apparent, and they
are pushing back against DeBlasio on the elite NYC high school
admissions. They will win both. Asians work harder than anyone to get
ahead. Their parents are poor immigrants for the most part, but the
family is dedicated to educate the kids and have them be successful.
Their culture is driven to succeed, and they do. Now Asians make a up a
fast growing part of the NYC population, and especially in Queens. They
will soon be a political force that has to be recognized. When DeBlasio
tried to change and downgrade admission requirements for the elite
schools in order to get more blacks accepted without the needed grades
and proven skills, he stirred the hornet's nest. Fact is there are many
more Asians in these schools, but they are from a wide variety of
countries, they are almost all poor, and they busted their butts to win
admission doing it on their own with the help of tutors who are readily
available to anyone. Blacks and Latinos in general just have not had the
same drive to pass the exams, and that takes a lot of time and study,
and sacrifice to pay the tutors. That is a fact. So now DeBlasio
decided if enough blacks can't pass the test, he would just make it so
they can get a seat even if they are not qualified to do the
exceptionally high standard of work. A clearly discriminatory move
against Asians, and for blacks, and one guaranteed to either ruin the
schools level of quality by downgrading the high level of standards, or
creating numerous failures of the kids not qualified to do the work.
Becoming a doctor today makes no sense unless it is plastic surgery,
cardiology or maybe orthopedics. As my internist told me- unless you do
procedures, the hospitals are not interested in you since you are a loss
leader. In NYC a pediatrician is paid $130,000. General practitioners
are considered a loss leader by the hospital and medical groups. At NY
Cornell Hospital they took away all of the admin support for the
internists and cut other support. We are headed for a real shortage of
high quality doctors as the older top ones retire, and we get a flood of
foreigners who may not want to practice in small town America, and
lesser qualified docs, and as care becomes in network, and more like a
clinic setting, than old time in private settings. Wait times to see top
docs can be months now, and many are not even seeing new patients. The
entire medical and insurance setup needs drastic change, and Obamacare
and single payer is not the answer. Just look at what Medicare pays a
doc and you see why a large number of doctors do not see Medicare
patients. Only the young or less qualified see Medicaid patients.
It was disgraceful to watch Strzok testify, and hear the Dems say he
deserves a purple heart. Here is a guy who violated FBI and general law
enforcement policy regarding publishing personal political views,
purposely interfered with the election of the president, and helped
trigger the Mueller investigation by being in charge of starting this
whole mess. His actions, and those of McCabe, Comey, Jarrett and many
others in the Obama administration created a story line designed to
interfere with Trump being able to function fully. Add on the Dems
refusal to cooperate on anything that might benefit the people of
America, and we have failure to solve immigration, healthcare and other
major issues. The Dems prefer to inhibit solutions, and just want to
undo the election. And Strzok dares to sit there smug and arrogant,
lying, and the Dems hail him as a hero???? He and his girlfriend
undermined democracy, created a situation that now inhibits the
administration in foreign policy, wastes huge amounts of time for the
White House, and is destroying lives of innocent staffers who have to
hire lawyers, and are living in fear of they know not what. Putin could
say to Trump- hey you think I interfered, how about those guys Strzok,
Comey, McCabe, and Jarrett. They did more to disrupt your administration
than I ever could. And now we learned last week that a top DOJ official
was married to a Fusion exec, and was feeding the fake dossier to the
FBI, and that there are three versions of the dossier. Yet the Dems call
Strzok a hero and claim the Republicans are just trying to discredit
Mueller. The whole bunch belong in jail. The media is failing to report
the outrageous actions of Strzok in full, and still are hoping Mueller
will indict Trump on something. Hopefully, in the end Gowdy, Nunes and
the others will expose the whole story in the next several weeks. And
now we have absolutely ridiculous statements by Schumer and others about
Kavanaugh, which are utter lies and disgusting. They even had signs
preprinted to say he is a racist with the name left to be filled in when
Trump named his choice. The left is destroying any chance the Dems had
to take back the House. If all goes as I project in November, and the
Republicans keep the House and add 4-6 seats in the Senate, then maybe
we can get on with solving real problems and expose the real story of
the effort to undo the 2016 election results.
Trump really blew it today. What he said was really stupid. He could
have responded in several other ways but he let his defensiveness get in
the way. Big pity as the reopening with Putin is critical to resolving N
Korea, Syria, Iran and other things. This will create All sorts of
domestic political and foreign policy problems just as he was winning
the battle on NATO, trade and N Korea. Now whatever good was done with
Putin will get buried by his comments. It turns out there were high
level staff meetings between the US and Russia for months and they were
going well supposedly. Now who knows.
The Dems were all over Trump for meeting Putin, just as they were for
the Kim summit. Recall the open mike comment by Obama in 2012- "tell
Vladimir I can be a lot more flexible after the election". In short- I
am lying to the voters, but after the election I will do things
different than what I am lying about, and I will be a push over again.
Where was CNN, ABC, NBC then. The press makes it sound like Trump is
some sort of novice in negotiation and foreign policy, but that the
community organizer Obama was some sort of experienced negotiator.
Except Obama gave away the whole store to Russia, Iran, ISIS, China, N
Korea and the EU. So now they complain Trump is too tough. I guess they
prefer to let Iran continue to run rampant thru the Mideast, and ISIS to
resurrect. The truth is, the Dems would rather see no summits, and no
foreign policy wins by the US and the world which might make Trump look
good, than to see these summits that might mean the end of the N Korea
threat, and the end of the Iranian regime, and progress on Syria and
cyberwar. The Dems and media are desperate now to find a way to
undermine Trump since there is no collusion story anymore, and he handed
it to them on a platter today at that press conference. Really dumb. You
also have to wonder why now Mueller and Rosenstein released the
indictment of Russians when the whole story was known to the US in much
more detail than the indictment says, well over a year ago, and the
intrusions also were into Republican servers, which the indictment does
not mention. Why is Mueller indicting the Russians instead of regular
Justice Dept prosecutors as normally happens in these cases. Looks like
Mueller needs to justify his existence using cases that Nunes says were
well documented by DOJ over a year ago
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3)Trey Gowdy, recently responded to a CNN reporter’s question, about the military and the DOD ban
Wake up America! END BIRTHRIGHT FOR TOURIST, FOREIGN CITIZENS AND ESPECIALLY 'ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS.'
Robert Kelley, ex-IAEA inspector (YouTube screenshot)
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani listens during a joint press conference with Austrian president, following talks on July 4, 2018 at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna. (AFP PHOTO / APA / GEORG HOCHMUTH)
“Sometimes conflicts arise, and we are naturally concerned about the possibility of military confrontation between the Iranian and Israeli forces in Syria. We do everything possible to prevent it. To prevent the escalation of the conflict,” he was quoted as saying.
Dzhagaryan told the paper that Iran is a “friendly country” and “one of our key partners” which cooperates with Russia in “various spheres” such as ending the war in Syria and that Iran’s presence in the war-torn country is legitimate because it was invited by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“Iran is not a country that you can put pressure on. This is a big state, pursuing an independent foreign policy. Work with Iranians can only be a method of persuasion,” Dzhagaryan said.
Tensions between the two foes has risen in recent months and Jerusalem has repeatedly said it would not allow Iran to set up a permanent presence in Syria.
Israeli officials, such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, have met with their Russian counterparts , both in Russia and in Israel, numerous times in recent weeks to stress the importance of this point."
Last week Liberman reiterated Israel’s concerns, stressing that the "the Iranian presence in Syria is unreasonable, and we are not prepared to accept an Iranian presence in Syria anywhere, and as you have heard more than once, we will act against any Iranian consolidation in Syria.”
In recent weeks Syrian government forces backed by Russian air-power have been retaking large swathes of territory on the Syrian Golan Heights from rebel groups along the Israeli border. Iranian forces and affiliated Shiite militias are also said to be playing a minor role in the offensive.
Due to the offensive and the Shiite forces creeping steadily to the border, the IDF reinforced the Golan Division with additional armor and artillery ready to protect Israel’s border “until the last millimeter.”
Last week in a joint press conference in Helsinki with US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin agree on securing Israel’s border with Syria in accordance with the 1974 Separation of Forces Agreement following the Yom Kippur War.
Doing so, Putin said, would bring “peace to [the] Golan Heights and bring a more peaceful relationship between Syria and Israel, and also to provide security of the State of Israel.”
Moscow intervened in the Syrian conflict in September 2015 and as an ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Moscow finds itself part of an alliance between Damascus and Tehran, the patron of Hezbollah. Russia, which views Iran as a key player in resolving the crisis in Syria, has repeatedly emphasized the importance of the role that the Islamic Republic plays in the war-torn country.
Israel believes that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard’s Corps and Quds forces have continued to entrench themselves in Syria despite strikes against Iranian targets attributed to Israel, the most recent being last week in Syria’s Aleppo province.
Israeli intelligence estimates there are thousands of Iranian advisers and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps officers in Syria, some 9000 Shiite militia fighters from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and another 7,000 Hezbollah fighters.
Israel and Russia implemented a deconfliction mechanism system over Syria to prevent accidental clashes between the two militaries and, according to Liberman, the deconfliction mechanism with Russia is “a connection that proves itself.”
“It is clear that each side has its own interests. Each side sees the picture differently. In the years of civil war in Syria, we were able to avoid direct friction, and that is an achievement in itself,” he said in February. “This is an effective relationship.”
3)Trey Gowdy, recently responded to a CNN reporter’s question, about the military and the DOD ban
of transgenders from joining the U.S. armed forces.
As Trey typically does so very well, he nailed it rather succinctly.
Question: How can President Trump claim to represent all U.S citizens, regardless of sexual orientation, when he banned transgenders from joining the military? Isn't that discrimination?
Trey Gowdy's Response: “Nobody has a ‘right’ to serve in the Military. Nobody. What makes people think the Military is an equal opportunity employer? It is very far from it -- and for good reasons -- let me cite a few.
The Military uses prejudice regularly and consistently to deny citizens from joining for being too old or too young, too fat or too skinny, too tall or too short. Citizens are denied for having flat feet, or for missing or additional fingers.
Clearly annoyed by the reporter's attempt to trap him with the question, he went on to explain: "By the way, poor eyesight will disqualify you, as well as bad teeth. Malnourished? Drug addiction? Bad back? Criminal history? Low IQ? Anxiety? Phobias? Hearing damage? Six arms? Hear voices in your head? Self-identification as a Unicorn? Need a special access ramp for your wheelchair?
Can't run the required course in the required time? Can't do the required number of push-ups? Not really a ‘morning person’ and refuse to get out of bed before noon? All can be legitimate reasons for denial."
"The Military has one job: Winning War. Anything else is a distraction and a liability. Did someone just scream ‘That isn't Fair’? War is VERY unfair, there are no exceptions made for being special or challenged or socially wonderful.
YOU must change yourself to meet Military standards -- not the other way around.
I say again: You don't change the Military. You must change yourself. The Military doesn't need to accommodate anyone with special issues. The Military needs to Win Wars -- and keep our Country safe -- PERIOD!
If any of your personal issues are a liability that detract from readiness or lethality, it is “Thank you for applying and good luck in future endeavors.”
“ . . . . any other questions?"
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4) The banality of Barack Obama
Obama made a big speech in South Africa, and all I can think is, Same old Obama.
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4) The banality of Barack Obama
Obama made a big speech in South Africa, and all I can think is, Same old Obama.
His techniques are all there: nods to the opposition, odd things thrown into sequences of events to deflect attention from his record, and a view of the world that hasn't changed a bit since his days of reading Tom Friedman. Heck, he probably still reads Tom Friedman, and golfs with him out on the tony, gated links, too.
He blathers on about the wonders of globalism and technology, and then takes credit for all of the "progress." Progress, progressivism, get it? He calls for taxing "the rich." He also does quite a bit to ignore his own record, starting with his doubled down record of lies (Obamacare, Benghazi, Hillary Clinton's emails) and says other politicians do it. Yech.
Here are some of the most annoying highlights of his dreary speech, which is sure to fade into the ether, given its rote loathing of President Trump (not mentioned by name, but obvious enough) and inability to grasp his own role in all the problems he talks about.
He starts with praise for the big state over the dynamism and enterprise of the private sector, all because of its control:
In those nations with market-based economies, suddenly union movements developed; and health and safety and commercial regulations were instituted; and access to public education was expanded; and social welfare systems emerged, all with the aim of constraining the excesses of capitalism and enhancing its ability to provide opportunity not just to some but to all people. And the result was unmatched economic growth and a growth of the middle class.
Then he shows amazing unfamiliarity with how South Africa has fallen apart since Mandela left the scene, with white farmers' farms expropriated Zimbabwe-style, opening the gate for the rest of that same-old-socialism result. Maybe Mandela didn't set up the institutions to prevent that as he should have. Right now, South Africa has tyranny of the majority, the same miserable picture found all over the Third World, which stays third-world, for this reason.
And then as Madiba guided this nation through negotiation painstakingly, reconciliation ... we understood it was not just the subjugated, the oppressed who were being freed from the shackles of the past. The subjugator was being offered a gift, being given a chance to see in a new way, being given a chance to participate in the work of building a better world.
Or this old chestnut out of tune with current events:
It is a plain fact that racial discrimination still exists in both the United States and South Africa. (Cheers and applause.)
He uses euphemisms for socialism, calling them "closed economies." Anybody know a "closed" economy that isn't socialist? And plenty of those "market-based principles" were little more than crony capitalism, as the horrible experience of Russia in the 1990s showed. There's a reason Russia turned to Vladimir Putin:
The introduction of market-based principles, in which previously closed economies along with the forces of global integration powered by new technologies, suddenly unleashed entrepreneurial talents[.]
He brings up billionaires, not quite getting beyond how they "fly him out" ... and hand him the six-figure speaking fees, fancy vacations on private islands, and a celebrity lifestyle that characterizes his current life. He would have us think he's not enjoying it, and all he cares about are the ordinary schmoes – who, by the way, voted for Trump because of it:
Now, it should be noted that this new international elite, the professional class that supports them, differs in important respects from the ruling aristocracies of old. ... Some even supported Barack Obama for the presidency of the United States, and by virtue of my status as a former head of state, some of them consider me as an honorary member of the club. (Laughter.) And I get invited to these fancy things, you know? (Laughter.) They'll fly me out.
Here's another whopper of lumped together problems told in a way that obscures his own bad record in creating them:
And their decisions – their decisions to shut down a manufacturing plant, or to try to minimize their tax bill by shifting profits to a tax haven with the help of high-priced accountants or lawyers, or their decision to take advantage of lower-cost immigrant labor, or their decision to pay a bribe – are often done without malice; it's just a rational response, they consider, to the demands of their balance sheets and their shareholders and competitive pressures.
So where was he on the flat tax back when he was president? Flat tax is the only thing that breaks these end-runs on the tax structure he decries. Where was he on illegals who benefited these Democrat tycoons who hired the cheap labor? That's right: practically inviting them in as loyal potential Democrat voters. Where was he on manufacturing? Out denouncing the bitter clingers and saying the jobs would never come back.
There are a lot of doozies in that sequence. He throws in bribes for good measure to muddy the waters from his own record. Speaking of bribes, where was he on Hillary Clinton's foundation donations for State Department favors?
It gets worse. Trump voters are his next problem, because Democrats repeatedly say their motivation in voting for Trump is that it's all about their hate for people who "look different."
Because history also shows the power of fear. History shows the lasting hold of greed and the desire to dominate others in the minds of men. Especially men. (Laughter and applause.) History shows how easily people can be convinced to turn on those who look different, or worship God in a different way.
The old bitter clingers, right?
Then there's his tax-the-rich mantra, one that always hits the little guy, not the billionaire Democratic campaign donors he purportedly claims to be aiming at:
For almost all countries, progress is going to depend on an inclusive market-based system – one that ... maintains some form of progressive taxation so that rich people are still rich but they're giving a little bit back to make sure that everybody else has something to pay for universal health care and retirement security[.]
That's his solution, tax "the rich" to pay for bureaucrats and put half the Millennial generation in their moms' basements, for lack of work. We know what that looked like because we lived it.
And then, with perfect opacity, he natters on about how at some point, he's had enough – and praises himself for "giving back" or some such tale, given that he's not:
I should add, by the way, right now I'm actually surprised by how much money I got, and let me tell you something: I don't have half as much as most of these folks or a tenth or a hundredth. ... You don't have to take a vow of poverty just to say, "Well, let me help out and let a few of the other folks – let me look at that child out there who doesn't have enough to eat or needs some school fees, let me help him out. I'll pay a little more in taxes. It's okay. I can afford it."
He blathers on most disingenuously, with a long passage about "facts," which he doesn't have, and Friedmanian talk about "technology," which adds nothing new, then demonstrating his biggest problem, which is that he listens to no one but himself and Ben Rhodes:
Most of us prefer to surround ourselves with opinions that validate what we already believe. You notice the people who you think are smart are the people who agree with you. (Laughter.) Funny how that works.
Best I can conclude from this dreck is that Donald Trump has nothing to worry about from this frozen-in-amber socialist thinking, coupled with a bad presidential record. Been there, done that.
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5) Feature: George Soros Bet Big on Liberal Democracy. Now He Fears He Is Losing.
By Michael Steinberger
(New York Times) -- On a clammy Tuesday morning in Paris at the end of May, George Soros, the world’s second-most-vilified New York billionaire (but worth many billions more than the other one), addressed the European Council on Foreign Relations, an organization he helped found a decade ago. Described by the woman who introduced him as a “European at heart,” the Hungarian-born Soros, who made his fortune running a hedge fund and is now a full-time philanthropist, political activist and freelance statesman, was there to share his thoughts on salvaging the European Union.
Wearing a dark suit, tieless and with the collar of his blue shirt outside the lapel of his jacket, Soros took the stage with the determined stride of an 87-year-old who still plays tennis a few times a week. But there were some concessions to age. He gave his speech sitting down and used a desk lamp to illuminate the text. (In fairness, the hotel conference room hosting the event was morosely dark.) He turned the pages with his right hand while keeping his left hand on his left knee, as if propping himself up. There were moments when he seemed on the verge of losing his place, although he never did.
In person, Soros is quite charming, with a wry sense of humor. But his writings — he has published 14 books — and speeches can be a little wooden, and this occasion was no exception. He barely acknowledged the audience, which included the president of Serbia and the prime minister of Albania, except to say, “I think this is the right place to discuss how to save Europe.” But apart from urging the European Union to direct more aid to Africa, which he said would ameliorate the refugee crisis that has led to so much of the recent political upheaval in Europe, his remarks were more descriptive than prescriptive. The European Union, he said, faced an “existential crisis.”
Briefly touching on Europe’s economic outlook, he said, “We may be heading for another major financial crisis.” Partly in response to his warning, the Dow fell nearly 400 points that day. Soros is generally considered the greatest speculator Wall Street has known, and though he stopped managing other people’s money years ago, the reaction was a real-time display of his continued ability to move markets. The attention given to that comment also underscored, in a subtle way, an enduring frustration of his life: His financial thoughts still tend to carry more weight than his political reflections.
Yet the political realm is where Soros has made his most audacious wager. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, he poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the former Soviet-bloc countries to promote civil society and liberal democracy. It was a one-man Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe, a private initiative without historical precedent. It was also a gamble that a part of the world that had mostly known tyranny would embrace ideas like government accountability and ethnic tolerance. In London in the 1950s, Soros was a student of the expatriated Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, who championed the notion of an “open society,” in which individual liberty, pluralism and free inquiry prevailed. Popper’s concept became Soros’s cause.
It is an embattled cause these days. Under Vladimir Putin, Russia has reverted to autocracy, and Poland and Hungary are moving in the same direction. With the rise of Donald Trump in the United States, where Soros is a major donor to Democratic candidates and progressive groups, and the growing strength of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe, Soros’s vision of liberal democracy is under threat in its longtime strongholds. Nationalism and tribalism are resurgent, barriers are being raised and borders reinforced and Soros is confronting the possibility that the goal to which he has devoted most of his wealth and the last chapter of his life will end in failure. Not only that: He also finds himself in the unsettling position of being the designated villain of this anti-globalization backlash, his Judaism and career in finance rendering him a made-to-order phantasm for reactionaries worldwide. “I’m standing for principles whether I win or lose,” Soros told me this spring. But, he went on, “unfortunately, I’m losing too much in too many places right now.”
The night before his speech in Paris, I had dinner with Soros in his suite at the Bristol Hotel, where he usually stays — and one of the city’s most elegant addresses, conveniently located just up the street from the Elysées Palace (although on this trip Soros had no plans to see France’s president, Emanuel Macron, whom he knows and admires). An aide took me up to the suite and ushered me into the dining room, where Soros was already seated at the table with his wife, Tamiko (Soros has been married three times and has five children — though that is where the similarities to Donald Trump end). It was after 8:30, but he seemed eager for conversation. He spoke slowly, in a still-thick Hungarian accent, moving his cupped hand in a semicircle as if summoning his words. As we talked over a first course of tomato-and-avocado salad, a thunderstorm swept across Paris, rattling the windows. One especially violent thunderclap struck as we were discussing Russia. “That’s Putin,” another aide joked. In 2015, Putin expelled Soros’s philanthropic organization, the Open Society Foundations, from Russia, claiming it was a security threat, and Russian state media churn out a steady flow of anti-Soros content. (At a recent joint press conference with Trump in Helsinki, Putin spoke scornfully of Soros.)
Paris was the first stop for Soros on a month long spring trip to Europe. He normally would have visited Budapest, but not this time. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, a former Soros protégé, was re-elected in April after running a campaign in which he effectively made Soros his opponent. Orban accused Soros, who is an American citizen, of plotting to overwhelm Hungary with Muslim immigrants in order to undermine its Christian heritage. He attacked Soros during campaign rallies, and his government plastered the country with anti-Soros billboards. In the aftermath of the election, the O.S.F. announced that it was closing its Budapest office because of concerns for the safety of its employees. The fate of the Soros-founded Central European University, based in Budapest, was also in doubt.
Soros said he couldn’t visit Hungary under present circumstances: “It would be toxic,” he said. He told me that Orban’s campaign was “a big disappointment,” but quickly added, “I think I must be doing something right to look at who my enemies are.” Last autumn, he signaled that same sense of defiance when he announced that he was in the process of transferring the bulk of his remaining wealth, $18 billion in total at the time, to the O.S.F. That will potentially make it the second-largest philanthropic organization in the United States, in assets, after the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It is already a sprawling entity, with some 1,800 employees in 35 countries, a global advisory board, eight regional boards and 17 issue-oriented boards. Its annual budget of around $1 billion finances projects in education, public health, independent media, immigration and criminal-justice reform and other areas. Organizations like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood are among its grantees.
Soros originally planned to close the O.S.F. in 2010. He didn’t want it to outlive him, because he feared it might then lose its dynamism and entrepreneurial spirit. But he changed his mind when he realized that, as he put it, “I had more money than I can realistically or usefully spend in my lifetime.” He also saw that, with liberal values and civil society fragile in so many places, the O.S.F.’s work was becoming ever more essential. “I found a mission, a niche, that I felt could be carried on,” he said as we finished dinner.
A few minutes later came an unexpected reminder of what he and the O.S.F. are up against. A Soros aide and I took the elevator back down together, and when we stepped into the Bristol’s lobby, we found ourselves in the middle of a reception line that stretched the length of the room. It had formed there to greet one of Africa’s longest-serving autocrats, Denis Sassou Nguesso, the president of the Republic of Congo. The next day, a few hours after Soros spoke to the European Council on Foreign Relations, Roseanne Barr went on a Twitter rant that served as a vivid demonstration of what he is up against personally. Soros was maneuvering to bring about “the overthrow of us constitutional republic,” Barr tweeted. She also claimed that Soros, a Holocaust survivor, had actually been a Nazi. Among those who retweeted the Nazi gibe was Donald Trump Jr.
According to Soros, 1944 was the formative year of his life. The Nazis invaded Hungary and immediately began deporting Jews. To save his family, his father, Tivadar Soros, a lawyer, obtained false identities for George, who was then 13, and his older brother, Paul. One day, George was ordered to deliver summonses on behalf of the Jewish Council. Tivadar, recognizing that they were essentially deportation notices, instructed his son to tell the recipients not to heed them. Soon after, Tivadar arranged for Paul to move into a rented room and sent George to live with a Hungarian agricultural official, who passed him off as his Christian godson. The official’s job included taking inventory of a confiscated Jewish-owned property; he took George with him. These episodes have become the basis for the claim that George was a Nazi collaborator. In fact, though, there is no credible evidence that he collaborated with or was sympathetic to the Nazis. George, his brother and his parents all survived the war. Soros says that he came out of the experience with a strong defiant streak, a contempt for tribalism and a propensity to side with the oppressed.
In 1946, as Communists were rising to power in Hungary, Soros fled to England. He earned a degree from the London School of Economics, where Karl Popper was a professor. In 1945, Popper published a political treatise, “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” a fierce assault on totalitarianism, in both its fascist and Marxist forms, and a ringing defense of liberal democracy. Soros left Popper’s classroom with not only the idea that would later animate his philanthropy but also the desire to live a life of the mind. He had to make money first, though. When he moved to New York in 1956 to take a job on Wall Street, his goal, he told me, was to sock away $100,000 in five years, which would allow him to quit finance and turn to scholarly pursuits. But instead, he quipped during our dinner, “I overperformed.”
In 1969, Soros formed what would become the Quantum Fund. It was one of a new breed of investment vehicles known as hedge funds, which catered to institutional investors and wealthy individuals and which used leverage — borrowed money — to make huge bets on stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities. Quantum was wildly successful from its start, delivering 40 percent annual returns. Soros would later attribute his knack for playing the markets to what he called his “theory of reflexivity” — basically, the idea that people’s biases and perceptions can move prices in directions that don’t accord with the underlying reality. Soros claimed his strength as an investor was in recognizing and acting on what he referred to as “far from equilibrium” moments. (His oldest son, Robert, once claimed the “reflexivity” explanation was bunk; he said the tip-off for his father that the market was nearing a major move was when his bad back flared up.)
By the late 1970s, Soros had become a very wealthy man. Now he had the means to make himself an agent of history. He was frank about his ambition, though also self-deprecating. As he wrote in his 1991 book, “Underwriting Democracy”: “I was a confirmed egoist but I considered the pursuit of self-interest as too narrow a base for my rather inflated self. If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood which I felt I had to control, otherwise they might get me into trouble. But when I had made my way in the world I wanted to indulge my fantasies to the extent that I could afford.”
He decided that his goal would be opening closed societies. He created a philanthropic organization, then called the Open Society Fund, in 1979 and began sponsoring college scholarships for black South African students. But he soon turned his attention to Eastern Europe, where he started financing dissident groups. He funneled money to the Solidarity strikers in Poland in 1981 and to Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. In one especially ingenious move, he sent hundreds of Xerox copiers to Hungary to make it easier for underground publications to disseminate their newsletters. In the late 1980s, he provided dozens of Eastern European students with scholarships to study in the West, with the aim of fostering a generation of liberal democratic leaders. One of those students was Viktor Orban, who studied civil society at Oxford. From his Manhattan trading desk, Soros became a strange sort of expat anticommunist revolutionary.
In the meantime, Quantum grew into a multibillion-dollar colossus. Soros made his most famous trade in 1992, when he bet against the British pound. The currency was vulnerable because it had been pegged at what seemed an unsustainably high rate against the German mark; with Britain in recession, Soros reasoned, the British government would ultimately choose to see the pound devalued rather than maintain the high interest rates needed to defend it from speculative investors. Soros’s terse command to his head trader, Stanley Druckenmiller, was to “go for the jugular.” Druckenmiller did, and on Wednesday, Sept. 16 — Black Wednesday, as it came to be known — the Bank of England stopped trying to prop up the pound’s value. It promptly sank against the mark, falling out of Europe’s Exchange Rate Mechanism and dealing a setback to the push for greater European integration. The sterling crisis turned hedge funds into the glamorous rogues of finance and demonstrated the punitive power that they could wield against policymakers in a world of free-flowing capital. The trade made $1.5 billion for Quantum, and Soros, whom the British tabloids dubbed “the man who broke the Bank of England,” became a household name.
By then, the Soviet empire had collapsed, and Soros was devoting huge sums of his own money to try to smooth its transition from Communist rule. For example, he donated $100 million to support Russian scientists and keep them from selling their services to countries hostile to the West; he spent $250 million on a program to revise Russian textbooks and train teachers to promote critical thinking. While the era was one of Western triumphalism, when it was widely assumed that Russia and other newly freed countries would inevitably embrace liberal democracy — a view most famously expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay, “The End of History” — Soros did not share that certitude. This part of the world had little tradition of civil society and liberal democracy, and in his view these needed to be nurtured if the region was to avoid backsliding into autocracy. “I generally have a bias to see the darkest potential,” he told me. “It is something that I have practiced in the financial markets to very good effect, and I have transferred it to politics.”
During the 1990s, Soros toggled between his day job and his philanthropy, and it was not always easy to disentangle his dual roles. For a time, Quantum and O.S.F. were run out of the same offices. In December 1992, three months after his bet against the British pound, Soros announced a $50 million donation to build a water-treatment facility in war-ravaged Sarajevo, and it was hard not to see that money as having been sucked straight from the British treasury. Soros once described his bifurcated existence rather graphically, writing that he “felt like a giant digestive tract, taking in money at one end and pushing it out at the other.”
If that was the case, indigestion was inevitable, and it came in 1997, when Quantum was at the center of a speculative attack on the Thai baht. The episode was a nearly identical reprise of what happened to the British pound. (Quantum made roughly $750 million this time.) There was one critical difference, however: While Britain was a major industrialized country that ultimately had little trouble absorbing the blow to its currency, Thailand was an emerging economy for which the consequences were devastating. Economic output plunged, banks and businesses folded and huge numbers of people were thrown out of work. The baht crisis rippled into other Asian economies. Malaysia’s prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, called Soros and other speculators “unscrupulous profiteers” whose immoral work served no social value. Soros publicly rejected the criticism, but when investors took aim at the Indonesian rupiah in the fall of 1997, Quantum was not among them. Nor did it join other hedge funds when they targeted the Russian ruble the following year. Having already invested hundreds of millions of dollars trying to stabilize Russia, Soros would have been undercutting his own work by betting against the Russian currency. He ended up taking a $400 million loss.
“That was where the crossroads between the philanthropist and the investor became difficult,” says Rob Johnson, a longtime Soros associate who worked as a portfolio manager at Quantum in the 1990s. But by then, according to Johnson, the only reason that Soros was still running a hedge fund was to generate more money for his causes.
In a speech to students and faculty at Moldova University in 1994, Soros described in strikingly personal terms why he became a political philanthropist. His objective, he said, was to make Hungary “a country from which I wouldn’t want to emigrate.” To that end, he showered Hungary with money and resources in the years after the Berlin Wall fell. In the early 1990s, the O.S.F. gave $5 million to a program that offered free breakfasts to Hungarian schoolchildren. It spent millions to modernize Hungary’s health care system. In all, Soros has funded around $400 million worth of projects in Hungary since 1989 — and that figure doesn’t include the initial $250 million that he gave to endow Central European University, which opened in Prague in 1991, moved to Budapest two years later and has since graduated more than 14,000 students drawn from across Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Soros also cultivated a number of young activists he believed could advance his dream of remaking Hungary as a place he would never again feel compelled to leave. Among them was Viktor Orban, a bright, charismatic student who was ardently pro-democracy, or so it seemed. In addition to providing Orban with a scholarship at Oxford, Soros donated money to Fidesz (the Alliance of Young Democrats), a student organization that Orban helped found and that evolved into his political party.
But during the 1990s, Orban drifted to the right. Elected prime minister in 1998, he governed as a mainstream conservative, emphasizing patriotism and traditional values. Outwardly, he remained pro-Western. Under his leadership, Hungary entered NATO, and he also laid the groundwork for its admission to the European Union. But a shock defeat in the 2002 election seemed to radicalize Orban. When he reclaimed the prime minister’s office in 2009, he began ruthlessly consolidating power. He packed the courts with Fidesz loyalists, and various independent media were bought out by Orban supporters. At the same time, he turned away from the West and drew close to Vladimir Putin. Orban was re-elected in 2014. The following year, the European refugee crisis hit. Tens of thousands of refugees passed through the Balkans and arrived on Hungary’s border. Orban’s government erected a 109-mile fence in order to keep them out, and it later refused to comply with a European Union quota plan that would have required it to take in asylum-seekers.
Groups that received financial support from the O.S.F. were providing assistance to the refugees massed along Hungary’s border, and this became a pretext for Orban’s war on Soros. The Hungarian Parliament enacted legislation requiring NGOs to register with the government and disclose foreign sources of income above a certain threshold; it passed a bill that would have stripped Central European University of the right to award diplomas in Hungary. Orban’s government introduced what it called the “Stop Soros” bill making it a crime to assist illegal immigrants. (Parliament passed the bill last month.)
In one campaign rally in Budapest, Orban referred to Soros as “Uncle George,” telling tens of thousands of supporters that “we are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the world.” Along with the fiery speeches, there were the billboards, which featured a picture of a smiling Soros and the message, “Let’s not let George Soros have the last laugh.” The laughing Jew had been a trope of Nazi propaganda, but Orban denied that the billboards were anti-Semitic.
Orban’s coalition won 49 percent of the vote, enough to give it a supermajority in Parliament. But the anti-Soros campaign didn’t end with the election. Days after the vote, a magazine owned by a pro-Orban businesswoman published the names of more than 200 people in Hungary that it claimed were Soros “mercenaries.” The list included representatives of human rights groups, anticorruption watchdogs and Central European University faculty members and administrators. In mid-May, the O.S.F. announced that it was closing its Budapest office, which was responsible for almost half its international grants. Patrick Gaspard, the O.S.F.’s president, says that the language and imagery Orban used to go after Soros was “nothing short of violent” and that the Hungarian prime minister’s threat to turn the country’s intelligence services on the O.S.F. made it impossible to remain in Budapest. “I have the habit of taking autocrats at their word,” Gaspard says. “We have to protect the security of our staff and of our data.” The office is relocating to Berlin.
In recent years, governments throughout Eastern Europe have attacked Soros. But why Orban, personally popular and facing hopelessly divided opponents, chose to make Soros-bashing the centerpiece of his campaign puzzled many observers. Orban “is extremely successful,” Michael Ignatieff, the president of Central European University and the former leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, told me in London in April. “He’s a much better politician than any of his opposition. He has intelligence and charm. He’s funny and reads a room well. What’s crazy is that he feels he needs to delegitimize Soros in order to win an election.” Some observers offered a psychological explanation: Noting that Orban had had a turbulent relationship with his own father and a tendency to chafe under authority, they suggested that bludgeoning Soros was a form of patricide, a way of slaying his political godfather. But Thomas Carothers, a senior vice president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, believes that Soros was simply a useful cudgel for Orban. Civic groups were the last source of potential opposition, he says, and because some of them were backed by the O.S.F., going after Soros was a way to undermine their credibility. “Strongman leaders want to de-universalize human rights and civic liberties,” says Carothers, who has served on various O.S.F. advisory boards. “It is much harder for Orban to say that he rejects the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is much easier to say, ‘I push back against this intrusive man sitting in New York.’ Soros is a very convenient bogeyman.”
Given that Orban ran and won on a xenophobic platform, it seems fair to wonder if Soros’s work in Hungary — and in much of Eastern Europe — was doomed from the start. With Putinism and Orbanism on the rise and the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaching, there is renewed debate about the import of the events of 1989 and whether Russians, Poles and Hungarians really intended to embrace the full menu of Western liberal values. Francis Fukuyama is among those who have doubts today. “There’s now a lot of evidence that a lot of that turn toward liberal democracy in the early days, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, really was driven by a kind of educated, very pro-Western elite,” he told me recently. But less-educated people who lived outside large urban areas “didn’t really buy into liberalism, this idea that you could actually have a multiracial, multiethnic society where all these traditional communal values would have to give way to gay marriage and immigrants and all this stuff. That they definitely did not buy into.”
But Fukuyama went on to say that it takes events and skillful manipulators to rouse the forces of intolerance. In Hungary, the global financial crisis and the refugee crisis were the fuses, and Orban proved very adept at providing the spark. Leonard Benardo, the vice president of the O.S.F., made a similar observation. He said resentment of the European Union, which came to be seen as an “emasculating force of Hungarian identity,” as he put it, coupled with economic anxiety, left Hungarians receptive to Orban’s appeal. “Hungarians are not irredeemably racist,” Benardo said. “Ethnic entrepreneurs like Orban play upon the darkest fears of people to produce political support and an us-versus-them mentality.”
In contrast to Benardo, my grandfather was not a social scientist. But like Soros, he was a Hungarian-born Jew who ended up in the United States, and he believed that anti-Semitism was a habit of mind that Hungarians would never kick. He admired Soros, but thought he was wasting his money in Hungary. When I told Soros about my grandfather, he smiled and shook his head knowingly. He said that his brother, a shipping magnate, had felt the same way. Soros did not.
“I don’t blame the Hungarian people at all,” he said. “In fact, I admire them for their willingness to stand up to oppression and to fight for their freedom.” He added: “We have to distinguish between the people and the government.”
He then told me a story from 1944, about a Nazi officer his father met in a cafe. During the course of the conversation, the officer quietly admitted to misgivings about the orders he was obliged to carry out. His father, a Jew in hiding and virulently opposed to the Nazis, tried to comfort the officer, telling him that it was a difficult situation. Throughout his life, the elder Soros shared this story to make the point that circumstances matter and that how people act isn’t necessarily how they feel, a lesson that his son was now applying to Orban’s Hungary. I asked him if he expected to visit Hungary again in his lifetime. “I hope so,” he said, but without much conviction.
Two weeks later, President Trump called Orban to congratulate him on his re-election.
Soros became a major political donor in the United States during George W. Bush’s presidency. Angered by what he saw as an effort by the Bush administration to use the war on terror to stoke fear and stifle dissent, he began donating vast sums to Democratic candidates and progressive causes. He helped fund the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, as well as MoveOn.org, and spent more than $20 million backing John Kerry’s unsuccessful bid to deny Bush a second term. In addition to being a generous donor, he was an outspoken one. He accused the Bush administration of employing Nazi propaganda techniques, and later said that the United States would need to undergo “a certain de-Nazification process” after Bush left office.
Soros was an early backer of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. In Paris, Soros told me that Obama was “actually my greatest disappointment.” Prompted by an aide, he immediately qualified himself, saying that he hadn’t been disappointed by Obama’s presidency but felt let down on a professional level. While he had no desire for a formal role in the administration, he had hoped that Obama would seek his counsel, especially on financial and economic matters. Instead, he was frozen out.
After Obama was elected, “he closed the door on me,” Soros said. “He made one phone call thanking me for my support, which was meant to last for five minutes, and I engaged him, and he had to spend another three minutes with me, so I dragged it out to eight minutes.” He suggested that he had fallen victim to an Obama personality trait. “He was someone who was known from the time when he was competing for the editorship of The Harvard Law Review to take his supporters for granted and to woo his opponents,” Soros said.
During the 2016 election cycle, Soros contributed more than $25 million to Hillary Clinton and other Democratic candidates and causes. While he had foreseen the possibility of a Trump-like figure emerging (“The American public has proven remarkably susceptible to the manipulation of truth, which increasingly dominates the country’s political discourse,” he wrote in The Guardian in 2007), he was as surprised as everyone else that the Trump-like figure turned out to be Donald Trump. Soros told me that he had known Trump casually and had even socialized with him (about 30 years ago, a friend of Soros’s dated one of Trump’s senior people, and they all went out for dinner a few times). “I had no idea he had any political ambition,” Soros said. Trump had tried to coax him into becoming the lead tenant in one of his commercial buildings, he said. “I told him I couldn’t afford it,” Soros recalled with a chuckle.
He said that he had been “very afraid” that Trump would “blow up the world rather than suffer a setback to his narcissism” but was pleased that the president’s ego had instead led him to reach out to North Korea. “I think the danger of nuclear war has been greatly reduced, and that’s a big relief.” In his annual state-of-the-world speech in Davos this year, Soros said Trump “would like to establish a mafia state, but he can’t, because the Constitution, other institutions and a vibrant civil society won’t allow it.” He also characterized Trump as a “purely temporary phenomenon that will disappear in 2020, or even sooner,” and predicted a Democratic landslide in the 2018 midterm elections. Five months on, he was sticking by those predictions. “For every Trump follower who follows Trump through thick and thin, there is more than one Trump enemy who will be more intent, more determined,” Soros told me. He is doing his part to shorten the Trump era: In advance of the midterm elections, Soros has so far contributed at least $15 million to support Democratic candidates and causes.
Asked if he would support Bernie Sanders if the Vermont senator won the Democratic nomination in 2020, Soros said it was too soon to say. He expressed displeasure with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, another possible candidate, over her role in ousting Al Franken from Congress: “She was using #MeToo to promote herself.” He said his main goal as a political activist was to see a return to bipartisanship, a surprising claim in light of his lavish support for the Democrats. It was the extremism of the Republican Party that had prompted him to become a major Democratic donor, he said; he wanted the Republican Party to reform itself into a more moderate party. He said he was not especially partisan himself: “I don’t particularly want to be a Democrat.” He spoke of his respect for John McCain. He even said he would be inclined to give financial support to moderate Republicans like Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, although he quickly walked back that comment: “I shouldn’t say that. That would hurt them.” And while the Republicans had made bipartisanship impossible, he didn’t want to see the Democrats become more ideologically rigid and confrontational.
If Soros views his relationship with the Democratic Party as mostly transactional, for some Democrats the feeling appears to be mutual. While his money is welcome and needed, there seems to be a certain ambivalence about Soros within Democratic circles. It is partly because of his outspokenness. As Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a longtime Democratic strategist, puts it, “The best donors are silent donors; not talking is good.” A bigger issue is that the Democratic Party remains committed to campaign-finance reform and abhors the effect that the Citizens United decision has had on American politics. That 2010 Supreme Court ruling gave billionaires like Soros the right to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns. Kamarck says that in the post-Citizens United world, Democrats “can’t unilaterally disarm” and spurn donations from plutocrats like Soros, but they are conflicted about billionaire donors in a way that the Republicans are not.
Although Soros is squarely on the left on many issues — he supports a single-payer health care system and is a longtime advocate of criminal-justice reform — some on the left have long been dubious of him. In the 1990s, he was portrayed by the far left as an agent of American imperialism, helping to foist the so-called neoliberal agenda (mass privatization, for example) on Eastern Europe. For some critics, Soros’s Wall Street background has always been a mark against him. There is also discomfort with his philanthropy — not its goals, certainly, but what it is seen to represent. Soros is at the vanguard of what has come to be known as “philanthrocapitalism,” essentially large-scale social investing by billionaires like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Soros. (Last year Forbes magazine ranked Soros the 20th-richest American.) To those who object, this represents the privatization of social policy and, through the substantial tax benefits that charitable donations receive, it deprives the public sector of money that could be used to promote social welfare.
When I asked Soros to describe himself ideologically, he laughed. “My ideology is non-ideological,” he said. “I’m in the club of non-clubs.” When I suggested that “center-left” might characterize his views, he demurred; he said it wasn’t clear where he stood now because the left had moved further left, a development that did not please him. “I’m opposed to the extreme left,” he said. “It should stop trying to keep up with the extremists on the right.”
One morning in Paris, I had coffee with Alex Soros, who is 32 and the second-youngest of George’s five children. Bespectacled, wiry and careful with his words, he had recently earned a doctorate in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and was now running his own philanthropy while also working with the O.S.F. He was a little groggy, having been up late the night before writing an op-ed for The Daily News rebutting Roseanne Barr’s Nazi tweet. (His father’s lawyers also filed a cease-and-desist order against Barr; she issued an apology two weeks later.) When the caffeine finally kicked in, Alex told me that for many years, his father had not been eager to advertise his Judaism because “this was something he was almost killed for.” But he had always “identified firstly as a Jew,” and his philanthropy was ultimately an expression of his Jewish identity, in that he felt a solidarity with other minority groups and also because he recognized that a Jew could only truly be safe in a world in which all minorities were protected. Explaining his father’s motives, he said, “The reason you fight for an open society is because that’s the only society that you can live in, as a Jew — unless you become a nationalist and only fight for your own rights in your own state.”
But Soros’s Jewish identity, coupled with his status as a Wall Street billionaire, gave those disinclined to support his agenda an easy means to foment suspicion and resentment, and from the moment that he became involved in Eastern Europe, he was confronted with anti-Semitism. The dog-whistling has not abated with time; some would argue that anti-Semitism directed at Soros has become, at least under Orban, a state-sponsored contagion. But it has also lately taken some bizarre twists. Last year, a son of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, posted an anti-Semitic cartoon of Soros on his Facebook page. (Netanyahu has frequently disparaged Soros because of his financial support for groups critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.) And, of course, Soros is also routinely accused of having been a Nazi.
Anti-Soros sentiment is a more recent phenomenon in the United States. Soros became a focal point of right-wing vitriol when he started contributing to the Democrats. In an appearance on Fox News in 2004, Dennis Hastert, who was at the time the speaker of the House, suggested that Soros was involved with drug cartels, telling Chris Wallace that “I don’t know where George Soros gets his money. I don’t know where — if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from.” The effort to demonize Soros has been unrelenting and quite successful. In suggesting that Soros was plotting a coup against the American government, Roseanne Barr was repeating a claim made by, among others, Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who had posted a meme on her Facebook page suggesting that Soros was conspiring to topple President Trump and “our constitutional republic.”
Soros is regularly portrayed as the deus ex machina of American politics, a vast left-wing conspiracy unto himself. His wily hand — and wallet — have been blamed for the national-anthem protests in the N.F.L.; the unrest in Ferguson, Mo.; and the violence in Charlottesville. On Twitter, Soros haters trace virtually every national trauma, as well as every setback for conservatives, to him, or anything with the flimsiest connection to him. This stuff isn’t confined to the digital fringes either. The claim about Charlottesville, for instance, was leveled by Paul Gosar, a Republican member of Congress. After news broke of a sex scandal involving the former governor of Missouri, Eric Greitens, that state’s Republican Party issued a statement claiming that he had fallen victim to a “political hit job” orchestrated by Soros.
At this point, it is fair to say that “Soros” has eclipsed even “Hillary” as a trigger for a certain large subset of Republicans and conservatives. In April, conservative media outlets reported that Kimba Wood, the judge presiding over the case of President Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, had officiated at Soros’s third wedding, in 2013. None of them attempted to explain why this was a problem; it was apparently self-evident. In 2014, Mark Malloch-Brown, a former United Nations deputy secretary general and a longtime Soros protégé, became head of a company called Smartmatic, which specializes in electronic voting technology. Soros obsessives eventually seized on this as proof that he was now intent on manipulating election outcomes. In response, the company felt obliged to post a disclaimer on its website stating that Soros had no stake in Smartmatic and that its technology was not used during the 2016 United States presidential election. When I spoke with Malloch-Brown, he told me that this was the price of being associated in any way with Soros. “It’s a badge I wear with honor,” he said, “but it attaches to everything I do.”
Much of what is said about Soros on Facebook, Twitter and in right-wing media outlets is not overtly anti-Semitic, and it is possible that some of the people pushing these views are not even aware that he is Jewish. But the echoes are there. Glenn Beck used his show on Fox to peddle wild conspiracy theories about Soros. In 2010, he aired a multipart special called “George Soros: The Puppet Master,” which was widely condemned for its anti-Semitic overtones, beginning with its title (the Jew as puppet master, pulling the strings of humanity, is another age-old anti-Semitic trope). In recent years, the so-called alt-right has become a key driver of Soros paranoia. Breitbart portrays him as an arch-“globalist” who backs unrestricted immigration and a border-free world. (Neither claim is true.) Soros was one of the prominent Jews featured in the last ad of Trump’s 2016 campaign, which many regarded as anti-Semitic. Steve Bannon, formerly the head of Breitbart, led Trump’s campaign at the time. On a trip to Europe in March, Bannon lauded Viktor Orban as a “hero” and “the most significant guy on the scene today.”
Although the broadsides at Soros are often highly suggestive, the people behind them are usually careful to maintain a degree of deniability when it comes to the question of anti-Semitism. But not always. On his radio show last year, Alex Jones, who runs the conspiracy website Infowars, told listeners, “there is undoubtedly a Jewish mafia” and that it was headed by Soros. Offering the same twist that would later appear in Roseanne Barr’s tweet, Jones said that “one of the biggest enemies of Jews was the Jewish mafia” and that Soros was “out to get Jews.”
Britain’s vote in 2016 to leave the E.U. was a personal blow to Soros, an Anglophile but also a staunch supporter of European integration. Afterward, he donated more than $500,000 to a group called Best for Britain, led by Malloch-Brown, that plans to push for a second referendum to undo Brexit. In a tart response, Norman Lamont, who was chancellor of the Exchequer during the 1992 pound-devaluation crisis and, as such, the person on the losing end of Soros’s most celebrated trade, told a reporter, “George Soros is a brilliant financier, but he should stick to finance and stay out of British politics.”
In April, I met with Lamont. Now a member of the House of Lords and an ardent Brexit supporter, he insisted that he bore no ill will toward Soros because of Black Wednesday. But he regarded Brexit as a domestic political matter in which foreign money should play no part. That Soros had a home and office in London was irrelevant. “He can’t vote here,” Lamont said. In his view, Soros’s effort to get a do-over vote was undermining British democracy. “I think there would be incredible disillusionment with the political process if this vote was annulled,” he said.
During my dinner with Soros, I pointed out that some political observers drew a straight line from Black Wednesday to Brexit, in that the 1992 crisis strengthened the position of the Euroskeptics in Britain’s Conservative Party, the faction that ultimately pushed for and prevailed on the vote to leave the European Union. I asked Soros what he would say to a Brexit supporter puzzled by his seemingly contradictory roles in Black Wednesday and Brexit. His reply suggested he thought the answer was obvious. “This is the difference between my engagement in the markets, where my only interest is to get it right and make money, and my political engagement, where I stand for what I really believe in,” he said.
It is a comment that gets to the heart of the Soros conundrum. Even if you concede that policymakers are ultimately to blame for the income inequality that has fueled so much of the current backlash against globalization, the financial sector has had a major role in worsening it, and hedge-fund titans like Soros are powerful symbols of that inequality. And while Soros has written very candidly and persuasively about the pitfalls of casino capitalism — most notably in a 1997 Atlantic essay, subsequently expanded into a book called “The Crisis of Global Capitalism,” in which he acknowledged the destabilizing effect of financial markets — that doesn’t make him any less of a symbol. When pressed, Soros has said that if he hadn’t gone after the British pound or the Thai baht, someone else would have. That is unquestionably true (and in fact, Quantum was not the only hedge fund targeting those currencies). But that is not a particularly satisfying answer, and certainly not after the Great Recession, in which investment banks and hedge funds played such a destructive role. The industry that made him a billionaire contributed significantly to the circumstances that now imperil what Soros the philanthropist has tried to achieve.
On the other hand, if Soros’s riches had gone to someone else, would that person have put the money to the same use? It might have gone to a noble cause, but almost certainly not to something as ambitious and quixotic — or as dangerous — as the promotion of liberal values and democracy. (As Putin and Orban have shown, independent civil society is inevitably regarded as oppositional by governments that don’t want their powers checked.) Most plutocrats measure progress in numbers, but the kind of work that Soros, through the O.S.F., has done generally defies quantification. And as Leonard Benardo, the vice president of the O.S.F., noted when we spoke a few months ago, that work can be unpopular in the countries where it is done.
Soros’s efforts on behalf of one group in particular, the Roma, seem especially germane right now. In June, the new Italian interior minister, Matteo Salvini, the head of the far-right League party, commissioned a census of the country’s Roma. As an “answer to the Roma question,” as he menacingly phrased it, Salvini vowed to expel all non-Italian Roma and added, “Unfortunately, we will have to keep the Italian Roma.” Even in the age of Trump, his words were shocking, but he has refused to disavow them or back down. Improving the status of Europe’s estimated 10 to 12 million Roma has been a major priority for Soros and the O.S.F. since the early 1990s. The organization has contributed more than $300 million to projects combating discrimination against the Roma and providing them with greater education, employment and civic opportunities. It is a struggle because anti-Roma sentiment remains a potent force, a reality underscored by Salvini’s actions and statements. Given the political currents in Europe, this is another battle that Soros may well be losing. Salvini’s popularity has soared.
But it is also a clarifying battle. Setting aside all of the complications that come with being George Soros, would you rather live in the world that he has tried to create, or in the world that Salvini and Orban (and, for that matter, Trump) seem to be pushing us toward? In the aftermath of the Great Recession, it can certainly be argued that how Soros earned his money, and the fact that he accumulated such wealth, ought to carry more moral opprobrium in 2018 than maybe it did in 2008. But there is also a case to be made that in the present moment, with its echoes of the 1930s, how he amassed his fortune matters a lot less than what he has chosen to do with it.
There have been mistakes; by his own admission, Soros erred in championing Mikheil Saakashvili, the mercurial former president of Georgia, and also became too directly involved in the country’s politics in the early 2000s. He clearly misjudged Orban. But as Victoria Nuland, a former American diplomat who worked for both Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton, put it when I spoke to her recently, “George is a freedom fighter.”
On the morning of July 5, I visited Soros at his home in the Hamptons. He had returned from Europe the week before and was spending the rest of the summer at El Mirador, as his Mediterranean-style villa is known. For years, Soros has used the 10-bedroom, 15,000-square-foot complex as a salon of sorts, entertaining a revolving cast of writers, academics and political activists. Back in the day, Soros could often be found playing chess outside with dissidents from Eastern Europe.
A household employee showed me to a table in the dining room and offered me some ginger tea: “a specialty of the house.” A few minutes later, Soros walked in. He was dressed in a white linen shirt, dark trousers and sandals. He hadn’t been on the tennis court that morning; he was busy with phone calls instead.
In the five weeks since I had seen Soros in Paris, the Trump administration had slapped new trade sanctions on China and imposed tariffs on goods from Canada and the European Union. I asked why the markets and the broader economy were holding up so well in the face of a possible global trade war, the breakdown of the trans-Atlantic alliance and the political turmoil in Washington. Soros said these developments would eventually drag down the market, but he couldn’t say when. “I’ve lost my capacity to anticipate the markets,” he said, adding with a smile, “I’m an amateur now.” It was like hearing Roger Federer saying he had lost his touch around the net. Soros claimed that because the financial world was no longer his main focus, he was unable to time the markets the way that he used to. Politics now commanded his attention.
Soros was in a reflective mood. He said democracy was in trouble because in many countries it had become sclerotic, insufficiently responsive to the public’s needs. “It’s losing out,” he said. Illiberal democracy, of the sort that Orban had fashioned in Hungary, was proving to be “more effective,” for the time being at least. The new-age autocrats had shown themselves to be particularly cunning in going after civil society as a means of consolidating their power. “It’s a less abrasive way of exercising control than actually killing people who disagree with you,” he said.
It had become clear to him that his mentor and inspiration, Karl Popper, had been wrong in one critical respect. In a democratic society, politics wasn’t ultimately a quest to arrive at the truth; it was about gaining and holding power and manipulating public sentiment in order to do that. “He was a philosopher of science, and science is a search for reality,” Soros said. “He did not understand politics. In politics, you are spinning the truth, not discovering it.” I asked what Popper, who died in 1994, had thought of his political philanthropy. “He was very supportive, which means he didn’t take me seriously,” Soros said, laughing. “I don’t think Popper would be so happy with my current position, because I’m critical of him.”
Soros acknowledged that he had said things in the past that he now regretted — not necessarily the sentiments, but the way he had expressed them. Referring to the Nazi comments that he made during the Bush years, he said, “That was probably a mistake.” He told me that he was now choosing his words more cautiously, eschewing comparisons to the Third Reich and the use of the word “fascism” to describe political conditions in the United States and Europe.
In Paris, Alex Soros had told me that his father, while an excellent parent, had been emotionally distant. It was, he said, a defense mechanism born of his wartime experience: “To be emotional, to give off emotion, could be a sign of vulnerability.” But he said his father had started to open up in recent years.
As my conversation with Soros in Southampton drew to a close, I thought I picked up a little vulnerability. He was talking about his wealth and the opportunities it had given him. “For me, money represents freedom and not power,” he said. For a long time, money had given him the freedom to do and say what he pleased, and also the freedom not to care what other people said and thought about him. But he conceded that he had started to care. “I have become a bit more concerned about my image, because it is disturbing to have those lies out there,” he said, citing Roseanne Barr’s tweet as an example. He also admitted that being the anointed villain for so many people around the world was unpleasant. “I’m not happy to have that many enemies,” he said. “I wish I had more friends.”
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6)List of countries that 'give' birthright citizenship......
HERE IS A LIST OF ALL THE DEVELOPED NATIONS OF THE WORLD THAT OFFER BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP TO THE NEWBORN BABIES OF TOURISTS AND 'ILLEGAL' ALIENS:
1. United States. That's right, ONLY ONE. Every other modern developed nation in the world has gotten rid of birthright citizenship policies. Yet, most of U.S. news media and politicians the last two weeks have ridiculed the comments by some other politicians that it is time for the U.S. to put an end to birthright citizenship for tourists and 'illegal aliens.'
- NO OTHER COUNTRIES (ZERO-NONE-ZILCH) folks, the U.S. 'Stands alone.' There used to be all kinds of developed countries that gave away their citizenship as freely as we do in the U.S. but one by one they all have recognized the folly, recklessness, lunacy, stupidity of that policy.
- SOME MODERN COUNTRIES THAT RECENTLY ENDED THEIR BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP POLICY: Canada was the last non-U.S. Holdout. Illegal aliens stopped getting citizenship for their newborn babies in2009. Australia's birthright citizenship requirements are much more stringent than those of H.R. 1868 and took effect in 2007.
- New Zealand repealed in 2006.
- Ireland repealed in 2005.
- France repealed in 1993.
- India repealed in 1987.
- United Kingdom repealed in 1983.
- Portugal repealed in 1981.
The United States is the 'laughing stock' of the modern world. Only the U.S. values its citizenship 'so lowly' as to distribute it promiscuously to the off-spring of foreign citizens visiting Disney World on tourist visas and to foreign citizens who have violated their promises on their visitor, work and student visas who stay illegally in the country, as well as to those who sneak across our borders.
It's not just Mexico and South America who are sending illegals across our borders. Currently, the CBP(Customs Border Protection) reports that of those apprehended illegally crossing the border, China is number one.
Wake up America! END BIRTHRIGHT FOR TOURIST, FOREIGN CITIZENS AND ESPECIALLY 'ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS.'
Illegal aliens from China, India, Russia, the Middle East, and a host of other nations are flooding the United States. Ironically, most often these 'illegals' and/or their offspring are given positions at the front of the line for Government jobs, contracts and assistance. Look around you! We are giving away our culture, and economic and fiscal strength because our borders are not secure and we bestow citizenship irresponsibly.
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7) new romance of socialism
What does it mean if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez really is the future of the Democratic Party?
By Jonathan Tobin
At only 28 years old and with nothing but an upset primary win in a New York City congressional district on her résumé, being anointed as the “future of the Democratic Party” was quite a burden to place on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Since beating Rep. Joe Crowley—a veteran incumbent, as well as the boss of New York’s Queens County’s Democratic Party—on
Campaign buttons for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic Socialist who led a surprise upset victory over Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) in a Democratic Party primary on June 27. Credit: Twitter.
June 26, Ocasio-Cortez has become something of a political rock star, according to Democratic National Chairman Tom Perez, who gave her that title.
Perez might be right about Ocasio-Cortez and his party. But if so, there are two things about her that are actually of greater interest than the fact that she is a charismatic figure who embodies the Democrats’ hopes of generating a massive turnout of young voters this fall for the midterm elections. One is that she ran as a “Democratic Socialist,” rather than a garden-variety Democrat. The other is that she’s already on record libeling the State of Israel and has struggled to back up or even give a coherent explanation for those views.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders proved during the course of his surprisingly effective 2016 presidential campaign that “socialist” was no longer a dirty word for American liberals. For those who have grown up in the three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reality of what that term has actually meant during the 20th century is as remote to them as the collapse of the Roman Empire. For many young voters, socialism is a catchall phrase embodying their resentment of a rapidly changing global economy, and a claim of wanting to make the world a better, fairer and more equitable place.
In a Democratic Party drifting to the left with figures like Sanders and now Ocasio-Cortez appealing to the sentiments of its liberal base, the stigma that had rightly attached itself to socialism has faded.
Socialism has always been in fashion in certain pockets of academia, but it was widely accepted in the early 20th century as societies struggled to adjust to a modern industrial economy. Given the oppression they faced in Europe, Jews were vulnerable to the notion of creating a new world in which equality would reign and discrimination would be eliminated.
Some forms of socialism—such as Labor Zionism and even the Bundists, who hoped to find freedom for Jews in a Europe ruled by socialism—were relatively benign. But the strain of socialists who gained power in much of the world soon illustrated not only the basic fallacy of their economic theories (something that was also true in Israel, as its current prosperity wasn’t possible until it discarded the socialism of its founders), but also what happens when power is concentrated in the hands of a small group that thinks it knows how everyone else should live.
The great lessons of the 20th century were that when regimes ruled by this ideology are created to suppress individual rights and the free market, the result is inherently dictatorial and violent in nature. Economic ruin also soon follows. It’s not just that, for all of its problems, capitalism is the only sure path to prosperity and freedom. During the course of the last century, the cumulative death toll from Communist regimes, which always described themselves not inaccurately as “socialist,” amounts to approximately 100 million slaughtered in famines, purges and gulags. Blood always flows when individual freedom is sacrificed on the altar of utopian ideology.
That socialism would now be making a comeback shows how fleeting is historical memory. But the problem with this sort of utopian thinking is that it involves more than just discredited economic theories. Today’s socialists are also influenced by intersectional theory that identifies all causes associated with minorities or Third World peoples as part of a general struggle against capitalism. Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez accused Israel of atrocities, embracing lies spread by apologists for Hamas terrorists during the weekly “return marches” that started this spring, when Israel’s border with Gaza was assaulted by Palestinian rioters armed with rocks, Molotov cocktails, explosives and incendiary devices.
In a PBS “Firing Line” interview conducted after her victory, Ocasio-Cortez was asked to account for her previous claims that Israel had conducted a “massacre.” Her response was contradictory and incoherent. Though at one point she said she supported Israel’s right to exist and a two-state solution, she also said she opposed the “occupation of Palestine.” When challenged by interviewer Margaret Hoover to explain what she meant by that, Ocasio-Cortez was flustered and begged off, saying she wasn’t an “expert on geopolitics.”
That says a lot about the way even young politicians mouth slogans without knowing much about their meaning. Since that interview, Ocasio-Cortez has flip-flopped on the issue more than once as she reacted to criticism from fellow leftists, who fear she is backing off from her opposition to the Jewish state. Unfortunately, the people whose efforts she and Sanders were supporting by unfairly criticizing Israel do know what they mean by “occupation.” For those who took part in those marches, “return” means turning back the clock to 1948 and erasing the State of Israel, all of which they deem “occupied” territory. Yet that doesn’t stop contemporary “socialists” from seeking to undermine Israel’s right to defend itself.
Ocasio-Cortez won’t be the only member of Congress who thinks their ignorance is no reason to avoid spouting off about serious issues, even when it means libeling Israel. Yet the real problem here is the consequences of the utopian impulse at the heart of her ideas. The romance of socialism is irresistible to those who believe that their outrage and good intentions are a reasonable substitute for sound economics or an understanding of conflicts in which the murderous hate of anti-Zionism is disguised as the struggle against imperialism. But it’s a temptation that anyone with an understanding of history should avoid.
If she and those who follow in her footsteps are the future of the Democratic Party, that bodes ill for both the United States, Israel, and most certainly, for the Democrats.
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By TIMES OF ISRAEL, TOI Staff
Israel showcases to US reporters parts of trove Mossad spirited out of Tehran; 'These guys were working on nuclear bombs,' confirms ex-IAEA inspector on seeing the material
The archive of Iranian nuclear documents seized by the Israeli Mossad from a Tehran warehouse in January shows that Iran’s program to build nuclear weapons “was almost certainly larger, more sophisticated and better organized” than was suspected, unnamed nuclear experts were quoted as saying in the New York Times on Sunday, after being shown selected documents from the haul by US reporters.
One of the Iranian documents specifies plans to build a first “batch of five weapons” and discusses sites for possible underground nuclear tests, the Times reported, after one of its reporters was given limited access to the haul last week, along with a reporter from the Washington Post, and another from the Wall Street Journal.
“None were built, possibly because the Iranians feared being caught, or because a campaign by American and Israeli intelligence agencies to sabotage the effort, with cyberattacks and disclosures of key facilities, took its toll,” said the Times.
“It’s quite good,” Robert Kelley, a nuclear engineer and former inspector for the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, told The Times dryly, after being shown some of the documents. “The papers show these guys were working on nuclear bombs.”
Robert Kelley, ex-IAEA inspector (YouTube screenshot)
The documents also reinforce Israel’s contention that Iran remains determined to attain a nuclear weapons archive, despite its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal (the JCPOA), the US reporters noted.
The materials they were shown include documentation that names current Iranian President Hassan Rouhani as a member of the “Council for Advanced Technologies” that approved the rogue nuclear weapons program, the Washington Post said, and indicate “a supporting role by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as the Quds Force.” Previously released documents indicate that the Iranian army was charged with overseeing the conversion of low-enriched uranium to weapons-grade fuel suitable for nuclear bombs.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani listens during a joint press conference with Austrian president, following talks on July 4, 2018 at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna. (AFP PHOTO / APA / GEORG HOCHMUTH)
The three US reporters were given limited access to the trove last week, and were briefed by Israeli officials. Israel, which unveiled the documents in April, has been mining the trove of 100,000 documents for new information, and has also shared the material with the IAEA and with US and European intelligence agencies. US President Donald Trump withdrew from the JCPOA in May, soon after Netanyahu publicly presented the haul at a press conference, in which he declared that “Iran lied” when claiming not to seek nuclear weapons.
The thrust of last week’s briefing for the US press was to highlight how far the nuclear program had progressed — Iran “was on the cusp of mastering key bombmaking technologies when the research was ordered halted” in 2003, the Washington Post said — and to underline Israel’s insistence that the archive demonstrates that the Iranian regime has not abandoned its effort to obtain a nuclear weapons arsenal, but has merely mothballed parts of it.
“These documents are old, but they have a bearing on the future,” a senior Israeli official was quoted by the Post as saying. “It’s not a history lesson. They have capabilities they can use in the future.”
Iran halted much of the nuclear weapons program in 2003, but internal memos in the archive “show senior scientists making extensive plans to continue several projects in secret, hidden within existing military research programs,” said the Washington Post.
“Let there be no mistake: the amount of personnel in the overt and covert parts will not decrease,” it quoted an Iranian official writing in a memo dated September 3, 2003. “The structure will not become smaller, and every sub-project will supervise both its overt and covert parts.”
“In a few years, when some of the JCPOA’s restrictions expire, Iran will be in a position to resume work on a nuclear device that Israel sees as a threat to its existence,” the Israeli official told the Post.
The seized archive “explains why the [nuclear deal] to us is worse than nothing, because it leaves key parts of the nuclear program unaddressed,” the Israeli official said, echoing Netanyahu’s frequent contention. “It doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb. It paves Iran’s path to the bomb.”
The Washington Post said US intelligence agencies have long believed that “Iran has kept the intellectual core of its nuclear program intact.” And the documents showcased by Israel detail several meetings in late 2003 in which the Iranian nuclear project chiefs “discuss ways to keep the program’s scientists busy with nuclear-relevant research,” even after it was ostensibly frozen.
The Tehran warehouse from which the documents were purloined “was put into use only after the 2015 accord was reached with the United States, European powers, Russia, and China,” the Times reported. Israeli officials contend that the fact that the Iranians “systematically went about collecting thousands of pages spread around the country documenting how to build a weapon, how to fit it on a missile and how to detonate it” demonstrates that they fully intend to return to the effort of nuclear weapons building when the opportunity arises..
The three US reporters were permitted to see and touch, with gloves on, “a few pages of original files, including handwritten notes signed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the Iranian physicist who Western intelligence agencies say was in charge of [the Iranian program] Project Amad,” the Washington Post said. “Journalists were given copies of some documents, including several that were previously unpublished. Others were shown only briefly or not at all, on the grounds that they contained explicit technical details that could be used to make nuclear weapons.”
The documents show that Iran obtained “explicit weapons-design information from a foreign source,” the Washington Post said. “We see explicit material related to nuclear weapons from different sources, some of it not Iranian in origin,” an Israeli intelligence official said. Israeli officials would not say whether the bomb design information was provided by a state or by an individual. Iran is known to have obtained assistance in building uranium-enrichment centrifuges from Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is also believed by US intelligence to have given “partial blueprints for a Chinese nuclear device to at least one of his international customers,” the Washington Post said.
“Iran had foreign help, though Israeli officials held back any documents indicating where it came from,” said the New York Times. “Much was clearly from Pakistan, but officials said other foreign experts were also involved — though they may not have been working for their governments.”
The archive confirms that the covert Iranian nuclear program was launched in the late 1980s and halted in 2003, when Iran feared a US invasion, and when its secret uranium enrichment plant at Natanz was exposed. While this was known, revelations in the archive include “previously unknown photos of a large cylindrical test chamber in which Iran is said to have conducted tests of an implosion device of the type used to trigger a nuclear detonation,” the Washington Post said.
The US reporters were also shown documents that show Iran was “measuring radiation from a neutron-generating explosive test inside the same chamber in 2002,” it added. “In modern nuclear weapons design, a neutron generator releases radioactive particles to help sustain a powerful nuclear chain reaction.”
The reporters were also shown documents and photographs detailing Iranian work on “making a form of uranium metal that can be used as a neutron initiator, and still others [that] describe problems with uranium contamination outside the test chamber, which was located at the Parchin military base outside Tehran.”
The Post noted that when the UN sought to inspect the Parchin test site years later, Iran first “completely dismantled the test chamber, scraped away several tons of topsoil, cut down nearby trees and covered the entire area with fresh asphalt.”
Reported the Times: “By the time the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Yukiya Amano, was finally permitted to visit the site in 2015, it was empty, though the agency’s report indicated that it looked as if equipment had been removed. The photos [shown to the reporters by Israel] indicate that is exactly what happened: They show a large chamber that nuclear experts say is tailor-made for the kind of experimental activity that the international inspectors were looking for….
“The chamber appears to be part of neutron experiments that strongly point to an effort to build nuclear weapons,” added the Times. “Nuclear explosions start when fast-moving particles known as neutrons split atoms of nuclear fuel in two, producing chain reactions that release more neutrons and enormous bursts of energy. At the core of an atom bomb, a device known as a neutron initiator — or sometimes a spark plug — creates the initial wave of speeding neutrons.”
In the documents, one of the Iranian scientists, Masoud Alimohammadi, warns that work on neutron-generated chain reactions for a nuclear explosion must be kept secret at all costs. “‘Neutrons’ research could not be considered ‘overt’ and needs to be concealed,” Alimohammadi’s notes say. “We cannot excuse such activities as defensive. Neutron activities are sensitive, and we have no explanation for them.” Alimohammadi, the Times noted, was assassinated in January 2010.
While Israel argues that the archive underlines how Iran fooled the West, and that the 2015 agreement is a terrible mistake, an assessment shared by the Trump administration, the Washington Post noted that “proponents say the pact has permanent provisions that will alert inspectors and spy agencies quickly if Iran begins work on an actual weapon.”
Under Tehran’s nose
Israeli officials also gave the three US reporters additional, but not full, details of the operation to seize and bring home the Iranian archive, some of which has been previously detailed
8a) Russia concerned about military confrontation between Israel and Iran
Moscow is concerned by a possible military escalation between Iran and Israel and is doing everything possible to prevent a conflict between them, Russian Ambassador to Iran Levan Dzhagaryan said in an interview with Russian daily Kommersant on Wednesday.“Sometimes conflicts arise, and we are naturally concerned about the possibility of military confrontation between the Iranian and Israeli forces in Syria. We do everything possible to prevent it. To prevent the escalation of the conflict,” he was quoted as saying.
Dzhagaryan told the paper that Iran is a “friendly country” and “one of our key partners” which cooperates with Russia in “various spheres” such as ending the war in Syria and that Iran’s presence in the war-torn country is legitimate because it was invited by the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“Iran is not a country that you can put pressure on. This is a big state, pursuing an independent foreign policy. Work with Iranians can only be a method of persuasion,” Dzhagaryan said.
Tensions between the two foes has risen in recent months and Jerusalem has repeatedly said it would not allow Iran to set up a permanent presence in Syria.
Israeli officials, such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, have met with their Russian counterparts , both in Russia and in Israel, numerous times in recent weeks to stress the importance of this point."
Last week Liberman reiterated Israel’s concerns, stressing that the "the Iranian presence in Syria is unreasonable, and we are not prepared to accept an Iranian presence in Syria anywhere, and as you have heard more than once, we will act against any Iranian consolidation in Syria.”
In recent weeks Syrian government forces backed by Russian air-power have been retaking large swathes of territory on the Syrian Golan Heights from rebel groups along the Israeli border. Iranian forces and affiliated Shiite militias are also said to be playing a minor role in the offensive.
Due to the offensive and the Shiite forces creeping steadily to the border, the IDF reinforced the Golan Division with additional armor and artillery ready to protect Israel’s border “until the last millimeter.”
Last week in a joint press conference in Helsinki with US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin agree on securing Israel’s border with Syria in accordance with the 1974 Separation of Forces Agreement following the Yom Kippur War.
Doing so, Putin said, would bring “peace to [the] Golan Heights and bring a more peaceful relationship between Syria and Israel, and also to provide security of the State of Israel.”
Moscow intervened in the Syrian conflict in September 2015 and as an ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Moscow finds itself part of an alliance between Damascus and Tehran, the patron of Hezbollah. Russia, which views Iran as a key player in resolving the crisis in Syria, has repeatedly emphasized the importance of the role that the Islamic Republic plays in the war-torn country.
Israel believes that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard’s Corps and Quds forces have continued to entrench themselves in Syria despite strikes against Iranian targets attributed to Israel, the most recent being last week in Syria’s Aleppo province.
Israeli intelligence estimates there are thousands of Iranian advisers and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps officers in Syria, some 9000 Shiite militia fighters from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq and another 7,000 Hezbollah fighters.
Israel and Russia implemented a deconfliction mechanism system over Syria to prevent accidental clashes between the two militaries and, according to Liberman, the deconfliction mechanism with Russia is “a connection that proves itself.”
“It is clear that each side has its own interests. Each side sees the picture differently. In the years of civil war in Syria, we were able to avoid direct friction, and that is an achievement in itself,” he said in February. “This is an effective relationship.”
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9) ASPEN CONFERENCE
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