Climate-Denying Group Led by Trump Strategist Lobbied for Dakota Access, Keystone XL

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By Steve Horn and Itai Vardi

The Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF), a conservative advocacy, lobbying, and electioneering group led by a strategist for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, has lobbied for both the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines.

Tony Fabrizio, a veteran Republican tactician and lead pollster, chairs CFIF’s Board of Directors, according to its 2017 incorporation filings, submitted in Florida. Documents from the state show that Fabrizio signed off on CFIF’s forms back in 2004.

According to federal lobbying disclosure forms, the group's team of lobbyists, at the end of 2016, engaged with then-President Barack Obama's staff to express “concern with ongoing violent protests and obstruction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and [to urge] allowance of construction to continue without any further delay.”

U.S. Federal Election Commission filings show that Trump campaign's latest payment to Fabrizio's polling firm occurred in March, in the sum of $450,000. The New York Times reported that Fabrizio has worked sporadically as an adviser to President Trump since 2011, when Trump first began considering running for the office.

Fabrizio did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Dakota Access Push

In September, about a month before officially filing to lobby for Dakota Access, CFIF wrote a blog post criticizing those protesting the pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in Cannon Ball, North Dakota.

“When is enough enough?” wrote CFIF’s Timothy Lee, who is listed as a lobbyist for Dakota Access on its disclosure form. “When a rational person knows they aren’t going to win, that their point isn’t going to be heard, that they came up short — they throw in the towel. Sure, a toddler may continue to whine and cry, but an adult moves on.”

At the time, current U.S. Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, served on the Board of Directors of Dakota Access co-owner Energy Transfer Partners. Fabrizio served as an adviser for Perry’s 2012 Republican Party presidential campaign.

After President Trump gave Dakota Access the green-light in January, CFIF sang his praises.

“Today, President Trump signed executive actions advancing the Dakota Access Pipeline, thereby helping restore faith in due process of law,” Lee said in a press release. “Company officials followed the letter of the law in their completion of the approval process, and it is a relief to see that diligence recognized by President Trump.”

A spokesperson for Energy Transfer Partners told DeSmog she was not familiar with CFIF and the company did not retain the group to lobby on its behalf. Reached by email, CFIF told DeSmog that it lobbied for Dakota Access independently of Energy Transfer Partners and was not hired by the company to do so.

“The Center for Individual Freedom is an independent advocacy organization and the direct lobbying we do is on behalf of our mission. Consequently, CFIF has never been retained by anyone,” said Jeffrey Mazzella, president of CFIF and member of the organization's Dakota Access lobbying team. “Tony Fabrizio is not a registered lobbyist for the organization, and does none.”

Oil Export Ban, Keystone XL

In 2015, CFIF deployed lobbyists in what ended up being a successful push to repeal the U.S. crude oil export ban that had been in place since the oil crisis of the 1970s.

Harold Hamm, lead energy adviser for Trump’s campaign and CEO of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) giant Continental Resources, led the way in funding the public relations campaign to repeal the export ban. Oil from the Bakken Shale is now being exported to Asia, and the opening of the Dakota Access pipeline, which carries Bakken oil, is expected to boost the flow of oil for export. As previously reported by DeSmog, Continental Resources — which has its sights set on shipping crude oil to South Korea — has oil flowing through Dakota Access.

“There seems to be increasing demand for light quality crude in Asia,” Michael Cohen, head of energy commodities research at Barclays, recently told Reuters. “I think with Dakota Access coming online, it makes the pipeline route from the Bakken to the Gulf Coast more economical.”

During the second quarter of 2012, CFIF also lobbied for Keystone XL, which President Trump has recently approved. CFIFadvocated by “urging that Keystone XL Pipeline approval language be included in the final version of the Highway Bill,” according to lobbying disclosure forms.

Previously, CFIC has also lobbied against renewable energy tax credits and President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which was set to regulate carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants.

The firm Mercury Public Affairs, where Fabrizio works as a senior counselor, currently maintains fossil fuel industry clients. These include New Jersey Natural Gas, Penn East Pipeline Company LLC, and the Government of Qatar, which co-owns with ExxonMobil the Golden Pass Liquified Natural Gas export terminal, which Perry's Department of Energy recently approved.

Bryan Lanza, communications director for President Trump’s transition team, was recently hired by Mercury as well.

Tobacco Past, Climate Denial Present

CFIF’s roots trace back to the tobacco industry, with the group founded in 1998 by Thomas Humber, who was then a public relations professional for the National Smokers Alliance (NSA). The Smokers Alliance was created and funded by tobacco giant Philip Morris, according to documents housed in the University of California-San Francisco’s (UCSF) Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive.

A 2013 study published by the British Medical Journal revealed that marketing efforts for the Smokers Alliance were led by public relations firms such as Burson-Marsteller and Ailes Communication, the latter the namesake of former Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes. Ailes served as an adviser to Trump’s presidential campaign.

The paper also highlights that the Smokers Alliance closed its doors in 2001, handing off some of its cash to CFIF.

“We regret that the [Smokers Alliance], as an organization, must end, but that does nothing to diminish the commitment to Individual freedom that has driven the NSA,” reads a 2001 memo written by Humber, also published by UCSF.

“'The effort to disenfranchise and marginalize smokers is, in reality, only one facet of a much broader assault on individual freedoms that has begun to infuse this society. Consequently, upon dissolution, the NSA will contribute some remaining assets to the Center for Individual Freedom, a 501(c)(4) corporation that supports the constitutional freedoms that all Individuals must enjoy.”

Today, CFIF is active in denying the scientific reality of climate change, calling it “political science” as recently as January 2016.

“When we talk about global warming, or global cooling, or global climate change broadly, we’re not talking about science so much as ‘political science,'” wrote CFIF in a blog post. “Science so far hasn’t been able to say with certainty why the earth’s climate may be warming. Many of the computer models predicting, for example, a precipitous decline in Antarctic sea ice have been wrong.”

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION FIGHTS IN COURT TO PREVENT TOP CIA OFFICIAL FROM TESTIFYING ON TORTURE

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By Alex Emmons

MORE THAN EIGHT YEARS after President Obama formally ended the CIA’s torture program, the Trump administration is fighting to block the CIA’s new deputy director from providing a deposition about her role in pioneering the agency’s most abusive torture techniques.

The Trump administration appointed Gina Haspel as deputy director of the CIA in February, attracting criticism from human rights advocates due to her former role in abusive interrogations. The move was interpreted as a public sign of the administration’s approval for some of the CIA’s most brutal abuses after the 9/11 attacks.

Haspel is being called to provide a deposition by James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen — two contract psychologists who made tens of millions of dollars for their work shaping the CIA’s torture program. The ACLU is suing Mitchell and Jessen on behalf of three former CIA detainees — one of whom died in captivity in 2002 after being beaten and doused with cold water.

Lawyers for Mitchell and Jessen claim that everything the psychologists did was authorized by the CIA, and that Haspel would confirm that if the court ordered her to give a deposition. Lawyers are also seeking numerous documents, and a deposition from James Cotsana — a retired CIA official whom Mitchell and Jessen identified as their direct supervisor.

Haspel ran a secret prison in Thailand in 2002, part of the CIA’s global network of “black sites.” That prison — codenamed “DETENTION SITE GREEN” by Senate investigators — was the site of the CIA’s first prisoner interrogations after the 9/11 attacks, and Haspel supervised them. She later took part in covering up the abuses, helping to destroy 92 videotapes of interrogations against the Senate’s wishes.

The Senate torture report does not mention Haspel by name, but details the role of the prison’s station chief in the horrific torture of detainee Abu Zubaydah, who the CIA waterboarded until he became “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.”

Mitchell and Jessen were the ones who waterboarded Zubaydah, and described the interrogation as “a template for future interrogations of high-value captives” in a cable to the CIA. Zubaydah’s interrogation was held up as a model, and similar techniques were used on many of the 119 detainees the CIA had in its custody.

In a hearing before a district court in Washington state on Friday, the government said that deposing Haspel and Cotsana would reveal “state secrets,” and that despite media reports, the government could not confirm or deny Haspel and Cotsana’s role in the program.

Dror Ladin, a staff attorney for the ACLU, argued that there’s no need to depose Haspel and Cotsana because it would not affect Mitchell and Jessen’s responsibility for torture. “It’s never been a defense in a torture or a war crimes case to say ‘I was following instructions,’” said Ladin. “This case has never been about that. It was about the design of the program, its testing on Abu Zubaydah, the use of those techniques on our clients.”

For more than a decade, the Bush and Obama administrations have used the state secrets privilege to block numerous lawsuits against government agencies and the architects of the torture program. To this day no victim of CIA torture has ever obtained compensation for their treatment.

The lawsuit against Mitchell and Jessen is the first torture lawsuit the Department of Justice did not try to block in its entirety. Although the government is not a direct party to the case, it is paying Mitchell and Jessen’s legal fees. Knowing they could face legal liability for their actions, the CIA provided Mitchell and Jessen with a multi-million dollar indemnification contract in 2007 – meaning that if they were sued for their actions, taxpayers would foot the bill.

‘Pacifist’ Japan might acquire cruise missiles to strike North Korea: source

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The government is thinking of buying and deploying cruise missiles in response to North Korea’s provocative missile and nuclear tests, an official said Friday.

The government is eager to set aside funds to study the feasibility of acquiring the ability to strike enemy missile sites, and could do so in the draft budget for fiscal 2018, the official said on condition of anonymity.

However, there are concerns in the government and ruling parties that acquiring such offensive potential would contradict Japan’s exclusively defense-oriented “posture” and trigger a backlash from the opposition parties, even though they have shown in recent years that they are woefully incapable of stopping the ruling camp.

According to the official, the government is looking to purchase the Tomahawk, the cruise missile used by the U.S. to attack a Syrian airfield last month.

The Tomahawk is a long-range, all-weather, subsonic cruise missile. It has enough range to hit any part of North Korea from the Sea of Japan and can fly at extremely low altitudes, making it less noticeable to radar.

The government is considering deploying Tomahawks on Aegis-equipped vessels in the Maritime Self-Defense Force fleet, the official said. The ships would have to be modified to use them, if they are actually introduced.

The United States, Japan’s security ally, was cautious about Tokyo acquiring cruise missiles but has since moderated its stance in light of tensions on the Korean Peninsula, according to a Defense Ministry source.

To acquire a strike capability, Japan would need to revise the guidelines for its 10-year defense program ahead of schedule and review the five-year defense buildup plan as well. Both were approved by the Cabinet in late 2013.

A panel on security issues in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party is expected to propose recommendations on improving Japan’s defensive capabilities later this month, with an eye on helping the government explore the option of attaining a strike capability as well.

In a Diet committee meeting on Jan. 26, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said a decision to strike enemy launch sites when there is no alternative would fall under the category of self-defense under the recently reinterpreted war-renouncing Constitution, thereby expressing his belief that the possession of a strike capability would pose no dilemma for Japan.

Flynn was warned by Trump transition officials about contacts with Russian ambassador

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By Greg Miller and Adam Entous

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn was warned by senior members of then President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team about the risks of his contacts with the Russian ambassador weeks before the December call that led to Flynn’s forced resignation, current and former U.S. officials said.

Flynn was told during a late November meeting that Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s conversations were almost certainly being monitored by U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said, a caution that came a month before Flynn was recorded discussing U.S. sanctions against Russia with Kislyak, suggesting that the Trump administration would reevaluate the issue.

Officials were so concerned that Flynn did not fully understand the motives of the Russian ambassador that the head of Trump’s national security council transition team asked Obama administration officials for a classified CIA profile of Kislyak, officials said. The document was delivered within days, officials said, but it is not clear that Flynn ever read it.

The previously undisclosed sequence reveals the extent to which even some Trump insiders were troubled by the still-forming administration’s entanglements with Russia and enthusiasm for a friendly relationship with the Kremlin.

The failed efforts to intervene with Flynn also cast harsh new light on a national security adviser who lasted just 24 days on the job before revelations about his discussions with Kislyak — and misleading accounts of them — forced him to resign.

Robert Kelner, a lawyer for Flynn, declined to comment.

Providing the Kislyak bio was seen by Obama officials as part of an effort “to make sure the new team had a full appreciation of the extent of the threat from Russia,” a former U.S. official said.

The perceived need to impress this point upon Flynn added to the growing concerns among senior members of the Obama administration, who at the time were still coming to grips with the scale of Russian interference in the 2016 election and were worried that any punitive measures they imposed might be rescinded when Trump was sworn in.

The request for the Kislyak document came from Marshall Billingslea, a former senior Pentagon official in the George W. Bush administration who led Trump’s national security transition team from November until shortly before Trump’s inauguration.

Billingslea, who declined requests for comment, was nominated this week for a high-level position in the Treasury Department overseeing efforts to disrupt terrorist financing.

A former deputy undersecretary of the Navy, Billingslea was among a small group of experienced national security hands on the Trump transition whose entrenched skepticism toward Russia seemed at odds with the pro-Moscow impulses of Flynn and the incoming president, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss Trump personnel and decision-making .

Others included Samantha Ravich, a deputy national security adviser to Vice President Richard B. Cheney; and Christopher Ford, a former State Department official who now works as a special assistant on counterproliferation issues in the Trump White House.

Ravich declined to comment. A spokesman for the National Security Council did not respond to requests for comment from Ford.

The Trump administration has taken a harsher tone toward Russia in recent weeks after the Syrian government, which is backed by Moscow, used chemical weapons on civilians. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last month accused Russia of being “incompetent or complicit” in the attack, and CIA Director Mike Pompeo described Russian President Vladi­mir Putin as “a man for whom ‘veracity’ doesn’t translate into English.”

But Trump has pointedly refused to employ such language himself and this week renewed his skepticism that Russia was responsible for a hacking and propaganda campaign targeting last year’s presidential race — a position held by the president that is at odds with the unanimous view of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Asked during a recent CBS interview whether he believed the allegations of Russian meddling, Trump said, “I’ll go along with Russia. Could’ve been China, could’ve been a lot of different groups.”

The unusual steps taken by transition officials working with Flynn suggest that internal tensions over Russia began almost immediately after Trump’s victory in an election that Moscow sought to help him win, according to a declassified report by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Billingslea was tapped in early November to head the effort to assemble a national security team for Trump in Washington, leading a so-called “landing team” that was based in offices at the General Services Administration headquarters in Washington but also had space in the Old Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House.

The effort was hampered by confusion in the election’s aftermath, friction among factions competing for influence with Trump, and communication difficulties created by an arrangement in which the landing team was based in Washington, but Flynn and his deputy, K.T. McFarland, spent almost all of their time at Trump Tower in New York.

In an attempt to improve coordination, the group scheduled a November meeting in Washington, a session attended by Flynn as well as about a dozen aides and staff members from other departments, officials said. Others also participated by phone.

As Flynn went through his upcoming appointments, he mentioned that he was being inundated with requests for meetings from diplomats. Most would have to wait to get access to Trump’s designated national security adviser, a position that would give Flynn enormous influence in the White House. Flynn then revealed that he’d already scheduled a conversation with Kislyak.

Meetings with foreign counterparts are commonplace for incoming national security advisers. But the reference to Kislyak raised eyebrows among officials who had spent much of their careers treating Russia as an adversary and avoiding encounters with Russian officials who might be engaged in espionage.

Several also worried that engaging with Kislyak, even if appropriate, had only political downsides for Trump, whose effusive praise for Putin during the campaign had fanned suspicion about his associates’ ties to Moscow.

Billingslea warned Flynn that Kislyak was likely a target of U.S. surveillance and that his communications — whether with U.S. persons or superiors in Moscow — were undoubtedly being monitored by the FBI and National Security Agency, according to officials familiar with the exchange. Flynn, a retired three-star general who led the Defense Intelligence Agency, would presumably have been aware of such surveillance.

Billingslea then said that he would obtain a copy of the profile of Kislyak, officials said, a document that Billingslea urged Flynn to read if he were going to communicate with the Russian envoy. Flynn’s reaction was noncommittal, officials said, neither objecting to the feedback nor signaling agreement.

Shortly thereafter, during the week of Nov. 28, Billingslea and other transition officials met with lower-level Obama administration officials in the Situation Room at the White House.

At the end of the meeting, which covered a range of subjects, Billingslea asked for the CIA profile. “Can we get material on Kislyak?” one recalled Billingslea asking.

Days later, Flynn took part in a meeting with Kislyak at Trump Tower. White House spokeswoman Hope Hicks has confirmed that both Flynn and Jared Kushner, Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, took part in that session, which was not publicly disclosed at the time.

It’s not clear whether the Kislyak profile was shared before that meeting. He continued to communicate with Kislyak, however, exchanging text messages and cellphone calls, culminating in a conversation intercepted by U.S. intelligence agencies just as the Obama administration was announcing election-related sanctions on Russia.

The Dec. 29 measures included the expulsion of 35 suspected Russian spies, the closure of two Russian compounds in the United States and economic sanctions against Russian intelligence services and officials.

Kislyak would have been keenly interested in whether the Trump administration, just weeks from taking office, intended to enforce these measures. After denying for weeks that he had discussed the sanctions with Kislyak, Flynn altered his story in early February when told that The Post planned to publish a story saying he had done so, citing multiple sources familiar with the contents of the Kislyak call.

Flynn was forced to resign days later and may face other consequences for his dealings with Russia. The FBI has interviewed Flynn about the conversations with Kislyak. Flynn is also under investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general over $45,000 he accepted for appearing at a 2015 event in Russia and $530,000 his former consulting firm was paid for work tied to the Turkish government.

The CIA bio on Kislyak was placed in a room in the Trump transition offices set up to handle classified material. Officials familiar with the document said that even if Flynn had read it, there is little in it that would have triggered alarms.

The file spans three or four pages, describing Kislyak’s diplomatic career, extensive involvement in arms negotiations, and reputation as a determined proponent of Russian interests. It noted that he routinely reported information back to Moscow and that any information he gathered would be shared with Russia’s intelligence services. But the file did not say Kislyak was a spy.

During Flynn’s fleeting tenure as national security adviser, he had several follow-on conversations with Kislyak and at one point proposed a lunch, officials said. The Russian Embassy called repeatedly to collect on that offer, officials said, until Flynn was fired and the calls stopped.

Navy SEAL killed in Somalia, first since notorious 'Black Hawk Down' battle in 1993

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By W.J. Hennigan

A Navy SEAL was killed and two others were wounded during a raid targeting a remote compound used by Shabab militants in Somalia, U.S. defense officials said Friday.

The SEAL, who was not publicly identified, is the first U.S. service member killed in combat in Somalia since the infamous "Black Hawk Down" battle in 1993 that left 18 U.S. military personnel dead, according to the Pentagon.

Officials said the U.S. force was accompanying Somali National Army soldiers during an assault on a Shabab compound near Barij, about 40 miles west of Mogadishu, the Somali capital, when they came under attack before dawn Friday.

The militants were "associated with some attacks on facilities that we use and that our Somali partners use nearby," said Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman.

He said the Americans were there to "advise and assist" the Somali government troops and were not part of the team assigned to enter the compound.

After U.S. helicopters dropped Somali troops outside the compound, a firefight broke out. The Americans couldn’t take cover immediately and were hit during an "early phase of the mission," Davis said.

The episode comes as the U.S. military expands operations against Shabab, which is allied with Al Qaeda. The group has carried out lethal bombings and attacks across Somalia and neighboring Kenya for more than a decade. 

Last month, the White House granted the Pentagon broader authority to launch airstrikes and conduct operations against Shabab than during the Obama administration.

But Davis said the Barij raid was carried "under the same authorities that we've had since we began our operations there in 2013, which is to advise and assist on these types of missions."

U.S. Africa Command has provided intelligence, training and logistical support to the Somali army and to African Union troops battling Shabab since 2013. Hundreds of U.S. special forces rotate through Somalia annually. 

U.S. drone strikes have killed several of Shabab's top commanders, according to U.S. assessments. 

The Sunni Muslim militia overran Mogadishu in 2006 after its fighters had ousted local warlords. The group then enforced strict Islamic law and it was illegal to play soccer or listen to music.

African Union troops retook Mogadishu in 2011 and drove Shabab from many towns in the south, including major ports that had provided significant revenue. But it remains a potent force in some rural areas.

The SEAL marks the fourth U.S. service member killed in combat since last Friday in conflicts around the globe.

Two Army Rangers were killed during a battle against Islamic State fighters in eastern Afghanistan. A paratrooper also was killed in the fighting to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul from Islamic State.

The Borrowed Words of Ivanka Trump

The “inspirational quotes” of her new book, Women Who Work, function as their own, tidy versions of the alternative fact.

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By MEGAN GARBER

Beloved, Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, tells the story of Sethe, a woman who was born into slavery and who escaped her plantation—only to be, a mere month after she found freedom, re-captured. Before she was returned, Sethe, rather than subject her 2-year-old daughter to the horrors that awaited them, paid the girl the only mercy she could: She killed her. Years later and, now, “free” once again, Sethe is haunted—by her daughter, by her history, by the history that is all of America’s to bear—and by the general fact that freedom is, in this country, a deeply relative proposition.

Ivanka Trump quotes Beloved in Women Who Work, her new book on Rewriting the Rules for Success. Its title is adapted from a tagline that was adopted in a marketing meeting and that has lived most of its life as a promotional hashtag for the Ivanka Trump brand of clothing, jewelry, and, most recently, feminism. The book makes liberal use of inspirational quotes, of words borrowed from the likes of Oprah and Chopra and Gandhi and Socrates and Cynthia Nixon and Coco Chanel; the sentence Trump borrows from Morrison comes as a preface to Women Who Work’s chapter on Working Smarter, Not Harder. “Bit by bit … she had claimed herself,” writes the one author, quoting the other. “Freeing yourself was one thing: claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

The line is, in the book, written in the faux-handwritten, Post-It-noted font in which many of Trump’s other bits of borrowed wisdom are rendered; it is punctuated with the book’s other hashtag, #ITWISEWORDS. Later in the chapter on Working Smarter, Trump will revisit the Morrison quote to offer her own interpretation of the concept of “freedom.” “Are you a slave to your time or the master of it?” Trump asks. She anticipates the answer. “Despite your best intentions, it’s easy to be reactive and get caught up in returning calls, attending meetings, answering e-mails, and managing your team, only to realize that it’s 6:30 p.m.—and you haven’t done a single thing that’s of high value … .”

And, with that, Ivanka Trump compares being “a slave to your time” to being an actual slave. With one quote—a line chosen, according to the accompanying hashtag, for its disembodied wisdom—the scion turned businesswoman turned presidential advisor cheerfully ignores history, or, more specifically, she reclaims it for the purpose of selling sheath dresses, work-appropriate stilettos, and herself. 

Reviews of Women Who Work, at least the ones that have not been written by People magazine, have generally dismissed the book as being by turns “painfully oblivious” and “vapid” and “like eating scented cotton balls,” in part because it relies on chirpy platitudes to send its message of feminine empowerment, and in part because its vision of feminism is not very feminist at all, but also in part because the book, as The New York Times put it, serves up “a strawberry milkshake of inspirational quotes.”

Borrowing the words of the famous and the wise to lend a sheen to one’s own is a time-honored practice, of course, common not only in high school essays that introduce their insights with those gleaned from the great philosopher Merriam-Webster, but also in the self-help genre, and in academia, and in journalism. The technique, at its best, does what any quote, well-deployed, will do: to supplement one’s own wisdom and, indeed, to serve as a gesture of performed humility. I don’t know, but here is someone who does.

Women Who Work is a postmodern book; all it’s missing is the irony.  

But there is very little humility in this book that is premised on the notion that women would be better off if women would be more like Ivanka Trump. And Trump is not simply, in Women Who Work, quoting other people. She is, more strictly, appropriating their words. (The “IT” in #ITWISEWORDS stands for, yes, Ivanka Trump.) Trump is taking those words out of their original contexts, and blithely, if not willfully, misunderstanding them.

Here, Melville House’s Ian Dreiblatt points out, is advice that Maya Angelou’s mother gave her before she moved to New York City—words Angelou recalled in her memoir, The Heart of a Woman:

Take care of yourself. Take care of your son, and remember New York City is just like Fresno. Just more of the same people in bigger buildings. Black folks can’t change because white folks won’t change. Ask for what you want and prepared to pay for what you get.

Here is how Trump reframes that advice in Women Who Work: “Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it.” (The asking in this case, NPR’s Annalisa Quinn notes, comes in the context of explaining how women might request a raise.)

And here is a line from Jane Goodall, the primatologist, that Trump quotes in Women Who Work: “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

Here is how Goodall reacted to being included in Women Who Work, in a statement she provided to CNN: “I sincerely hope she will take the full import of my words to heart. She is in a position to do much good or terrible harm.”

Goodall added:

Legislation that was passed by previous governments to protect wildlife such as the Endangered Species Act, create national monuments and other clean air and water legislation have all been jeopardized by this administration. I hope that Ms. Trump will stand with us to value and cherish our natural world and protect this planet for future generations.

Which is, in one way, reminiscent of the musicians who protest their music being used in the campaign rallies of politicians they disagree with: Do not use my art for your agenda. (Or, in Goodall’s case: I hope your agenda will come around to mine.) The problem is broader, though—not a matter of intellectual property colliding with the frenetic pageantry of the political campaign, but rather a matter of the way words themselves are by turns weaponized and weakened within this chapter of American cultural life. Trump is at her leisure to use others’ insights; the way she is using them, though, is what grates. The words’ histories, their original contexts, their authorial intents—none of that much matters in the breezy world of Women Who Work. It is in that sense a deeply postmodern book; all it’s missing is the irony. 

Women Who Work, as it happens, arrives at a moment that is itself deeply anxious about context and history. It’s hard to read the lines above, and the many others like them—words borrowed from Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Mindy Kaling, and so many others, many of them women of color—and not be reminded of the approach to words and wisdom that is generally taken by Trump’s boss, who is also her father, who is also the U.S. president, who is also the person most directly responsible for bringing terms like “fake news” and “alternative facts” into the American vernacular.

Context is not an academic nicety. It is what makes the difference between words that have meaning and words that have none.

In a week that found President Trump suggesting that Andrew Jackson could have prevented the Civil War—in a year that found the president suggesting that Frederick Douglass is still alive—his daughter’s treatment of history is particularly striking. Here, in this book from Trump, the daughter-advisor, is the trend re-exerting itself: Here are words that have been stubbornly disentangled from their original purposes. Even the high school essay that clears its throat with a “Merriam-Webster defines [word] as” shows concern about that word’s history, usage, and culturally agreed-upon meaning. Trump, though, treats the words of others as if they were offerings at a brunch buffet. She merrily appends them to her own bits of wisdom—“I believe that we each get one life and it’s up to us to live it to the fullest”—and then moves on to the next chapter.

Context, though, is not an academic nicety. It is what makes the difference between words that have meaning and words that have none. It is what makes the difference between catchphrases about #WomenWhoWork and a true grappling with the experience that women live every day. It is the difference between “feminism” and feminism. Trump disregards context when she writes that “passion, combined with perseverance, is a great equalizer, more important than education or experience in achieving your version of success.” She disregards context when she talks about the diversity of her “demographic” not in terms of race or income, but in terms of being married or single, of having kids or not. 

Trump disregards context when she writes a book that ignores the structural forces that weigh on women’s lives, but that advises them simply to DREAM (be Determined, Respectful, Engaged, Ambitious, and Motivated) and to DO (be Dedicated and Optimistic).

And she disregards context, too, when she quotes Toni Morrison in order to make the point that women should try to avoid becoming “slaves to time.” Beloved, after all, is not merely a work of fiction. Morrison based her novel on the experiences of a woman who, just before the Civil War, escaped slavery in Kentucky and fled to Ohio. Her name was Margaret Garner. She is not quoted in Women Who Work.

North Korea accuses CIA of 'bio-chemical' plot against leadership

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By Nick Macfie

North Korea on Friday accused the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and South Korea's intelligence service of a plot to attack its "supreme leadership" with a bio-chemical weapon and said such a "pipe-dream" could never succeed.

Tension on the Korean peninsula has been high for weeks, driven by concern that North Korea might conduct its sixth nuclear test or test-launch another ballistic missile in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Reclusive North Korea warned this week that U.S. hostility had brought the region to the brink of nuclear war.

The North's Ministry of State Security released a statement saying "the last-ditch effort" of U.S. "imperialists" and the South had gone "beyond the limits".

"The Central Intelligence Agency of the U.S. and the Intelligence Service (IS) of south Korea, hotbed of evils in the world, hatched a vicious plot to hurt the supreme leadership of the DPRK and those acts have been put into the extremely serious phase of implementation after crossing the threshold of the DPRK," the North's KCNA news agency quoted the statement as saying, referring to the North by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

"A hideous terrorists' group, which the CIA and the IS infiltrated into the DPRK on the basis of covert and meticulous preparations to commit state-sponsored terrorism against the supreme leadership of the DPRK by use of bio-chemical substance, has been recently detected."

The U.S. Embassy in Seoul and South Korea's National Intelligence Service were not immediately available for comment. The U.S. military has said CIA director Mike Pompeo visited South Korea this week and met the NIS chief for discussions.

KCNA said the two intelligence services "ideologically corrupted" and bribed a North Korean surnamed Kim and turned him into "a terrorist full of repugnance and revenge against the supreme leadership of the DPRK".

"They hatched a plot of letting human scum Kim commit bomb terrorism targeting the supreme leadership during events at the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun and at military parade and public procession after his return home," KCNA said.

"They told him that assassination by use of biochemical substances including radioactive substance and nano poisonous substance is the best method that does not require access to the target, their lethal results will appear after six or twelve months...

"Then they handed him over $20,000 on two occasions and a satellite transmitter-receiver and let him get versed in it."

North Korea conducted an annual military parade, featuring a display of missiles and overseen by top leader Kim Jong Un and his right-hand men on April 15 and then a large, live-fire artillery drill 10 days later.

KCNA, which often carries shrill, bellicose threats against the United States, gave lengthy details about the alleged plot but said it could never be accomplished.

"Criminals going hell-bent to realize such a pipe dream cannot survive on this land even a moment," it said.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on Wednesday that Washington was working on more sanctions against North Korea if it takes steps that merit a new response. He also warned other countries their firms could face so-called secondary sanctions for doing illicit business with Pyongyang.

Tillerson said the Trump administration had been "leaning hard into China ... to test their willingness to use their influence, their engagement with the regime".

Two women accused of killing the estranged half-brother of North Korean leader Kim with a chemical weapon appeared in court in Malaysia last month.

They allegedly smeared the man's face with the toxic VX nerve agent, a chemical described by the United Nations as a weapon of mass destruction, at Kuala Lumpur airport on Feb. 13.