How an Indicted Oligarch Became a Key Player in Trump’s Ukraine Scandal
Dmytro Firtash at a public hearing at the supreme court in Vienna on June 25, 2019Herbert Neubauer/Getty On September 29, Rudy Giuliani appeared on ABC News, waving a fistful of papers. The document in his hand was an affidavit from Viktor Shokin, a former top Ukrainian prosecutor who was fired in 2016 under international pressure…
Free Speech Applies to Social Media Too
Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly via ZUMA Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech today defending his decision not to police political ads: “People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a Fifth Estate alongside the other power structures of society,” Mr. Zuckerberg, 35, said. He…
Mick Mulvaney Issues Furious Denial of Mick Mulvaney’s “Quid Pro Quo” Allegations
Evan Vucci/AP Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Thursday night sent out a statement to reporters moonwalking back an admission he’d made during a White House press briefing earlier in the day: that the Trump administration withheld military aid from Ukraine as a ploy to get Ukraine to investigate a baseless theory…
The Russians Who Hacked the DNC Are Now Targeting European Governments
Annette Riedl/DPA via ZUMA Press The group of Russian hackers that hacked the Democratic National Committee ahead of the 2016 US presidential election “has been busy compromising government targets, including three European Ministries of Foreign Affairs and the Washington DC embassy of a European Union county, all without drawing attention to their activities,” according to…
Donald Trump Just Won the Conflict-of-Interest Olympics
Kyodo via AP Images The United States will host the next G7 summit of world leaders at Donald Trump’s struggling Doral golf resort outside of Miami—a move that essentially forces foreign governments to line the president’s pockets. The decision poses perhaps the largest conflict of interest yet for a leader whose presidency is riddled with…
The Justice Department Hired the Son of a Vocal Trump Defender
Attorney General William Barr and President Donald TrumpAlex Brandon/AP The son of one of President Donald Trump’s most vocal defenders has a new gig in Trump’s Justice Department. Brady Toensing—whose mother Victoria Toensing and and step-father Joe diGenova are key players in the rapidly growing Ukraine scandal—joined the DOJ in June as a senior counsel…