David Warsh: About ‘The Untold Story of Russiagate’

Trump campaign manager and pro-Russia operator at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

In the summer of 2016, somebody, perhaps Vladimir Putin himself, sketched a peace plan for Ukraine. The provenance of the proposal remains deliberately vague. Had the suggestion been accepted, it would have avoided Russia’s war on its neighbor five years later. The so-called “Mariupol plan,” named for eastern Ukraine’s largest industrial city, would have split off four prosperous Donbass counties to form an autonomous republic, to be led by Viktor Yanukovych, the deposed president of Ukraine who had fled Kyiv for Russia two years before. In effect: East and West Ukraine

The trouble is, the proposal was conveyed, via intermediaries, amid elaborate secrecy, to just one man, U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump.  Rival candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former secretary of state, would certainly reject the plan were she to be elected. So the loosely worded proffer was said to be enhanced by a sweetener: Russia would take a hand in the American election, denigrating Clinton through a massive hacking campaign.

That’s the burden of a Sunday magazine article in Nov. 6 The New York Times Magazine: “The Untold Story of ‘Russiagate’ and the Road to War in Ukraine,” by reporter Jim Rutenberg.  It is a long and complicated tale, and sticks closely the NYT’s editorial position: that Russia’s war was unprovoked by NATO expansion.

In fact, the story of the  “Grand Havana Room meeting,” atop 666 Fifth Ave. in Manhattan,  between Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort , and Konstantin Kilimnik, manager of Manafort’s international consulting office in Kyiv, has been told before, though never as  concisely as has Rutenberg:  by the Mueller Report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the thousand-page Senate Intelligence Committee report, and by The Atlantic’s George Packer in his review of Andrew Weissmann’s book about his service as a top aide to former FBI director Robert Mueller, Where the Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation.

Ruteberg drew on these accounts, and on his own reporting, in a mostly successful attempt to connect two narratives. “Thrumming below the whole (U.S.) election saga was another story – about Ukraine’s efforts to establish a modern democracy….”

From the platform battles of the Republican National Convention to the turmoil of the transition to the first impeachment, the main business of the Trump presidency all had to do with Ukraine. “Even now” he writes, “some influential voices in American politics, mostly but not entirely on the right, are suggesting that Ukraine make concessions of sovereignty similar to those contained in Kilimnik’s plan, which the nation’s leaders categorically reject.”

I was especially struck when I came across this passage:

As [Paul] Manafort rose to become Trump’s campaign chairman – and as Russian operatives were hacking Democratic Party servers – the candidate took stances on the region that were advantageous to Putin’s ambitions for Ukraine. Ahead of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July, Trump shocked the American foreign-policy establishment by voicing only tepid support for NATO. He also told aides that he didn’t believe it was worth risking “World War III” to defend Ukraine against Russia, according to the Senate intelligence report released in the summer of 2020.

That was, I thought, Trump in a nutshell. Candid, shrewd, perhaps even wise… and profoundly dishonest. After all, Manafort was a veteran political operative, who had served in the Reagan administration until leaving to form a foreign-relations consulting firm with his friend Roger Stone. He had been deeply involved in Ukrainian politics, mostly with pro-Russian factions, for more than a decade.  What in the world was he doing suddenly showing up as Trump’s campaign manager barely two months before the election?

Three weeks after the convention, Manafort was forced to resign, after his name turned up on a suspicious Ukrainian payroll ledger. Starting in 2017, he was charged with multiple felonies, and convicted of many of them, Trump pardoned him in December 2020.

Rutenberg’s story reinforced my conviction that the endless harping of the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal on “the Steele dossier” and Special Counsel John Durham’s lengthy investigation of FBI methods in dealing with it were red herrings of the first order.  The investigations that began even before Trump took office had almost nothing to do with the discredited campaign documents. The various probes were motivated by suspicions of extensive conflicts of interest, and the fact that his campaign and presidency were chock-full of persons who had done business with Russia.

It matters because, not for the only time, Trump’s political instincts were canny, reflecting the unarticulated preferences of many American voters, perhaps a majority, to live in a peaceful, if imperfect world. Had Trump been able to do a deal with Putin along the lines of the Mariupol plan, many Ukrainian and Russian lives would have been saved. Trump almost certainly would have been re-elected, American democracy would have been further damaged, perhaps irreparably. Things turned out as they should have, at least until Russia invaded Ukraine. .

That is emphatically not to say that peace negotiations shouldn’t be pursued in this dreadful war.  Republican opposition to continuing high levels of aid to Ukraine is growing, according to recent polls. Fifty-seven Republican congressmen and eleven senators voted against Biden’s $40 billion aid package earlier this year. New positions in both parties will take shape after the mid-term elections.

Meanwhile, Axios reports that Trump is eager to announce a third run for the presidency.  Bring it on!  American democracy learned a great deal about its weaknesses and strengths during the five years it was enrolled in Trump University. The experience produced a close call, but dangerous times make for lasting lessons. Two or three years of post-graduate education will produce still more insight into the inner workings of a strong democracy.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this essay originated.

David Warsh: Judge Ellis and the rise of conservative Republican judges

The front of the U.S. Supreme Court Building.

The controversial four-year prison sentence {considered very light by some legal observers} handed down for Paul Manafort last week will bring renewed attention to the career of Judge T.S. Ellis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.  It’s an interesting story, to be sure.  After graduating from Princeton in 1961, Ellis piloted F4 Phantoms for the Navy before graduating from Harvard Law School, in 1969, and Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1970.  He practiced law in Richmond, Va., until 1987, when President Ronald Reagan nominated Ellis to the district bench, the same day he proposed Robert Bork for the Supreme Court.

That was the summer that former District Court Judge Lawrence Walsh began his investigation of the Iran Contra affair, as special counsel to the Department of Justice.  (He had served as Deputy Attorney General during Dwight Eisenhower’s second term.) Judge Ellis’s distaste for wide-ranging independent prosecutors is said to have begun then, and escalated during the Whitewater proceedings, along with the aversion of Congress.

I spent last week reading The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton, 2008), by Steven Teles, of Johns Hopkins University.  It is gem of a book, quite unlike several other histories of various aspects of the conservative movement that I have read in that Teles, a liberal, musters considerable sympathy for those whose story he is telling.

Rise was his second, after obtaining his PhD in political science at the University of Virginia . (WhoseWelfare: AFDC and Elite Politics [University of Kansas, 1996] was his first.) For much of his research, Teles worked as a dispassionate reporter, interviewing principals and gaining their trust. Many of the documents he used were given to him. “Serious political earning,” he writes, “requires a view from the inside, and with it an effort to empathize with the challenge faced by the actors from who one wishes to learn,”The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement casts no light on Judge Ellis’s own intellectual odyssey, but it brilliantly illuminates his times.

Teles begins by sketching what it was that the conservative legal movement was up against, a liberal legal movement with deep roots in the New Deal. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union in the 1950s fashioned a new activist approach to the law, and by the early 1960s the leadership of the professional bar began to join in.  A turning point was the landmark decision in Gideon vs Wainwright, in 1963, in which the Supreme Court required states to provide legal representation to persons accused of serious crimes who could not afford counsel. Oversight by the Office of Economic Opportunity gave rise to legal aid societies.

Conservative backlash followed, but was largely ineffective.  Former American Bar Association President Lewis Powell wrote a memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce shortly before Richard Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court, arguing that legal activism posed a grave threat to the very survival of American business, but that  businessmen had “responded – if at all – by appeasement, ineptitude, and ignoring the problem.”

But the first generation of conservative public interest groups was ineffective.  (During his own court tenure Powell was seen as a centrist, not a conservative.) Efforts under Nixon to “defund the Left” worked only at the margins. Teles writes, “Conservatives slowly recognized that they needed to develop their own apparatus for legal change, one that could challenge legal liberalism in the classroom, the courts, and in legal culture.”

The way out of the wilderness turned out to be intellectual.  The law and economics movement, founded by Henry Simons and Aaron Director after World War II at the Law School of the University of Chicago, gathered steam when Ronald Coase joined the faculty in 1958. Henry Manne, alumnus and serial entrepreneur, introduced the new thinking to Federal judges, starting at the University of Rochester.  And law professor Richard Posner, later an influential Federal appellate judge, published an influential textbook, Economic Analysis of Law, in 1973. Teles doesn’t stint on drama here, dwelling on Manne’s failed attempt to found a “Hoover Institution East” at Emory University in the early 1980s.

Similarly, Teles’s account shows how the Federalist Society filled a need. Organized with great fanfare in 1982, dedicated to burnishing the credentials of conservative lawyers, the Federalist Society opened chapter in significant law schools as quickly as possible and only slowly developed a national office.  At first it existed mainly to foster debate, to attract new members. Only after the defeat of the Bork nomination did the society begin to conceive of itself as a “counter-ABA,” grooming and vetting candidate for office.

It was when the first generation of grassroots activists and business executives gave way to what Teles calls a “new class” of  academics and legal professionals that the conservative legal movement found its feet, even though much trial and error remained. The rise of the conservative legal movement is too often told in terms of a “myth of diabolical competence,” by writers on the right as well the left. It turned out that three kinds of networks were required – intellectual, professional, and political, in addition to imaginative patrons. The other ingredient, Teles continues, is frank internal criticism. The most important document in reorienting conservative strategy was a testy memo written for the Scaife Foundation in 1980 that circulated widely among conservative foundations, criticizing donors’ previous efforts and pointing the way to the Federalist Society.

As noted, Teles is a liberal.  His third book was Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned against Mass Incarceration (with David Dagan, Oxford 2016); his fourth (with Brink Lindsey), The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth and Increase Inequality (Oxford 2017).  With Robert Saldin, of the University of Montana, he is working on a fifth, about Republican opponents of Donald Trump. Meanwhile, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement remains an enduring contribution.  A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

David Warsh, a veteran economics and political columnist, is proprietor of Somerville, Mass.-based economicprincipals.com, where this piece first ran.           

David Warsh: Comey tried to play referee in a dangerous game; see widely ignored context here

The report of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice on the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email practices has been extensively hashed over since it was published.   You can read about it, if you like, here or here or here.

What’s lacking is vital context. Yet tucked away on the last two public pages of the 568-page report are some tantalizing findings destined to eventually become the fundamental background to the story.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report covered eight broad topics, as described by its executive summary –

• The FBI investigation, code-named “Midyear Exam,” of former Secretary of State Clinton’s email server.
• Former FBI Director James Comey’s go-it-alone statement about the FBI’s findings in July, 2016.
• The Department of Justice’s subsequent decision not to charge Clinton with a crime.
• The discovery in September of some unexamined Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner’s laptop computer, and the month that passed before the FBI sought a warrant to examine the machine.
•  Comey’s decision to notify congressional leaders in October that the investigation had been reopened,
• Some recusal issues.
• Various text messages among agents.
• And the FBI’s policies regarding Twitter announcements.

Indeed, the report presents an unusually thorough re-examination of the issues.  Agents assigned to the IG’s office sifted through 1.2 million documents and interviewed more than 100 witnesses, some of them more than once.

News organizations concentrated on two aspects:  Comey’s decision to make a unilateral announcement of FBI findings on July 5, in which he scolded candidate Clinton for having been “extremely careless” while recommending publicly that no charges against her be brought; and  his decision to notify Congress on Oct. 28 that new emails had been found.  Both decisions are held by partisans to have influenced the election to some unknowable degree.

In both cases, Horowitz was blistering. Of the July statement, its contents undisclosed in advance to his Justice Department superiors, the IG wrote that Comey had been both insubordinate and heedless of well-established FBI rules. He should have made his recommendation privately and allowed (or forced) President Obama’s Justice Department to make the call (and take the heat) that no charges would be brought.  Of October, Horowitz wrote:

"… Comey’s description of his choice as being between 'two doors,' one labeled 'speak' and one labeled 'conceal,' was a false dichotomy. The two doors were actually labeled 'follow policy/practice' and 'depart from policy/practice.' His task was not to conduct an ad hoc comparison of case-specific outcomes and risks. Rather, the burden was on him to justify an extraordinary departure from these established norms, policies, and precedent.''

Receiving slightly more attention, at least in conservative media, was a text exchange between the agent leading the investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russian connections and a high-ranking FBI lawyer, then his girlfriend.  Lisa Page wrote on Aug. 8, “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?”  “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” replied special agent Peter Strzok.

(Remember, Paul Manafort was still managing the Trump campaign at the time; 10 days later he resigned.) In September Strzok was promoted to deputy assistant director of the Espionage Section.  In October, he drafted Comey’s letter to congressional Republicans – the one widely seen as harmful to Clinton’s candidacy.)

Overlooked entirely in the coverage, as far as I could tell, were four pages at the end of Chapter 12 -- “Allegations that Department and FBI Employees Improperly Disclosed Non-Public Information” – in other words, leaks.

Horowitz expressed “profound concerns” about the “volume and extent” of unauthorized communications, despite “strict limits,” which had been “widely ignored.” The IG’s ability to identify leakers was hampered by two factors. Horowitz wrote:  Sensitive information was widely shared, often involving dozens, and in some cases, more than a hundred persons; second, the normal strict rules governing disclosure appeared to have been widely ignored during the month before the election.

Which leads to those two pages at the end of the report. (I couldn’t think of a way to link them but you can easily scroll down here to find them at the bottom – Attachments G and H.) They contain two “link charts,” or schematic diagrams, depicting verified communications between FBI employees and media representatives, in April/May and October 2016.

Why April/May? That was a period in which Comey was pressuring the Department of Justice to move more quickly to obtain possession of the laptops that Clinton lawyers had used to sort personal from State Department messages, telling DOJ supervisors that he might appoint a special prosecutor if he couldn’t obtain them. (Horowitz found no evidence that he seriously considered it.) Already Comey had begun to contemplate the unilateral announcement he would make in July, fearing that the Obama administration could no longer announce a decision not to prosecute Clinton in a way that the public would find objective and credible.

Why October?  That was the period of intense behind-the-scenes maneuvering over the existence of the Weiner emails. After Comey revealed their existence in his letter to congressional leaders, Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett followed up with a blockbuster story, FBI in Internal Feud over Hillary Clinton Probe. Barret disclosed, among other things, that an FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation had begun.

Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe was later fired, at the IG’s instigation, and referred for possible criminal prosecution, for having confirmed the existence of the second investigation to Barrett, and for having been less than candid when interviewed about his actions. McCabe has said that he was defending the FBI (and himself) against earlier unauthorized leaks accusing him of resisting the investigation.

No details are included in those diagrams about the identities of the callers and the called, but it seems a reasonable bet that the centerpiece of “Network Two” is reporter Barrett.   Whoever it is, you get from those 112 calls a pretty good idea of what true shoe-leather reporting looks like these days. And remember, the charts reflect FBI contacts only with journalists; congressional staffers are not mentioned.  (They may yet be if the Democrats regain the House.)

Comey has insisted, both in his book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, and in interviews with agents working for the IG, that the threat of leaks had no effect on his decision to write that letter on the eve of the election. Some senior officials who worked for him weren’t so sure.  His general counsel, James Baker, told the IG, “If we didn’t put out a letter, somebody is going to leak it.”  Rudolph Giuliani, a U.S. attorney before he becoming mayor of New York, was widely involved as a go-between between FBI-connected sources and reporters at the time.

In each case, Comey’s defense against the Inspector General’s criticisms has been that he felt the FBI – and perhaps the nation itself – were  caught in a “500-year flood” and that extraordinary measures were required to deal with it.   Precisely this sense of the extraordinary is missing from Horowitz’s report.

The last word in these events will belong to journalists, first, and then historians. Among the former, reporter Barrett will likely be the most important. He left The WSJ  for The Washington Post in February 2017 and the next year helped The Post share a Pulitzer Prize with The New York Times for national reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and Russia's connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.

Comey sought to play the role of referee. My hunch is that eventually he will be seen to have performed a service similar to that of another outsize regulator with an independent streak.  Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, also 6 feet 8 inches tall, began a costly campaign against price inflation in the late 1970s.  Despite expert skepticism and political criticism, he won his battle over a 10 years and subsequently was celebrated at a hero.

Upholding post-Watergate standards at the Justice Department (Comey was deputy attorney general 2003-05) and the FBI during three presidential administrations is not the same as making monetary policy..  Yet there may be something in the experience of growing up tall that predisposes some men to act in certain ways when confronted with emergency. Whether you think the comparison is apt depends on what you expect will happen to President Trump and the congressional Republicans who support him.

David Warsh is a longtime business and political columnist and economic historian. He is proprietor of Somerville, Mass.-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first appeared.

Trump and treason; longing for Jim Webb and John Kasich

Our great leader.

Given Donald Trump’s pathological lying, record of personal and business corruption, narcissistic rapaciousness, and his hiding of the sort of financial information that previous presidents have provided to the public, we may never know the full extent of his ties to Russian murderer and kleptocrat–in-chief Vladimir Putin. (Some estimates put Putin's fortune as high as $100 billion.)

But given the extent of Putin’s relentless and successful effort to throw the presidential election to his fan Mr. Trump, we must start asking whether Mr. Trump is a traitor, perhaps because his organization has received massive loans from Russian figures close to the dictator. How much coordination was there between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin? How much will there be when our new maximum leader takes over?

One hint might be Donald Trump Jr.’s remark in 2008: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.’’

And then there is Mr. Trump's sleazy and very close associate Paul Manafort, with his very tight ties with the Kremlin. Much of the Trump entourage, including some members of his family, makes one want to take a bath in disinfectant. A creepy, immoral bunch.

John Shattuck, a lawyer and an assistant secretary of state (1993-98) in the Clinton administration and now at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, wrote for the Dec. 17  Boston Globe a column headlined “Trump raises specter of treason, '' about the Russian hacking to get Donald Trump elected. Among his comments:

“Why does Trump publicly reject these intelligence agency conclusions {on the Russian assault on our electoral system} and the bipartisan proposal for a congressional investigation? As president-elect, he should have a strong interest in presenting a united front against Russia’s interference with the electoral process at the core of American democracy.

“There are several possible explanations for Trump’s position. They are not mutually exclusive. First, he may be trying to shore up his political standing before the Electoral College vote on Monday. Second, he may be attempting to undermine the credibility of US intelligence agencies in advance of his taking office so that he can intimidate them and have a freer hand in reshaping the intelligence product to suit his objectives. Third, he may be testing his ability to go over the heads of intelligence professionals and congressional critics and persuade the American public to follow his version of the truth about national security threats. And finally, he may be seeking to cover up evidence of involvement or prior knowledge by members of his campaign team or himself in the Russian cyberattack.

“In each case the president-elect is inviting an interpretation that his behavior is treasonous. The federal crime of treason is committed by a person ‘owing allegiance to the United States who . . . adheres to their enemies, giving them aid or comfort,’ and misprision of treason is committed by a person ‘having knowledge of the commission of any treason [who] conceals and does not disclose’  the crime. By denigrating or seeking to prevent an investigation of the Russian cyberattack Trump is giving aid or comfort to an enemy of the United States, a crime that is enhanced if the fourth explanation applies — that he is in fact seeking to cover up his staff’s or his own involvement in or prior knowledge of the attack.’’

Meanwhile, many of us say: “If only the Democrats had nominated someone like Jim Webb as their presidential candidate and the Republicans John Kasich!’’ Honorable and able men with remarkably little bad baggage.

For a trip down Memory (or is it Amnesia) Lane, take a look at this show. http://trumpthemovie.com/

-- Robert Whitcomb

Robert Whitcomb: A little context, please, on race relations; for ferries; democracy in Vt.

This originated in GoLocalProv.com

The news media, for marketing reasons, and the general public, for psychological/emotional ones, generally want simple narratives of big events, preferably with clear villains and heroes, idiots and geniuses, not to mention vivid starts and banging ends. A recent narrative is that Britain’s exit from the European Union was suicidal and will  be a world-historical catastrophe. No it won’t, as calmer members of the financial sector quickly realized.

Last week it was the shootings by police and then the lunatic Micah Xavier Johnson’s murder of five police officers. Tragic indeed, but the implication by some news media that America is somehow doomed to ever-widening  conflict about race and related law-enforcement matters is ridiculous.

America -- like all nations! – has plenty of racism. But the progress  that our huge, and complicated country has made in recent decades toward an inclusive and  mostly un bigoted society is impressive. I can remember back when drinking fountains were segregated in the South. The United States is a far more just (except perhaps economically) and peaceful place now than it was in, say, 1968 --  the disorderly year to which 2016 is now compared by people who didn’t live through ‘68.

That three of the key personalities in commenting on last week’s racially related incidents  -- Dallas Police Chief David Brown, President Obama and U.S. Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch--- are African-American says something important.

Most Americans are ignorant of many basic facts of their nation’s history. About foreign matters they’re even worse: The bigotries in most of the world far exceed America’s. That’s  one big reason that, for all our faults, so many people from the rest of the world want to move to the United States. Those denouncing  extremely ethnically diverse America as somehow uniquely vicious in race relations ought to do more reading and traveling.

A couple of other observations spawned by last week’s horrors:

Some people complain about the “militarization of America’s police.’’ But what do they expect given that it’s so easy for nonpolice to buy or otherwise get military-style weapons? The NRA, its employees on Capitol Hill and the likes of Walmart that sell so many weapons have been the biggest militarizers of America. They’ve made the nation an armed camp, and the police have to protect themselves.

Meanwhile, an interesting story in the July 11 New York Times reports:

“A new study confirms that black men and women are treated differently in the hands of law enforcement. They are more likely to be touched, handcuffed, pushed to the ground or pepper-sprayed by a police officer, even after accounting for how, where and when they encounter the police.

“But when it comes to the most lethal form of force — police shootings — the study finds no racial bias.

“’It is the most surprising result of my career,” said Roland G. Fryer Jr., the author of the study and a professor of economics at Harvard and anAfrican-American.’’  Here’s the link:

The conventional wisdom can usually use a bit of editing.

xxx

Let’s hope that the return of warm-weather Providence-Newport ferry service, which will last just 10 weeks, helps get Rhode Island officials, working with the U.S. Transportation Department,  to start year-round commuter services by boat around Narragansett Bay. TheBay’s coast is heavily populated, there are lots of harbors and the (bad) roads are often congested – all making Rhode Island a damn good place for ferries.

In Europe,  most bodies of water with dense populations around them have ferry service, as does Massachusetts Bay. See:  http://www.bostonharborcruises.com/commuters/

Boston Harbor Cruises (BHC) runs  MBTA commuter boats that carry thousands of passengers to and from work each day, including the Inner Harbor Ferry between Charlestown Navy Yard and Long Wharf; the Hingham-to-Boston Ferry service, and the Hingham/Hull/Boston/Logan service.  BHC also operates the Salem Ferry under contract with the City of Salem in the summer. Its slogan is:  “Leave Gridlock in Your Wake’’.

What a fine economic-development tool ferries could be for a crowded state much of which is a bay.

xxx

Ah, Vermont, where citizens flock to hear local and state candidates take (usually) polite questions. Vermont and New Hampshire, for all their differences, have especially civic-minded and engaged citizens.

I saw an example last Sunday at a forum sponsored by the Washington and Orange County (Vt.) Republican committees, at which two smart candidates vying for the gubernatorial nomination answered some questions prepared by a moderator, made brief general statements on why they should be governor and took some queries from the floor. The forum was in the barnlike Vermont Granite Museum in Barre. That city is the site of famed granite quarries and some of the most bizarre cemetery sculptures I have ever seen! 

The candidates – former Wall Street executive Bruce Lisman and Vermont Lt. Gov. and businessman Phil Scott – were both very articulate. They generally had coherent if, of course, predictably vague answers to questions and made  sure that they told the audience what they wanted they to hear.

This led to some typical (hypocritical?) contradictions such as talking up the need for business-friendly deregulation and economic development while also implying that they’d block a big (and utopian) development proposed by a Utah businessman and put the kibosh on more wind turbines on Vermont’s ridges because they’re unpopular among the neighbors. 

And the scary word “Trump’’ was never mentioned on the stage.

I went mostly because I wanted to see and hear my friend Josh Fitzhugh, chairman of the  Washington County Republican Committee, dress up like Vermont founder Ethan Allen and give a speech, rife with 18th Century language but along the lines of what a Republican circa 2016 might say. To read the speech, hit this link: http://newenglanddiary.com/home/2016/7/11

The speakers, the earnest and cordial audience, the stout and rich-voiced lady singing “The National Anthem’’ at the start and “God Bless America’’ at the end and a fried-chicken  picnic (inside – it was raining) made it a day of industrial-strength Americana.

xxx

Donald Trump’s capacity for sleaze is exceeded by his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, a man who apparently would do just about anything for money.

For decades,  Washington lobbyist and fixer Mr. Manafort has represented some of the world’s worst people, including the late Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, former Ukrainian dictator Viktor Yanukovych  and the late Somali dictator Siad Barre. He has  also worked with Pakistan intelligence services (which have worked hand in glove with Islamic terrorist groups). In purely domestic matters, he has also shown a similar rapaciousness. He is truly an archduke of amorality among his fellow Beltway Bandits. Donald Trump presents himself as an “outsider’’ who will shake up Washington. Eh?

xxx

I think that many readers will look differently at their own lives as they plow through My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 3,600-page, barely edited autobiographical novel, or extended journal, or whatever it is. The Norwegian writer’s astonishing recall of the joys, pains, drama and tedium of daily life deepens our understanding of what it has been like to live in a Western nation for the last few decades.

xxx

As I walked our dog on a balmy night last week, I heard   a man softly playing songs from the ‘30s on a piano in his living room.   The music mixed with the sound of leaves being rustled by the southwest wind. It was a magical moment, and rare in these cacophonous times.

Robert Whitcomb is overseer of New England Diary.