We begin with Tessa Stuart at Rolling Stone on Trump’s selection of Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State:
As CEO of Exxon — the sixth largest corporation in the world, worth $246 billion — Tillerson developed a close, personal friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Literally: Tillerson accepted the Kremlin’s official Order of Friendship in 2013.
"Being a 'friend of Vladimir' is not an attribute I am hoping for from a #SecretaryOfState," Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) tweeted on Saturday.
Senator John McCain (R-AZ) sounded a similar note on Meet the Press the next day. "It's a matter of concern to me that he has such a close personal relationship with Vladimir Putin. And obviously they've done enormous deals together. That — that would color his approach to Vladimir Putin and the Russian threat," McCain said.
The New York Times:
Why would Mr. Trump choose as his top diplomat a man whose every decision or action would be tainted by suspicion that he’s capitulating to Russian interests or those of the oil industry, having spent his entire career at Exxon Mobil?
Mr. Trump seems impervious to ethical standards. By naming Mr. Tillerson, he risks burdening his administration with another appointee likely to ensure endless controversy.
David Dayen at The Nation points out Tillerson has an SEC problem:
Most of the commentary over Donald Trump’s presumed secretary-of-state nominee Rex Tillerson concerns the Exxon Mobil CEO’s closeness to Russia, and Senate Republican discomfort with that relationship. But Trump and Tillerson share something else that hasn’t gotten as much attention—a penchant to rip off their business partners.
In ExxonMobil’s case, I’m talking about shareholders. Tillerson’s company has been under formal investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission since August for failing to accurately value its proven oil reserves.Those reserves are critical to investors for assessing the future viability of the company. Without the certainty that the company can keep crude oil flowing decades into the future, ExxonMobil stock would plummet. Rewriting the disclosures to investors with lower valuations would cost the company billions of dollars. And actually the entire oil and gas industry would be affected by a new standard rather than the current ad hoc system.
The investigation is a kind of companion piece to the “Exxon Knew” campaign, which charges that the world’s largest publicly traded oil company was aware of the catastrophic effects of climate change nearly 40 years ago, but lied to shareholders about these risks to its business model. Attorneys general in over a dozen states have opened investigations into these matters.
Jackie Calmes at The New York Times points out that Trump’s cabinet picks will face financial scrutiny that he didn’t have to face:
After nearly two centuries in which Senate reviews were cursory at best, that confirmation process has become increasingly arduous, regardless of party, and especially in the committees that require nominees’ tax returns. [...]
Dean Zerbe, a former counsel to the Finance Committee, had some advice for Mr. Trump’s nominees facing that panel: Do not copy the president-elect’s defiance on disclosure. “The committee will say, ‘Bless your heart. Now send us your tax returns,’” Mr. Zerbe said.
Senate Democrats will be pressing in January to make the scrutiny even broader. They propose that all committees make nominees privately submit their three most recent federal tax returns. Three committees — Finance, Budget, and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs — already do so. Together they have responsibility for examining five cabinet-level officials before confirmation: the secretaries of Treasury, health and human services, and homeland security, and the president’s trade representative and budget director.
For Democrats, the tax-disclosure proposal is a way to underscore Mr. Trump’s refusal to release his returns, despite a four-decade tradition of presidential candidates doing so. More to the point, they will have ample opportunity to press home their contention that a number of his cabinet choices have wealth and backgrounds at odds with his populist pitch.
Marlow Stern at The Daily Beast recaps President Obama’s interview with Trevor Noah at The Daily Show:
POTUS took things one step further, drawing a line between President-elect Donald Trump’s team and the Russians.
“This was not a secret running up to the election!” exclaimed Obama. “The president-elect [Trump] in some of his political events specifically said to the Russians, ‘Hack Hillary’s emails so that we can finally find out what’s going on, and confirm our conspiracy theories.’ You had what was very clear relationships between members of the president-elect’s campaign team and Russians, and a professed shared view on a bunch of issues.”
Jonathan Chait:
Trump has dismissed the CIA’s findings as fundamentally untrustworthy on the grounds that the agency failed to assess Iraq’s weapons of destruction before the war (and ignoring the distortions of strong-arming from the Bush administration that contributed to this error). His aide Carter Page, and his prospective deputy secretary of State, John Bolton, are suggesting the U.S. government may have conducted the hacks in order to frame Russia, and hence Trump.
While it may give Trump too much credit to assume he has followed a considered strategy, there is a coherent pattern to the discourse he has promoted. It is a comprehensive attack on empiricism. He spreads distrust against every institution, so that the only possible grounds for belief is trust in a person. The suspicion he spreads against every institution protects Trump from accountability. If everybody is guilty — what governments don’t murder journalists? — then nobody is guilty. Questions about Trump’s own suspicious financial and political ties are simply more conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile, John Cassidy at The New Yorker dives into Trump’s attacks on the CIA:
Trump doesn’t confine himself to reality—nothing new there. For once, though, he has been called on it, and there will be more repercussions. The confirmation prospects of Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, whom Trump reportedly has settled on as his pick for Secretary of State, have been further complicated. Other nominees will also be affected: Democratic senators are sure to take their confirmation hearings as a chance to ask whether they agree with Trump’s statements about the C.I.A. and Russia. And, while that’s happening, the new Administration will find itself embroiled in hearings about the extent and impact of the Russian cyber attacks. Testifying at these hearings, senior intelligence and law-enforcement officials are likely to contradict Trump, or at least express views that diverge from his.
For anyone who had been hoping that the fabled “checks and balances” in the U.S. system wouldn’t fail us, this is just the sort of thing we want to see happening. Of course, it doesn’t mean the threat of democratic erosion has been beaten back—far from it—or that Trump won’t ride through this squall. But the reaction to his latest hissy fit does suggest that he has made his first big misstep since the election. In the phrase often attributed to Talleyrand after Napoleon ordered the summary execution of the Duke of Enghien, Trump’s attack on the C.I.A., and his refusal even to countenance the notion that Putin’s hackers sought to help him out, was “worse than a crime—it was a blunder.”
A really fascinating piece from Deputy Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on America’s influence:
America’s allies in Europe and Asia are fixated on whether the Donald Trump administration will reject the re-emergence of spheres of influence or embrace them. They worry that, in his campaign, Mr. Trump seemed to approve of the “strong” leadership of autocrats and favor a transactional approach to Mr. Putin. He showed little concern about Russia’s cybermeddling in our election or aggression in Ukraine while suggesting that NATO is “obsolete.” He argued that the United States should get out of the business of “defending the world” and described Japan and South Korea as free riders that should pick up the burden of their own defense and nuclear deterrence. [...]
A sphere-of-influence world would not be peaceful or stable; the United States will not be immune to its violent disruptions. Hegemons are rarely content with what they’ve got; the demand to expand their zones as well as cycles of rebellion and repression within them will lead to conflicts that draw us in. The United States would have to accept permanent commercial disadvantage as economic spheres of influence shut us out or incite a race to the bottom for workers, the environment, intellectual property and transparency.
America’s greatest contribution to peace and progress has been laying the foundation for an open, rules-based, connected world. Now we have to decide whether to continue to defend, amend and build upon that foundation or become complicit in dismantling it.
Former Director of National Security Michael Hayden:
What happens if the incoming administration directs that the “Russia did it” file be closed? Would standing intelligence requirements to learn more about this be eliminated? And if they were, what would the agency do with relevant data that would inevitably come through its collection network?
And what about the statute that requires the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community to keep Congress “fully and currently informed” about all significant intelligence activities? Data on a foreign power manipulating the federal electoral process would certainly qualify. What will the White House position be when the agency is asked by Congress if it has learned anything more on the issue?
More immediately, what will CIA Director-designate Mike Pompeo say during his confirmation hearings about this? He is not yet director, so he can fairly deflect any questions on the substance of this debate, for now. But every TV set at Langley will be turned on during his confirmation hearings, and his most important audience will not be the senators on the dais. His future workforce will be looking for clues about his willingness to defend them against charges of incompetence and politicization simply for saying what their craft tells them to be true.
And, on a final note, the always excellent Eugene Robinson:
The president-elect appears to be assembling not a government but an anti-government. He said Sunday that “nobody really knows” whether climate change is real, though 97 percent of climate scientists say it is, and he intends to appoint a fervid skeptic as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. He seeks to install a labor secretary who does not believe there should be a minimum-wage increase, an education secretary who shows little or no commitment to public education, and a housing secretary whose only relevant experience is having lived in houses. Is this a recipe for American greatness? Or for incompetence and failure? [...]
Maybe [Clinton] would have won if Russia hadn’t been avidly helping her opponent.
Our president is supposed to be chosen in polling places across the United States — not behind the imposing walls of the Kremlin.