We begin today’s roundup with reaction to President Trump’s decision to suddenly withdraw troops in Syria that were offering assistance to the Kurdish forces fighting ISIS. First up, The Washington Post:
The president claims that the Islamic State has been eliminated, but it has not. He suggested Turkey, Russia, Syria and European countries would prevent the group’s resurgence; they won’t. He also boasted that “if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey.” Such unhinged rhetoric ought to worry even those Americans who support Mr. Trump’s decision.
The New York Times:
Mr. Trump appears once again to have acted impulsively, in this case after a phone call with Mr. Erdogan. He blindsided officials at the Pentagon and the State Department and kept Congress and the allies in the dark. Administration national security officials have argued forcefully for maintaining a small troop presence in northeast Syria to continue pursuing the Islamic State and as a counterweight to Turkey and Syria’s Russian and Iranian allies. Mr. Trump’s determination to withdraw those remaining troops led to the resignations of former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the special envoy to the coalition fighting ISIS, Brett McGurk, last December.
Here’s Audrey Wilson at Foreign Policy:
Driving displacement. A Turkish incursion—as well as ensuing violence between Turkish and SDF forces—“would very likely displace large numbers of Kurds, who would head elsewhere in Syria or into Iraq,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, wrote in an email. “There are also large [internally displaced] populations in SDF-held areas who would be displaced anew if violence flares,” he added.
Trump’s former special envoy on ISIS Brett McGurk (read the whole thread):
Switching topics, Kevin Poulsen and Maxwell Tani at The Daily Beast confirm that RealClearPolitics is a right-wing site:
The company behind the non-partisan news site RealClearPolitics has been secretly running a Facebook page filled with far-right memes and Islamophobic smears, The Daily Beast has learned.
Called “Conservative Country,” the Facebook page was founded in 2014 and now boasts nearly 800,000 followers for its mix of Donald Trump hagiography and ultra-conservative memes. One recent post showed a man training two assault rifles at a closed door with the caption “Just sitting here waiting on Beto.” Others wink at right-wing conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s “ties to Islam” or the Clintons having their enemies killed, or portray Muslim members of Congress as terrorist infiltrators. The page is effusive with praise for Vladimir Putin, and one post portrays Russia as the last bastion of freedom in Europe.
Ryan Cooper on the attacks on the Ukraine whistleblower:
But there is a simple and obvious reason the whistleblower has not been prosecuted: They went through the official mechanisms for such things. Instead of sending documents to the press, they reached out to a staffer on the House Intelligence Committee who,per protocol, instructed them to report their concerns to the Intelligence Community Inspector General. The Inspector General then passed them on to Congress, despite the Trump administration's best efforts to obstruct that process. In other words, the whistleblower didn't break the law — something Taibbi bizarrely does not even mention.
And USA Today outlines the mounting evidence:
In a matter of a few short weeks, so many damning disclosures of malfeasance by Trump and his administration have emerged that they are hard to keep track of. The evidence of the president’s misuse of his powers is extensive, well-documented and growing by the day.
Irin Carmon previews gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court:
Aimee Stephens’s boss at Harris Funeral Homes called himself “old fashioned.” He required women employees to wear skirts and men to wear dark suits, because he believed that “a male should look like a … man and a woman should look like a woman.” Doing otherwise would violate “God’s commands.” When he fired Stephens after she’d worked there for almost six years, she argues, it was because she “departed from its owner’s sex stereotypes about how men and women should appear, behave, and identify.”
And yet this week, in a moment of terrifying historical weight, attorneys for the funeral home are asking the Supreme Court to say that Aimee Stephens wasn’t discriminated against on the basis of her sex — which is illegal under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — because she is transgender.
On a final note, don’t miss John Cassidy’s analysis of the case to disclose Trump’s tax returns:
In a filing to a federal court in New York, the Trump legal team, including Marc Mukasey, a son of Michael Mukasey, who served as Attorney General during the George W. Bush Administration, argued that, under the U.S. Constitution, a sitting President can’t be subjected to any criminal investigation except as part of an impeachment inquiry. The team’s argument was not merely that Trump can’t be hauled into court and prosecuted—a claim that now has the imprimatur of the U.S. Department of Justice—but that a President can’t be subjected to any type of “criminal process,” because it would “distract him from his constitutional duties.” [...]
The judge also noted that Trump’s legal team, in claiming that the President couldn’t be investigated, had placed a lot of emphasis on internal Department of Justice guidelines, which say that a President can’t be prosecuted while in office. But “the DOJ Memos do not constitute authoritative judicial interpretation of the Constitution concerning those issues,” Marrero wrote. “In fact, as the DOJ Memos themselves also concede, the precise presidential immunity questions this litigation raises have never been squarely presented or fully addressed by the Supreme Court.” Although Marrero obviously doesn’t speak for the high court, he did consider the constitutional arguments that Trump’s team had raised, and dismissed them, saying: “The Court concludes that neither the Constitution nor the history surrounding the founding support as broad an interpretation of presidential immunity as the one now espoused by the President.”