WaPo:
‘Once this is over, we’ll be kings’: How Lev Parnas worked his way into Trump’s world — and now is rattling it
When Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told CNN that “I don’t know Lev Parnas,” Bondy tweeted a close-up of Parnas and Conway, their heads leaning toward one another, both smiling widely. “#LevRemembers,” his lawyer wrote.
When Trump announced that former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi was joining his legal team, his lawyer tweeted a photo of Parnas and Bondi seated at a table together, their arms around each other’s shoulders.
When Trump himself told reporters on Thursday that he didn’t “know who this man is” — an assertion he had also made shortly after Parnas was arrested — his lawyer posted a video of Parnas chatting with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago Club in December 2016.
The video shows Parnas at the front of a crowd, introducing the president-elect to a broad-shouldered man who, according to Bondy, was then serving as the top tax official of Ukraine.
In interviews, Parnas has said he is convinced prosecutors working for Barr have pursued the criminal case against him to keep him quiet about Trump’s work in Ukraine. He said he believes transparency is now his best protection against further criminal action.
This past week, he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper his goal is to make Trump understand “he’s not a king.”
“And I think it’s important for the country to find out the truth,” he said, “exactly what happened.”
WaPo:
Dershowitz distances himself from White House response to Democrats’ impeachment charges
Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law emeritus professor who recently joined President Trump’s legal team, on Sunday distanced himself from a response by two White House lawyers to House Democrats’ impeachment case against the president, noting that he did not sign on to the document.
“I didn’t sign that brief,” Dershowitz said in an interview on ABC News’s “This Week.” “I didn’t even see the brief until after it was filed. That’s not part of my mandate. My mandate is to determine what is a constitutionally authorized criteria for impeachment.”
Dershowitz is one of four lawyers who were selected personally by Trump and announced Friday as new members of the president’s legal team. The others are former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi and former independent counsels Robert Ray and Kenneth W. Starr.
David Perry/CNN
The National Archives' dangerous corruption of history
t turns out that the National Archives, whose mission statement touts "
openness" as its first principle, edited out anti-Trump statements in order to avoid "current political controversy,"
according to a spokesperson. The National Archives also initially defended their decision on the grounds that the photograph was for display, rather than being a historical record, but that's a distinction without a difference when it comes to communicating with the public. In fact, an edited public exhibit might have a greater propaganda effect than an altered historical record.
While the National Archives
issued an apology and vowed to undergo "a thorough review" of its policies after the Washington Post first reported on the alteration, having discovered it by chance, as a historian I worry about how many other altered documents the Trump administration has buried in our records. Will we ever know?
Censoring photographs to avoid angering a political leader is not a new phenomenon: Stalin's regime
famously manipulated photographs to shape public perception. It's all part of what Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University, calls "
memory politics," and the American right has played an ongoing role in shaping our memory in ways that support their goals.
Thread:
Captain ‘Sully’ Sullenberger/NY Times:
Like Joe Biden, I Once Stuttered, Too. I Dare You to Mock Me.
The retired pilot responds to recent comments from the president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, on the way the former vice president talks.
This culture of cruelty is what drives decent people from public service, and what makes millions of Americans recoil from politics, and even from participating in our democracy. Vice President Biden has spoken openly — and courageously, in my view — about the pain of his severe childhood stutter. He takes time to reach out to children who have suffered as he did.
As I grew older, I learned to manage and overcome my stuttering, through much hard work and intense focus. I learned to slow down and to enunciate each word with precision. I joined the church choir, and found that singing helped me to practice controlling my breath, and the formation of words. I learned to resist and overcome the bullying.
I also learned that our imperfections do not define us.
The fact that I once stuttered did not keep me from being a successful U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, an airline pilot, or even a public speaker.
Timothy Egan/NY Times:
Trump’s Evil Is Contagious
The president has shown us exactly what happens when good people do nothing.
After being told that he would be in violation of Geneva Convention rules that the United States had helped to create back when America was actually great, President Trump relented, but still wondered: Why not?
The warlord in chief had already gone out of his way to protect a Navy SEAL member who’d been accused of committing war crimes. And what kind of man did the president upend the military code of justice for?
“The guy is freaking evil,” one fellow SEAL told investigators, referring to Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher, who was convicted of posing for photos with the corpse of a teenage boy who’d been killed in his custody. After the presidential intervention, the formerly shamed serviceman was posing at Mar-a-Lago.
Kali Gross/The Root:
Meghan Markle’s Choice of Independence and Self-Respect Reflects Legacies of African-American Women’s Resistance
When I saw photos of Queen Elizabeth II wearing a headscarf and a bewildered, vaguely hostile expression in the wake of the bombshell departure of the Duchess and Duke of Sussex, my first thought was: They didn’t know who they were messing with.
Most coverage of Meghan Markle’s and Prince Harry’s decision to step back from their royal duties—including their latest decision to relinquish their “royal highness” titles and repay public funds—has framed the move as evidence of Prince Harry’s effort to protect his family from the same tragic fate that his mother fatally suffered at the hands of pariah paparazzi. But the couple’s maneuvers also bear the distinct imprint of the historical legacies of African-American women’s resistance.