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Michael J. Stern, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, was a federal prosecutor for 25 years in Detroit and Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @MichaelJStern1
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Ever since “Trump 2020” campaign posters surfaced without Mike Pence’s name on it, there has been steady buzz building that Donald Trump might be considering replacing Pence on the ticket. That speculation has seemed like little more than yet another distraction. But today, a bizarre series of events involving Pence is raising questions about whether something might truly be going on behind the scenes.
It all started when multiple major media outlets reported that Mike Pence’s planned flight to a New Hampshire fundraiser had to turn around in mid-air and return to the White House due to an “emergency.” Various reports claimed that it was a security decision made by the Secret Service, and that it had nothing to do with Pence’s health. Then the story changed, and Pence’s flight supposedly never took off to begin with, and he never left Washington, again due to a still-unspecified emergency.
So what’s really going on? Your guess is as good as anyone else’s. The real story of what happened with Mike Pence, or most of it at least, will eventually get tracked down by the media. For now, what stands out is that no one can get their story straight. When a confusing development first takes place, the media can get caught off guard and make mistakes simply due to the speed at which things are happening. But in this instance the media has gotten the story wrong in so many ways, which usually points to misinformation being purposely released by the White House in the hope of burying the real story.
So now we’re looking at a bizarre “Mike Pence emergency” and possible attempt at a coverup today, just as the narrative about Trump ditching Pence from the ticket have reached their peak. And why the oddly specific denial about Pence’s health? Maybe it’s nothing. But this administration never met a ham-fisted stunt it didn’t like. It raises the question of whether the White House is manufacturing today’s “emergency” as a way of laying the groundwork to dump Pence after all. We’ll see.
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12:50 PM 7/2/2019
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“Fear, and the paralysis…”
Michael J. Stern, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, was a federal prosecutor for 25 years in Detroit and Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @MichaelJStern1
Michael J. Stern, Opinion columnist Published 3:15 a.m. ET July 2, 2019
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Michael_Novakhov shared this story from  The FBI News Review. |
“Fear, and the paralysis…”
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Michael J. Stern, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, was a federal prosecutor for 25 years in Detroit and Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @MichaelJStern1
Michael J. Stern, Opinion columnist Published 3:15 a.m. ET July 2, 2019
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"Fear, and the paralysis..."
6:58 AM 7/2/2019 - "Fear, and the paralysis...": Trump corruption investigators risk jobs, reputations for seeking truth - By Michael J. Stern - Post Link| Michael Novakhov - SharedNewsLinks℠ | ||
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Michael J. Stern, Opinion columnist Published 3:15 a.m. ET July 2, 2019
CLOSE
When I retired from the Department of Justice, shortly before the start of the 2016 presidential campaign, I found myself obsessively watching and reading the news. In an effort to reduce my chances of a stroke, I channeled my frustration with all things Trump into writing political op-eds. Then I sent them to family, friends and many of the federal prosecutors I’m still in touch with in several U.S. attorney’s offices.
And from those prosecutors who get my articles, I’ve received nothing but an unabashed two thumbs-up. Until now.
Since taking office,President Donald Trump has been pressuring the Department of Justice to prosecute his political opponents and the law enforcement team responsible for initiating the Russia investigation. Attorney General Jeff Sessions resisted. But when Trump installed William Barr as the head of federal law enforcement, Trump had a strategy in mind. With a presidential twist of the arm, Barr raised a white flag before the first tendon snapped.
Trump wants investigators to fear him
So began the Justice Department’s all-out offensive to “investigate the investigators.” In its wake, I’ve started receiving emails from federal prosecutors that go something like this: “Please keep sending me your articles, but don’t send them to my office email anymore.”
At first, I was surprised that my former colleagues would have any concern about receiving an article published in a mainstream newspaper. But over the past two years, the president has publicly buried government employees who investigated criminal activity connected to him or his campaign. FBI Director James Comey, Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page all worked on the investigation that documented Russian election interference designed to help Trump take the White House. All were fired or forced from their jobs.
Attorney General William Barr. (Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
Add to that list the president’s statement that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should be jailedfor appointing special counsel Robert Mueller and Trump’s order directing White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller. And just last week, in response to word that Mueller is scheduled to testify before Congress this month, the president falsely accused the former special counsel of destroying text messages between Strzok and Page and added, “That’s illegal. That’s a crime.”
Unvetted and unconfirmed: Obama didn't want a 'what now' moment if he won. Trump didn't plan and now we have chaos.
The president’s public campaign to turn the tables on the investigators is not limited to tyrannical retribution. It is designed to make prosecutors and agents second-guess every move they make in future investigations, for fear of becoming a target of the agency that employs them.
It’s designed to make them think: If I seek a wiretap on a Trump associate who is actively involved in criminal activities, will I end up spending the rest of my career prosecuting illegal reentry cases? Or, will DOJ assign someone to look through every text on my work phone, like they did to Strzok and Page? What will they do with the embarrassing personal texts they find?
Trump gets results with pressure and fear
Former FBI legal counsel Jim Baker said recently that the Trump-Barr attack on law enforcement will have a “chilling effect” on investigators who will worry that by investigating Russia’s interference in our elections, they could end up “being investigated themselves.”
I originally ended this piece with the comforting thought that Trump’s efforts will have no effect on those who inherit the duty of investigating corruption in the administration for which they work. But days passed, and I could not get myself to submit it for publication.
Civil rights assault: Trump Justice Department has turned 'religious liberty' into a license to discriminate
While I continue to have unfailing admiration and respect for the agents and prosecutors who dedicate themselves to the often thankless work of righting wrongs and keeping us safe, they are human. For all of Trump’s shortcomings, his superpower is influencing people through pressure, and desire, and fear. If the moral decomposition ofBarr, Rudy Giuliani and retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly has taught us anything, it is that.
I don’t know Sarah Fabian. Yet I’m willing to bet that when she joined the Justice Department’s legal team, she never imagined she would be the subject of a viral video in which she defended DOJ’s position that it is entitled to withhold basic sanitary supplies, like a toothbrush and soap, from children in detention camps who are sleeping on concrete floors with foil blankets.
Paralysis and fizzled investigations
There wasn’t a gun to Fabian’s head at last month’s court hearing. But as she squirmed under the inquisition light of the judges’ pointed questions, I could see DOJ’s long arm and a shadow of the threat that no doubt accompanied her into court that morning.
Trump and his eager henchman Barr have made clear that agents and prosecutors who investigate the president, his administration or his campaign are at risk of losing their jobs, their reputations and even their freedom.
It isn’t necessary for Trump to expressly prohibit investigations he wants stymied. As the president’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, testified to Congress, Trump expresses the subtext of his illicit directives in code. It so happens that agents and prosecutors, who have experience investigating the illegal activity of mob bosses, are well-versed in translating criminal code.
For law enforcement agents and prosecutors, second-guessing means lost opportunities and investigations that fizzle when they should spark. For Donald Trump, investigative palsy is not an unfortunate side effect of the most recent iteration of his DOJ takeover. Fear, and the paralysis that follows, is the point.
Michael J. Stern, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, was a federal prosecutor for 25 years in Detroit and Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @MichaelJStern1
The cartoonist's homepage, pnj.com/opinion Andy Marlette, Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal
For voters around the world, including the millions of Americans who will cast ballots in the midterms up to and on November 6, an election is democracy in action—an opportunity to make their voices heard, have a say in how their government is run and, if necessary, throw the bums out. It is a thoroughly political exercise, or so it would seem.
But to Peter Klimek, who works in the emerging field of electoral forensics, an election is something else as well. “Basically it is a huge, standardized social experiment,” he says. “What you are doing is taking the population of a country and segmenting it into different subpopulations—the eligible voters in their separate polling stations. Then you are having each one of them answer the same questions.”
And because huge experiments like elections follow the law of large numbers, a bedrock principle of probability, those answers from the voting data should show “certain statistical regularities,” says Klimek, who studies complex systems at Medical University of Vienna. When they do not, when there are instead statistical anomalies, that other F–word—fraud—may be the reason.
Read the whole story
· · · · · · · ·
Michael J. Stern, Opinion columnist Published 3:15 a.m. ET July 2, 2019
CLOSE
When I retired from the Department of Justice, shortly before the start of the 2016 presidential campaign, I found myself obsessively watching and reading the news. In an effort to reduce my chances of a stroke, I channeled my frustration with all things Trump into writing political op-eds. Then I sent them to family, friends and many of the federal prosecutors I’m still in touch with in several U.S. attorney’s offices.
And from those prosecutors who get my articles, I’ve received nothing but an unabashed two thumbs-up. Until now.
Since taking office,President Donald Trump has been pressuring the Department of Justice to prosecute his political opponents and the law enforcement team responsible for initiating the Russia investigation. Attorney General Jeff Sessions resisted. But when Trump installed William Barr as the head of federal law enforcement, Trump had a strategy in mind. With a presidential twist of the arm, Barr raised a white flag before the first tendon snapped.
Trump wants investigators to fear him
So began the Justice Department’s all-out offensive to “investigate the investigators.” In its wake, I’ve started receiving emails from federal prosecutors that go something like this: “Please keep sending me your articles, but don’t send them to my office email anymore.”
At first, I was surprised that my former colleagues would have any concern about receiving an article published in a mainstream newspaper. But over the past two years, the president has publicly buried government employees who investigated criminal activity connected to him or his campaign. FBI Director James Comey, Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page all worked on the investigation that documented Russian election interference designed to help Trump take the White House. All were fired or forced from their jobs.
Attorney General William Barr. (Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)
Add to that list the president’s statement that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should be jailedfor appointing special counsel Robert Mueller and Trump’s order directing White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller. And just last week, in response to word that Mueller is scheduled to testify before Congress this month, the president falsely accused the former special counsel of destroying text messages between Strzok and Page and added, “That’s illegal. That’s a crime.”
Unvetted and unconfirmed: Obama didn't want a 'what now' moment if he won. Trump didn't plan and now we have chaos.
The president’s public campaign to turn the tables on the investigators is not limited to tyrannical retribution. It is designed to make prosecutors and agents second-guess every move they make in future investigations, for fear of becoming a target of the agency that employs them.
It’s designed to make them think: If I seek a wiretap on a Trump associate who is actively involved in criminal activities, will I end up spending the rest of my career prosecuting illegal reentry cases? Or, will DOJ assign someone to look through every text on my work phone, like they did to Strzok and Page? What will they do with the embarrassing personal texts they find?
Trump gets results with pressure and fear
Former FBI legal counsel Jim Baker said recently that the Trump-Barr attack on law enforcement will have a “chilling effect” on investigators who will worry that by investigating Russia’s interference in our elections, they could end up “being investigated themselves.”
I originally ended this piece with the comforting thought that Trump’s efforts will have no effect on those who inherit the duty of investigating corruption in the administration for which they work. But days passed, and I could not get myself to submit it for publication.
Civil rights assault: Trump Justice Department has turned 'religious liberty' into a license to discriminate
While I continue to have unfailing admiration and respect for the agents and prosecutors who dedicate themselves to the often thankless work of righting wrongs and keeping us safe, they are human. For all of Trump’s shortcomings, his superpower is influencing people through pressure, and desire, and fear. If the moral decomposition ofBarr, Rudy Giuliani and retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly has taught us anything, it is that.
I don’t know Sarah Fabian. Yet I’m willing to bet that when she joined the Justice Department’s legal team, she never imagined she would be the subject of a viral video in which she defended DOJ’s position that it is entitled to withhold basic sanitary supplies, like a toothbrush and soap, from children in detention camps who are sleeping on concrete floors with foil blankets.
Paralysis and fizzled investigations
There wasn’t a gun to Fabian’s head at last month’s court hearing. But as she squirmed under the inquisition light of the judges’ pointed questions, I could see DOJ’s long arm and a shadow of the threat that no doubt accompanied her into court that morning.
Trump and his eager henchman Barr have made clear that agents and prosecutors who investigate the president, his administration or his campaign are at risk of losing their jobs, their reputations and even their freedom.
It isn’t necessary for Trump to expressly prohibit investigations he wants stymied. As the president’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, testified to Congress, Trump expresses the subtext of his illicit directives in code. It so happens that agents and prosecutors, who have experience investigating the illegal activity of mob bosses, are well-versed in translating criminal code.
For law enforcement agents and prosecutors, second-guessing means lost opportunities and investigations that fizzle when they should spark. For Donald Trump, investigative palsy is not an unfortunate side effect of the most recent iteration of his DOJ takeover. Fear, and the paralysis that follows, is the point.
Michael J. Stern, a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, was a federal prosecutor for 25 years in Detroit and Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @MichaelJStern1
The cartoonist's homepage, pnj.com/opinion Andy Marlette, Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal
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USA TODAY network Gary Varvel/Indianapolis star
The cartoonist's homepage, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/opinion/" rel="nofollow">www.usatoday.com/opinion/</a> Mike Thompson, USA TODAY
The cartoonist's homepage, courier-journal.com/opinion Marc Murphy, (Louisville, Ky.) Courier Journal
The cartoonist's homepage, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/opinion/" rel="nofollow">www.usatoday.com/opinion/</a> Mike Thompson, USA TODAY
The cartoonist's homepage, courier-journal.com/opinion Marc Murphy, (Louisville, Ky.) Courier Journal
The cartoonist's homepage, pnj.com/opinion Andy Marlette, Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal
The cartoonist's homepage, pnj.com/opinion Andy Marlette, Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal
The cartoonist's homepage, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/opinion/" rel="nofollow">www.usatoday.com/opinion/</a> Mike Thompson, USA TODAY
The cartoonist's homepage, pnj.com/opinion Andy Marlette, Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal
The cartoonist's homepage, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/opinion/" rel="nofollow">www.usatoday.com/opinion/</a> Mike Thompson, USA TODAY
The cartoonist's homepage, courier-journal.com/opinion Marc Murphy, (Louisville, Ky.) Courier Journal
June 27, 2019 Mike Thompson/USA TODAY Network
The cartoonist's homepage, pnj.com/opinion Andy Marlette, Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal
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For voters around the world, including the millions of Americans who will cast ballots in the midterms up to and on November 6, an election is democracy in action—an opportunity to make their voices heard, have a say in how their government is run and, if necessary, throw the bums out. It is a thoroughly political exercise, or so it would seem.
But to Peter Klimek, who works in the emerging field of electoral forensics, an election is something else as well. “Basically it is a huge, standardized social experiment,” he says. “What you are doing is taking the population of a country and segmenting it into different subpopulations—the eligible voters in their separate polling stations. Then you are having each one of them answer the same questions.”
And because huge experiments like elections follow the law of large numbers, a bedrock principle of probability, those answers from the voting data should show “certain statistical regularities,” says Klimek, who studies complex systems at Medical University of Vienna. When they do not, when there are instead statistical anomalies, that other F–word—fraud—may be the reason.
That appears to be the case with the results of Turkey’s 2017 constitutional referendum and its 2018 presidential election, which Klimek and colleagues analyze in a paper published earlier this month in PLOS ONE. Using their own set of statistical tools, the researchers identified multiple irregularities in both elections that they attribute to systematic ballot stuffing (submission of multiple ballots per person during the election) and voter rigging (defined as coercion or intimidation of voters). In the case of the constitutional referendum they wrote, “removing such ballot-stuffing characteristic anomalies from the data would tip the overall balance from a majority of ‘No’ to a majority of ‘Yes’ votes.” Klimek says, “We’ve showed that you can develop a unique tool set that allows you not only to screen a data set for potential signs of fraud but also to identify the specific methods used.” One of the most important features of such forensic tool kits (others in the field have created their own) is their portability. They can be used to analyze elections around the world, and a physical presence is not necessary. All that’s required is the voting data, ideally at the level of individual polling stations, which can usually be downloaded from official government Web sites.
There is clearly a need. A 2010 analysis of data from elections conducted in more than 170 countries between 1978 and 2004, published on the Social Science Research Network, found signs of some cheating in 61 percent of the countries, and major problems in 27 percent of them. Since the early 2000s various research groups, including Klimek’s, have used forensic tools to examine elections in multiple countries including Venezuela, Kenya, Cambodia, South Africa, Bangladesh and Argentina.
Although the new paper from Klimek’s group includes a disclaimer that it is “by no means direct proof of electoral fraud,” it makes a strong case the Turkish elections were marred by malpractice. And, the authors wrote, the patterns of irregularities in the two elections, held 14 months apart, were barely distinguishable from each other. “We found exactly the same malpractices in exactly the same districts in 2018 as we did the year before,” Klimek says. Making that kind of connection is key to preventing fraud in future elections, he adds. “If you want to get some policy-relevant actions out of this kind of research, you need to be able to tell what happened with which likelihood in which geographical area,” he notes.
The researchers worked with data from the official Web site of the Turkish election commission. To detect signs of ballot stuffing, they used the number of voters, the number of valid ballots cast (turnout) and the total votes tallied by the winners (‘Yes’ in 2017’s referendum and for Pres. Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2018) to create an “election fingerprint” for each of the polling stations they analyzed.
For the 2017 referendum, they crunched the numbers from 153,701 stations, grouped in 28,447 neighborhoods. For the 2018 election, they looked at 168,377 stations in 44,796 neighborhoods. When the data was plotted in two dimensions and compared with standardized fingerprints from trustworthy elections with normal distributions, Klemik’s team found “highly significant statistical support” for ballot stuffing in 11 percent of the polling stations they analyzed. (Ballot stuffing inflates both turnout and the percentage of winning votes.)
Election fingerprint analysis also turned up evidence of possible voter rigging at small, rural polling stations—which are less likely to be monitored by poll observers than large urban stations are, and where it is easier to identify the political leanings of individual voters. “That makes it much easier to conduct certain malpractices,” Klimek says, such as intimidating voters with an excessive police or military presence.
Walter Mebane, a professor of political science and statistics at the University of Michigan and co-author of a 2017 guide to election forensics for the U.S. Agency for International Development, urges caution when attributing election anomalies to possible fraud. “The problem is that many of the patterns that look irregular according to many statistical methods can be produced by strategic behavior, or normal politics,” he says. “You can tell that the pattern was manipulated or looks unusual, but you can’t tell why.”
Figuring out the “why” is the next big challenge, according to Mebane, a pioneer of the field. “Politics is weird, to use a technical term. All kinds of bizarre things can happen. I think the limit of election forensics, and this is the frontier of my research right now, is to try to see how well we can discriminate frauds from human behavior.”
An even more basic challenge faces researchers who want to use forensic tool kits to analyze U.S. elections—getting the data. “The way elections take place and are administered in the U.S. is not really up to the quality standards in other countries,” says Klimek, who tried and failed to apply some of his methods to the 2008 election. “The data quality was not good enough.” In most states, access to voter registration data is restricted mainly to the political parties, the candidates and some companies that work with them, Mebane says.
After a 2016 presidential election marred by allegations of foreign meddling, the midterm contest looms amid concerns about voter suppression in Georgia and other states as well as unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud by undocumented aliens. The most unexpected takeaway from electoral forensics may be that it is easier to analyze Russian elections than those in the U.S. “It’s really not much work to do this kind of analysis once you’ve got the data,” Klimek says. “With the algorithms we are talking about, it can be done in a couple of hours.”
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Study: Jon Stewart leaving 'Daily Show' helped Trump win presidency
Big Think-May 1, 2019
To conduct their analysis, the researchers used data from the 2016 Cooperative ... Using a 'difference in differences' statistical approach, the analysis ... Jon Stewart's departure was causal in the outcome of the 2016 election, ...
Study: Trump supporters held more sexist views after his election than ...
PsyPost-Mar 20, 2019
We found no evidence that the 2016 presidential election changed the ... with statistical controls and a propensity score matching analysis, and ...
Elections forensics can enhance, challenge legitimacy of election ...
University of Michigan News-Nov 7, 2018
My research studies whether statistical methods can accomplish this. ... at data from the 2016presidential election in Wisconsin and Michigan, ...
Voter ID laws don't seem to suppress minority votes – despite what ...
The Conversation US-Apr 4, 2019
... fraud during the 2016 election, was unable to unearth any significant evidence. Critics claim Republicans don't really care about electoral integrity ... But the research on voter ID laws and minority voter turnout has found mixed results. ... And statistical models can't account for every factor on Election Day ...
Republicans were upset about election fraud — before it threatened ...
Washington Post-Dec 6, 2018
It was 2016, and he was talking to a reporter from “This American Life,” the ... disputed by fact-checkers and statistical experts such as Nate Silver. ... in the name of supposed election integrity, though studies have failed to ...
Europe after the European election
American Enterprise Institute-May 1, 2019
Rather than populism, what makes the 2019 European election so ... He is the author of two books, “This Is London: Life and Death in the World City” (Macmillan, 2016) ... Dalibor Rohac is a researchfellow at AEI, where he studies the ... Journal of Economics, and The Review of Economics and Statistics.
Trump Could Win Re-Election
Outside the Beltway-Apr 24, 2019
If only there were a publication, perhaps a blog affiliated with ABC News or something, that uses statistical analysis to help people understand ...
Fake News Is an Old-People Problem
New York Magazine-Jan 9, 2019
... things you probably were already assuming without statistical data”: A new ... worked with a group of 3,500 people before and after the 2016 election. ... largely to studies showing that in 2016, fake news overwhelmingly ...
Money Still Rules US Politics
Jacobin magazine-Nov 6, 2018
In a paper on spending in the 2016 election, for example, Ferguson and his colleagues ... But the big studies of individual voters do not show this pattern. ... Statistical software for relating complex surveys of individuals to local ...
The Vulnerabilities of Our Voting Machines
Scientific American-Nov 1, 2018
One form of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, for example, was ... had access to a U.S. voting machine in order to do a security analysis, and .... statistical probability that the outcome on the paper and the outcome on the ...
Brian Kemp's Lead in Georgia Needs an Asterisk
The Atlantic-Nov 7, 2018
Abrams didn't have to fight just an electoral campaign; she had to ... voters from the state's registered electorate from 2016 to 2018 alone. ... An analysis of Kemp's records found that 70 percent of those ... As she explained her vision for “all Georgians,” her poll numbers inched up to a statistical tie with Kemp ...
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