Новости за 09.06.2017

The Trump administration is roiled by both political and substantive crises. At a basic level, Trump doesn’t know how to run the government, or think in terms of the public interest. And at an acute level, he is mired in the scandal of the century. On Thursday, fired FBI Director James Comey testified that Trump is an abject liar, and, without explicitly saying so, left little doubt he believes Trump obstructed justice as well.

British Prime Minister Theresa May’s bid to consolidate power has backfired. Her Conservative Party lost its governing majority in Thursday’s snap-election, forcing it to form a minority government with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, which gained 31 net seats while Conservatives lost 12, appeared to get its boost from young voters. That assessment, if accurate, confirms a trend in American and Western European politics toward a radical turn among... Читать дальше...

When Donald Trump abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey, who was overseeing the investigation into Russia’s meddling in last year’s election, political observers were quick to denounce the move as a nearly unprecedented assault on the rule of law. Not since 1973—when Richard Nixon fired Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor looking into Watergate—had a president so obviously tried to shield himself from scrutiny. “We are careening ever closer to a constitutional crisis,” Senator Edward Markey warned shortly after the news broke. Читать дальше...

The most critical government document released on Wednesday—the one that’ll have the most wide-ranging impact in the future—was not James Comey’s prepared testimony for the Senate Intelligence Committee about his interactions with Donald Trump. It was a simple press release, issued by the White House, announcing a “fourth wave” of judicial nominations since the Trump inauguration. The eleven nominations included four district court judgeships, three for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, three for the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims... Читать дальше...

In 2009, when Alice Methfessel died in California at age 66, everything in her house was rifled through and catalogued. That’s because Methfessel had once been the lover of the poet Elizabeth Bishop—the woman to whom Bishop dedicated the National Book Award-winning Geography III. When “a mass of unidentified paper sitting in a storage container” was discovered among Methfessel’s effects in 2010, her heirs “promptly sold the lot to Vassar,” in the words of Bishop scholar Lorrie Goldensohn.

It’s easy to get lost in the technical thickets of former FBI Director James Comey’s Senate testimony on Thursday. Did President Donald Trump really obstruct justice, as many Democrats argue, or was he simply a neophyte politician with a ham-fisted approach to management who didn’t understand that law enforcement is supposed to be independent? This question only raises further questions about what constitutes obstruction, whether there has to be an underlying crime, and whether Trump’s state of mind is relevant in rendering judgment. Читать дальше...