Pentagon caught in Trump-Ukraine scandal; US troop suicides still rising; Did Assad use chemical weapons in May?; Kessel Run is John Travolta; And a bit more.
Acting DNI pressed on Capitol Hill over tardy release of Trump-Ukraine whistleblower complaint. On Thursday, Joseph Maguire gave the House intelligence committee two reasons that he did not promptly send the nine-page document to Congress for nearly a month after he received it on Aug. 26. “One, he said he was advised by the Justice Department that it could contain privileged information about the internal workings of the executive branch. Second, there was a question of whether the complaint fell inside his purview because it concerned behavior by the president who is “outside the intelligence community’,” the Washington Post reported.
Such complaints must go to Congress if deemed credible by the intel-community inspector general. The complaint describes how President Trump pressed new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for help against a political rival — after freezing the congressionally-mandated delivery of military aid worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Trump allies are trying to blame the Pentagon for the aid freeze. That flies in the face of the available evidence, as Defense One’s Katie Bo Williams lays out.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on Wednesday: The Pentagon was “concerned about the package going to a new administration we didn’t know anything about.” The new Ukrainian president “came from nowhere, and there was a lot of concern would this aid wind up being beneficial to the Russians,” Graham said.
But there’s no evidence of that. The same month Zelensky took office, Defense Undersecretary for Policy John Rood wrote to Congress and “certified that the Government of Ukraine has taken substantial actions to make defense institutional reforms for the purposes of decreasing corruption [and] increasing accountability.”That leaves SecDef Mark Esper stuck in the middle. “I will tell you that corruption is a very serious issue for the services, for DOD,” he said on Wednesday. “It was a concern of the interagency, and it was a concern of Congress.” Corruption in Ukraine, he said, is “just one of the many things that I think we have to continue to assess.”
What next? Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., wants the Pentagon inspector general to investigate whether the department had a role in withholding the funds. Read on, here.
White House’s extraordinary efforts to shield Trump’s foreign phone calls from scrutiny. The complaint revealed that documents pertaining to Trump’s July 25 conversation were “locked down” by being “loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive level,” as Williams reported. The Post now adds that “Similar precautions appear to have been taken with other such conversations “following embarrassing disclosures early in his administration that enraged the president and created a sense of paranoia among his top aides.” Read on.
Giuliani pressed Ukrainians on behalf of Trump. Rudy Giuliani, acting as Trump’s private lawyer, spent a lot of time over the past year trying to ensure “that Ukrainian authorities pursued allegations that could damage his Democratic rivals,” as a Washington Post story puts it. The piece about Giuliani’s meetings with Ukrainian prosecutors adds context to Trump’s freeze of Ukrainian aid before his meeting with Zelensky. Read, here.
Thursday in whistleblower-chilling:
- At a private speech in Los Angeles in the morning, Trump railed at the whistleblower and the White House staffers he talked with about the July 25 conversation with Zelensky, calling them “close to a spy” and saying, “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.” The Los Angeles Times reports.
- The New York Times published information that could help reveal the whistleblower’s identity. The piece drew immediate criticism, an explanation from the Times’ editor, and this from the whistleblower’s lawyer: “Any decision to report any perceived identifying information of the whistle-blower is deeply concerning and reckless, as it can place the individual in harm’s way,” said Andrew Bakaj, his lead counsel, told the Times.
More than 300 natsec pros signed a letter calling for an impeachment inquiry because of national security concerns. Read, here.
And some 233 House lawmakers now support such an inquiry, according to a Post tally. Just 218 are required to send a bill of impeachment to the Senate.
From Defense One
Pentagon Caught In The Middle Of Trump's Ukraine Scandal // Katie Bo Williams, Defense One: Some presidential allies want to hang the security-aid freeze on the Defense Department. There’s no evidence for that.
Global Business Brief // Marcus Weisgerber: Will Turkey return to F-35?; DOD AI chief: send money; SecDef tours troubled carrier; and more…
The Air Force's Kessel Run Is the John Travolta of Defense Acquisitions // Dan Ward: Right now, the much-hyped software-development office is doing fine work. Let’s remember that when the inevitable backlash arrives.
White House Used Classified System to Hide Trump’s Phone Call: Whistleblower // Katie Bo Williams: The IC employee wrote that the July 25 call to Ukraine was not the only time documents had been improperly hidden in codeword-level systems.
Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief from Bradley Peniston (above) and Ben Watson (below). If you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1840, Alfred Thayer Mahan was born in West Point, N.Y. Mahan’s “The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783” is often considered the most influential book on naval strategy. The State Department remembers Mahan’s book as “pav[ing] the way for Great Britain’s emergence as the world’s dominant military, political, and economic power. Mahan and some leading American politicians believed that these lessons could be applied to U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the quest to expand U.S. markets overseas.”
The Assad regime used chemical weapons last May, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday. “The episode took place on May 19 near the village of Kabana as President Bashar al-Assad’s forces sought to subdue resistance in Latakia province,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “At least four people were wounded in the rocket strike, which was alleged at the time by the Syrian opposition but took months for U.S. intelligence to confirm.”
Said Pompeo: “The United States will not allow these attacks to go unchallenged. Nor will we tolerate those who chose to conceal these atrocities.” But there’s little indication so far that the White House will carry out airstrikes as a result of these alleged CW attacks, as President Trump ordered in April of 2017 and 2018.
And ICYMI: The U.S. sanctioned two Russian companies Thursday “for trying to surreptitiously provide jet fuel to Russian forces in Syria,” the Journal reports separately, attributing the sanctions to “concern over Russia’s role” in helping the Assad regime’s targeting of civilians.
The U.S. envoy to Syria is still placing his hopes on a UN-led peace process that he said Thursday had been “languishing since 2015.” But not anymore, said Ambassador Jim Jeffrey. “The Damascus regime was holding off for years. They agreed to launch this thing. It will be launched within the coming weeks,” Jeffrey told reporters Thursday at the State Department. “We stand full-square behind this.” However, he added, “This is still symbolic at this point.”
Apropos of nothing, here’s a roadmap for advancing the pursuit of justice in the Sept. 14 Saudi refinery attacks, via the Washington Institute’s Michael Knights and Tim Michetti, working off precedents from the war against the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.
Highlights: “U.S. officials probably have access to satellite/drone imagery, electronic intelligence, and/or intercepted communications that prove the attack was launched from inside Iran. Normally, they would hesitate to reveal such evidence for fear of compromising sources and methods, but this case should be an exception.”
The Saudis might also have GPS data from recovered weapons debris at the refinery. “If so, they must provide this data and access to the original hard drives to UN investigators, along with any chain of custody records.”
Consider the case of the Shark-33 WBIED, for water-borne improvised explosive device, that the “Saudi-led coalition captured in Yemen in early 2017,” Knights and Michette write. “Riyadh never gave the UN access to data from the boat’s onboard computer system, which contained images from inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facility where the computer was constructed and exact GPS coordinates from the Iranian factory. The UN was also denied information on where the boat was recovered. As a result, it was unable to conclude that Iran had helped convert the boat into a WBIED.”
Why this matters: “When much of this information was later released to the public, it showed that the Saudis had wasted what should have been an intelligence slam dunk.” Read on, here.
Afghanistan’s national election is Saturday. And here are a few stats and data points to set the scene:
- Afghanistan has 35 million citizens;
- 9.6 million are registered voters;
- Nearly 5,000 polling centers are spread across 33 provinces;
- 110,000 officials are working the polls;
- 72,000 troops and police are pulling security. "The first two security rings closest to each polling center will be manned by police and intelligence officers," AP reports today. And Afghan soldiers "will be deployed to the third and most distant cordon."
- Incumbent President Ashraf Ghani’s campaign slogan translates to “State Builder.” His main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, uses “Stability and Integration” as a motto.
Reminder: The Afghan presidency is a five-year term, and the winning “candidate must secure 50 percent of the vote to win outright. If, as expected, that threshold is not crossed, a runoff will be held between the top two contenders — most likely on November 23,” al-Jazeera reports in a preview of its own. Or read Reuters’ preview, here.
BTW: The CIA on Thursday welcomed a Russian Mi-17 helicopter to the agency’s museum. That helo was “the first American air asset in Afghanistan after 9/11,” CIA tweeted Thursday. “The Mi-17 carried Team JAWBREAKER in, flew hundreds more missions, and is a tangible legacy of CIA’s pursuit of al-Qa’ida.” Read more from the story behind it all, here.
The U.S. military gets a new Joint Chiefs Chairman on Monday when Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford hands the reins over to Army Gen. Mark Milley. See Dunford’s nearly three-minute parting message to the troops, here.
U.S. defense officials said Thursday that active duty suicides are rising, then they asked reporters not to call the problem “skyrocketing” or “growing,” Reuters’ Idrees Ali reports from an “unusual” briefing Thursday. Military Times’ headline for the same briefing: “Active duty suicides are on the rise, as the Pentagon works on new messaging and strategy.”
Top-line takeaways from the DoD’s 2018 Annual Suicide Report:
- “The number of suicides jumped from 285 to 325 between 2017 and 2018,” Military Times writes.
- And the highest rates were found in the Marine Corps and the Army National Guard.
- “In all three components, more than 90 percent of suicide deaths were of enlisted troops: E-1s through E-4s made up 43 percent of active duty suicides, 39 percent of reservists and 53 percent of Guardsmen,” MTs reports. “Of those between 60 and 70 percent were carried out with a firearm, and 90 percent of those were with personally-owned weapons.”
- The National Suicide Prevention Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-273-8255.
Said SecDef Esper of the trend on Wednesday in Norfolk: “I wish I could tell you we had the answer to prevent further, future suicides in the armed services.” More here.
A Duke University study says U.S. employers think veterans lack social-emotional skills in the workplace, Military Times reported Thursday. It also found “others rated veterans as a better fit for jobs working with things rather than people.” And those perceptions — which researchers found could be altered by listing volunteer opportunities or work with animals on veterans’ resumes — are old ones about vets whose stubbornness confounds advocates like Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America CEO Jeremy Butler as well as Louis Celli of the American Legion. More, here.
A former American soldier is being held “on charges related to a double murder” in Ukraine after fighting for a far-right Ukrainian militia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported Thursday. What’s more, this former U.S. soldier is not only “linked to [that] 2018 double murder in Florida,” he’s also “linked to another U.S. soldier arrested in Kansas on unrelated bomb plot charges.” The story gets even more strange, with stopovers in Kenya to fight al-Shabaab. Read on, here.
Breaking this morning: NRA Was 'Foreign Asset' To Russia Ahead of 2016, New Senate Report Reveals, NPR’s Tim Mak reports today.
The gist: “[T]he Senate Finance Committee's Democratic staff found that the NRA underwrote political access for Russian nationals Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin more than previously known — even though the two had declared their ties to the Kremlin.”
But that’s not all. “The report, available here, also describes how closely the gun rights group was involved with organizing a 2015 visit by some of its leaders to Moscow.”
The next step could be an IRS inquiry, said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. More here.
US lawmakers take recess, again. The Senate left Thursday for a two-week recess after three weeks of work, which came after a five-week August recess, CNN’s Kristin Wilson tweeted Thursday afternoon.
If the national climate around impeachment is a bit too toxic for you, you’re not alone. Alexander Hamilton predicted pretty much the same hostile political climate around impeachment and the republic’s pursuit of innocence or guilt back in 1788 when he anonymously penned Federalist No. 65 — especially (in this case) the biting second paragraph. You can find that, here.
We learned three new things about robots this week: (1) That model from Boston Dynamics can do gymnastics (quite well); (2) another has learned to ice skate; and a third is now available to select customers in the construction industry. CNN has a bit more on that third robot, which looks very much like the dog from that terrifying “Black Mirror” episode, here.
New York’s AG is suing Dunkin' Donuts over a belatedly-disclosed cyberattack in 2015, Reuters reports. The AG says Dunkin “did nothing in 2015 to protect 19,715 customers whose accounts had been targeted in a single five-day period, after learning about the problem from its own app developer… That failure came to roost in late 2018 when more than 300,000 customer accounts were accessed in new attacks.” A bit more here.
And finally this week: John Malkovich will be joining Steve Carell in Netflix’s upcoming “Space Force” comedy series, Variety reported Thursday.
Just catching up to this story? “The show, which was ordered straight to series in January, is described as a [10-episode] workplace comedy centered around the people back on Earth tasked with creating a sixth branch of the armed services.”
About Malkovich’s character: He’ll play Dr. Adrian Mallory, “the head science advisor. He is described as brilliant, arrogant and hoping to prevent space from becoming the next great international battlefield.”
Other known characters include "a self-centered media consultant," Carell's General Mark R. Naird, Naird's high school student daughter, a female helicopter pilot, "a brilliant astrophysicist and rocket engineer who immigrated from China as a teenager and loves all things American," as well as "a charming observer from the Russian Government." Read on, here.
Have a safe weekend, everyone. And we’ll see you again on Monday!