Trump began his Twitter tirade on Tuesday night, slamming Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) for being upset over Comey’s firing despite the fact that Schumer has said he had no confidence in Comey’s leadership. Read more (5/10/17 9 AM)
Former FBI Director James Comey reportedly thought he was being pranked when he first saw news of his own firing, (New York Times)
Comey was speaking to FBI employees in Los Angeles on Tuesday, the Times reported, when news that he had been fired came up on the screen of a television that was playing in the background.
According to the Times, Comey saw it and “laughed, saying he thought it was a fairly funny prank.”
That’s when “his staff started scurrying around in the background and told Mr. Comey that he should step into a nearby office.“
At the time that Comey emerged and confirmed that he had been fired, he still had not heard directly from the White House, the Times reported. Read more (5/10/17 9 AM)
According to the Washington Post, White House press secretary Sean Spicer disappeared and hid behind a “tall hedge” after a brief interview with Fox Business on Tuesday night following the firing of FBI director James Comey — apparently in an effort to avoid a field of reporters hungry for answers.
Spicer first divulged news of Comey’s firing at around 5:40 p.m. by shouting it to nearby reporters outside his office, according to the Post.
After Spicer spent a few minutes in the shadows, Janet Montesi, an executive assistant in the White House press office, told reporters at the scene that Spicer would answer questions, but not on camera. Spicer then came out from the bushes. Read more (5/10/17)
Former FBI Director James Comey asked for a “significant increase” in resources for his bureau’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the U.S. election, days before President Donald Trump unceremoniously fired Comey Tuesday evening, the New York Times reported Wednesday.
According to the Times’ report, Comey made the request last week in a meeting with deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, whose letter Trump used to justify Comey’s ouster.
The Department of Justice denied the report. Read more (5/10/17 12:30 PM)
So you’re confused about this whole James Comey thing but also care about America so want to be less confused? Come with me!
James Comey was (until today) the Director of the FBI. A Republican appointed by Barack Obama in 2013. He made a lot of enemies in the Democratic Party when, 11 days before the 2016 election, he re-opened investigation into Hillary’s emails.
Turned out nothing interesting was in those new emails, and also that this probably did result in Hillary losing the election. Kinda uncool. Also turns out, he did not announce that the FBI was looking into links between Trump’s campaign and the Russian Government.
It is clear (though some still argue) that Russia actively worked to influence the outcome of the US Presidential election. They did this by hacking and releasing information on Hillary Clinton, and by creating and promoting incendiary and false news stories online.
The Obama Administration knew about this and got real mad at Russia, basically kicking all of their diplomats out of the country and creating new sanctions.
There are two main concerns that the FBI (and other agencies, including congress) have been looking into.
1. Whether the Trump campaign was in communication with the Russians before or after the election to say that the Obama sanctions wouldn’t last.
(This would be bad. Basically actively working against the existing government of the United States, which is illegal.)
2. Whether the Trump campaign actively worked with the Russians to time the release of negative information on Hillary Clinton.
(This would be even worse. Both could be considered treason.)
A number of people in Trump’s campaign and also his current team had conversations with Russian diplomats and lied about it. This includes Mike Flynn, who definitely violated the law and who was fired for lying to VP Pence about it. It also includes Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who agreed that he would not be involved in the Russia investigations because he lied under oath about it.
The FBI has had an on-going investigation into this stuff the whole time, and James Comey has been leading that investigation.
Quick note, a Grand Jury is a citizen panel that decides whether there’s enough evidence to try a case. These are usually secret, in order to protect the people who might not be even brought to trial, much less found guilty. But sometimes they need to gather information, like documents or testimony. And they do this with court summonses called subpoenas.
Well, yesterday, CNN reported that a Federal Grand Jury investigating Mike Flynn and the Trump Campaigns ties to Russia exists. That Grand Jury has issued subpoenas for more information, indicating to experts a high level of seriousness to the investigation.
It’s pretty clear that Trump campaign knows about this, and as it’s a Federal case, it was likely overseen by the FBI director, James Comey.
Suddenly, just before that story came out, the Trump team decided that Comey’s treatment of Hillary’s emails was bad, and fired him. The recommendation to fire Comey came from AG Sessions, who, again, recused himself from the Russia investigation after lying under oath. To be clear, both Sessions and Trump have previously praised Comey at length for his treatment of that investigation.
The response from Dems and also many Reps has been shock. It is very concerning for a President to fire someone who is investigating him. This seems to have happened very quickly. Comey found out he was fired the same time as everyone else, the letter Trump wrote to him was delivered to DC, but Comey was in Los Angeles at the time. Of course, the Deputy Director of the FBI is now in charge, but Trump has the job of appointing a new director, and has not made any sign that he has a list of candidates.
This seems the sort of thing that most congressional lawmakers, who have a mandate to check the power of the President, should be very worried about. Many are calling for a Special Prosecutor, who would be free to work without congressional approval, to be appointed.
Others want broad, unanimous support for Comey’s replacement, which would ensure someone who is not under Trump’s thumb.
The power to grant these things lies with congress. A congress that is controlled by the President’s party, but not by the President.
And that is where we are. It is pretty convoluted, thank you for taking the time to read.
The controversial points in this are: 1 Whether the Russian government hacked Hillary’s emails (many Republicans say there is no proof while every intelligence agency in the US said that it was orchestrated by the Russian government.
2. Whether Jeff Sessions lied under oath or if he just misspoke or forgot that he had met with Russian officials. In any case, he agreed to remove himself from the congressional investigation.
3. Whether the Trump Campaign investigation was the cause of Comey’s firing. The stated reason is that Comey “lost credibility” and damaged the reputation of the FBI by mis-handling the Clinton email investigation.
That’s as good as I can do, it feels like it’s a good deal more comprehensive and concise than most of what I’ve been reading. If it helped you, please show it around.
There’s no credible reason to believe that Comey wasn’t fired because of the Russia probe. It’s so obvious as to almost defy the need for explanation or restatement. With just slightly less certainty I think we can say that the only reasonable explanation for why Trump would take this step is that he knows or at least seriously fears there’s profoundly damaging information the investigation will unearth.
Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) slammed Attorney General Jeff Sessions for urging President Donald Trump to fire FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday, calling his participation a violation of his promise to recuse himself from the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
Sessions — who apparently recommended Comey’s termination in a letter to Trump — said in March that he would recuse himself from investigations into Trump’s Russia ties after it was revealedhe’d twice met with a Russian ambassador before Trump took office and denied the meetings during his attorney general confirmation hearing.
That means he vowed not to have any role in the investigations. For Franken and others, that suggests he should have been precluded from participating in firing Comey, who had reportedly requested a “significant increase” in resources for the bureau’s investigation into the election interference days before he was sacked. Read more (5/10/17)
It won’t happen, but Sessions should be forced to resign.
It’s been a year since we warned that Intel’s Management Engine – a separate computer within your own computer, intended to verify and supervise the main system – presented a terrifying, unauditable security risk that could lead to devastating, unstoppable attacks. Guess what happened next?
For the past week, the IT press has been full of news about the AMT module in the Management Engine making millions of systems vulnerable to local and remote attacks, with a firmware update to disable the module as the only really comprehensive solution. But AMT is only one of the many components of ME, and every one of them could have a vulnerability as grave as this one – and Intel is not offering any way to turn off ME altogether, meaning that there’s a lot of this in our future.
ME is a brilliant example of why declaring war on general-purpose computing is a terrible idea. There are lots of reasons to want a computer that can only run some programs (instead of every program): preventing poisoned operating systems and other malware, preventing game cheating, enforcing copyright restrictions (DRM), etc… Every one of them is presented as a use-case for ME.
But ME isn’t a way of designing a computer that can only run “good” programs. Instead, it’s a way of putting your general-purpose, universal computer under the supervision of another general-purpose, universal computer, and declaring this second computer (the ME system) to be off-limits to auditing, user-control, modification, etc. That works great, provided that your second computer has perfect security and zero flaws in its programming. But if there is even a single, minor flaw in that second system, you now have a devastating security disaster, because your main computer, by design, can’t tell you what that second system is doing, nor can it override the instructions that the supervising system sends it – once that supervising system is compromised, it’s game over.
Intel won’t tell us how to disable ME altogether for lots of reasons, but a big one is surely the fact that they’ve sold lots of entertainment companies on the promise of using ME for DRM – for example, to stop you from running a program that converts one of the W3C’s DRM-locked video streams into a download. Letting you shut down this back door into your computer – and your whole digital life – would also eliminate the means by which Intel plans to stop you from watching TV the wrong way. This is a terrible trade-off.
Now, there’s a new dingo babysitter in town: Ajit Pai, the FCC Chairman who has vowed to “take a weed-whacker” to the neutral internet.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man: John Oliver’s new Net Neutrality rant is his best yet, and it includes a shortcut to get you through the deliberately obscure commenting system the FCC has created to make it nearly impossible to weigh in on Pai’s neutracidal killing-spree: just visit GoFCCYourself.com and you’ll be taken directly to the relevant form.
Except, not right now. So many people have heeded Oliver’s call-to-arms that they’ve crashed the FCC’s website. Again.
When Purdue Pharma’s patent on the MS Contin was close to expiry, the Sackler family who owned the company spent millions trying to find a product that could replace the profits they’d lose from generic competition on MS Contin: the result was Oxycontin, a drug that went on to kill Americans at epidemic scale.
Oxycontin is the result of applying Purdue’s tried-and-true time-release technique to another out-of-patent drug, oxycodone (AKA percoset, roxicodone, etc). The plan was to produce an effective painkiller that lasted 12 hours at a time, overcoming the major deficit of drugs like MS Contin in that they had to be taken regularly to be effective. With a 12 hour formulation, the market for MS Contin – mostly people with terminal cancer – could be expanded to a wider world of chronic pain sufferers.
But from the earliest clinical trials, it was clear that Oxycontin didn’t work for 12 hours in most patients. Purdue massaged the numbers, lobbied the FCC, and got its drug approved as a 12-hour dose of effective pain relief. This led to hundreds of millions in advertising and direct marketing by pharma reps to doctors to prescribed Oxycontin for all manner of long-term pain relief. Billions in revenue followed.
When doctors told their reps that their patients’ pain returned in much less than 12 hours, the reps – and the company’s chief doctor – urged them to increase the dose of Oxycontin (and thus the company’s profits), rather than calling for an increased frequency (or another drug). The result was that pain patients took ever-greater doses of a highly addictive drug, but at long intervals that guaranteed excruciating withdrawal symptoms for hours before they were supposed to take another pill. Their doctors then upped their dosage further, leading to even higher highs and lower lows, and more addiction, a black market, and an epidemic of fatal overdoses that continues to resonate through America’s poorest communities today.
The Sackler family is richer than ever. Forbes estimates their net worth at $14 billion – richer than the Rockefellers.
