July 30, 2018

Maybe Trump Paid the Russians to Hack the DNC Server?

Metzel Mikhail/TASS via ZUMA

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It’s Monday morning, so I might as well start off with where we are on the collusion witch hunt news, so that at least I can keep track of which new lies get told this week. Aaron Blake gets me up to speed:

The most notable portion of the interviews was when Giuliani rekindled the idea that collusion isn’t even a crime….“Hacking is the crime. The president didn’t hack. He didn’t pay for the hacking.”

He added on Fox: “I have been sitting here looking in the federal code trying to find collusion as a crime. Collusion is not a crime.” In case you forgot, Trump himself has been arguing for more than a year not that collusion wasn’t a crime, but that there simply was “no collusion.”

….Giuliani also, at one point, seemed to offer a very narrow denial of what happened with the Trump Tower meeting. While discussing Michael Cohen’s allegation that Trump knew about the meeting, Giuliani focused his defense on arguing not necessarily that Trump didn’t know about it — but that he wasn’t physically at the meeting. And he did it on both shows. “I’m happy to tell Mueller that Trump wasn’t at the Trump Tower meeting,” Giuliani said.

So: Trump didn’t pay the Russians to hack the DNC server and he wasn’t physically present at the Trump Tower meeting.

As far as I know, no one has ever accused him of either of these things, but now that he’s denied them I suppose my working assumption is that he did pay for the hacks and he was at the Trump Tower meeting. This is partly based on the fact that Rudy must have brought this up for some reason—presumably to get ahead of an accusation coming shortly?—but mainly it’s based on Trump’s Razor: everything Trump says is a lie until proven otherwise. I’ve rarely gone wrong applying Trump’s Razor to the various burblings that come out of the mouths of both Trump and his spokespeople, and I doubt it will steer me wrong this time.

One way or another, then, documents and/or testimony from Trump Org. folks will demonstrate that Trump paid to hack something; and also that he sat in on one or more of the “adoption” meetings with the Russians at Trump Tower. That’s my guess, anyway.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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