Category: Politics

Jean Swanson, a Vancouver city council candidate, was released Sunday from jail after serving partial time for her role in the Kinder Morgan protest. Jean Swanson, a Vancouver city council candidate (center), was released Sunday from jail after serving partial time for her role in the Kinder Morgan protest. Swanson, along with former B.C. Teachers’ Federation president Susan Lambert and five others, were sentenced on Wednesday to seven days behind bars after they pleaded guilty to contempt of court for blocking construction at a Kinder Morgan site in Burnaby. Swanson and Lambert, along with Kathleen Flahert, Gyoba Sachiko, and Heather Martin-McNab, were released early due to good behaviour. Jean is… Read More

Reacting to The New York Times story that White House Counsel Don McGahn has been speaking with Robert Mueller’s team, President Trump tweeted out that McGahn is not a “John Dean type ‘RAT,’” and that the story was fake news. It’s odd that Trump should bring up John Dean this weekend, for it was just this week that we also learned Trump has an Enemies List, just like Richard Nixon. Unlike Nixon, though, the president is hiding nothing—using security clearances and his Twitter account as the chief weapons to go after his opponents. This is a dangerous move. Nixon’s Enemies List, officially called his “Opponents List,” was a document that… Read More

On an early morning in June, I joined several dozen Democratic donors in a plush residence on the 64th floor of Trump World Tower to support the reelection of a Democratic congressman. The irony that we were raising money in the president’s building escaped no one, and the congressman took some questions from the audience about Trump’s tweets and Robert Mueller’s investigation. But most in the crowd wanted to know one thing: What’s the Democratic message? There, in a building staffed with uniformed doormen, standing on floors so fine that we’d been asked to remove our shoes, the donors demanded to know why their party had no unifying theme. Or,… Read More

The news cameras showed up, like they always do, and Donald Trump was ready for them. He emerged from a helicopter with TRUMP stamped across the side. He grinned. Then he took one of the most absurd victory laps in modern American politics. With every tweetstorm of his presidency, this is the moment—April 27, 2011, on a tarmac in New Hampshire—that should flicker across the national memory. Donald Trump’s Original Sin Trump’s story that day was about the birth certificate of the man who was president at the time, the man whom Trump would eventually replace in the Oval Office. After years of badgering Barack Obama about his birthplace, after… Read More

This week, retired Admiral William McRaven published an unsparing open letter to President Trump requesting that, in the wake of the president’s decision to strip former CIA Director John Brennan of a security clearance, the president grant him the same honor. It is a startling intervention by a luminary of military leadership—the man responsible for the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden—who has not previously publicly criticized this president, nor any other for that matter. To understand the meaning of McRaven’s intervention, one must recognize the ongoing challenge faced by former national security officials and military officers regarding appropriate responses to this president. National security is supposed to exist apart… Read More

Floyd Abrams well remembers the era when Richard Nixon battled the free and independent press. As a young First Amendment lawyer, Abrams was co-counsel for the defense, representing The New York Times in 1971 when Nixon unsuccessfully sought to block publication of the Pentagon Papers. Nixon wiretapped journalists, put some of them on his enemies list, and dispatched his vice president, Spiro Agnew, to threaten broadcast licenses and deride media members as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” And how benign those actions now seem in retrospect. Abrams, still practicing constitutional law at age 82, says the current president easily trumps Nixon as the most dire threat the press has ever faced.… Read More

Greyhound’s impending departure from Western Canada has prompted Lillooet to renew its call for the former B.C. Rail corridor between North Vancouver and Prince George to be reopened to passenger trains. The district has asked the Union of B.C. Municipalities to lobby the provincial government to work with Via Rail to determine the feasibility of restarting passenger service along the line, which ceased in 2002. “With the loss of Greyhound, this has now really put added stress on so many communities all the way up and down the line — especially those along Highway 97 to the north,” said Lillooet Mayor Marg Lampman. “It’s my hope that the premier will… Read More

Hazy smoke blanketed Vancouver as befit the presence of the Billy Graham of Big Tobacco — a veritable, if middle-aged, incarnation of Keanu Reeves as The Devil’s Advocate. Peter Luongo, the managing director of Rothmans, Benson and Hedges, televangelist of the nation’s nicotine pedlars, frowned as nature’s fire-and-brimstone obscured Robson Square. I imagine he thought, there’s no profit in that smoke. Still, he’s up for his new role now that tobacco is back in the news. “We do have a vision that we think can help people,” Luongo said sincerely. “It’s really about switching people from cigarettes to smoke-free alternatives. It’s a business opportunity, but it’s also a real opportunity… Read More

Written by Elaine Godfrey (@elainejgodfrey) Today in 5 Lines Jurors in Paul Manafort’s fraud trial ended a second day of deliberations without reaching a verdict. The judge said he has received threats and denied media requests to release the names of jurors in fear for their safety. Trump refused to say whether he plans to pardon Manafort if he’s convicted, but said that his former campaign chair is “a very good person” and that the trial is “very sad.” Trump blamed the cancellation of his military parade on Washington D.C. officials, saying they had inflated the cost. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser contradicted Trump on Twitter, claiming that she “got thru”… Read More

The paperwork was signed. Former FBI agent Peter Strzok, who became a lightning rod for efforts to undermine the Russia investigation, was set to receive a two-month suspension and a demotion as punishment for his alleged misconduct during the 2016 election. Then the FBI’s Deputy Director David Bowdich stepped in. In a letter spanning just over a page, Bowdich harangued Strzok directly for “undermin[ing] the credibility of the FBI” by sending text messages on an FBI-issued cell phone that were deeply critical of Donald Trump during a period in which the bureau was investigating his campaign. In an unusual reversal of the decision made by the Office of Professional Responsibility,… Read More