Trump/Russia Update

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Everything you need to know about Trump and Russia

Trump stands by Sessions in storm over Russia contacts

 

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President Trump stood by his attorney general Jeff Sessions on March 2, amid a growing storm over revelations that Sessions met last year with Russia's ambassador but did not disclose the contacts in Senate testimony. (Reuters)

By Dana Milbank Opinion writer March 3 

Having trouble following the fast-moving developments about the Trump team’s ties to Russia? Here’s a primer to get you up to speed: 

President Trump got to know Russian President Vladimir Putin “very well,” but he doesn’t “know Putin.”

Putin sent Trump “a present” and they spoke, but Trump has “no relationship with him.” 

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Trump has “nothing to do with Russia,” but his son has said “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” and “we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” 

Russia definitely hacked the Democratic National Committee, unless it was a 400-pound man in his bedroom or a guy in a van down by the river.

White House uses members of intelligence community, Congress to counter Russia stories

 

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National Security reporter Greg Miller explains why the Trump administration is enlisting the help of intelligence officials and Members of Congress to counter Russia stories.(Jorge Ribas, Ashleigh Joplin/The Washington Post)

U.S. intelligence agencies allege that Putin meddled in the election to try to get Trump elected, but this was all a “ruse” and a “fake news fabricated deal to try and make up for the loss of the Democrats.” 

There was “no communication” between Trump’s team and Russia during the campaign and transition, except for communication with Russia by Trump’s future national security adviser, his future attorney general and his son-in-law and two others.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions “did not have communications with the Russians,” except for the two meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak he neglected to mention under oath. 

Sessions then said he never discussed the campaign with Russians, which is not what was alleged. 

Sessions had “no idea what this allegation is about” regarding his Russian contacts but had enough of an idea what it was about to declare “it is false.” 

Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, but this decision is unrelated to the discovery that he spoke twice with the Russian ambassador despite his claims that he had no such meetings. 

Sessions cannot confirm the investigation he recused himself from exists or will exist in the future. 

Sessions believes that perjury is one of the constitutional “high crimes and misdemeanors” and “goes to the heart of the judicial system,” except his false testimony under oath to Congress was not a false statement but a case of speaking too quickly. 

Sessions met with the Russian ambassador during the time Sessions was serving as a surrogate for the Trump campaign, but not in his capacity as a surrogate for the Trump campaign.

Sessions remembers nothing of his meetings with the Russian ambassador, except that he remembers clearly talking about terrorism and religion and Ukraine and he’s sure they didn’t talk about the campaign.

It was a total coincidence that around the same time Sessions was meeting with the Russian ambassador, Trump gave an interview that ended up on Russian state-owned TV saying he didn’t believe reports of Russian influence in the U.S. election. 

Trump, Trump’s press secretary and a broad swath of Republican members of Congress said there is no reason for Sessions to recuse himself from the investigation from which Sessions recused himself. 

The incendiary and salacious “dossier” by a former British intelligence official on Trump’s involvement with Russia was completely unverified, but U.S. authorities were prepared to pay the man who wrote it. 

Carter Page, who has extensive ties to Moscow, had “no role” in the Trump campaign, except that Trump, meeting with The Post’s editorial board, listed Page as an adviser. 

Reports of the Trump team’s ties to Russia are “fake news,” yet those who leaked the information for those articles need to be found and punished. 

Trump ousted Michael Flynn, his national security adviser, who Trump says did nothing wrong. 

Flynn, who spoke several times with Kislyak on the day President Barack Obama announced sanctions against Russia, told Vice President Pence and the FBI that the discussion that intelligence officials heard them having about sanctions was not a discussion about sanctions. 

The sanctions that Flynn reportedly discussed with Kislyak, in the conversation he can’t entirely remember, were not really sanctions. 

Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had “absolutely nothing to do and never has with Russia,” except for his extensive work for Russian oligarchs and pro-Russia forces in Ukraine. 

Manafort declared in the fall that “there’s no investigation going on by the FBI that I’m aware of” into his contacts with Russia, months after that investigation began.

Sessions previously asserted that “no one is above the law” and that failure to punish people for being untruthful under oath “will weaken the legal system,” and he proclaimed that “I’m very careful about how I conduct myself in these matters.” Except when he isn’t. 

So, now you know everything there is to know about Trump and Russia. This has been a public service announcement.

Trump's Defense

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 /THE NATIONAL INTEREST

March 4, 201710:38 a.m.

Trump’s New Russia Scandal Defense Is to Pose as the Victim of Obama

By Jonathan Chait

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The victim in chief. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

It is usually a mistake to read Donald Trump’s tweets as reflecting any course of action more considered than dyspeptic gut responses to whatever news has flashed across his face at the moment. Donald Trump’s splenetic Saturday morning tweets, alleging that Barack Obama wiretapped his phones came as a surprise to his advisers. Accusing the former president of serious crimes, and threatening legal action against him, is the sort of step that most presidents would not take without some advance planning. And indeed, not long after alleging that the former administration had consummated a Watergate-esque scheme to subvert the democratic process and destroy him, Trump was moving on to beef with the successor as host of his old reality television show.

Still, elements of a long-term strategy, accidental or otherwise, could be gleaned from the rant. The president may well have previewed the line of argument that may emerge as his primary defense.

Before this morning, Trump’s message on the Russia scandal has emphasized his innocence. He and his associates have done nothing wrong, and all the charges reflect baseless Democratic attempts to make excuses for Crooked Hillary’s sad defeat. (i.e., “Russia talk is FAKE NEWS put out by the Dems, and played up by the media, in order to mask the big election defeat and the illegal leaks!”) His new line of argument ignores the question of his own guilt or innocence and turns the accusation against his predecessor, who – he alleges – ordered his phones to be wiretapped.

The apparent source of this theory is a radio rant by right-wing talk show host Mark Levin, which was aggregated by the pro-Trump conservative ethnonationalist site Breitbart, and which (Robert Costa reports) came to the attention of the White House staff. Since wiretaps must be legally approved by a special court and would require a high standard of evidence, it is highly unlikely that Levin’s theory is correct. (Or, at least, the theory assumes an act of breathtaking illegality by Obama for which Levin has produced no evidence.) It is also fairly ironic that Trump has chosen to compare Obama to Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy, given that Trump was closely mentored by the key architect of McCarthy’s smear campaign, and deliberately patterned his own campaign on Nixon’s.

But intellectual coherence or consistency are not baseline requirements for the messaging task Trump needs. If the Russia scandal continues to produce revelations of unethical or unpatriotic behavior by his campaign, he will need a response that can rally the conservative base behind him (and thus make Republicans in Congress reluctant to support independent investigations or even impeachment proceedings.) Turning the charge against Obama does that for him. It reframes the issue as a matter of the hated Obama abusing his power to discredit Trump. Any information flowing from the scandal is therefore presumptively tainted by its association with the former president.

The benefit of this line of reasoning is that it does not require conservatives to actually defend Trump’s behavior. All that’s needed is for their distrust of Obama to overcome their misgivings about Trump – a condition that describes virtually the entire Republican base. Notably, Mark Levin himself had lined up behind Ted Cruz against Trump during the presidential primary, calling Trump’s attacks on Cruz “Nixonian” and – even using the strongest rebuke in the conservative movement lexicon – “Alinskyite.” Now Levin is back on the team and, having forgotten his earlier diagnosis of Trump’s character and honesty, redirecting his anger against the Democrats. Conveniently for Trump, while unifying his base, attacking the alleged crimes of Obama also attracts support from left-wing sources like the Nation and the Intercept, which have consistently dismissed the Russia scandal as “neo-McCarthyism.”

A crucial element to Trump’s success during the campaign was his ability to position himself as an insurgent, marshalling the support of Americans who had a wide range of discontent with the status quo under a single anti-establishment candidacy. Every populist who wins an election has to deal with the tricky problem of converting a political style that requires a lack of power or responsibility to the condition of having both. By making himself a victim of Obama’s alleged abuses of power, Trump revives and extends his status as insurgent indefinitely. The most powerful person on Earth will remain the victim of a conspiracy so vast.

From Jonathan Chait

On March 2, House Speaker Paul Ryan asserted that he had seen “no evidence that anybody on the Trump campaign or an American was involved in colluding with the Russians.” What evidence would he like? A Trump adviser coyly revealing his advance knowledge of stolen email dumps, then admitting he has a “back-channel communication with Assange”? Because that exists. Maybe video of Trump asking Putin to hack his opponents’ email? Because that exists, too. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump announced at a press conference last summer. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” (Trump later claimed he was joking.) Even if Trump had nothing to do with encouraging the Russian hacking, aggressively exploiting it was a ­conscious choice. Other Republicans, like Marco Rubio — in one of his periodic outbreaks of conscience — asserted that the GOP should renounce the use of information from WikiLeaks rather than reward foreign interference in American elections. Trump made the opposite decision.

And Trump’s party has mostly decided likewise. All of it is fine — the nondisclosure of tax returns, the unprecedented self-enrichment, the fantastic lies and authoritarian lingo. Republicans in Washington see Trump as a useful vehicle for their policy objectives. Indeed, at least for the time being, Trump’s nationalist ravings have utility for special interests from the Kremlin to Wall Street, all of whom look upon the American president with smugness and satisfaction at a deal well struck. In Trump’s short tenure as president, his demagogic claim that elites have betrayed the American people out of solicitousness to foreign powers has finally become true.​

The Bayesian World

SCIENCE

Do You Really Have That Disease? 

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February 28, 20173:29 AM ET

Commentary

ADAM FRANK

UIG via Getty Images

You're sitting in the doctor's office waiting for the result of a test. The test will tell you whether you have a disease you really don't want to have.

As you wait, it seems as if the whole world is poised like a pencil balancing on its tip. In a moment, the doctor will come through that door and, based on the test, your world will fall one way or another.

Or will it?

I hope you never face a moment like this or, if you have faced one, it's now far behind you. But as scary as these moments can be, they also illustrate a more subtle way of thinking about a field most people (including me) aren't very good at thinking about: statistics.

As part of my sabbatical season, I've been teaching myself probability and statistics (I'm training for work I want to do in Network Theory). Statistics has never been a field that's come easily to me. But the deeper I dig into it, the more I'm falling in love with its ideas. Today, I want to use the example of the doctor and the test to introduce something remarkable in statistics that's been affecting us all. It's called Bayes' theorem. And because of its use in Big Data and all those algorithms ruling our world, it's worth taking a moment to consider.

So let's get back to the doc's office. Let's say she comes in and tells you the test was positive. She also tells you the test is 80 percent accurate.

Does that mean there's 80 percent probability that you have the disease?

While that might seem to be the intuitive conclusion, it doesn't tell the whole story. But to tell the whole story, you'll need a subtler kind of statistical reasoning. That's where Bayes' theorem comes in.

The usual way of thinking about statistics is what's called the frequentist interpretation. Simple frequentist reasoning goes like this: Let's say there are 1,000 people living in a small town and 10 of them have an illness. If I pick a citizen at random, what is the probability that the person has the illness? A simple frequentist calculation says the probability would be 1 percent (i.e. 10/1000 = 0.01).

The Bayesian interpretation of statistics looks at things much differently. It doesn't just see probabilities as an expression of how frequently something happens. Instead Bayesians take statistical inference as a way of stating our confidence about unknown states of the world based on knowledge of the world we already have. With each new piece of knowledge we can update how confident we are about something being true or not true. In that way, the Bayesian view often focuses on what's called conditional probability. What is the probability of this happening if I already know that has happened? (It's actually much richer than this but I'm simplifying here for brevity.)

To see how it all works, let's go back to our test. We already know the test was 80 percent accurate. But now we also want to consider the times when the test comes back positive even though you don't have the disease. These are known as false positives. Let's assume there is a 9.6 percent probability of the test coming back with a false positive. Finally, we should also ask: What's the raw probability of getting the disease? Is it rare or common? Let's say it's pretty rare, like in our small town example, with the probability of a random person having the disease being just 1 percent.

The power of the Bayes perspective is the way it quickly works with all this information rather than just looking at the positive test result. It considers how rare the disease is and the possibility of false positives, too. In this way the famous Bayes' theorem (whose equation and explanations can be found here) allows you to quickly get the all important conditional probability you're really interested in. And what do we mean by conditional probability? We mean the probability that you actually have the disease given that the test came back positive. That's the real question you want to answer.

Remember, if you had only considered the test, you'd think the probability you have the disease was 80 percent. With Bayes' theorem, however, it turns out that, in fact, you really have only about an 8 percent chance of having the disease. There is a big difference between 80 percent and 8 percent — and that difference comes because of the fact that disease is actually rare and there is a nonzero rate of false positives. By considering these other pieces of information in a clear and quick way, Bayes' theorem upends our usual intuitive statistical sensibilities.

What our little parable of the doctor's visit and test really tells us is the enormous power of the Bayesian perspective. Even though it has been known for some time(Thomas Bayes lived in the 18th century), its study and use has been growing like wildfire over the past few decades. In particular, the world of Big Data is powered by statistical reasoning — and much of that reasoning is powered by Bayes. So whether it's a spam filter or the language recognition going into your conversations with Siri, you've already met Bayes a lot of times.

Well, probably.

(*Please note the example in this post DOES NOT tell you to ignore any test you get but to get it done again or have other tests to confirm the initial result. Please! Talk with your doctor).

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Adam Frank is a co-founder of the 13.7 blog, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, a book author and a self-described "evangelist of science." You can keep up with more of what Adam is thinking on Facebook and Twitter: