Biden accuses Trump of ‘betrayal’ for reportedly ignoring intelligence
Joe Biden criticized President Donald Trump on Saturday for failing to respond to intelligence reports that Russia put a bounty on the heads of American troops in Afghanistan.
The presumptive Democratic nominee called it a “betrayal” of Trump’s duty as commander in chief that he did nothing after receiving intelligence reports that Russia paid Taliban radicals to kill GIS.
“This is beyond the pale. It’s a betrayal of the most sacred duty we bear as a nation — protect & equip our troops when we go into harm’s way,” Biden said.
White House spokeswoman Kayleigh Mcenany denied Saturday that either Trump or Vice President Mike Pence was briefed on the intelligence report.
Mcenany did not deny the veracity of the report about the Russian bounty, but she said that top intelligence officials say neither Trump nor Pence was told about it.
She blasted The New York Times for reporting that Trump was briefed. The story cited unnamed officials.
“This does not speak to the merit of the intelligence but the inaccuracy of The New York Times,” she said in a statement.
The former vice president noted that according to reports, Trump was told about the campaign in March but has not mentioned the report or punished Vladimir Putin. Trump even recently called for Russia to be included in the G-7 summit this summer.
“Donald Trump has continued his embarrassing campaign of deference and debasing himself before Vladimir Putin,” Biden said.
Biden made the remarks at a virtual fundraiser hosted by Hollywood heavyweight Jeffrey Katzenberg.
About 20 soldiers died in Afghanistan last year, and it’s not known how many are believed to be linked to the Russian plot.
The Times report concerned some of Trump’s Republican allies in Congress.
Rep. Michael Mccaul, R-texas, the leading GOP member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said on Twitter that if the story is true, “It would only deepen my grave concerns about the Putin regime’s malicious behavior globally.”
Mccaul did not address the idea that Trump didn’t know of the intelligence, but said his administration must take “swift and serious action to hold the Putin regime accountable.”
Trump previously has said that he believes Putin’s claim that he did not order a campaign of interference in the 2016 presidential election over American intelligence that concluded Putin was responsible.
NEWYORK>> Milton Glaser, the groundbreaking graphic designer who adorned Bob Dylan’s silhouette with psychedelic hair and summed up the feelings for his native New York with “I (HEART) NY,” died Friday, his 91st birthday.
The cause was a stroke, and Glaser had also had renal failure, his wife, Shirley Glaser, told The New York Times.
In posters, logos, advertisements and book covers, Glaser’s ideas captured the spirit of the 1960s with a few simple colors and shapes. He was the designer on the team that founded New York magazine with Clay Felker in the late ’60s.
“Around our office, of course, he will forever be one of the small team of men and women that, in the late ’60s, yanked New York out of the newspaper morgue and turned it into a great American magazine,” the magazine’s obituary of Glaser said.
Soon city magazines everywhere were sprouting and aping its simple, witty design style. When publishing titan Rupert Murdoch forced Felker and Glaser out of New York magazine in a hostile takeover in 1977, the staff walked out in solidarity with its departing editors, leaving an incomplete issue three days before it was due on newsstands.
“We have brought about
— however small — a change in the visual habits of people,” he told The Washington Post in 1969. “Television conditions people to demand imagination.”
But he said he had to work to keep his style fresh.
“There’s an enormous pressure to repeat past successes. That’s a sure death.” Referring to a beloved ’60s design motif, he added that he couldn’t do another rainbow “if my life depended on it.”
His pictorial sense was so profound, and his designs so influential, that his works in later years were preserved by collectors and studied as fine art.
But he preferred not to use the term “art” at all.
“What I’m suggesting is we eliminate the term art and call everything work,”
Glaser said in an Associated Press interview in 2000, when the Philadelphia Museum of Art hosted an exhibit on his career. “When it’s really extraordinary and moves it in a certain way, we call it great work. We call it good when it accomplishes a task, and we call it bad when it misses a target.”
The bold “I (HEART) NY” logo — cleverly using typewriter-style letters as the typeface — was dreamed up as part of an ad campaign begun in 1977 to boost the state’s image when crime and budget troubles dominated the headlines. Glaser did the design free of charge.
His 1966 illustration of Dylan, his face a simple black silhouette but his hair sprouting in a riot of colors in curvilinear fashion, put in graphic form the 1960s philosophy that letting your hair fly free was a way to free your mind. (For him, though, it wasn’t a druginspired image: He said he borrowed from Marcel Duchamp and Islamic art.)
The poster was inserted in Dylan’s “Greatest Hits” album, so it made its way into the hands of millions of fans.
“It was a new use of the poster — a giveaway that was supposed to encourage people to buy the album,” Glaser told The New York Times in 2001. “Then it took on a life of its own.”
MEXICO CITY >> The dramatic assassination attempt on Mexico City’s police chief was just the latest and clearest sign that Mexico’s powerful criminal element is bringing the violence it has unleashed on the general population directly to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s door.
More than 35,000 Mexicans were slain last year, the highest number on record and a grave threat to the president’s ambitious agenda.
Police Chief Omar García Harfuch was nearly added to this year’s murder total Friday when more than two dozen gunmen executed a carefully coordinated plan to intercept his armored vehicle at dawn with grenades, assault rifles and a .50-caliber sniper rifle on the capital’s grand boulevard. García survived with three bullet wounds and within hours blamed the Jalisco New Generation Cartel for the attempt that killed two of his bodyguards and a bystander.
It came less than two weeks after a federal judge and his wife were gunned down in their home in the western state of Colima. The Jalisco gang is also suspected in that attack.
“The cartel declared war on the government of López Obrador,” said Samuel González, a security analyst and the man who established the Attorney General’s Office special organized crime unit. “He doesn’t have any other option than to go after them,” because otherwise attacks on high-level government officials could continue.
It didn’t take long for López Obrador to disagree.
“We’re not going to declare war on anyone,” he said Saturday afternoon in a video broadcast through his social media. “We’re not going to violate human rights. We’re not going to allow massacres. But we’re going to stop these attacks from being orchestrated, and we’re not going to make any agreements with organized crime as we did before.”
The president said the key will be perseverance, with help from the intelligence services, which reportedly gave some warning that García might be targeted by an attack.
“Now we have given great importance to intelligence,” López Obrador said. “Before, the CISEN (National Intelligence Center) was used to spy on opponents. That is over. Now we have an intelligence center to prevent, and that is why these attacks have been prevented or the most regrettable and serious results of these attacks have been avoided.”
Last year this intelligence showed some problems.
In October, a botched operation to capture a son of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán in Culiacan, Sinaloa, resulted in the young drug capo’s release after cartel gunmen wreaked havoc on the city. López Obrador said this month that he ordered the release to avoid more bloodshed.
At the time, López Obrador pushed aside criticism that it was a sign of weakness that organized crime would continue to exploit. The president responded that his government will not be forced into a drug war.
“This is pacifying the country by convincing, persuading without violence, offering well-being, alternative options, better living conditions, working conditions, strengthening values,” he said then. He asked for one more year to “completely change this.”
Eight months later here we are.
On June 17, Raúl Rodríguez a columnist for El Universal, one of Mexico’s largest newspapers, wrote in a column that Mexican intelligence had intercepted a conversation between Jalisco gang operators in which it was clear they were planning to hit a major targetinthecity.
Rodríguez wrote that two unnamed security officials had confirmed the information and that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had confirmed the authenticity of the conversation. No names were mentioned, but analysts determined that the four potential targets were three members of López Obrador’s cabinet and García.
“It’s the way the mafiosos communicate with governments to tell them, ‘You touch me and we’re going to kill your most important officials,’” said Edgardo Buscaglia, an organized crime expert at Columbia University.
“When this happens, organized crime understands that the government is taking measures that are going to hurt its business and they begin to kill members of the political elite,” Buscaglia said.
Earlier this month, Santiago Nieto, the head of Mexico’s Financial Intelligence Unit, announced that in collaboration with the DEA, the unit was freezing nearly 2,000 accounts believed to be used by the Jalisco gang. Nieto was mentioned as one of the potential cabinetlevel targets of the cartel this month. There are also nearly a dozen pending extraditions of Jalisco gang associates, Buscaglia said.
The administration should continue to pressure the cartel while increasing security to protect its political elite, starting with López Obrador who continues to fly commercial and travel with little security, he said.
On Saturday, Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum shared a photo with García smiling from his hospital bed and said that he was doing well and had “more energy than ever.” She praised Mexico City’s police for a rapid response that likely saved his life.
Since the attack, authorities had made 19 arrests in the case, she said, including the alleged mastermind of the plot. López Obrador had not made any comments since early Friday.
Later, Ulises Lara, spokesman for the capital’s prosecutor’s office, confirmed the arrests and listed the weaponry recovered. It included 34 rifles, a grenade launcher and five .50-caliber sniper rifles.
Mexico’s security strategy — some question whether it is coherent enough to merit the label — bears little resemblance to the “hugs, not bullets” slogan that López Obrador campaigned on.
Last year’s soaring murder rate already challenged his longer-term goal of attacking the root causes of violence. The economic devastation worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic is making clear those policies will have little chance as more Mexicans are pushed into poverty.
“All that’s in place now is not a coherent, integrated security strategy, but one that is very much almost exclusively reliant on force, on militarized force specifically,” said Franko Ernst, senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.