The Editorial Board

Behrouz Boochani could not be in Melbourne to receive Australia’s most prestigious literary award last Thursday. He was on a small Pacific island 2,500 miles away, near the equator, where he, along with hundreds of other refugees and asylum-seekers, has been locked up by Australia for nearly six years now.

“I have been in a cage for years but throughout this time my mind has always been producing words, and these words have taken me across borders, taken me overseas and to unknown places,” he said in his acceptance speech, delivered by video. “I truly believe words are more powerful than the fences of this place, this prison. This is not just a basic slogan. I am not an idealist. I am not expressing the views of an idealist here. These words are from a person who has been held captive on this island for almost six years.”

Boochani’s words are indisputably powerful. An Iranian Kurd who was a journalist and filmmaker, he said he was compelled to flee after police arrested several of his colleagues and raided his office. But his efforts to reach Australia by boat were stymied by the Australian navy, and he was shunted off to a detention center for refugees on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.

Boochani continued to write on Manus, now mostly through WhatsApp messages to his translator so the words would be preserved, despite regular searches by guards who often seized phones. In addition to articles for local and international outlets, he shot a documentary and worked on a book about his detention. That book, “No Friend but the Mountains,” won this year’s Victorian Prize for Literature and the 125,000 Australian dollars (about $90,000) that come with it.

The guidelines for the Victorian Prize stipulate that the writer must be a citizen or permanent resident of Australia, but the Wheeler Center, which administers the literature awards, made an exception for him. The judges described Boochani’s book as “a stunning work of art and critical theory which evades simple description.”

But it was not enough to secure passage to Australia. Under the country’s hard-line policy in force since 2013, all refugees who arrive by boat are refused settlement in Australia and are sent off to Manus or the tiny island-state of Nauru. The government has justified the policy as a way to prevent refugees from attempting a dangerous and potentially deadly crossing by sea, often at the hands of criminal gangs. But the offshore detention, often lasting years, has been described by refugees and human-rights organizations as a hellish and indefinite limbo in equatorial heat that drives many refugees, even children, to despair and suicide.

A pair of class-action lawsuits filed in December by a human rights group on behalf of about 1,200 migrants detained on the islands claims the asylum-seekers have been subjected to torture and “crimes against humanity.”

Under the Obama administration, the United States agreed to resettle up to 1,250 of the refugees in America in exchange for Australian assistance with refugees elsewhere. The deal was the subject of the infamous phone call on Jan. 28, 2017, in which the newly inaugurated President Donald Trump first heard of it from the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull. “This is going to kill me,” declared a horrified Trump. Amazingly, the deal survived, and a few refugees continue to reach the U.S.

It would be far better to end the offshore detention altogether. One hopes Boochani’s voice will prove more powerful than the misguided logic of successive Australian prime ministers who have rejected all criticism of their draconian policy and continue to detain hundreds of men, women and children on isolated Pacific islands.

“I dwell among a sea of people with faces stained and shaped by anger, faces scarred with hostility,” Boochani wrote in “No Friends but the Mountains.” “Every week, one or two planes land in the island’s wreck of an airport and throngs of people disembark. Hours later, they are tossed into the prison among the deafening ruckus of displaced people, like sheep to a slaughterhouse.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/03/opinion/behrouz-boochani-book-australia.html" id="8f456073-af17-3db0-abc4-00e4baf8be99">The New York Times</a>.

Letter From an Australian Jail

Editorial of The Times:

By many measures, the United States is thriving. The economy is humming, and unemployment is at 4 percent. High-school graduation rates are at an all-time high, and teenage pregnancy rates are at an all-time low. The crime rate is way down, and illegal immigration has been declining for more than a decade.

And yet: Polls show that 3 in 5 Americans think the country is on the wrong track. A majority expect things to get worse in the coming year. The president’s job approval numbers are underwater; Congress’ even more so.

As President Donald Trump prepares to deliver his delayed State of the Union address Tuesday, he might want to ask himself why people are so unsettled.

Our dysfunctional political system is surely taking a toll. Witness the recent partial government shutdown over the president’s demand for $5.7 billion in border-wall funding: For 35 days, a quarter of the federal government was derailed and 800,000 workers stripped of their livelihood, at an estimated loss of $3 billion in economic activity. All in service of nothing but a presidential tempest.

One certainty: There was not — and is not — a border emergency meriting the infliction of such pain and damage, or the waste of billions on a futile wall.

Trump has said that his big speech on Tuesday will “cover a lot of territory” and emphasize unity. Considering that he pledged the same last year, it’s wise to remain skeptical. But if he is interested in assuring the public that he can see beyond his narrow politicking on immigration to tackle truly urgent problems, here’s a starter list of possibilities:

Health care. “We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Trump promised. Instead, after laboring to gut the Affordable Care Act, he has so far produced only higher premiums and, according to a recent Gallup survey, 7 million more uninsured Americans.

Opioids. Trump was on the right track when, in October 2017, he declared opioid abuse a public health emergency. Yet almost 50,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses in 2017, more than were ever killed by guns or HIV in a single year.

Economic inequality. “In many ways this is the greatest economy in the HISTORY of America and the best time EVER to look for a job!” the president tweeted in June. Not for all Americans. Real wages have barely budged for decades; the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has not risen in nearly 10 years. Though oversimplified, Sen. Bernie Sanders’s claim that the top 0.1 percent control almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent is basically correct. Before falling silent on the question, Trump once vowed to eliminate a tax loophole that benefits wealthy hedge fund managers and private equity executives; that might be one proposal on which he could team up with the newly Democratic House.

Infrastructure. The president once sought $1.5 trillion in new spending on infrastructure, but Congress allocated only $21.2 billion — or slightly more than 1 percent of Trump’s pledge. One-quarter of bridges in the United States are structurally deficient or not designed to handle the current traffic, the Department of Transportation estimates. The lead contamination in the water system of Flint, Michigan, shocked America, but it was one of many examples of lead-poisoned water around the country. New York’s subways and public housing have fallen into decrepitude. Schools in Baltimore went without heat this past winter.

Foreign policy. On the campaign trail, Trump pledged a Middle East peace plan. Where is it? Meanwhile, we are spending about $700 billion annually on the military. Our troops have been fighting in Afghanistan for 17 years. Thousands more troops remain in Iraq.

The high price of higher ed. Student-loan debt has topped $1.5 trillion and now constitutes the second-largest category of consumer debt, behind only mortgages. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who recently declared the debt load a “crisis in higher education,” has proposed no credible plan to address it.

Gun safety. “We’ve seen too much of it, and we’re going to stop it,” Trump said in the wake of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting in February 2018. Yet in 2017, more people were killed by guns than in any other of the past 50 years and at the highest rate since the crack epidemic of the mid-1990s.

Climate change. Most scientists — and nations — see it as the mother of all crises. Trump’s approach thus far: champion fossil fuels and, when the weather gets chilly, tweet a joke about how the nation could use more global warming. Compromise on how to address the climate crisis will be hard to come by. But if the nation’s leaders are going to have a showdown, can’t it at least be over a real problem?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/opinion/state-of-the-union-2019.html" id="37ff3485-1763-369a-abbb-56dbc27c3982">The New York Times</a>.

A More Honest State of the Union

Editorials of The Times

On Sept. 14, 2001, Congress wrote what would prove to be one of the largest blank checks in the country’s history. The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists gave President George W. Bush authority to attack the Taliban, the Sunni fundamentalist force then dominating Afghanistan that refused to turn over the mastermind of the attacks perpetrated three days earlier, Osama bin Laden.

In the House of Representatives and the Senate combined, there was only one vote in opposition: Barbara Lee, a Democratic representative from California, who warned of another Vietnam. “We must be careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target,” she said. “We cannot repeat past mistakes.”

Days later, Bush told a joint session of Congress just how broadly he planned to use his new war powers. “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there,” he declared. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

More than 17 years later, the U.S. military is engaged in counterterrorism missions in 80 nations on six continents. The price tag, which includes the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and increased spending on veterans’ care, will reach $5.9 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2019, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University. Since nearly all that money has been borrowed, the total cost with interest will be substantially higher.

The war on terror has been called the “forever war,” the “long war,” a “crusade gone wrong.” It has claimed an estimated half-million lives around the world.

It is long past time for a reappraisal.

More than 2.7 million Americans have fought in the war since 2001. Nearly 7,000 service members — and nearly 8,000 private contractors — have been killed. More than 53,700 people returned home bearing physical wounds, and numberless more carry psychological injuries. More than 1 million Americans who served in a theater of the war on terror receive some level of disability compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The blood was spilled and the money was spent based on the idea that war abroad could prevent bloodshed at home. As Bush explained in 2004: “We are fighting these terrorists with our military in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond so we do not have to face them in the streets of our own cities.”

But hatred is borderless. It is true that since 9/11, no foreign terrorist group has conducted a deadly attack inside the United States. But there have been more than 200 deadly terrorist attacks during that period, most often at the hands of Americans radicalized by ideologies that such groups spread. Half of those attacks were motivated by radical Islam, while 86 came at the hands of far-right extremists.

When Donald Trump ran for the White House, one of his central promises was to rein in overseas military adventurism and focus the country’s limited resources on its core strategic priorities. While Trump’s foreign policy has been unwise if not self-defeating in many areas, he is right, as was Barack Obama, to want to scale back a global conflict that appears to have no outer bound.

That retrenchment needs to start where it all began: Afghanistan, which has remained for more than 17 years an open-ended war without an exit strategy or a focused target.

At the peak of NATO involvement in 2011, around the time bin Laden was killed in Pakistan, there were more than 130,000 soldiers from 50 nations fighting the Taliban and building up the Afghan national army so it could stand on its own. There are now 16,000 soldiers from 39 countries in the NATO force. More than 14,000 of them are American. Their mission now includes less combat and more training. But the result remains the same: The intelligence community’s 42-page “Worldwide Threat Assessment,” released last week, devotes only a single paragraph to the war in Afghanistan, labeling it a “stalemate.”

This page has been supportive of the war in Afghanistan since it began. We criticized NATO countries in Europe for not sending enough soldiers. And we were critical of the Bush administration for its lack of postwar planning and for diverting resources to the war in Iraq.

Events have shown us to have been overly optimistic regarding the elected Afghan government, though we were rightly critical of its deep dysfunction. We have raised concerns about military tactics that cost civilians their lives and been skeptical of the Pentagon’s relentlessly rosy assessments of the progress made and the likelihood of success.

We were supportive of Obama when he promised to end the war, we called for the faster withdrawal of forces and were disappointed when he fell victim to the sunk cost fallacy and sent in more troops late in his presidency. “It’s unlikely that keeping a few thousand American troops in Afghanistan for an extra year will do anything other than delay the start of that nation’s post-American era,” we wrote in 2015.

Trump repeatedly called for ending the war in Afghanistan. In 2012, for instance, he said the conflict there was not in the national interest. Once in office, however, he was persuaded by his military advisers in 2017 to increase the U.S. presence in pursuit of a new “plan for victory.” The plan, he said, would defeat the Taliban and other terrorists “handily.” The rules on airstrikes were relaxed, and their number skyrocketed. The Pentagon sent in 4,000 more troops, to augment the 10,000 that Obama left behind.

The plan is failing. More bombs and boots haven’t brought victory any closer. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed, maimed and traumatized. Millions of people are internally displaced or are refugees in Iran and Pakistan.

Poppy cultivation is up four times over 2002. Despite years of economic and military aid, Afghanistan remains one of the least developed countries in the world. Afghan security forces, which were supposed to take over from NATO troops, have lost a staggering 45,000 soldiers in battle since 2014 and can’t fill their recruitment targets.

Trump’s administration — which announced it would withdraw 7,000 troops but has yet to do so — is now negotiating with the Taliban, talks that are scheduled to continue this month. That’s a promising sign of a much-needed acknowledgment of reality.

It is time to face the cruel truth that at best, the war is deadlocked, and at worst, it is hopeless. The initial American objective — bringing bin Laden to justice — has been achieved. And subsequent objectives, to build an Afghan government that can stand on its own, protect the population and fight off its enemies, may not be achievable, and certainly aren’t achievable without resources the United States is unwilling to invest.

Walking away from a war is not a strategy. But an orderly withdrawal of NATO forces can be organized and executed before the year is out and more lives are lost to a lost cause. Two Americans have been killed in combat already in 2019. No American soldiers should be fighting and dying in Afghanistan in 2020.

Recent talks between the United States and the Taliban appear to have made encouraging progress. Those talks might be most accurately described as a negotiated capitulation by the international forces. The Afghan government hasn’t been party to the discussions because the Taliban doesn’t consider it a legitimate entity — just a puppet of the United States. In any case, once NATO forces leave, any treaty with the Taliban would be difficult to enforce.

But as part of any withdrawal discussions, it should be made clear to the Taliban, the Afghan government and neighboring nations that if the country is allowed to again become a base for international terrorism, the United States will return to eradicate that threat. The Taliban have paid a very high price for harboring bin Laden and — whatever their role in the future of the country — are unlikely to trigger a return of American forces by making a similar mistake in the future.

The eventual withdrawal of American forces might be the only thing that all the parties to the conflict want to see happen. A majority of Americans want an end to the war. If Trump doesn’t end it by the end of the year, Congress can repeal the 2001 authorization of military force. Congress needs, in any event, to reconsider its blank check. Congress should also make it easier for Afghans who worked with NATO forces and want to immigrate to the United States to do so. Many have waited for years.

No one can pretend that a withdrawal, even with an agreement, is likely to make life better for the Afghan people in the short term. That’s an agonizing consequence that anyone who supports withdrawal must acknowledge. Some experts predict an even fiercer civil war as the Kabul government and its army weaken and warlords gain new power. That could mean more deaths, new refugee flows and cuts in international aid that could cripple the Afghan military.

The plight of women and girls in Afghanistan has been perilous in wartime, and it could become far bleaker if the Taliban topple the current government and reimpose their barbaric pre-2001 regime.

Yet it’s also possible that a decision to withdraw could prompt the Afghans, the Taliban and regional players like Pakistan, Russia, Iran, India and China to work together on a cooperative solution to stabilize Afghanistan and deny terrorists a base. Such a solution that preserves some of the civil society gains that the Afghans have made, while keeping the country free of international terrorists, is in the interests of all those parties.

The failure of American leaders — civilians and generals through three administrations, including the Pentagon, the State Department, Congress and the White House — to develop and pursue a strategy to end the war ought to be studied for generations. Likewise, all Americans — the media included — need to be prepared to examine the national credulity or passivity that’s led to the longest conflict in modern U.S. history.

The military has given honorable service. It is not the soldiers’ fault that their country sent them on a mission that was not achievable and failed to change course when that fact became apparent.

Any reckoning with the longest war in this country’s history must also grapple with one of its gravest miscalculations. We need to recognize that foreign war is not a vaccine against global terrorism. In fact, the number of Islamist-inspired terrorist groups has grown worldwide since 2001, often in response to U.S. military intervention.

Nearly two decades of terrorist attacks — here and abroad by attackers foreign and domestic — have shown the obvious: that terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy force that can be defeated, and it knows no borders. It can be thwarted in certain instances, but cannot be ended outright.

If efforts to deal with international terrorism are to be sustainable indefinitely, they need to rely principally on intelligence and interdiction, diplomacy and development — not war without aim or end.

The troops have fought bravely in Afghanistan. It’s time to bring them home.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/03/opinion/afghanistan-war.html" id="53c935ef-530e-397d-ac56-a1a984f3c355">The New York Times</a>.

End the War in Afghanistan

Editorial of The Times

The average person would have to spend 76 working days reading all the digital privacy policies they agree to in the span of a year. Reading Amazon’s terms and conditions alone out loud takes approximately nine hours.

Why would anyone read the terms of service when they don’t feel as though they have a choice in the first place? It’s not as though a user can call up Mark Zuckerberg and negotiate his or her own privacy policy. The “I agree” button should have long ago been renamed “Meh, whatever.”

The legal fiction of consent is blatant in the privacy scandal du jour. Both Google and Facebook have been paying people — including minors as young as 13 — to download an app that tracks nearly all their phone activity and usage habits.

Facebook advertised their app on services beloved by teens, like Snapchat and Instagram, seeking participants between the ages of 13 and 35. The sign-up process required minors to get parental consent. (How rigorous? Users simply had to scroll down and click on a check box.) In exchange for participating in what Facebook called a research project, each user received $20 a month, plus referral bonuses.

Similarly, Google’s Screenwise Meter app harvested user information in exchange for money. Google was a little more careful than Facebook, barring minors unless they were participating as part of a larger household.

It’s unlikely these children understood what they gave up by agreeing to use the app. And even if they’d received proper parental consent, their parents may not have understood what they were giving away on their child’s behalf.

But it wasn’t the predatory nature of these programs that prompted Apple to disable them on iPhones and iPads. Rather, Apple objected to how Google and Facebook had used a loophole to transmit customer data without having to go through Apple first.

In other words, it looks as though two tech giants and their armies of lawyers didn’t read the policy closely enough and violated Apple’s terms and conditions.

People are often startled by what they wind up giving away by clicking on the “yes” button. They are shocked to find when they connect their Spotify and Netflix accounts to their Facebook account that those streaming services gain access to their Facebook messages. They are confused and outraged by Facebook’s uncanny ability to recommend “friends” that the company shouldn’t really know about — say, a social worker’s client, a sperm donor’s biological child, a woman’s father’s mistress.

Data is powerful and can inform on us in unexpected ways. Companies learn all about you, but also all about your friends who haven’t signed up for these services. Consumers’ confusion about this gives rise to conspiracy theories that phone microphones are secretly snooping on users. According to academics who have done the research, that’s probably just paranoia. The likely truth is that all the other data you give away is enough to predict what you have said and will say in conversations.

Countless devices and internet services now pervade daily life. We don’t need to live in a world governed by their terms and conditions, propped up by the legal fiction of consent. If empowered and properly funded, the Federal Trade Commission can become the privacy watchdog that this era so desperately needs. And the repeal or modification of the Federal Arbitration Act can defang the very worst provision that so frequently pops up in terms and conditions — the surrender of the right to sue a company in court.

Legislation can mandate transparency about who has your data and can give users the right to stop it from being sold. New laws can lay down basic guarantees of privacy that won’t require you to wade through hundreds of thousands of words of legalese.

Europe is already leading the way with the General Data Protection Regulation. California has followed that example by passing a law with similar protections, scheduled to go into effect in 2020.

Americans deserve strong privacy protections. Consent is not enough to replace them. The clicks that pass for consent are uninformed, nonnegotiated and offered in exchange for services that are often necessary for civic life. It’s time to start seeing the “I agree” button for what it really is.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/opinion/internet-facebook-google-consent.html" id="ac0ebaf0-d5d3-3765-a68b-0480f119f436">The New York Times</a>.

How Silicon Valley Puts the ‘Con’ in Consent

Venezuela’s political and economic crisis took a fateful turn on Wednesday when the 35-year-old head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, declared himself interim president and was promptly recognized by the United States, Canada, the Organization of American States and most Latin American governments. A mass demonstration called by Guaidó brought out throngs waving flags and chanting, “Get out, Maduro!”

But the embattled incumbent, Nicolás Maduro, defiantly stood his ground, railing against “coups” and “gringo interventions,” cutting ties with the United States and urging the armed forces to stand with him. Russia, Maduro’s ally and benefactor, weighed in with blistering warnings to the United States against any intervention. The Venezuelan defense minister declared that the armed forces, long a bastion of support for Maduro, remained behind him, but much depends on whether the rank and file will follow.

That Maduro must go has been obvious for some time. Since he succeeded the leftist strongman Hugo Chávez in 2013, his mismanagement, cronyism and corruption, exacerbated by the drop in the price of oil, Venezuela’s dominant source of revenue, have brought the country to ruin. Hyperinflation has rendered wages virtually worthless, people are dying of starvation and lack of medical care, and millions have fled to neighboring countries.

The question has been how to pry Maduro out without a blood bath. Maduro, with the opposition divided and the armed forces behind him, tenaciously clung to power, largely blaming a hostile United States for the country’s woes. He packed the Supreme Court with allies, created a parallel legislature, suppressed mass demonstrations by force and orchestrated his own re-election last May.

Yet the original legislature, the National Assembly, despite being formally stripped of power by Maduro, remained under the control of the opposition and is a source of legitimate power. And when Guaidó — a hitherto little-known engineer with a knack for coalition-building — was elected head of the legislature on Jan. 5, he promptly declared the president illegitimate and invoked a constitutional rule that transfers power to the head of the National Assembly should the presidency be vacated. His call for mass demonstrations drew many of the urban poor who once ardently rallied to Chávez’s leftist and anti-American banner, but now found themselves nearly starving to death.

The confrontation of two presidents raised terrifying prospects of carnage, especially should the military stand by Maduro. In this fray, the overt support of the United States for Guaidó has played a major role. Vice President Mike Pence made that support clear this week in a widely cited tweet and video, and in a Jan. 15 phone call to Guaidó he offered “resolute support” for the National Assembly as “the only legitimate democratic body in the country.”

That support is hardly symbolic. Recognizing Guaidó as the legitimate president allows the U.S. government to free millions in Venezuelan assets frozen by sanctions imposed on Maduro, money that the opposition could use for humanitarian assistance or to fund the new elections Guaidó has pledged. The Trump administration on Thursday promised $20 million in initial aid.

But American intervention also carries risk. On Wednesday, President Donald Trump once again raised the specter of a military intervention when he said, “All options are on the table.” A similar suggestion by Trump in August 2017 was promptly, and properly, rejected by South American leaders. Any military intervention could prove catastrophic, especially if Russia, the primary arms supplier to Venezuela, stepped in. Even such measures as sanctions on Venezuelan oil would risk worsening the humanitarian disaster.

The Trump administration is right to support Guaidó. But given the history of American support for right-wing dictatorships in Latin America, the United States must be seen as participating in a broad coalition of South American and other democratic nations seeking to help Venezuelans achieve a peaceful end to a destructive dictatorship.

What is indisputable at this tense moment is that Maduro’s misrule has become intolerable and that he must go. A formidable array of countries have recognized a fresh young leader. It is now their duty to do everything in their power to persuade Maduro, if necessary by guaranteeing him haven, that his final act must be a peaceful exit.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/opinion/venezuela-maduro-trump.html" id="b4ab78d5-57e5-3a97-ac01-821c4f883eda">The New York Times</a>.

Venezuela Is Between Maduro and a Hard Place

The World Health Organization has ranked vaccine hesitancy — the growing resistance to widely available lifesaving vaccines — as one of the top 10 health threats in the world for 2019. That news will not come as a surprise in New York City, where the worst measles outbreak in decades is underway. Nor in California or Minnesota, where similar outbreaks unfolded in 2014 and 2017, respectively. Nor in Texas, where some 60,000 children remain wholly unvaccinated thanks in part to an aggressive anti-vaccine lobby.

Leading global health threats typically are caused by the plagues and perils of low-income countries — but vaccine hesitancy is as American as can be. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the percentage of children who are unvaccinated has quadrupled since 2001, even though the overall utilization of most vaccines remains high. More than 100,000 American infants and toddlers have received no vaccines whatsoever, and millions more have received only some crucial shots.

It’s no mystery how we got here. On the internet, anti-vaccine propaganda has outpaced pro-vaccine public health information. The anti-vaxxers, as they are colloquially known, have hundreds of websites promoting their message, a roster of tech- and media-savvy influencers and an aggressive political arm that includes at least a dozen political action committees. Defense against this onslaught has been meager. The CDC, the nation’s leading public health agency, has a website with accurate information but no loud public voice. The U.S. Surgeon General’s office has been mum. So has the White House — and not just under the current administration. That leaves just a handful of academics who get bombarded with vitriol, including outright threats, every time they try to counter pseudoscience with fact.

The consequences of this disparity are substantial: a surge in outbreaks of measles, mumps, pertussis and other diseases; an increase in influenza deaths; and dismal rates of HPV vaccination, which doctors say could effectively wipe out cervical cancer if it were better utilized. But infectious disease experts warn that things could get much worse. Trust in vaccines is being so thoroughly eroded, they say, that these prevention tools are in danger of becoming useless. The next major disease outbreak “will not be due to a lack of preventive technologies,” Heidi Larson, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, writes in the journal Nature, but to an “emotional contagion, digitally enabled.”

Thwarting this danger will require a campaign as bold and aggressive as the one being waged by the anti-vaccination contingent. And to launch such a campaign would require overcoming strong inertia: a waning public health apparatus, countervailing politics and a collective amnesia over the havoc the diseases in question once wrought. But to succeed would be to rescue from oblivion one of the greatest triumphs of human ingenuity over disease — and to save countless lives.

Get tough. After the 2014 California measles outbreak, the state eliminated nonmedical exemptions for mandatory vaccinations. After a similar outbreak in Michigan, health officials there began requiring individuals to formally consult their local health departments before opting out of otherwise-mandatory shots. In both cases, these tougher policies drove up vaccination rates. Other states ought to follow this lead, and the federal government should consider tightening restrictions around how much leeway states can grant families that want to skip essential vaccines.

Be savvy. The Vaccine Confidence Project is a London-based academic endeavor that monitors anti-vaccine websites for rumors and conspiracies and addresses them before the messages go viral. It also conducts regular surveys of attitudes and puts out a vaccine confidence index. Federal health officials would do well to implement a similar program, make it as public as possible and pair it with an aggressive and targeted social media campaign that makes as much use of celebrities as the anti-vaccine movement has.

Be clear. Vaccines, to some extent, are victims of their own success. In the United States especially, they’ve beaten so many infectious foes into oblivion that hardly any practicing doctors, let alone new parents, remember how terrible those diseases once were. An effective pro-vaccine campaign needs to remind us: Vaccines prevent 2 million to 3 million deaths globally each year. In developing countries, people line up for hours to get these shots. It’s also OK to get out of the gray zone. Scientists, especially, are uncomfortable with black-and-white statements, because science is all about nuance. But, in the case of vaccines, there are some hard truths that deserve to be trumpeted. Vaccines are not toxic, and they do not cause autism. Full stop.

Know the enemy. The arguments used by people driving the anti-vaccination movement have not changed in about a century. These arguments are effective because they are intuitively appealing — but they are also easily refutable. Instead of ignoring these arguments, an effective pro-vaccine campaign would confront them directly, over and over, for as long as it takes. Yes, there are chemicals in vaccines, but they are not toxic. No, vaccines can’t overwhelm your immune system, which already confronts countless pathogens every day.

Know the audience. Not every parent with concerns about vaccination is a rabid conspiracy theorist bent on resisting inoculation forever. In fact, studies suggest that less than 2 percent of all parents fall into this category. The rest of vaccine-hesitant families sit along a spectrum. Some reject all vaccines but are still open to receiving information. Others are only worried about one specific vaccine. And others still are merely anxious and looking for reliable information. Any successful campaign will need to mind this diversity and prioritize listening to concerns as much as dispelling myths.

Enlist the right support. Some doctors and scientists have referred to “uneventful vaccination” as “The Greatest Story Never Told.” Although they may not spread on the internet like the stories of terrible mishaps that anti-vaxxers traffic in, these far more common tales of inoculation without incident can be a powerful elixir for a nervous new parent. The best ambassadors of these stories are likely to be parents themselves. Surveys suggest that pro-vaccine families are often eager to help counter misinformation, but they don’t know where to start. If health officials corralled these families and trained them in the basics of vaccine science, they might succeed where official voices sometimes fail.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/opinion/vaccines-public-health.html" id="209de332-ac33-39b9-a5ba-2441916ee032">The New York Times</a>.

How to Inoculate Against Anti-Vaxxers

Last summer, a federal judge in San Diego said the Trump administration treated immigrant children detained at the border worse than chattel.

“The unfortunate reality,” wrote Judge Dana Sabraw in ordering a halt to President Donald Trump’s policy of separating the children from their parents, “is that under the present system, migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property.”

That was underscored Thursday when the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services released a report revealing that thousands more children than previously disclosed may have been torn from their parents for months before the policy was even announced. The report confirmed that, as the number of families seeking asylum has soared, the true crisis on the border was a humanitarian one that the administration’s actions have made far worse.

The report said department officials who care for immigrant children seized at the border realized by August 2017 that the proportion of children separated from their parents was 10 times greater than had previously been the case, when families were usually broken up only if there were safety concerns for the children. It was not until the following April that the administration announced a zero-tolerance approach, under which families would be pulled apart because all adults crossing the border without authorization would be criminally charged and jailed.

In an accounting that resulted from Sabraw’s order, stemming from a legal challenge brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, the government acknowledged that nearly 3,000 children had been separated from their parents since the policy was announced. But on top of that, the inspector general said, thousands more may not have been counted.

Overall, the total number of children separated at the border is “unknown,” according to the report. Nor was it clear how many of these children had yet to be reunited with their families.

Sabraw was right when he wrote that the government’s responses to the chaos it caused “belie measured and ordered governance, which is central to the concept of due process enshrined in our Constitution. This is particularly so in the treatment of migrants, many of whom are asylum seekers and small children.”

The report describes department officials essentially grasping in the dark to come to terms with what had happened. “Because the tracking systems in use at that time were informal and designed for operational purposes,” according to the report, immigration officials were “unable to provide a more precise estimate or specific information about these children’s placements.”

Department officials had to search more than 60 databases “to identify indicators of possible separation, such as an adult and child with the same last name apprehended on the same day at the same location.” Officials also had to review 12,000 case files and contact the department’s shelters to find children who had been separated from their families.

In a report released in October, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general found its computers had been unable to track family members who had been separated.

Such dysfunction goes beyond mere incompetence. To have so little regard for the damage done to so many children, for the heartache caused to so many parents, is to indulge in callousness, if not deliberate cruelty. Trump doesn’t need a wall. He needs a heart.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/family-separation-border-trump.html" id="6770e772-310a-38db-a1f2-5a96b25fd766">The New York Times</a>.

The Lost Children of the Trump Administration

If there’s an upside to the crushing defeat of Prime Minister Theresa May’s laboriously negotiated plan for withdrawing from the European Union, it is that staring in the face of an exit without a deal 10 weeks from now may finally compel British lawmakers to accept reality.

That was far from evident in the immediate aftermath of the 432-202 vote in Parliament on Tuesday. Although it was the worst drubbing a British government had suffered in modern times and a dangerous step toward the cliff’s edge, the vote was cheered by many sides — by hard-core Brexiteers who would sever ties to the Continent at any cost; by “remainers” for whom any glitch in the Brexit process keeps alive the hope of staying in the union or at least softening the terms of a divorce; by Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, who wants to oust May so he can come to power.

Corbyn’s ambitions, at least, were dashed for the moment when many of the politicians from May’s camp who defied her on Tuesday came to her support on Wednesday, opting to keep her in office rather than risk an election in which they had no acceptable alternative candidate.

On the Continent, the exasperation was tangible. “If a deal is impossible, and no one wants no deal, then who will finally have the courage to say what the only positive solution is?” asked Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, which includes the EU’s heads of state and government, in a tweet that implied that the solution should be for Britain to stay in the union.

The 27 other members of the EU have been united in insisting that the withdrawal agreement negotiated with May’s government over 17 months be viewed as a final deal. Among other provisions, that nearly-600-page agreement set a transition period lasting through 2021 to make a trade deal and included a “backstop” that would ensure that no matter what else was decided in that period, the border between the Republic of Ireland and the British province of Northern Ireland would remain open.

“It’s not up to us, the French, the Europeans, to tell the Britons what they must do,” said the French minister for European affairs, Nathalie Loiseau. “What we can tell them is ‘Hurry up!’ because March 29 is tomorrow.”

Although debate on Brexit has dominated the British media, social and traditional, for 2 1/2 years now, the British public and its legislators have remained almost as far from agreement as before.

And in their fervor, the British have often behaved as if the debate were only among themselves, and not with the entire bloc. Hard-core advocates of quitting in particular have clung to the illusion that Britain can abandon those elements of the union they dislike, like free movement of people, and keep those that benefit them.

In the tumultuous Parliament sessions of this week, and often before that, May came under withering criticism for not producing a deal. Yet hers was a mission impossible from the outset.

If the votes of this week make at least that much clear, British politicians may at last begin confronting the real options they face. These includes trying to forge a consensus position on a new Brexit deal and hoping the Europeans will consider it; or opting for a new referendum, which is favored by politicians who believe that enough of the public has reconsidered Brexit to scrap the idea; or accepting May’s deal.

These are difficult and contentious choices, and they need time. At this late hour, even before the shock of this week’s votes has subsided, both sides need to take a deep breath and agree on extending the deadline. Leaders of the union have indicated that they would look favorably on an extension of the deadline, and May has given hints in the same direction.

There’s too much at stake to stop trying.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/opinion/brexit-vote-theresa-may.html" id="5f4dc15a-ce65-3134-ad93-bdeedbe25b3c">The New York Times</a>.

Britain Races Toward a Cliff. Time to Slow Down.

You know the system has broken down when the clearest way out of a government shutdown may be for the president to declare a fake national emergency.

This was the direction President Donald Trump appeared to be leaning Thursday, as he flew to McAllen, Texas, to promote his border wall — a PR stunt that he didn’t want to perform and that he said in advance was unlikely to bear fruit. “It’s not going to change a damn thing,” he was reported to have said, “but I’m still doing it.”

He’s probably right. Negotiations to end the shutdown prompted by Trump’s wall fixation have gone nowhere — despite the president’s storming out of his Wednesday huddle with lawmakers — and his show at the border won’t change that. The growing sense is that to break the impasse Trump will need to find a way to at least claim to be building his wall without Congress, possibly by attempting the norm-shattering and constitutionally suspect tactic of declaring the border situation a national emergency requiring military intervention.

As the president stews over his wall, more and more Americans are feeling the squeeze from what, if it goes beyond Friday, will be the government’s longest stoppage ever. Millions of lives already have been upended — well beyond the 800,000 federal workers not getting paid — and millions more could be if the dysfunction continues, disrupting everything from air travel to the federal courts to basic services throughout Indian Country like health care and law enforcement.

How did we get into this sorry situation? A meltdown of this magnitude typically has many causes. In this case, the president’s inability to reach some sort of deal rests heavily on several basic failures of understanding by him and his team. These include:

1. A failure to grasp how divided government works. The president somehow came to believe that he’d have more leverage once the Democrats took control of the House. Maybe someone convinced him that, after the transfer of power, he could shift blame for the impasse onto Speaker Nancy Pelosi — a favorite villain of Republicans. Or maybe he assumed that Pelosi &amp; Company would fold in the face of the dysfunction and public outcry a shutdown would bring. Whatever the logic, Team Trump assumed Democrats would become more pliable and a deal would emerge.

Unfortunately, Trump has been spoiled by two years of Congress being led by weak-kneed members of his party who, even when troubled by his excesses, largely let him run amok, lest he call down upon them the wrath of the Republican base.

But for their part, Pelosi and her new majority are concerned about presenting a united front against Trump’s challenges to constitutional authority. With the president’s wall having become a flashpoint, the political costs to Democrats for cutting a deal seen as advantageous to Trump would be steep.

2. A failure to understand the costs of playing only to the base. While Republican lawmakers may be awed by Trump’s command of their party’s troops, Democrats are more motivated by the fact that the bulk of the electorate is tired of the president’s divisive demagoguery. Time and again, Trump has chosen partisanship over leadership, doing nothing to expand his appeal. This puts him at a disadvantage in wooing the public to his side of the wall debate.

3. A failure to understand Nancy Pelosi. Apparently, Trump never got around to reading “The Art of War,” or at least not Sun Tzu’s admonition to “know your enemy.” If he had, the president would have tried to develop at least a basic working relationship with Pelosi. The White House clearly assumed that, at some point — maybe after she secured the speaker’s gavel — Pelosi would bend to Trump’s will. But the speaker is not impressed with bluster. She is seldom cowed by political pressure from her own team, much less the opposing one. She plays the long game, and her will is as formidable as Trump’s, possibly more so. One key difference: Pelosi knows how the legislative process works.

4. A failure to understand shutdown politics. If you don’t want to be blamed for one, don’t say you’re going to own it. Trump sacrificed that option when he boasted how “proud” he’d be to grind the government to a halt.

5.A failure to understand how the government works. Neither Trump nor anyone on his team had a clue how disruptive even a partial shutdown could be — and how they’d need to scurry to prevent millions of people from losing food stamps, housing or tax refunds.

6. A failure to understand how members of Congress operate. Standing by the president when he’s tweeting out empty threats and insults is one thing. But when a shutdown starts causing pain and outrage back home, Republican lawmakers, especially those in vulnerable districts or states, start asking themselves which they value more — their president or their political hides. Even casual students of Congress know that this is not a tough call.

Bottom line: Trump loves to boast that he leads with his “gut.” He really can’t be bothered with all the humdrum details of governing, remaining proudly ignorant of how anything works in Washington — the presidency, the Congress, the Constitution. That’s left him in a standoff for which he was wholly unprepared.

For the sake of the millions being hurt, let’s hope he manages to blunder himself back out of this mess soon.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/opinion/editorials/trump-shutdown-pelosi.html" id="1c95b5e5-590f-37ba-a9db-a4e038cbd8fb">The New York Times</a>.

What Trump Could Learn From His Shutdown

The Federal Trade Commission issued a $5 billion fine against Facebook on Wednesday. It’s an eye-popping number for sure, one that blows previous fines out of the water.

It’s a number that makes for impressive headlines, but it is largely meaningless. Facebook posted $15 billion in revenue last quarter, at which point it announced that it had set aside $3 billion to pay potential fines. Facebook’s stock price barely budged when the size of the expected fine was first reported this month. After the FTC’s official announcement on Wednesday, the stock price closed slightly higher than at opening.

The weightlessness of the fine isn’t the only problem with the deal. The settlement order grants Facebook and its officers immunity in a wide range of possible misdeeds committed before June 12. The agency has also declined to hold Mark Zuckerberg — or anyone else — personally liable for Facebook’s repeated privacy violations. Come again?

Yes, Facebook has agreed to sweeping new oversight of how the company handles personal data, which includes information like names, phone numbers, IP addresses and even biometric information. But the oversight largely consists of a mandatory privacy program to be created by Facebook, for Facebook.

The company agreed to a privacy program back in 2011 when it first got into trouble with the FTC. The new privacy program is much more stringently outlined, but it is not enough. In the words of Commissioner Rohit Chopra, who cast one of two dissenting votes on the new deal: “The settlement imposes no meaningful changes to the company’s structure or financial incentives, which led to these violations. Nor does it include any restrictions on the company’s mass surveillance or advertising tactics.”

All it takes to show the fundamental dysfunction at the heart of American privacy law is to revisit the story of how we got to this $5 billion fine.

In 2010, Facebook changed its privacy controls without warning its users, when it started “Instant Personalization” — where the site handed personal data over to third parties like Pandora and Yelp without informing users ahead of time. It kicked off enough of a controversy that four senators objected and the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the FTC.

The commission found that Facebook had engaged in “unfair and deceptive practices” through its actions. “Facebook represented that third-party apps that users installed would have access only to user information that they needed to operate,” the FTC said in 2011. “In fact, the apps could access nearly all of users’ personal data — data the apps didn’t need.”

Facebook repented and settled with the FTC, placing itself under a consent decree. The agreement required Facebook to stop making “misrepresentations” about users’ privacy and security, to create a comprehensive privacy program to deal with the user data it was charged with sharing, and to audit its privacy program every two years for the next 20 years.

Under the agreement Facebook is liable for up to $16,000 (adjusted for inflation) a day per infraction. It’s not just that Facebook, a more than $570 billion company, should have known better. It did know better. The FTC has it in writing.

Three years later, Facebook allowed a personality test app to harvest data on nearly 87 million people — data that was fed to a political consultancy called Cambridge Analytica, in order to develop psychological profiles of American voters.

On its own, what happened between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica may not have been explicitly illegal under American law, but Facebook’s actions did violate the consent decree.

The Federal Trade Commission is also responsible for this state of affairs — its lenient attitude toward Silicon Valley allowed the industry to misbehave. And when the FTC did strive to protect Americans’ privacy, its resources were never quite enough to stand up to tech giants. The budget of the agency — of which its digital privacy division is only a small part — is smaller than the office of the California attorney general. Yet this is an agency expected to police companies valued at half a trillion dollars.

On the same day that the FTC announced the new settlement and $5 billion fine on Facebook, the company disclosed that it was the subject of an antitrust investigation by the agency, and possibly by the Justice Department as well. But despite renewed interest in antitrust for the tech industry, antitrust law itself must evolve before robust government oversight has any chance of taking place.

This week, Zuckerberg announced major changes to his company’s privacy protections. “Overall, these changes go beyond anything required under U.S. law today,” he wrote in a Facebook post. He is right. And that’s a profound condemnation of American privacy laws.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/opinion/facebook-fine-5-billion.html" id="a51d4bce-5fa3-3b45-aa98-ec71092c89cf">The New York Times</a>.

A $5 Billion Fine for Facebook Won’t Fix Privacy

‘They’re Doing It as We Sit Here’

If you were searching for a metaphor for the withering ideal of American public service — the one that puts country before party, truth before “narrative” or “brand” — it’d be hard to do better than the painful spectacle of Robert Mueller trying, in his halting voice, to sound the alarm Wednesday about Russian subversion of American democracy.

It’s the same alarm that virtually every member of America’s intelligence and law enforcement communities has been ringing for the past three years: Russia attacked our elections in 2016 and is intensifying its efforts today. “It wasn’t a single attempt,” Mueller said. “They’re doing it as we sit here.”

Appearing before two congressional committees rife with politicians intent on using him to fill out their own versions of reality, Mueller seemed frail and at times even confused. But he successfully rebuffed nearly all efforts to draw him beyond the boundaries of evidence established in the report he delivered about Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The exceptions came when representatives actually showed an interest in Russian meddling and Donald Trump’s embrace of it. “I hope this is not the new normal,” Mueller said at one point, in response to a question about whether American candidates might now feel free to welcome foreign influence, “but I fear it is.”

The “sweeping and systemic” nature of that interference was the most unequivocal finding of Mueller’s 448-page report, although just as disturbing was the report’s meticulous recounting of the ways the Trump campaign accepted and even encouraged it.

A few of the more egregious examples: Throughout 2016, the report found, Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, gave private polling information to Russian agents and shared campaign strategy with them; in June 2016, Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, arranged a meeting with Russians at Trump Tower in the expectation of getting “dirt” on the Hillary Clinton campaign; on July 27 of that year, candidate Trump publicly called on the Russians to hack Clinton’s emails, five hours before they attempted to do just that; the campaign then devised its strategy and created its messages around WikiLeaks’s releases of stolen files from the Democratic National Committee.

Nearly all Republicans on both committees failed even to acknowledge the threat posed by Russia and other countries. With significant exceptions like Will Hurd, representative of Texas, Republican lawmakers seemed much more focused on protecting Trump and deflecting any concerns about electoral security by impugning Mueller’s integrity, attacking the origins of an investigation that he did not initiate, and — in one particularly disgraceful jab by Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania — accusing his investigative process of being “un-American.”

In another era — the time Mueller seemed to hail from — an attack by a foreign government to divide Americans and upend their elections might have produced a different response. It might have drawn legislators together to develop a bipartisan initiative to make clear, as Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, put it, “that we, the people — not some foreign power that wishes us ill — we decide who shall govern us.”

Yet for all the bluster and misdirection — about Fusion GPS, the Steele dossier, the texts of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page — the Republicans offered little pushback against Mueller’s key revelations.

Of course Trump and his senior campaign staffers and associates didn’t worry that what they were doing was wrong. The 2016 campaign was providing too many opportunities to pad their bank accounts. From Manafort’s efforts to leverage his position to extract himself from a multimillion-dollar debt to Trump’s own attempts to build a giant hotel in Moscow, self-dealing permeated the Trump campaign. Remember, as late as weeks before the election, Trump and most of his top advisers thought he had no chance of winning. The real purpose of the campaign was to build up the Trump brand and be the “greatest infomercial in political history,” as Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, phrased it.

Narrow self-interest explains Trump’s attitude toward the WikiLeaks releases, which he should have decried but instead praised as a “treasure trove.” When Mueller was asked to comment on Trump’s reaction, he again ventured a bit beyond his report and said, “Problematic is an understatement.”

Trump has pretty much had one rejoinder to the report’s revelations: “No collusion.” But as Mueller’s testimony made clear, that’s misleading. For one thing, collusion is a legally meaningless term in this context. The special counsel’s office was looking for evidence of criminal conspiracy, and its failure to find a sufficient amount to bring charges may have been due in part to the efforts of Trump campaign members and associates to cover their tracks or otherwise obstruct the investigation.

With regard to obstruction, Mueller found himself in an impossible position. A prosecutor’s job is to find the facts and decide whether to bring criminal charges. But while Mueller was obligated to do the first by the terms of his appointment, he was prohibited from doing the second by prevailing Justice Department policy, which says a sitting president may not be indicted. As a result, the report he produced exists in an unsettling limbo — documenting evidence that Trump may have committed federal crimes yet studiously refusing to take a position on whether he in fact did so.

Republican lawmakers expressed understandable frustration that Mueller had cast suspicion on Trump without formally charging him with anything. Particularly after all the talk of locking Clinton up during and after the 2016 campaign, it was good to hear them defend the presumption of innocence as a core American principle. Mueller’s unsatisfying response was, essentially: My hands are tied.

At least twice Mueller called for legislation to improve information-sharing and other coordination among intelligence agencies — an objective that was supposed to have been met with reforms after the Sept. 11 attacks.

But that kind of concerted legislative action seems unlikely. To this day, Trump refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of Russian intervention, and the Republican-controlled Senate is unwilling to consider legislation for enhanced election security — maybe because doing either could be seen as an admission that the election was tainted.

Conceding the obvious might seem like a small price to pay. But the president appears more concerned with nursing his ego than safeguarding American democracy — and that puts us all, Republicans, Democrats and independents, at risk.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/opinion/robert-mueller-report-testimony.html" id="40225288-f682-3cb7-a57b-5c554711026e">The New York Times</a>.

(Editorial)

The back-to-back appearances before congressional committees on Wednesday by Robert Mueller, the former special counsel, are being hyped like the Super Bowl. Many critics of President Donald Trump are hoping the event — nationally televised and slated to run roughly five hours — will be a turning point that will not only reveal Trump to be unfit for office but also guarantee his political downfall, if not via impeachment then by a crushing defeat in 2020.

They shouldn’t hold their breath. Mueller’s appearance is unlikely to produce any shocking revelations, no matter how clever or aggressive lawmakers’ questioning.

This does not mean the hearings are without merit. Far from it. Despite all the political heat surrounding the Russia investigation, most Americans will never read the Mueller report. Many have only a vague sense of what it says — or, worse still, their perception of it is inaccurate, thanks to the efforts of Trump and his defenders to distract from and distort the findings.

Even if Mueller refuses to say anything beyond the contents of his report — as is expected — his televised testimony can serve as a valuable explainer and a much-needed corrective. As goes the analogy making its way around political circles: People aren’t reading the book, but they will watch the movie.

Aware of the political risks of overpromising, House Democrats have stressed that they are not looking for any new bombshells from Mueller. Rather, they want him to illuminate some of the most damning bits of his report.

“It’s a pretty dry, prosecutorial work product,” Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the head of the House Intelligence Committee, said of the Mueller report in a Sunday interview. “We want Bob Mueller to bring it to life.”

This calls for considerable finesse. Democrats must press Mueller to be clear and forthcoming, without looking as if they are badgering him, piling on or pressing him to draw conclusions not supported by the evidence.

To maximize efficiency, Democrats on the two committees have divvied up the lines of inquiry. The Judiciary Committee, which has three hours to question Mueller, will focus on possible obstruction of justice by the president and those in his circle, while the Intelligence Committee, which has two hours, will dig into Trump associates’ interactions with Russia.

Among the bigger-picture questions Democrats will pursue are why Mueller did not insist on an interview with the president as part of his investigation and whether Trump’s actions would merit indictment if he were not president of the United States.

More specifically, Judiciary Committee members will press Mueller to expand on a handful of the dozen or so episodes of potential obstruction cited in his report — including Trump ordering Don McGahn, the White House counsel at the time, to fire Mueller, then later instructing McGahn to deny any such effort. The Trump administration has blocked McGahn himself, along with many others named in the report, from testifying before Congress.

Complicating matters, Mueller is seen as, if not a hostile witness, at least a grudging one. In his brief public statement on his report in May, he all but begged Congress not to force him to testify and warned that, if called, he would provide no information beyond the scope of his report. “The report is my testimony,” he asserted.

Lawmakers have held mock sessions, running through practice questions and fine-tuning them to be as pointed — and un-duckable — as possible. On “Fox News Sunday” this weekend, Jerrold Nadler, the Judiciary Committee chairman, offered an example of how this could go: “‘Look at Page 344, Paragraph 2. Please read it. Does that describe obstruction of justice? Did you find that the president did that?’”

That said, Democrats acknowledge that it will be a challenge to get anything new out of Mueller. As Schiff recently joked, “We have a far better chance of the love affair in North Korea working out” than of getting Mueller to say whether Trump should be indicted after leaving office.

The Editorial Board

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