The special counsel investigating possible ties between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia’s government has taken over a separate criminal probe involving former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. “That investigation … (has) a number of tentacles and offshoots that involves conduct over a fairly lengthy period of time involving a lot of people,” says Law professor Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor.
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“They wholly undercut the idea that there is some rational process behind the president’s decisions,” says law professor emeritus Walter Dellinger, who served as acting solicitor general under President Clinton. “I believe it is unprecedented for a president to publicly chastise his own Justice Department.”
Read More in The New York Times
“In short, the narrative that attributes Trump’s victory to a ‘coalition of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters’ just doesn’t square with the 2016 election data,” writes public policy professor Nicholas Carnes and a colleague. “According to the election study, white non-Hispanic voters without college degrees making below the median household income made up only 25 percent of Trump voters. That’s a far cry from the working-class-fueled victory many journalists have imagined.”
Read More in The Washington Post
Energy expert Brian Murray joins a panel to discuss the president’s decision to pull the United States out of the agreement. Murray says the move means the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases is stepping away from the international process to address emissions over the next several decades, and that the responsibility will now fall on other nations. (starts at 8:25 mark)
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“The notion that this change in policy will somehow resurrect the coal mine sector is a little bit hard to fathom,” says Brian Murray, interim director of Duke’s Energy Initiative. “Coal mining is subject to market forces that reduced employment significantly over the last several decades.”
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“The United States is not to blame for the rise of the Islamic State. Nor is the United States all-powerful, capable of preventing any evil in the world. Far from it. But different U.S. policies might have better positioned it in the fight against the Islamic State,” writes political scientist Peter Feaver.
Read More in Foreign Policy
Law professor Samuel Buell says he is convinced that if former FBI Director Robert Mueller, the newly named special prosecutor in the Trump-Russia investigation, believed he needed Trump’s tax returns, he would seek them and get them quickly. “It’s hard to imagine an individual connected with federal law enforcement still alive in the United States with his stature,” Buell says.
Read More in Politico
Being a part of Paris Accord discussions is so important that it’s spurred many companies across a broad array of U.S. sectors to advocate for staying in the agreement, says Brian Murray, director of the Environmental Economics Program at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions. “You want the U.S. at the negotiating table,” Murray says. “These are companies that operate in most of those countries anyway, so they’re going to be living with the Paris agreement with or without the United States in it.”
Read More at Law 360
“The White House visit by Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc on May 31 will be the first by a leader of a Southeast Asian nation since Trump’s inauguration. It signals awareness of the tremendous opportunity to build on the foundations laid by Presidents Bush and Obama to establish a strong framework for cooperative development and peaceful engagement,” write political scientist Edmund Malesky and Renate Kwon, program manager of the Southeast Asia Research Group.
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Edward Balleisen, associate professor of history and public policy, talks about the history of business fraud in America as a guest on C-SPAN2’s “Book TV.” Balleisen’s recent book, “Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff,” looks at the development of regulations to protect consumers and investors.
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Generals dominate just about every big national security decision President Trump makes. Chastened by the losses in Iraq, will military officers take a more cautious view? “The conventional wisdom on this is probably wrong,” says political scientist Peter Feaver, a national security adviser in George W. Bush’s White House. “Empirically, the military is more reluctant to use force . . . but if force is used, then they want it to be used without restraint.”
Read More in The Washington Post
“It is imperative that the United States and local allies learn how to respond to ISIS’ presence in the physical and cyber domains now. If we cannot learn to outpace ISIS, we will not be ready for the group that surpasses it,” writes Andrew Byers, a visiting assistant professor of history who has served as an intelligence and counterterrorism analyst.
Read More in The Hill
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