July 28, 2023

Friday, July 28,2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

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Joe is always busy.

U.S. Economy Grew at 2.4% Rate in Second Quarter.

The economic recovery gained momentum in the spring as buoyant consumer spending and resurgent business investment helped, once again, to keep a recession at bay.

Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, rose at a 2.4 percent annual rate in the second quarter, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That was up from a 2 percent growth rate in the first three months of the year and far stronger than forecasters expected a few months ago.

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Kamala is always busy.

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Israel. What’s Next.

Thomas Friedman spoke with the President.

Biden Is Weighing a Big Middle East Deal.

For the hundreds of thousands of Israeli democracy defenders who tried to block Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial coup on Monday, the stripping of the Israeli Supreme Court’s key powers to curb the executive branch surely feels like a stinging defeat. I get it, but don’t totally despair. Help may be on the way from talks between the United States and Saudi Arabia.

Yes, you read that right.

When I interviewed President Biden in the Oval Office last week, my column focused on his urging Netanyahu not to ram through the judicial overhaul without even a semblance of national consensus. But that’s not all we talked about. The president is wrestling with whether to pursue the possibility of a U.S.-Saudi mutual security pact that would involve Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel, provided that Israel make concessions to the Palestinians that would preserve the possibility of a two-state solution.

After discussions in the past few days among Biden; his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan; Secretary of State Antony Blinken; and Brett McGurk, the top White House official handling Middle East policy, Biden has dispatched Sullivan and McGurk to Saudi Arabia, where they arrived Thursday morning, to explore the possibility of some kind of U.S.-Saudi-Israeli-Palestinian understanding.

The president still has not made up his mind whether to proceed, but he gave a green light for his team to probe with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia to see if some kind of deal is possible and at what price. Closing such a multinational deal would be time-consuming, difficult and complex, even if Biden decides to take it to the next level right away. But the exploratory talks are moving ahead now — faster than I thought — and they’re important for two reasons.

First, a U.S.-Saudi security pact that produces normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and the Jewish state — while curtailing Saudi-China relations — would be a game changer for the Middle East, bigger than the Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Because peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the custodian of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, would open the way for peace between Israel and the whole Muslim world, including giant countries like Indonesia and maybe even Pakistan. It would be a significant Biden foreign policy legacy.

Second, if the U.S. forges a security alliance with Saudi Arabia — on the conditions that it normalize relations with Israel and that Israel make meaningful concessions to the Palestinians — Netanyahu’s ruling coalition of Jewish supremacists and religious extremists would have to answer this question: You can annex the West Bank, or you can have peace with Saudi Arabia and the whole Muslim world, but you can’t have both, so which will it be?

Now wouldn’t that make an interesting discussion around Netanyahu’s cabinet table?

I’d love to see Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, go on Israeli television and explain to the Israeli people why it is in Israel’s interest to annex the West Bank and its 2.9 million Palestinian inhabitants — forever — rather than normalize ties with Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Muslim world. A Saudi-Israeli peace could dramatically reduce the Muslim-Jewish antipathy born over a century ago with the start of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict.

But before such a choice — annexation or normalization — can be brought before this extremist Israeli government, a lot of things have to be agreed to by a lotof people.

That said, Jake Sullivan is not in Riyadh today for tourism.

The Saudis are seeking three main things from Washington: a NATO-level mutual security treaty that would enjoin the U.S. to come to Saudi Arabia’s defense if it is attacked (most likely by Iran); a civilian nuclear program, monitored by the U.S.; and the ability to purchase more advanced U.S. weapons, like the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense antiballistic missile defense system, which are particularly helpful to the Saudis against Iran’s growing mid- and long-range missile arsenal.

Among the things the U.S. wants from the Saudis are an end to the fighting in Yemen, where the conflict has blessedly been diminishing over the past year, an unprecedentedly large Saudi aid package to Palestinian institutions in the West Bank and significant limits on the growing relationship between Saudi Arabia and China.

For instance, the U.S. was not amused by reports last year that Saudi Arabia was considering accepting Chinese renminbi to price some oil sales to China instead of the U.S. dollar. Over time, given the economic clout of China and Saudi Arabia, that could have a very negative impact on the U.S. dollar as the world’s most important currency. That would have to be canceled. The U.S. also wants the Saudis to curtail their dealings with Chinese tech giants like Huawei, whose latest telecommunications equipment is banned in the U.S.

This would be the first time the U.S. signed a mutual security pact with a nondemocratic government since President Dwight Eisenhower did so with predemocratic South Korea in 1953, and it would require Senate approval.

Just as important, though, is what the Saudis would demand of Israel to preserve the prospect of a two-state solution — the way the United Arab Emirates demanded that Netanyahu forgo any annexation of the West Bank as a price for their Abraham Accords.

The Saudi leadership is not particularly interested in the Palestinians or knowledgeable about the intricacies of the peace process.

But if the Biden team made a deal without a significant Palestinian component, it would simultaneously strike a death blow to the Israeli democracy movement — by giving Netanyahu a huge geopolitical prize for free after he just did something so antidemocratic — and to the two-state solution, the cornerstone of U.S. Middle East diplomacy.

I don’t believe Biden will do that. It would spark a rebellion in the progressive base of his party and make ratification of the deal well nigh impossible.

“It will be hard enough for President Biden to sell any deal like this to the U.S. Congress,” Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, which funds the State Department, said to me. “But I can assure you that there will be a strong core of Democratic opposition to any proposal that does not include meaningful, clearly defined and enforceable provisions to preserve the option of a two-state solution and to meet President Biden’s own demand that Palestinians and Israelis enjoy equal measures of freedom and dignity. These elements are essential to any sustainable peace in the Middle East.”

I believe that, at a minimum, the Saudis and Americans could (and should) demand four things from Netanyahu for such a huge prize as normalization and trade with the most important Arab Muslim state:

• An official promise not to annex the West Bank — ever.

• No new West Bank settlements or expansion outward of existing settlements.

• No legalization of wildcat Jewish settlement outposts.

• And transferring some Palestinian populated territory from Area C in the West Bank (now under full Israeli control) to Areas A and B (under Palestinian Authority control) — as provided for in the Oslo accords.

In return, the Palestinian Authority would have to endorse Saudi Arabia’s peace deal with Israel.

Truth be told, the Palestinian Authority is in no position to engage in peace talks with Israel today. It’s a mess. The Palestinians need to remake their government, but in the meantime, the far-right ministers in Israel’s cabinet are trying to absorb as much of the West Bank as fast as they can. The urgent need is to stop that immediately — but not with another dose of finger wagging from the State Department about how “deeply troubled” the U.S. is about Israeli settlements. Rather, the best move is a big strategic initiative that has something significant for everyone, except the zealots on all sides.

I repeat: Any deal will take months of difficult negotiations among the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Palestinian Authority — and success would be a long shot, at best.

But if Biden decides to try for it and the U.S. could put on the table a deal that is hugely in America’s strategic interest, hugely in Israel’s strategic interest, hugely in Saudi Arabia’s strategic interest (admitting it into a very exclusive club of countries with a U.S. security umbrella) and revive Palestinian hopes for a two-state solution, that would be a very, very big deal.

And if it also forced Netanyahu to abandon the extremists in his cabinet and make common cause with the Israeli center left and center right, well, wouldn’t that just be the cherry on top? (Thomas Friedman, New York Times).
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More Trump issues.

When will indictments 3 and 4 happen?

Trump Faces Major New Charges in Documents Case. The manager of Mar-a-Largo, Carlos De Oliveira, was also named as a new defendant.

Federal prosecutors on Thursday added major accusations to an indictment charging former President Donald J. Trump with mishandling classified documents after he left office, presenting evidence that he told the property manager of Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, that he wanted security camera footage there to be deleted.

The new accusations were revealed in a superseding indictment that named the property manager, Carlos De Oliveira, as a new defendant in the case. He is scheduled to be arraigned in Miami on Monday.

The original indictment filed last month in the Southern District of Florida accused Mr. Trump of violating the Espionage Act by illegally holding on to 31 classified documents containing national defense information after he left office. It also charged Mr. Trump and Walt Nauta, one of his personal aides, with a conspiracy to obstruct the government’s repeated attempts to reclaim the classified material.

The revised indictment added three serious charges against Mr. Trump: attempting to “alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence”; inducing someone else to do so; and a new count under the Espionage Act related to a classified national security document that he showed to visitors at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.

The updated indictment was released on the same day that Mr. Trump’s lawyers met in Washington with prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, to discuss a so-called target letter that Mr. Trump received this month suggesting that he might soon face an indictment in a case related to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It served as a powerful reminder that the documents investigation is ongoing, and could continue to yield additional evidence, new counts and even new defendants.

Prosecutors under Mr. Smith had been investigating Mr. De Oliveira for months, concerned, among other things, by his communications with an information technology expert at Mar-a-Lago, Yuscil Taveras, who oversaw the surveillance camera footage at the property.

That footage was central to Mr. Smith’s investigation into whether Mr. Nauta, at Mr. Trump’s request, had moved boxes in and out of a storage room at Mar-a-Lago to avoid complying with a federal subpoena for all classified documents in the former president’s possession. Many of those movements were caught on the surveillance camera footage.

The revised indictment said that in late June of last year, shortly after the government demanded the surveillance footage as part of its inquiry, Mr. Trump called Mr. De Oliveira and they spoke for 24 minutes.

Two days later, the indictment said, Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira “went to the security guard booth where surveillance video is displayed on monitors, walked with a flashlight through the tunnel where the storage room was located, and observed and pointed out surveillance cameras.”

A few days after that, Mr. De Oliveira went to see Mr. Taveras, who is identified in the indictment as Trump Employee 4, and took him to a small room known as an “audio closet.” There, the indictment said, the two men had a conversation that was meant to “remain between the two of them.”

It was then that Mr. De Oliveira told Mr. Taveras that “‘the boss’ wanted the server deleted,” the indictment said, referring to the computer server holding the security footage.

Mr. Taveras objected and said he did not know how to delete the server and did not think he had the right to do so, the indictment said. At that point, the indictment said, Mr. De Oliveira insisted again that “the boss” wanted the server deleted, asking, “What are we going to do?”

Two months later, after the F.B.I. descended on Mar-a-Lago with a search warrant and hauled away about 100 classified documents, people in Mr. Trump’s orbit appeared to be concerned about Mr. De Oliveira’s loyalties.

“Someone just wants to make sure Carlos is good,” the indictment quoted Mr. Nauta as saying to another Trump employee.

In response, the indictment said, that employee told Mr. Nauta that Mr. De Oliveira was “loyal” and “would not do anything to affect his relationship with Mr. Trump.” After the conversation, Mr. Trump — who during his 2016 presidential campaign often assailed his opponent, Hillary Clinton, for deleting material from her email server — called Mr. De Oliveira and said that he would get him a lawyer.

The revised indictment also charges Mr. De Oliveira with lying to federal investigators. It recounts an exchange in which he repeatedly denied seeing or knowing anything about boxes of documents at Mar-a-Lago, even though, the indictment said, he had personally observed and helped move them when they arrived.

Mr. De Oliveira’s lawyer, John Irving, declined to comment.

A statement attributed only to the Trump campaign called the new accusations a “desperate and flailing attempt” by the Justice Department to undercut Mr. Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican nomination to take on President Biden next year.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Nauta have both pleaded not guilty to the charges in the original indictment. Their case has been scheduled to go to trial in May.

The new charges lay out in detail efforts by Mr. Nauta to speak with Mr. De Oliveira about the security camera footage and to determine how long the footage was stored after the government sought to obtain it under a subpoena.

The indictment contains an additional charge related to a classified document — a battle plan related to attacking Iran — that Mr. Trump showed, during a meeting at his Bedminster golf club, to two people helping his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows write a book.

The updated indictment provides specific dates during which Mr. Trump was in possession of the document — from Jan. 20, 2021, the day he left office, through Jan. 17, 2022, the date Mr. Trump turned over 15 boxes of presidential material to the National Archives. The specificity of the dates indicates that prosecutors have the document in question and the indictment describes it as a “presentation concerning military activity in a foreign country,” adding it was marked top secret.

The meeting at which Mr. Trump showed off the document was captured in an audio recording and Mr. Trump can be heard rustling paper and describing the document as “secret” and “sensitive.”

Still, he has tried to suggest that he never had a document in his hand and was simply blustering.

“There was no document,” Mr. Trump claimed to the Fox News host Bret Baier in a recent interview. “That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things. And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document per se. There was nothing to declassify.”

The original indictment filed by Mr. Smith and his team in June came about two months after local prosecutors in New York filed more than 30 felony charges against Mr. Trump in a case connected to a hush money payment made to a porn star in advance of the 2016 election.

Mr. Trump remains under investigation by Mr. Smith’s office over his wide-ranging efforts to retain power after his election loss in 2020, and how those efforts led to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. He is also being scrutinized for possible election interference by the district attorney’s office in Fulton County, Ga. (New York Times).

Read the superseding indictment bringing new charges against Trump here.
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Yesterday, July 27th, was Black Women’s Equal Pay Day.

Forbes -“Black Women’s Equal Pay Day is on July 27th this year, and means Black women must work an additional 208 days to catch up to what white, non-Hispanic men made the year before. Black women are typically paid only 67 cents for every dollar paid to white men, and the wage gap actually widens to 65 cents on the dollar for Black women who hold doctorate degrees compared to white men with the same education. This adds up to a loss of $53,334 a year, and more than $2.1 million over the course of a 40-year career, according to a new analysis from the National Women’s Law Center.”

One more thing.

Hispanic or Latina women earn 54 cents on the dollar, making Latina Equal Pay Day take place on October 8, 2023. Native and Indigenous women earn 51 cents on the dollar, which means Native Women's Equal Pay Day will take place on November 30, 2023. (Idealist).

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Eve and I are spending the summer in Montauk - the furthest town in the Hampton East End of Long Island —so this made us smile.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida canceled two fund-raising events in the Hamptons recently, reportedly over a lack of interest from donors. (New York Post)

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World Cup Update.

USWNT (US Women’s National Team) vs. Netherlands. Below, see USWNT fans at the 1-1 game.

Photos by the Athletic photographer Georgia Soares.

Netherlands’ fans with their band and dancers coming singing and dancing with a lot of passion and excitement.

Reaction of USA fans after Lindsey Horan of Colorado tied the 1-0 game for the USWNT.

Teammates after Horan tied the score for the American women.

Touch the Twitter link 👇 to watch the Horan Goal.

The Associated Press reported the goal that drew a draw this way - “Horan was fuming after she was knocked over by Danielle van de Donk in the second half of Thursday’s rematch of the 2019 women’s final, when the United States beat the Netherlands to win their second consecutive World Cup title.

She got her revenge minutes after the tackle in a sequence that included Horan cursing about van de Donk before shoving her, as well. The two trash-talked and were separated by a referee before Horan scored the game-saving goal for the United States.

Horan and van de Donk were smiling after the game — van de Donk was wearing a swimming cap because of a cut to her head from a later collision — but almost anything goes in the World Cup. The two are professional teammates for French club Lyon.”

Lindsey Horan of the United States sprinted away from the Netherlands defense to head in the tying goal.

 USWNT plays Portugal next Tuesday with a chance to lock up a knockout round berth. The Netherlands plays Vietnam on Tuesday with the same hope too.

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We lost Sinéad O’Connor on Wednesday. The Tributes pour in.

The Unapologetic Brilliance of Sinéad O’Connor.

On Wednesday, the Irish singer and songwriter Sinéad O’Connor was found dead in a private home in London. She was fifty-six. O’Connor’s discography—she released ten studio albums, beginning in 1987—is so broad and dynamic that it’s difficult to efficiently characterize her sound, from the buoyant, whooping new wave of “Mandinka,” a single from her début LP, to her voluptuous, breathy take on Cole Porter’s “You Do Something to Me,” to her haunted rendition of the traditional Scottish tune “The Skye Boat Song,” which she recently recorded for the title sequence of the television show “Outlander.”

Throughout her career, the richness of O’Connor’s music was often surpassed by the vehemence and scorch of her politics. Perhaps most notably, she once ripped up an eight-by-ten photograph of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live” while singing the word “evil”—an act of righteous dissent against the Catholic Church’s ghastly mishandling of sexual abuse by clergy.

O’Connor had her biggest hit in 1990, with “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a song originally written by Prince for the Family, a side project that he was producing. It feels ludicrous to suggest that anyone has ever sung anything better than Prince—let alone sung one of Prince’s own songs better than Prince (!)—but, whatever, let’s say it: O’Connor embodied that track in an unusually profound and singular way. She understood its rage. Prince played it live sometimes; his version was always a little jazzier, funkier, sexier, airier. O’Connor sounds only furious. It’s tempting to read the song as an account of romantic collapse, but it applies to any sort of loss: a breakup, a death, the end of some love. (There’s a line in the final verse that alludes to O’Connor’s mother, who died when O’Connor was eighteen, and whom O’Connor would later characterize as a physically abusive alcoholic.) When something disappears before we want it to, we are left powerless, incomplete, yearning. There is simply no antidote to that kind of humiliation:

Since you been gone, I can do whatever I want
I can see whomever I choose
I can eat my dinner in a fancy restaurant
But nothing
I said nothing can take away these blues
’Cause nothing compares
Nothing compares to you

For years, O’Connor remained adamant that her performance on “S.N.L.” did not “derail” her career, as many critics claimed—she continued making the exact sort of music that she wanted to make, and if it did not reach the same commercial heights, so what? That had never been the goal. O’Connor had been thrashing against the dumb, stultifying demands of capitalism and pop stardom even before she was famous. In her 2021 memoir “Rememberings,” she tells a story about Nigel Grainge, the British record executive who signed her, suggesting that she “wear short skirts with boots and perhaps some feminine accessories such as earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and other noisy items one couldn’t possibly wear close to a microphone.” She walked out of the lunch. The next day, she went to a barbershop—a “Greek place by a bathhouse”—and had her head shaved by a reluctant employee. “I loved it. I looked like an alien. Looked like Star Trek. Didn’t matter what I wore now,” she wrote.

When “Rememberings” was first published, someone from O’Connor’s team reached out to me to see if I might be interested in joining her for a conversation at Greenlight Bookstore, in Brooklyn. (In 2016, after O’Connor had briefly gone missing from a Chicago suburb, I’d written a piece about what her music had meant to me.) I was due to give birth the same week of the event, but I said yes, of course, absolutely, yes. Selfishly, I was eager to talk to O’Connor about motherhood. In the final days of my pregnancy, I’d been waddling around the neighborhood, ordering increasingly larger sizes of lemon Italian ice, feeling moony with love yet utterly terrified. O’Connor had given birth to four children—Jake, Roisin, Shane, and Yeshua, each by a different father—between 1987, when she was twenty, and 2006, when she was forty. She had written so vividly about the supposedly incompatible experience of being a single parent and an artist, and of finding deep satisfaction in both pursuits. She portrayed parenthood as noble and gratifying. “If I have no other purpose in this life other than to put these four children on the earth, well, that’s enough for me to feel like I did something useful in this world,” she wrote. Of course, she had done so much more.

O’Connor cancelled the event the afternoon before it. Her publicist said it was due to illness, though the next day O’Connor tweeted that she was retiring: “I’ve gotten older and I’m tired… there’ll be no more touring or promo.” I gave birth to my daughter shortly thereafter. In January of 2022, O’Connor’s second son, Shane, died by suicide after disappearing from a hospital; he was seventeen. Though O’Connor and I had never met, I was gutted when I heard the news. It was plain from her writing that she had been a fierce and steadfast parent. Later that year, while navigating my own seismic loss, I felt that perhaps I understood some of her grief. On a Twitter account that’s since been deleted, she describedthe vastness of her suffering: “Been living as undead night creature since. He was the love of my life, the lamp of my soul. We were one soul in two halves. He was the only person who ever loved me unconditionally. I am lost in the bardo without him.” O’Connor was never quiet about her pain, even when it would have been easier to swallow or evade it—in fact, being unapologetic about the crippling weight of certain sorrows was the defining characteristic of her work. It feels dangerous to say that it is possible to die of a broken heart, but anyone who has gone through it knows how grief can feel insurmountable sometimes. It is a violent rupture. You prepare the tourniquets, you apply pressure, you pray that you will stop bleeding before it’s too late.

My copy of “Rememberings” is still filled with Post-it notes and highlighted passages, preparations for an evening that never happened. I circled one section from the foreword twice: “I never made sense to anyone, even myself, unless I was singing. But I hope this book makes sense. If not, maybe try singing it and see if that helps.” O’Connor could be cheeky; the line feels sly. Yet it reminds me that any true attempt to understand her life requires a return to her singing. In 2010, she performed a duet, with her friend Kris Kristofferson, of “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” a ballad about the kind of loneliness that can only be abated by sustained human contact. Kristofferson wrote the song in 1970; it has been recorded various times, by various artists, over the last fifty years. The duet with O’Connor is my favorite rendition: raw, quivering, a little off-kilter, unbearably intimate. It’s only two minutes long. O’Connor could be a belter—her voice was resolute, bold, loud—but here, she is quiet, almost reverent, almost timid. The footage is grainy, but at the end you can see them smile widely at each other. This, I think, is what O’Connor always wanted: anguish, laid bare. And then a gorgeous moment of communion, a weight lifted, a reminder that we do not have to be alone in our despair. With that smile, she is free. ♦ (Amanda Perusich, The New Yorker).

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