PRESS ROOM

On Wednesday, investigators held the first televised interviews in the ongoing impeachment inquiry into US President Donald Trump. Acting US Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor and George Kent, a senior State Department official in charge of Ukraine policy, answered questions from members of the House Intelligence Committee regarding the administration’s foreign policy dealings in Ukraine. At the center of the impeachment inquiry is whether Trump improperly conditioned security aid and a White House meeting with newly-elected Ukrainian President Voldymyr Zelenskiy on a commitment to investigate Trump’s political rivals. The evidence indicating a quid pro quo and a shadow foreign policy led by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has been widely corroborated by witnesses, according to publicly released materials.

If we reduced military spending by $125 billion annually, as proposed by the Sustainable Defense Task Force (details below), we could use those funds to finance part of the Green New Deal. For example, most of the funding required for Warren’s Green Manufacturing could be paid for through reduced military spending. More ambitious cuts in military spending could fully fund Warren’s plan and fund a significant portion of the Sanders plan.

The famous Vietnam Memorial, [Hoh] writes, “is a wall that contains 58,000 names. It would have to lengthened by some 2,000 feet to include the 100,000 to 200,000 plus Vietnam vets who are estimated to have been lost to suicide, while keeping space for those yet to come. VA data reveals that almost two Afghan and Iraq veterans die by suicide each day on average. That adds to an estimated 7,300 veterans who have killed themselves since just 2009, after coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq, a number greater than the 7,012 service members killed in those wars since 2001.”

Uber's ultra-millionaire CEO Dara Khosrowshahi came under fire Sunday for downplaying the Saudi kingdom's gruesome murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi as a "mistake" comparable to technological malfunctions in self-driving cars. "It's a serious mistake," Khosrowshahi told Axios in an interview that aired late Sunday. "We've made mistakes, too—with self-driving, and we stopped driving and we're recovering from that mistake. I think that people make mistakes, it doesn't mean they can never be forgiven. I think they have taken it seriously."

The reality is that deaths by suicide often kill veterans at a level greater than combat, while the primary reason for these deaths lie in the immoral and ghastly nature of war itself.

America’s military might, technology, and diplomacy must support human rights and the rule of law around the world—not undermine them.

After welcoming Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the opening day of public impeachment hearings for a second visit to the Oval Office, President Trump did something highly unusual for such encounters: He invited a select group of Republican senators to join the two leaders' meeting.

Foreign influence in America is the topic du jour. From the impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s request that a foreign power investigate a political opponent to the indictment of associates of his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, for illegally funneling foreign money into U.S. elections, the nation has been transfixed by news of illegal foreign influence in the political process. While such efforts to subvert American elections garner headlines, there remains a treasure trove of perfectly legal ways foreign powers are subverting American democracy. And they’re not waiting for election day -- they’re doing it every single day of the year.

An inadvertent effect of the Trump administration’s personnel management has been to make the U.S. Military Academy at West Point’s class of 1986 among the most influential in history. Its graduates include the U.S. secretary of state (Mike Pompeo), a high-profile Washington insider and reputed “Trump whisperer” (Dave Urban, who now heads up a powerful lobbying firm), an ultraconservative Republican congressman (Mark Green, who was previously a part of the mission that captured Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein), and a bevy of Pompeo’s best buddies—including Brian Bulatao, the undersecretary of state for management, and Thomas Ulrich Brechbuhl, the State Department’s counselor. As of this summer, it also includes President Donald Trump’s new secretary of defense: Gulf War veteran Mark Esper.

Capsized boats in the Mediterranean that were filled with distressed African families, corpses scattered along the hills of South America’s Darien Gap, and thousands of African refugees now stuck at the U.S.-Mexico border, are all consequences of the crackdown on civil society that is silently sweeping across much of Africa.

The very real threat of open conflict between the United States and Iran still looms large in the wake of September’s attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil installations. What remains of the Iran nuclear deal is quickly crumbling, and we’ve arrived at the logical conclusion of several years of escalating hostility between the United States, its Gulf allies, and Iran. Fortunately, staring down the barrel of war has had a sobering effect on Saudi, Emirati, Iranian, and American policymakers, who have all sent limited but noteworthy signals of their desire to reduce tensions. The Trump administration, already mired in more crises than it can manage, should not miss the opportunity these signals present to walk the region back from the brink.

To understand the debate over Warren’s proposal it is first necessary to understand what she is proposing to cut. The Warren plan would eliminate the Pentagon’s war budget, known officially as the Overseas Contingency Operations account, or OCO. The account was originally justified as a way to fund the initial stages of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which had not been planned in the Department’s initial budgets. But for years it has been used as a slush fund to pay for tens of billions of dollars-worth of items that have nothing to do with fighting current conflicts. The reason? Because the Pentagon’s regular budget has been capped under the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA), while the OCO account has not. Putting money into OCO to pay for non-war items is an evasive maneuver designed to thwart the intent of the BCA to control the deficit.