When Turkey’s intelligence chief Hakan Fidan visited Washington earlier this month, reportedly to brief Congress on the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, he came with another agenda: pressing the Trump administration to extradite Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish national whom Turkey accuses of masterminding an attempted coup in July 2016. Today, Istanbul got Washington’s answer. The Justice...
Category: Articles
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Maria Butina’s Gun Has a Whiff of Smoke
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago–meaning last week–President Trump avowed there was no collusion between his presidential campaign and Russian state agents. And one of his most loyal allies on Capitol Hill agreed. Then came Thursday’s plea agreement from Maria Butina, the Russian graduate student who insinuated herself into Republican circles with...
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What Do Democrats Do With the CIA?
It was a get-together only a Washington policy addict could love. On a cold winter night, I took a Metrobus to a weekday evening presentation at the National Press Club, two blocks from the White House. The event was organized by a former CIA director. It featured four former government officials and a national security...
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The Legacy of Bush’s CIA Pardons
When I first came to Washington in the 1980s, one of the first stories I reported on regularly was the Iran-contra scandal. As vice president, the late George Bush was in the thick of it. In the fall of 1986, while working as an editor at The New Republic magazine, I commissioned a story by...
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How the U.S. Justice Department Could Prosecute Khashoggi’s Killers
The evidence against the perpetrators of Jamal Khashoggi’s killers is strong and getting stronger. “If the crown prince went in front of a jury he would be convicted in 30 minutes,” Sen. Bob Corker, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee told reporters after hearing CIA director Gina Haspel briefed a group of senators Tuesday...