The Washington Post National Weekly - January 1, 2017

SUNDAY, JANUARY 1, 2017

. IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY Will he keep his promises?

Donald Trump made 60 official pledges in a ‘contract’ with voters, vowing to ‘make America great again.’ He has 1,461 days in his term to do it.

PAGE 12

Politics Pence tames GOP jitters 4 Nation Real gun? Police can’t tell. 7 The List What’s in, what’s out 23

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THE FIX

Great divide in media vs. voters C ALLUM B ORCHERS

tion, I said that “Kelly’s charge makes Trump look like a hypocrite,” because Trump had criticized Clinton for accepting primary-debate utopsies of the media’s 2016 election questions from interim chair of the Democratcoverage generally reached the same ic National Committee, Donna Brazile. conclusions: Cable channels aired too “Is The Fix an editorial section of The Washmany Donald Trump rallies. Journalington Post?” Jon wrote in his email. “I don’t ists were too quick to dismiss Trump’s candiintend to be political or snarky; I’m honestly dacy as a joke. The press devoted too much atjust curious. I see these type of leading statetention to Hillary Clinton’s emails. ments in many articles today in a variThese are legitimate, if debatable, ety of publications and online news criticisms. But the campaign exposed a sources. To me, it seems as if you (and more fundamental problem: The mainnot just you, but maybe the media as a stream media simply do not understand whole) are telling your audience what many voters — specifically, many of conclusions they should draw from the those who backed Trump. And these votstory.” ers do not understand the media, either.

Jon genuinely did not understand Two conversations — one with a jourwhat The Fix is or what I do as a journalnalist, the other with a voter — drove ist. So I replied: “The Fix is a news analyhome these points for me. sis blog. We interpret the news. A In March, as Trump strengthened his straight news approach to the same subgrip on the Republican nomination, I inject might have noted matter-of-factly terviewed CBS News anchor John Dickthat Trump’s acceptance of debate queserson, who had recently moderated a tion info is inconsistent with his critiRepublican debate. We talked about cism of Hillary Clinton for doing somewhy so many journalists failed to anticiSCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES thing similar. I would not use the word pate Trump’s political success, which seemed to be driven largely by anger.

In 2016, the media and voters of Donald Trump, seen among ‘hypocrite’ in a straight news story beReporters had not failed to identify reporters after a GOP debate, didn’t understand each other. cause it is, as you suggest, a loaded term.

At The Fix, however, my job is to interthe anger, Dickerson said. “You could arpret the situation. Trump said you shouldn’t gue that anybody who’s on social media and Conservatism was important, but another accept information about debate questions. watches Twitter would have an overly strong quality — a perceived ability to shake up WashBut he did just that. Sure looks like the dictionsense of the anger out there,” he said. Good ington — was more important. ary definition of hypocrisy to me.” point.

Journalists might have known that — and Jon followed up with a kind thank-you note.

“We missed that [Trump] would be the seen Trump’s rise coming — if they had spent Instead of reacting with fury, he asked an honplace where all those votes went and that he more time learning what makes voters tick. est question. You might say he had practiced would basically pay no price for his evolving Voters have a role to play in promoting ungood journalism. views over time,” Dickerson said. “The same derstanding, too. After the election, I received The takeaway from this election cycle is that people who have been the angry voters at the an email from a man named Jon who was trouvoters and the media often do not understand heart of the Republican Party — who fueled bled by my word choice in a recent article. each other — or what they think, do or value. the tea party and gave so much support to Ted Writing about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly’s More questions, calmly asked and answered Cruz — their principal argument is that the claim, in her book, that the president-elect had on both sides, can help solve the problem. n leaders in Washington have not stayed conbeen tipped off about a primary-debate quesBY

A

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stant, that they’ve shifted and changed once they got to Washington. So if constancy is the crucial quality, Donald Trump is not your candidate.”

Constancy was not the crucial quality. The media did not understand that many voters who complained about Republicans’ waffling on conservative principles actually cared more about electing an outsider than a conservative.

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2017 The Washington Post / Year 3, No. 12

CONTENTS POLITICS THE NATION THE WORLD COVER STORY ENTERTAINMENT BOOKS OPINION THE LIST

4 7 10 12 17 18 20 23

ON THE COVER In the 2016 race, such as at stops like this one in Orlando on Nov. 2, Donald Trump made pledges. A few weeks before then, he enshrined 60 of them in a “contract.” Photograph by JABIN BOTSFORD, The Washington Post

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POLITICS

Pence builds bridges to Republicans

JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST

He is expected to be a powerful vice president and is already easing fears about Trump BY

S EAN S ULLIVAN

O

fficially, Mike Pence is the vice president-elect, the head of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team and the governor of Indiana.

Unofficially, some Republicans see a few more titles in front of his name.

“It seems like he’s taken on the role of explainer-in-chief,” said Rep. Charlie Dent (Pa.), a centrist Republican who did not support Trump in the campaign.

“He’s the comforter-in-chief,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group. “That role works . . . because everyone respects his integrity and likes him personally.”

After Trump was elected, some Republicans were nervous about how he would govern and how closely his agenda would align with their traditional conservative priorities. In Pence, a soft-spoken former congressman with deep roots in Republican politics, many hear a reassuring and familiar

voice who has mollified some of their concerns.

In speeches and conversations with elected officials, donors and other party power brokers, Pence has talked up the next administration’s desire to undo President Obama’s signature health-care law, nominate a staunchly conservative Supreme Court justice and implement deep tax cuts — policies mainstream Republicans have craved.

When Trump rattles them with unorthodox ideas — as he did when he threatened to impose tar-

Vice President-elect Mike Pence walks out to speak during a “USA Thank You Tour 2016” event in Hershey, Pa., on Dec. 15.

iffs on companies shipping operations overseas — Pence seems to always be there to try to soothe their discomfort.

Pence has also become an ambassador to some of Trump’s fiercest Republican critics in the campaign, such as former presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, whom Trump met with in December, and Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), who sat down with Pence recently.

All of this has put Pence on a trajectory to be a potentially powerful vice president.

Already, he is drawing compari-

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POLITICS sons to the last Republican to hold that office, Richard B. Cheney, who had immense influence in the West Wing.

“My observation is that Mike Pence will be as powerful a vice president in domestic policy as Vice President Cheney was in foreign policy,” said Bobbie Kilberg, a longtime Republican fundraiser. “I think there is a significant parallel.”

But the value of that power, particularly with Congress, will be closely tied to Trump’s popularity with voters.

“If you lose your political stroke and your favorability . . . well then I don’t care how good the salesman is then, you’re going to have a problem moving the product,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a Pence supporter who noted that Cheney initially could move a lot of votes, but as Bush’s popularity declined, so did the vice president’s influence on the Hill.

Pence, whose boss does not like to be upstaged, is wary of being viewed as playing an outsize role behind the scenes or as the person who has to explain Trump to fellow Republicans.

“He believes the president-elect has a very unique and clear way of communicating,” said Marc Short, a senior adviser to Pence. “He would reject the notion that the president-elect needs to have an explainer-in-chief or a comforterin-chief.”

Trump has repeatedly praised Pence publicly. But he has also sought to make clear who is in charge.

“He is a great guy. That’s one of my great decisions. He’s a friend of mine, but he’s a great guy. Hasn’t he done a good job?” Trump asked at a rally in Des Moines last month.

In the span of a few hours one day last month, Pence’s impact on the incoming administration could be seen as his outreach to Republicans extended from the hallways of the Capitol building to a glitzy hotel ballroom at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

He attended Senate Republicans’ weekly lunch on Dec. 6, which he hopes to continue doing when he is in town, and used his remarks to underscore the importance of fighting the health-care law known as Obamacare and assert that tax reform is a real and achievable goal, according to a person familiar with the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private meeting.

CLIFF OWEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

“The high quality of people that he’s named already says so much about his executive abilities.”

Carly Fiorina, talking about the Cabinet of Donald Trump, her former rival

Later, Pence met privately with Sasse, one of the most vocal Republican Trump critics during the campaign. Sasse’s office called the meeting “productive.” Short called Sasse an “up and coming leader” whom Pence and the new administration “look forward to working with.”

In the evening, Pence addressed wealthy patrons of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, at a fundraising dinner in the new Trump International Hotel a few blocks from the White House.

Donors dined on a roasted grape and kale salad and beef tenderloin, and Pence went point by point through Trump’s most urgent legislative priorities: repealing Obamacare, reinforcing national defense, putting a conservative jurist on the Supreme Court to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia and slashing taxes “across the board.”

He also defended Trump for helping broker the deal with furnace and air-conditioner manufacturer Carrier to keep about 800 jobs in the United States. The move drew charges of “crony capitalism” from some conservatives.

“Make no mistake about it: Our president-elect and I believe fervently in the free market,” Pence

said. “But you cannot say you are for free markets and stand by while an avalanche of higher taxes, regulations and big government stifle out the competitiveness of the American economy.”

Trump’s tweet a few days earlier warning he would slap a 35 percent tariff on products sold in the United States by companies that outsource operations concerned right-leaning groups such as the anti-tax Club for Growth and spurred further worries about Trump’s corporate intervention.

During the dinner, Pence once again sought to heal some of the wounds left over from the campaign, inviting Fiorina to stand and the crowd to applaud her for being a “great, great voice” for American conservatism. During the campaign, Fiorina said she was “horrified” by Trump, and Trump once appeared to insult Fiorina’s appearance.

After her meeting with Trump, Fiorina praised the Cabinet being put together by the presidentelect.

“The high quality of people that he’s named already says so much about his executive abilities,” she told reporters. “But it also says that people recognize the opportu-

Carly Fiorina receives acknowledgment from Vice Presidentelect Mike Pence as he addresses a Heritage Foundation meeting in Washington, D.C., last month. Pence has worked to heal some of the rifts from the Republican primary.

KLMNO WEEKLY

nity that our new president-elect has to really make a huge impact on people’s lives in this country and on events around the world.

So it was an honor for me to be there.”

Beyond opening a dialogue between the incoming administration and its critics, Pence has also left a mark on the team Trump is assembling. He championed Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) to be nominated for CIA director and Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) for health and human services secretary, people familiar with the process said.

But some Pence allies have been passed over. Trump chose former Goldman Sachs executive Steven Mnuchin for treasury secretary, not Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.).

Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), a Trump ally who is serving as the transition team’s liaison to Congress, predicted Pence will be the administration’s key point person working with GOP congressional leaders. Pence knows many members from his days as the House Republican Conference chairman from 2009 to 2011.

“It will be a vice president with a real meat-and-potatoes job description,” Collins said.

Pence likes to introduce himself in speeches as a “Christian, a conservative and a Republican — in that order.” Some religious conservative leaders see him as a figure who will give a voice to their causes in the White House.

Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, has known Pence for two decades.

From Pence, Perkins said, he hopes Trump will learn to be open about faith and conservative principles.

“Pence has not compartmentalized his life,” Perkins said. “And I think it would be great benefit to the president to do the same. I think he’ll have that opportunity, to have someone beside him that is guided by faith and his relationship with God.” The contrasts between Pence and Trump have been clear to many Republicans since Trump tapped him as his running mate in July. But Pence appears determined to try to convince his party that Trump is not all that dissimilar from him — and them.

“I often tell people that, you know, other than a whole lot of zeros, Donald Trump and I have lot in common,” Pence said in his speech at the Heritage Foundation dinner. n

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POLITICS

Ivanka Trump’s role is still uncertain

BY J ULIET E ILPERIN AND K AREN T UMULTY

T

he quest to unearth the Manhattan moderate who may lie deep within Donald Trump’s psyche runs directly through his daughter Ivanka.

This, at least, is the impression that she has given over the past several weeks, brokering meetings between the president-elect and environmentalists, such as former vice president Al Gore and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, and chatting about child care with prominent feminists.

But as Ivanka Trump expands her circle of allies and sorts out what kind of influence she might have over the policies of the next administration, the question arises: Are her efforts a reflection of her passions and convictions — or of a desire to extend the brand of a fashion entrepreneur whose market is primarily young women?

The two might not be mutually exclusive. The public and private outreach she has made to influential liberals, and the vigor with which they are seeking her out, underscores the extent to which the Trumps’ political and financial interests are interwoven, even as family members take steps to separate themselves from aspects of their business.

Sorting out the Trump family enterprise is a work in progress.

The president-elect has tweeted that he will be “leaving my great business in total in order to fully focus on running the country.”

Watchdog groups and ethics experts are calling for Trump to divest his businesses, but the family is looking at a more complicated arrangement. While Trump’s two older sons, Don Jr. and Eric, are likely to focus on running their father’s real estate empire after he takes office, Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, intend to serve as informal but influential advisers to the next president.

The likelihood is that Ivanka Trump will drastically scale back her role in her father’s commercial enterprises, but it is far from cer-

BRYAN R. SMITH/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES

The question is whether she will be an informal presidential adviser or a brand promoter — or both tain that she will relinquish control over the formidable lifestyle brand she has established.

One of her advisers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing decisionmaking process, said that “she’s figuring out what her role is” and knows that she will have to “separate commercial interests from her issue advocacy.”

Alienating young women could pose a financial risk to Ivanka Trump’s business ventures. Opponents of the president-elect have targeted the brand with a boycott.

Shortly after her prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention this summer — where she sported a dress from her fashion line that sold out at Macy’s shortly thereafter — a Cosmopolitan-Morning Consult poll of 3,000 registered voters found that 28 percent of women ages 18 to 34 had a positive view of her, while 42 percent had a negative opinion.

A more recent survey suggests that the ugly presidential campaign has not put a pall on her business. In late October, Forbes

reported, the research firm Brand Keys asked 950 upscale women ages 18 to 35, “In light of Ivanka Trump’s involvement with the Trump campaign for president, how likely would you be to consider buying her line of shoes and clothing?” Slightly more than half responded “extremely likely” or “very likely.”

Ivanka Trump is entering uncharted territory: Several presidents’ daughters, and daughtersin-law, have served as White House hostesses, but presidential historian William Seale said that none served as an influential public policy adviser. “A more modern woman, coming in with her own career, is a little different,” he said.

“If there’s someone there who’s smart and can do it, why not?”

Several people who know Ivanka Trump and her husband say the two could prove invaluable as the new president seeks to build trust with groups that opposed his candidacy. The two have moved easily within Manhattan’s overwhelmingly liberal upper crust.

“They are two of the most valu-

A woman shops at the Ivanka Trump store in New York.

The president-elect’s daughter is likely to figure prominently in the White House, but it is not clear whether she will give up control of her own business interests.

Several people who know her say she would prove invaluable to her father’s presidency, but she risks alienating her brand’s customers.

able people to the president-elect, in terms of making a bridge to different constituencies,” said Kevin Sheekey, who managed all three of former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s campaigns and served as deputy mayor for government affairs.

Ivanka Trump plans to focus on issues related to women and families. A newer interest is climate change, which led to meetings in December between the presidentelect and Gore and then DiCaprio.

But until recently, Ivanka Trump has been relatively quiet on environmental issues.

In 2012, Ivanka Trump and Kushner attended the White House correspondents’ dinner as Bloomberg’s guests and sat at the same table as Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, which has received tens of millions of dollars from Bloomberg to shut down coal plants across the country. The group discussed climate change, Sheekey recalled, and Brune came away impressed.

But in an interview, Brune said his favorable impression of Ivanka Trump and Kushner has to be weighed against the presidentelect’s policy positions and key appointments, including his nomination of Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Brune compared that appointment to “putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires.”

“It’s great that Ivanka and Jared may, occasionally, feel that climate change is an issue. Until they’re setting policy, it’s a sideshow, it’s a distraction — at best,” he said.

With few options, prominent progressives see Trump’s daughter and son-in-law as potential allies within Trump’s circle. Kirk Fordham, a strategist for progressive groups who has worked for Republicans, estimated than “fewer than 10 percent” of these organizations developed a “Trump contingency plan” before the election. Now, he said, they need to mobilize their Republican members. “You’ve got to be powermapping his New York relatives and his friends, because nearly all of them are liberal.” n

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ARE THESE REAL?

NO. TOP: COURTESY OF CINCINNATI, MOHAVE COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE, BEAVERTON POLICE AND ORLANDO POLICE; BOTTOM: PROVO POLICE, TEWKSBURY POLICE AND FAIRBORN POLICE

Deadly run-ins, replica guns T HIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN BY J OHN S ULLIVAN AND REPORTED

BY J ENNIFER J ENKINS, J ULIE T ATE, S HAUN C OURTNEY AND J ORDAN H OUSTON

O

n a warm September evening in Columbus, Ohio, panicked witnesses called police to report that a group of boys had robbed a man at gunpoint and fled into a maze of alleys and fences on the city’s east side.

In the fading light, Officer Bryan Mason cornered two of the boys in an alley, where, according to police, 13-year-old Tyre King pulled a gun from his waistband. Mason fired three rounds, striking the teen in the head, chest and torso.

The black gun police recovered at the scene looked like their own department-issued, polymerframed Smith & Wesson Military and Police semiautomatic pistol.

It even had a laser sight. But police would soon learn that King’s weapon was a BB gun — a facsimile of the gun Mason used to shoot and kill the teen.

At a news conference the next day, Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs waved a stock photograph

of the BB gun. “Our officers carry a gun that looks practically identical to this weapon,” she said. “. . . It looks like a firearm that could kill you.”

Police across the country say that they are increasingly facing off against people with ultra-reallooking pellet guns, toy weapons and non-functioning replicas.

Such encounters have led police to shoot and kill at least 86 people over the past two years, according to a Washington Post database of fatal police shootings nationwide. In 2016, police fatally shot 43 people wielding the guns.

In 2015, police also killed 43.

The Post analysis is the first accounting of fatal police shootings involving people armed with air guns, toys or replicas, a phenomenon last studied in depth more than 25 years ago, when Congress first sought to address the problem of police shootings involving toy guns. The 86 shooting deaths are among the nearly 2,000 people shot and killed by police since 2015, which The Post is tracking, something no government agency does.

Police recovered a wide variety of the weapons in the fatal shoot-

In two years, police have killed nearly 90 people carrying firearms that appear real but are not

ings, but almost all had one thing in common: They were highly realistic copies of firearms. Of those, 53 were pneumatic BB or pellet guns that fire small-caliber metal balls or pellets. An additional 16 were Airsoft guns, which use compressed air cartridges to fire plastic BBs. Thirteen were replicas, two were toys, one was a starter pistol and one was a lighter.

Experts who study the domestic market for pellet and Airsoft guns said consumer demand for replica firearms has grown.

“They are red hot,” said Tom Gaylord, an industry consultant who runs a popular blog for the Ohio-based Pyramyd Air, one of the largest air gun retailers in the country. Pyramyd Air declined to comment.

Police say it is virtually impossible to train officers to identify imitation firearms from any distance. Short of eliminating the guns, police have little choice but to assume the guns are lethal.

Efforts to stop production of the guns or radically alter their appearance have mostly failed because of resistance from gunmakers and gun rights groups, such as

the National Rifle Association.

“We’re talking about this 26 years later, and I’m not sure anything has really changed except that tragic occurrences continue to happen,” said Chuck Wexler, who runs the Police Executive Research Forum, a policing policy think tank that studied the issue in 1990 for Congress. “A toy gun in a country with 300 million real guns is hard to distinguish.”

The role of imitation firearms in fatal police encounters reemerged as a national issue in 2014, when Cleveland police fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was playing with a BB gun in a park. Police were responding to a call about a man with a gun outside a local recreation center.

The shooting was among a spate of controversial and deadly encounters with police that helped galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement.

Of the 86 fatal shootings involving imitation firearms since 2015, the most common theme was mental illness: 38 of those killed had a history of it, according to their families and police reports.

Fourteen of the calls were for continues on next page

Precipitating call that led to the police encounter: 911 call – 16 8 Erratic person – 11 Domestic disturbance call – 9 KLMNO NATION Robbery – 9 WEEKLY Serving warrant – 6 Suicidal person – 6 from previous page Burglary – 3 Why is it that domestic disturbances. Ten othPatrolling neighborhood – 3reers began as robberies. The a 13-year-old maining circumstances Suspicious vehicleinclude –2 patrolling neighborhoods, servTraffic stop – 1 would have ing arrest warrants and making Theft – 1 traffic stops. nearly an exact Of the people killed, 50–were Suspicious activity 1 white men. The oldest person replica of a Drug investigation 1 killed was Robert Patrick Quinn,

77, who was fatally shot in Pittston, Pa., as he rode his motorized scooter outside an apartment complex while waving a realisticlooking pellet gun.

Columbus, Ohio, Mayor Half of the shootings happened Andrew Ginther (D) at night. In age almost every case, he killed asked (white/black brackets): at a news etc. male/female, police said the victims conference after Tyre Whitefailed – 41 to comply with an officer’s orders. In King, 13, was shot by Black – 18 60 cases, police said they pointed police in September guns at officers. Hispanic – 8 Among the dead are Ernesto Other – 252Flores, a mentally distraught year-old man who after a standoff with police in April 2015 stepped Malehome – 64 in out of a pink stucco Montclair, Calif., Female holding –a 5BB gun. Police opened fire, killing Flores in front of his family. One of only five women killed by police was 17-year-old Shelly Haendiges, who was shot in Kokomo, Ind., history, according to police or family 28 (41 percent after police– responded to a robbery call and found her pointing of total) a pellet gun at a store clerk. Her family said she suffered from mental illness.

Age The BB gun recovered after Under 17 4 police killed King, the Ohio–teenager, was made by18-24 Umarex USA, – 11 one of the largest air gun and 25-34 – 22 firearm manufacturers in the 35-44 – 14 world and the self-proclaimed “king of replicas.” 45-54 Umarex–makes 13 air guns under the Beretta, Colt, 55+ 5 Smith & Wesson, HK, Ruger and Browning brands. It sells BB guns that are copies of such firearms as Gunsthe(airsoft, lighter, Hecklerbb, & Koch MP5 etc.) submachine gun, a mainstay of specialBB gun – 24 ized military and police units. The Pellet gun – 18 Umarex 40XP BB gun that King Airsoftsells – 12for allegedly brandished about $50Replica in stores, gunincluding – 12 Walmart. Gunmaker Sig Sauer –3 makes air guns that Toy are advertised as “carbon copies” of their most popular lethal firearms.

Umarex USA and Sig Sauer did not return repeated calls seeking comment.

Gun rights groups, including Gun Owners of America, based in Virginia, have lobbied against laws that seek to alter air guns to make them distinguishable from firearms.

Michael E. Hammond, a legal adviser to the gun rights group,

SUNDAY, JANUARY 1, 2017

Circumstances that led to fatal shootings by police of individuals armed with imitation firearms

18 Undetermined 911 call 14 Domestic disturbance 11 10 9 7 4 3 3 2 2 1 1 1

86 fatal shootings

police firearm on him?

Erratic person Robbery Serving warrant Suicidal person Patrolling neighborhood Burglary Traffic stop Suspicious vehicle Theft Suspicious activity Drug investigation Traffic accident

Demographic of the people slain RACE

GENDER 4 14

54 White 19 Black 11 Hispanic 2 Other

AGE Under 17 18 to 24

27 25 to 34

81 Male

5 Female

16

35 to 44

18 7

45 to 54 Over 55

Type of gun 86 guns total

31 BB 22 Pellet 16 Airsoft 13 Replica 4 Other Source: Staff reports

said the alterations never seem to be enough for those who dislike guns. “It all arises out of this general animus and media-fed fear of anything that has to do with guns,” Hammond said.

The NRA declined to comment.

In Ohio, where King and Rice were killed, the state does not regulate BB guns and also allows firearms to be openly carried.

The day after Rice’s death, black legislators in Ohio tried to regulate the guns, introducing a law requiring all BB and pellet guns sold in the state to have special markings or be brightly colored. The bill died in committee.

Two years later, police shot King. “Why is it that a 13-year-old would have nearly an exact replica of a police firearm on him in our neighborhoods, an eighth-

THE WASHINGTON POST

grader involved in very, very dangerous conduct in one of our neighborhoods?” Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther (D) asked at a news conference after the shooting.

Safety on In the 1980s, police shootings of children prompted Congress to pass the first and only federal regulations on toy guns.

In 1983, 5-year-old Patrick Andrew Mason was alone in his Stanton, Calif., home when an officer who was called to the unit to do a welfare check mistook the boy with his red toy gun for a burglar; the boy was fatally shot while his single mother was away at work, according to news reports. In 1988, officers in San Francisco responding to a report of shots fired mistook a plastic toy

gun for a .22-caliber pistol and shot a 13-year-old mentally disabled boy in the head, killing him.

Parents began to push manufacturers to make the guns appear less realistic. Retailers such as Toys “R” Us stopped carrying realistic toy guns, and toy manufacturers began adding an orange plug to toy guns. After several states restricted the use of imitation firearms, Congress in 1988 passed a law requiring the brightorange barrel plug on all toy guns.

The law applied to water guns, many replicas and Airsoft guns that fire nonmetallic projectiles, but it exempted BB, pellet guns and replicas of antique firearms.

The law also mandated two studies on whether the new orange tips would prevent shootings.

In one study, FBI recruits were confronted by assailants carrying firearms or guns with orange tips.

The recruits had two seconds to decide whether to shoot. When faced with unmarked replica pistols or guns with orange tips, officers shot 95 percent of the time.

“It is clear from this study that the orange plug marking system does not help police officers distinguish between toy guns and real guns,” concluded the 1989 report, which was managed by the National Institute of Justice.

The second study a year later reached the same conclusion, saying that police response when confronted with the guns was linked to environmental factors — such as what a police dispatcher tells an officer. Calls for service in a high-crime area, for example, might lead officers to consider “a worst case scenario,” said the report, overseen by the Police Executive Research Forum.

But it was the behavior of the person holding the toy gun that mattered most.

“If they are told there’s a person with a gun acting in a threatening manner, that’s what they respond to,” said David L. Carter, a professor at Michigan State University who spoke to officers in 27 law enforcement agencies for the 1990 study.

In 2015, Congress revisited the issue when Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) introduced a bill that would force the country to enact a law similar to California’s, which requires the entire surface of all toy and BB guns be painted a

SUNDAY, JANUARY 1, 2017

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NATION bright color.

The bill stalled in committee.

Twelve states, the District and Puerto Rico have banned the guns or imposed restrictions on their use, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In 2015, Boston outlawed imitation firearms in public. Boston Police Commissioner William B. Evans said if a facsimile gun has been used in a crime, police will charge a suspect with possession of a real gun.

“They are the exact same unless you have it in your hand and take it apart,” Evans said.

‘Dangerous and unfair’ In March in Gainesville, Fla., Alachua County sheriff’s officers were called to a parking lot where they encountered 16-year-old Robert L. Dentmond, who was armed with what appeared to be an AR-15 rifle.

Dentmond was a high school sophomore who had lived in foster care, according to police reports. His mother went to prison, and his father physically abused him, the records show. He was on probation for burglary.

One bright spot for Dentmond was Cayla Todd, his girlfriend of one month.

But on the night of March 20, Todd said they fought online and that she ended the relationship.

Dentmond sent her a Facebook message, which investigators later found.

“I’m finna have the police shoot me,” Dentmond wrote.

At 10:07 p.m., Dentmond called police and said that he was at the Majestic Oaks Apartments with an M-16.

When deputies and officers from the Gainesville Police Department arrived, they saw the 6-foot Dentmond in a dimly lit parking lot holding a gun.

Police ordered him to drop the gun, they said.

After 24 minutes, Dentmond leveled what looked to officers like an assault-type rifle and began walking. Nine officers opened fire and didn’t stop until the gun fell from his hand. He died at a hospital.

After the shooting, police saw Dentmond’s weapon had broken in two, according to a state report.

When picking up the pieces, an officer noticed that their weight “did not feel right” and they seemed to be plastic.

ANDREW SPEAR FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Officers did not learn until the next morning that Dentmond’s gun was a toy, an Airsoft rifle with the orange tip removed.

“Some of them broke down in tears,” Alachua County Sheriff Sadie Darnell said. “It’s not a highfive situation. It’s a devastating career-long and lifelong impact.”

Grant McDougall, the psychotherapist who evaluated the deputies after the shooting, said they all wished that they could go back and change the outcome.

“Every single one of them — some of them very graphically — grieved the loss, even if they would sit here and tell me they did the right thing,” McDougall said.

A grand jury investigating the shooting cleared the officers and suggested that the state ban imitation firearms.

“It is dangerous and unfair to all for law enforcement to confront a situation where to all appearances a real weapon is involved, only to be subjected to intense second-guessing after the fact when that turns out not to have been so,” the jury said.

Dentmond’s family could not be reached for comment.

Todd told The Post that police could have done more. “He was only 16 years old. He didn’t need to die,” she said.

Three months later, it almost happened again.

In June, Alachua County deputies got a call that two groups of young men were driving around with what appeared to be AK-47s.

The department sent every available unit, and they quickly came upon men wearing werewolf masks hanging out of two cars’ sunroofs and waving what appeared to be Heckler & Koch MP5 machine guns, according to Darnell and records.

Police disarmed them. The guns were plastic toys, and the gunmen, university students, were making a movie for a film contest.

‘Oh, he’s shooting them’ In Columbus, Ohio, Chief Kim Jacobs has spent the past few months explaining to outraged community members why one of her veteran police officers fatally shot a 13-year-old carrying a BB gun. She wants people to understand how a mix of panicked reports of armed mayhem and a real-looking gun can turn deadly.

Complicating the matter is that the officer, Bryan Mason, had been involved in three shootings since 2009, one of them fatal. In 2012, Mason shot and killed a man who was pointing a firearm at another person. In all cases, Mason’s use of force was ruled justified by the department. Jacobs said Mason would not be allowed to comment until the conclusion of the investigation.

Jacobs said the shooting has taken its toll on everyone, including Mason.

“You go to work and you do your job, and then all of the sudden you’re under criminal investi-

Maurice Cardwell, Tyre King’s father, wears a pin in remembrance of his son. He has no sympathy for Bryan Mason, the officer who shot King. “Ain’t nobody held accountable,” Cardwell said.

“There’s no wrongdoing over there, it seems. And you’re killing kids?”

KLMNO WEEKLY

gation,” Jacobs said.

King’s family has no sympathy for Mason. “Ain’t nobody held accountable,” said his father, Maurice Cardwell. “There’s no wrongdoing over there, it seems.

And you’re killing kids?”

Sept. 14 started out like most days for Tyre King. His parents described him as an astute child who worked selling candy, cutting grass and trimming hedges.

After King returned from school that day, he finished his homework and left his house. At 7:42 p.m. witnesses called 911 to report a robbery. The callers said a gunman wearing a hoodie and baggy pants fled the scene. The robbery victim came on the line and told dispatchers, “I’m not going to mess with it over $10.”

Another witness said seven or eight armed men were running away with police chasing them.

“Oh, he’s shooting them. Oh, my God,” a caller said, apparently describing police shooting King.

Chanda L. Brown, an attorney for the family, said they had serious doubts that King was involved in the robbery and that he did not own a BB gun. Police have not disclosed the source of the gun.

Brown said she thinks King was shot running away, not pulling a gun.

The only person charged in the robbery is Demetrius E. Braxton, 19. His attorney, Lodema M’Poco, told The Post last month that Braxton admits he used the gun to commit the robbery while King and others waited nearby. M’Poco said Braxton passed the gun to King, who put the weapon in his pants. Braxton said that after police ordered him and King to the ground, King ran and Mason shot him. M’Poco said Braxton did not see King pull the BB gun out.

Braxton pleaded guilty in November to felony robbery charges.

Brown, the King family’s attorney, said police failed to train officers how to deal with children with BB guns.

“Shooting should be the last resort,” she said.

For Jacobs and other officers, they seldom have the benefit of weighing all the evidence and making a decision.

“People don’t really understand the dynamics of a police-involved situation, how fast they occur,” Jacobs said. “They all have families, they want to go home at the end of their shift.” n

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Mining is poisoning Tibet, herders say S IMON D ENYER Jiajika, China

the letter said.

A May 2009 protest in the village of Xizha prompted a severe crackdown, the letter said, with guns and tear gas used, seven women severely beaten, and 12 men blindfolded, detained and tortured.

Whether the mine is truly the culprit for all the grasslands’ ills is another matter — climate change, for example, is probably an important factor. But that does not soothe local anger.

BY

H

igh in western China’s Sichuan province, in the shadow of holy mountains, the Liqi River flows through a lush, grassy valley dotted with grazing yaks, small Tibetan villages and a Buddhist temple.

But there’s poison here.

A large lithium mine not only desecrates the sacred grasslands, villagers say, but spawns deadly pollution. The river used to be full of fish. Today, there are hardly any. Hundreds of yaks, the villagers say, have died in the past few years after drinking river water.

China’s thirst for mineral resources, and its desire to exploit the rich deposits under the Tibetan plateau, have spread pollution and anguish for many of the herders whose ancestors lived here for thousands of years. The land they worship is under assault, and their way of life is threatened without their consent, the herders say.

“Old people, we see the mines and we cry,” a 67-year-old yak herder said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “What are the future generations going to do? How are they going to survive?”

A local environmentalist, who also declined to be named to avoid backlash from authorities, said he had done an oral survey of local opinion and found that Tibetans would oppose mining projects even if companies promised to share profits with local communities, to fill in mines after they were exhausted, and to return sites to their natural state.

“God is in the mountains and the rivers, these are the places that spirits live,” he said.

‘We just knew they had lied’ It was in 2009 that toxic chemicals from the Ganzizhou Rongda Lithium mine first leaked into the river, locals say, killing their livestock and poisoning the fish.

“The whole river stank, and it was full of dead yaks and dead fish,” said one man downstream in the village of Balang, who declined to be named for fear of retribution.

SIMON DENYER/THE WASHINGTON POST

Villagers on the western Chinese plateau blame mineral extraction for their sacred lands’ pollution A pollution outbreak and a protest by villagers in 2013 forced the government to order production temporarily stopped, locals said.

“Officials came to the village to try to persuade people,” the man said. “They said we have to have the mine but promised they would take time to fix the pollution problem before reopening it.”

But in April, just after mining restarted, fish began dying again, locals said. “That’s when we just knew they had lied,” the man said.

In May, residents staged a second protest, scattering dead fish on a road in nearby Tagong. Protesters were surrounded by dozens of baton-wielding riot police.

Again the government stepped in, issuing a statement to “solemnly” promise that the plant would not reopen until the “environmental issues” were solved.

But the problem at the Jiajika mine is not an isolated one. Across Tibetan parts of China, protests regularly erupt over mineral extraction, according to a 2015 report by Tibet Watch.

China is focused on copper and

gold extraction from Tibet but is also exploiting other minerals “with increasing intensity,” including chromium, iron, lithium, iron, mercury, uranium and zinc — as well as fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, the report said.

When protests break out, China’s response “has generally been heavy-handed,” with authorities seeking to politicize the protests, Tibet Watch wrote.

In the villages outside Xiaosumang township in Qinghai, residents blame a lead and zinc mine for the deterioration of the grasslands, and even for falling harvests of caterpillar fungus, a highly prized health cure that is the backbone of the local economy.

Contaminated water from the mine, residents said in a joint letter to the authorities in 2010, not only killed their livestock but also caused people who drank it to die of cancer, they said.

“Over the years, many herders would sigh and say: ‘Life can’t go on like this anymore. Even drinking has become a big issue for people living on the grasslands,’ ”

A woman washes clothes near a lithium mine in Tagong township.

Local residents say pollution from the mine has killed fish in the Liqi River and killed yaks that drink the water. China and Tibetan villagers clash over mining and land grabs, leading to protests that can end in violent crackdowns.

A conflict without end In Jiajika, 300 miles to the southeast, the commercial pressure to reopen the lithium mine is mounting. The element is a vital component in rechargeable batteries, and demand — and prices — are skyrocketing.

Last January, Youngy Co. Ltd., the parent company of Ganzizhou Rongda Lithium, promised investors that the local government would step up efforts to reopen the mine in March.

That same month, an article in a local newspaper outlined the authorities’ dream of making the area “China’s lithium capital,” calling Jiajika the biggest lithium mine in the world.

He Chengkun, Youngy’s media officer, said an official investigation found that the plant was not responsible for killing fish in 2013 or in 2016. “The local government has made it clear it is nothing to do with our company,” he said.

Nevertheless, across the Tibetan plateau, resource extraction, land grabs and environmental destruction remain flash points between Tibetans and authorities, said Free Tibet Director Eleanor Byrne-Rosengren, reflecting both local grievances and the wider problem that Tibetans do not have the right to decide what happens to Tibet and its resources.

“Those resources feed the demands of Chinese industry instead of the needs of the Tibetan people,” she said. “That is why their environment is put at risk and their rights are trampled upon, and why we can expect to see this conflict played out repeatedly in the future.” n

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‘This is not my home’ P AMELA C ONSTABLE Kabul BY

T

hree men slumped on their cots in a clean but cramped dormitory room.

They looked glum and shellshocked, as if they had suddenly found themselves in a forbidding foreign place.

In many ways, they had.

Javed Hakimi, Mohsen Amiri and Navid Mohammedi were among 45 unhappy passengers who arrived here under guard on a charter flight from Frankfurt in December. It was the first of many such flights that are expected to return thousands of Afghan asylum seekers from Germany under a E.U. agreement with President Ashraf Ghani.

Across Western Europe, as many as 80,000 Afghans may be repatriated after their asylum applications are rejected, under the agreement signed by Ghani and E.U. officials in October.

After the flight from Frankfurt landed, some of the passengers headed for buses home. But these three had no one waiting for them.

They said that their immediate families live in Germany and that once their 10-day stay at a government rest house ended, they would have nowhere to go.

“I am completely alone here,” said Amiri, 35, noting that he survived a capsizing off Greece in 2012 while trying to reach his mother and siblings in Germany.

“I was a law-abiding person there, and I was training to be a house painter, but they rejected my asylum case and said I had to go home. This is not my home. I don’t even know where to start looking.”

To German officials, these were the easiest foreigners to legally remove amid a chaotic surge of refugees from Syria, Iraq and other countries that has overwhelmed many nations and generated an angry backlash across Europe. All of the Afghans had arrived illegally, some had committed crimes in Germany, and none were found to qualify for political asylum.

To Afghan officials, these men will become a burden that the

PAMELA CONSTABLE/THE WASHINGTON POST

Repatriated by Germany, migrants are torn from the lives they built far from their native Afghanistan poor, insurgent-plagued country cannot afford. Hundreds of thousands of war refugees are pouring back from bordering Pakistan; large numbers of rural families have been displaced by the Taliban and are living in camps.

“This is a real crisis for us,” said Rohullah Hashimi, an official at the Afghan ministry for refugees.

“We pleaded with the Europeans to only send those who wanted to come voluntarily, but there was a lot of pressure for us to take back more.” Many Afghans sold everything before they left their country, and they have returned penniless. Without prospects, he said, they may try to go back to Europe or join the insurgents.

Hakimi, 57, spent more than 20 years in Germany, where he married and raised two daughters, but his criminal record made him a high priority for the new return policy. He was once convicted of drug dealing there and was imprisoned for two years, then deported to Afghanistan.

He sneaked back in 2015, paying smugglers to guide him across a half-dozen countries. He was working in his brother’s restaurant in Hamburg in December when he received a notice to report to the police.

“They accused me of selling drugs, but I served my time in prison, and I wanted to be with my family again,” Hakimi said. He said one man slated for the same flight had killed someone but was allowed to stay at the last minute after a church said he had converted to Christianity and repented.

Mohammedi, 21, has even fewer ties to Afghanistan, having grown up in Iran, where his family lives after fleeing to escape civil war. He said they faced harassment there and encouraged him to go to Germany to live with an uncle. In 2011, at age 16, he made the hazardous journey, winding up at a train station in Paris late at night.

“I bought a ticket to Frankfurt and was so exhausted I fell asleep on the train,” he said. “A policeman

From left, Navid Mohammedi, 21, Mohsen Amiri, 35, and Javed Hakimi, 57, were deported from Germany after the country rejected their applications for asylum. Back in Afghanistan, they are alone and unsure how to begin a life anew in a place that no longer feels like their home.

woke me up and asked where I was from. I told him Afghanistan, and he said to me in Dari: ‘Don’t worry.

You’re safe now. You’re in Germany.’ ” As a minor, Mohammedi said, he was sent to school and given a multiyear visa. But several weeks ago, he said, he was informed his asylum claim had been rejected.

Until recently, Germany was sending back only Afghans who would leave voluntarily, but after a flood of nearly 900,000 migrants in 2015, the government decided to speed asylum processing for those fleeing civil wars, such as Syrians, and step up deportations of others less likely to win asylum cases, including many Afghans.

In 2016, Germany deported a record 23,750 asylum seekers.

More than 200,000 foreigners have pending deportation orders, including 12,500 Afghans.

Under the E.U. pact with Kabul, German officials said they will focus on individuals with criminal records and recent illegal entries, and avoid returning those from unsafe regions. But the policy has angered Afghan expatriates.

Afghan officials said they had little to offer new arrivals, except food and shelter for a few days, subsidized by the nonprofit International Organization for Migration, which is also providing those without homes a one-time payment of about $600.

Amiri, who was reunited with his family in Germany four years ago, seemed the most undone by his deportation. He recounted his trek, when an overloaded smuggler’s boat capsized near Greece.

“We all started swimming, and I finally reached the banks, but five people drowned, including three children,” Amiri said.

The German government was welcoming at the time, he said, but during deportation, that changed.

Police “took all my money at the airport,” he said. “On the plane . . . they treated us like terrorists, even following us to the bathroom.”

After this first flight, Afghan officials said, the deportations were halted for the Christmas season. The second group will arrive this month. n

COVER STORY

TRUMP MADE A ‘CONTRACT’ WITH VOTERS. WILL HE KEEP HIS WORD? During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump made more than 280 promises, though many were contradictory or just uttered in a single campaign event. But on Oct. 22, Trump issued what he called his “Contract With the American Voter.” This was a specific plan of action that would guide his administration, starting from the first day, and it listed 60 promises. He even signed it with his distinctive signature. During Trump’s term, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker will track the progress of each pledge — and whether Trump has achieved his stated goal.

For updated fact checks, go to wapo.st/TrumpPromiseTracker

GOVERNMENT PROCESS

1

Propose a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress.

2

Impose a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce the federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety and public health).

3

Require that for every new federal regulation, two existing regulations must be eliminated.

4

Impose a five-year ban on White House and congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave government service.

5

Impose a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government.

TRADE

6

Impose a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for U.S. elections.

7

Begin the process of selecting a replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia (from a list of 20 issued during campaign).

8

Cancel every unconstitutional executive action, memorandum and order issued by President Obama.

9

Enact new ethics reforms to reduce the corrupting influence of special interests.

10

Cut red tape at the Food and Drug Administration to speed approval of new drugs.

JIM R. BOUNDS/BLOOMBERG NEWS

11

IMMIGRATION

12

17 18

Direct the commerce secretary and U.S. trade representative to use every tool under American and international law to end foreign trading abuses immediately.

Direct the commerce secretary and U.S. trade representative to identify all foreign trading abuses that unfairly impact American workers.

13

Direct the treasury secretary to label China a currency manipulator.

14

Establish tariffs to discourage companies from laying off their workers in order to relocate in other countries and ship their products back to the U.S. tax-free.

15

Announce the U.S. withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

16

Announce the U.S. intention to renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from the deal under Article 2205.

Cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities.

Begin removing the more than 2 million “criminal” illegal immigrants from the country.

19

Cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take back “criminal” illegal immigrants.

20

Suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur.

21

Impose “extreme vetting” on all people coming into our country.

22

Establish a two-year mandatory minimum federal prison sentence for illegally reentering the United States after a previous deportation.

23

Fund the construction of a wall on our southern border.

24

Make Mexico reimburse the United States for the full cost of the wall. continues on next page

Shipping containers wait at Port of Wilmington in Wilmington, N.C. Among the trade initiatives Trump has proposed are withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and establishing tariffs to discourage firms from laying off workers and moving to foreign countries.

ECONOMY

MARK LENNIHAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A stock trader taped a dollar bill to his computer screen at the New York Stock Exchange last month. Trump says he wants to grow the U.S. economy by 4 percent each year and create at least 25 million jobs during his four-year term as president.

from previous page

25

Establish a five-year mandatory minimum federal prison sentence for illegally reentering the United States for those with felony convictions, multiple misdemeanor convictions, or two or more prior deportations.

26

Reform visa rules to enhance penalties for overstaying.

27

Reform visa rules to ensure open jobs are offered to American workers first.

28

30

Leverage public-private partnerships and private investments through tax incentives to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over 10 years.

Reduce the number of tax brackets from seven to three, and likewise greatly simplify tax forms.

31

39

Make sure the $1 trillion infrastructure plan will be revenue neutral.

32

Propose and pass a tax simplification bill in which the largest tax reductions are for the middle class.

33 34 35

Create at least 25 million jobs in the first term.

Grow the economy 4 percent a year.

Establish new screening procedures for immigration to ensure those who are admitted to our country support our people and our values.

Lower the business tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent.

ENVIRONMENT

Incentivize employers to provide on-site child-care services.

29

37

Cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure.

36

Create tax-free dependent-care savings accounts for young and elderly dependents.

38

Provide matching contributions for low-income families to the dependent-care savings accounts.

40

Allow trillions of dollars of American corporate money overseas to be brought back at a 10 percent tax rate.

41

Allow Americans to deduct child care and elder care from their taxes.

42

Give a middle-class family with two children a 35 percent tax cut.

HEALTH CARE CRIME

43 44 45

Reduce surging crime, drugs and violence.

Create a task force on violent crime.

Increase funding for programs that train and assist local police.

46

Increase resources for federal law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to dismantle criminal gangs and put violent offenders behind bars.

ENERGY

47

Lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion worth of job-producing American energy reserves, including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal.

48

Lift the Obama-Clinton roadblocks and allow vital energy infrastructure projects, such as the Keystone Pipeline, to move forward.

49 50 51

Fully repeal and replace Obamacare.

Replace Obamacare with health savings accounts.

Allow the purchase of health insurance across state lines.

52 53

Let states manage Medicaid funds.

Provide veterans with the ability to receive public Veterans Affairs treatment or attend the private doctor of their choice.

NATIONAL SECURITY

54 55 56

Expand military investment.

Eliminate the defense sequester.

Pass a law to protect our vital infrastructure from cyberattacks.

WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

EDUCATION

57 58 59 60

End Common Core.

Make two- and four-year college more affordable.

Expand vocational and technical education.

Redirect education money to give parents the right to send their kid to the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school of their choice.

President Obama signs the Affordable Care Act during a ceremony on March 23, 2010. The bill was passed after a months-long political battle that left the legislation without a single Republican vote. Trump wants to repeal the law and replace it with health savings accounts.

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HEALTH

Fitness could become a tax write-off BY

D ES B IELER

W

“It is exclusively products, services and programs that are for physical activity,” he said, using a football as an example, as well as a canoe (“You can only use a canoe for one thing”) or even golf clubs.

Golf shirts, though, would not be covered, nor would sneakers, which are worn by all sorts of people in all sorts of non-strenuous situations. “You cannot make the case that by buying footwear you’re going to be physically active,” Cove said, although he noted that cleats, or jerseys specifically for team competitions, could be exceptions.

The bill makes a point of not appearing to be a tax break for the country-club set, specifying that a qualified “fitness facility” cannot be “a private club owned and operated by its members” or one that offers “golf, hunting, sailing, or riding facilities.”

Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, expressed some skepticism about the usefulness of the PHIT Act, in particular the way it would allow some fitness-related expenses to be deducted from taxes, as medical expenses can be. But health expenses must account for more than 10 percent of your adjusted gross income for you to deduct them. For most people, that’s a lot, and as Williams put it: “The people that tend to have that problem are people who are ill or not well.

These are the least likely people to go out and do a lot of exercising.”

Williams also said: “The problem with health savings accounts is the people who tend to have them are people who have money to put aside and can afford to have a high-deductible health plan.

That tends to be good for people with high incomes.”

Cove acknowledged that was a “legitimate” concern about the PHIT Act, saying, “The mechanism isn’t perfect, because some people will be not able to partake in it.” But he pointed to a way it could benefit the many thousands of parents whose children are signing up for sports every year. Those families are already taking huge amounts of money out of their pockets for equipment costs and fees, he said, so if they can use the legislation to get, say, a 30 percent savings on their expenses, they will get more out of that than people who are wealthier.

To Williams, though, “that kind of subsidy” for athletic pursuits “really defeats the purported purpose of the PHIT Act, which is to get people who are not active to become active.” He noted that an HSA is a “high-deductible healthinsurance program,” asking, “Do people want to make that tradeoff, to save a few dollars on their [fitness] expenses?”

Kind indicated he was aware of

Proposed bill would allow for HSA, FSA dollars to pay for some exercise expenses

ISTOCKPHOTO

ould you engage in more physically taxing activity if it helped lower your taxes? That is the thinking behind proposed legislation, and supporters think it can help people reduce their waistlines by improving their bottom lines.

It’s called the PHIT Act, as in Personal Health Investment Today. It would change the tax code to allow people to use pre-tax medical accounts, such as health savings accounts (HSAs) and flexible spending accounts (FSAs) to help pay for fitness-related expenses.

“We spend so much money on the back end when it comes to health-care treatment in our country, especially for chronic disease management, obesity-related illnesses,” said Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), the bill’s lead sponsor in the House, along with Rep. Charles W. Boustany Jr. (R-La.).

“This legislation kind of flips the tax code and creates tax incentives on the front end to try to encourage people to lead more active lifestyles.”

According to the language of the bill, “the World Health Organization determined that in the United States a $1 investment in physical activity alone (in time and equipment) would reduce medical expenses by $3.20.” The idea here is that, if people know they are receiving an effective discount on such things as gym memberships and exercise equipment, they will be more likely to make those expenditures and, having done so, get health-improving use out of them.

There are limitations on what would count as “qualified sports and fitness expenses,” and participants could not use more than $1,000 of their pre-tax allotments ($2,000 if filing jointly) toward them. Thomas Cove, president and chief executive of the Sports and Fitness Industry Association, which originally helped craft the bill several years ago, outlined what would qualify and what would not make the cut.

the possible drawbacks to the reach of the PHIT Act. “You can means-test all this stuff,” he said.

“I don’t have a problem as far as drawing lines and making sure that it’s getting to people who might otherwise struggle to be able to afford these type of activities.”

The congressman acknowledged that the bill might ultimately not be all that effective, but he figures it’s worth a shot, as part of an effort to “think a little creatively” about using the “power of the [tax] code” to encourage exercise.

“This is just another tool that I’ve been working on to try to make the healthy choice be the easy choice in people’s lives,” he said. “All too often, the greatest obstacle to improve individual health is inertia. . . . If this is an incentive that they need, to get them to finally go out and start leading a more active lifestyle, then I think we need more of that in our country. Otherwise the costs are just going to continue to mount on the back end.”

Kind and Cove noted the bill’s unusual bipartisan support; its 89 co-sponsors in the House include 51 Democrats and 38 Republicans. The Senate version, which Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) is championing, has the official support of seven Republicans and five Democrats.

“I think it’s something that’s crucial as we move forward, including if Republicans are eager to try to replace the Affordable Care Act,” Kind said. Pre-tax devices such as HSAs and FSAs have been prominent in many “repeal and replace” plans, and although Cove said that the bill’s supporters did not intend for it to become part of that political dynamic, it has worked out that way, and its cross-party appeal makes it attractive.

“To do this the right way,” Kind said of efforts to address the ACA, “there’s going to have to be some common ground, and some bipartisanship, and this is one example of where there is a lot of overlap of interests between the parties.” n

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‘La La Land’ almost didn’t get made BY

S TEPHANIE M ERRY

F

or a creative industry, Hollywood does not exactly put creativity on a pedestal. Movies that are not reminiscent of other movies — or plays or books or comics — do not usually get made, which is why for every imaginative film from a dreamer such as Wes Anderson, Charlie Kaufman or Spike Jonze, there are dozens of reboots, sequels, remakes and origin stories.

So of course “La La Land” almost did not make it to the big screen. The musical, released nationwide just before Christmas, is one of the most celebrated movies of 2016 and a shoo-in for a bestpicture nomination at the Oscars, but it had one huge strike against it: originality.

It was not based on a Broadway show, and no big-name composer was attached. It was not a tentpole, those films meant to create a constellation of spinoffs.

“All of it was just completely unknown,” said Damien Chazelle, the writer-director who spent six years trying to bring his effervescent musical to the masses. “To me, that’s what would make a movie exciting, but in Hollywood right now, that’s what makes a movie unmakeable.”

Say what you will about awards season, but the Oscars have one benefit for movie fans who don’t care for superheroes: Awards shows prompt studios to make movies that cater to adults. Yet even the front-runners, as good as they are, are not always entirely fresh. Of the eight best-picture nominees at the Oscars in February, five were based on books, one was a remake and two came from true stories, including the winner, “Spotlight,” about the investigative reporters at the Boston Globe who uncovered sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

Luckily for Chazelle, he had already proved that the stories springing from his mind have the potential to find both commercial and critical success. The reason Lionsgate gave him the green light on “La La Land” is because he wrote and directed 2014’s

DALE ROBINETTE/LIONSGATE

“Whiplash,” which was nominated for five Oscars, including best picture, and won three.

“La La Land” nods nostalgically to musicals of yore — but a genre that peaked in the 1950s is not exactly a bankable one. The movie follows two struggling artists: Emma Stone’s Mia works at a coffee shop when she is not suffering through another demoralizing audition, and Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian is a jazz musician coming to terms with the fact that people don’t listen to his favorite type of music anymore. The two don’t get along at first. But pretty soon, they are waltzing while floating around a planetarium and tap-dancing in the Hollywood hills.

Stone is a big fan of musicals.

During a recent visit to Washington, she gushed about some favorites, including the brightly colored Jacques Demy movies of the 1960s, which heavily influenced Chazelle.

“In the ones I really love, you can’t get to any other place without bursting into song, whether you’re so heartbroken you need to sing or you’re so hopeful that you have to sing or you’re so excited that you have to sing,” she said.

“It’s almost like an animated mov-

Too much originality can kill a film. This musical got a rare chance.

Director Damien Chazelle, above, spent six years on the nontraditional, usually “unmakeable” musical “La La Land.” TOP: The film’s stars, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.

ie where you watch these characters have these expressions that you’ve only ever had inside because you’re face isn’t made of rubber.”

After a pause, she added, “Well, mine is a little bit.” (Yes, the 28-year-old is just as charming and self-effacing in person.)

Musicals are not exactly a ubiquitous genre, so wholly original ones are nearly extinct, with the exception of Disney movies such as “Frozen” and “Enchanted.”

“Chicago,” “Les Miserables,” “Dreamgirls” and “Mamma Mia!” were all popular Broadway shows long before they became hit movies — and “Rock of Ages” and “Nine” were celebrated stage productions before they were box-office duds.

None of these had the vibe that Chazelle was going for, though.

He’s not interested in the technical razzle-dazzle or the idea of “putting on a number” so much as giving audiences a break from the constraints of real life.

“Breaking into a song is expressing a feeling in a way that normal movie grammar or normal reality wouldn’t let you,” he said.

Chazelle, 31, comes across a bit like an overgrown kid. He has a

full head of unruly dark curls, and he stares at the table while answering questions. He fidgets a lot. But this is apparently what a mad cinematic genius looks like because, against all odds, his movie casts a powerful spell.

“La La Land” blends nostalgic and modern in ways that keep familiar scenes from feeling stale.

The opening showstopper takes place on an L.A. freeway during a traffic jam, when a diverse mix of drivers ditch their cars to start singing and dancing in the street.

Later, Sebastian and Mia channel Fred and Ginger with a tap duet at sunset. The observatory from “Rebel Without a Cause” makes a cameo, but so does A Flock of Seagulls, when Mia runs into Sebastian while he’s performing with an ’80s cover band.

Chazelle knew that the cultural references had the potential to give the audience whiplash, so he came up with ways to connect the dots. He made rules for how all of the scenes should be shot — with an active camera, but one that only moved when the characters did.

He also made sure the characters’ personalities remained constant; they wouldn’t suddenly become more old-fashioned just because they were ballroom dancing.

It wasn’t always easy to make it all cohere. The logistics of directing can be a slog; most of it is “nuts-and-bolts problem-solving,” he said. But whenever Chazelle thought he was losing sight of what he wanted to do, he would come back to the music. Some nights, he would listen to Justin Hurwitz’s score while driving home, and looking out over L.A. while hearing the lush sounds of a 90-piece orchestra reminded him of the magical feeling he wanted to impart to the audience. Now he can hardly believe he has pulled it off.

“I had my moments of frustration, but now I look back and I get what the red flags would be,” Chazelle said of the difficulty getting his movie financed. “There’s nothing quite like a musical that goes completely off the rails.”

There’s also nothing quite like a musical that doesn’t. n

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BOOKS

A long history of disappointments N ONFICTION

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THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY AND THE MIDDLE KINGDOM America and China, 1776 to the Present

By John Pomfret Holt. 693 pp. $40

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REVIEWED BY

W ARREN I . C OHEN

s President-elect Donald Trump roils the waters across the Pacific, foreign affairs specialists around the world agree that management of relations between the United States and a rising China surpasses all other international issues, quite possibly for the remainder of the century. In “The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom,” John Pomfret reminds us that the two countries have disappointed each other since their earliest contacts but have always muddled through. Perhaps overly optimistic, he imagines they will again.

When I began my study of Chinese-American relations nearly 60 years ago, the finest analysts of that relationship were men such as Doak Barnett and Robert Barnett, Jim Lilley, and Jim Thomson, all born in China. The People’s Republic was off limits, and most of my generation studied in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Today we are blessed with hundreds of younger men and women who studied in Beijing, Nanjing and other great centers of learning on the mainland. Pomfret was one of the first of these, and he became a journalist whose reporting from Beijing, much of it for The Washington Post, was superb. And now he has joined Jim Mann, the most scholarly reporter of his generation, as a historian of Chinese-American relations.

Mann’s several books — “Beijing Jeep,” “About Face,” “The China Fantasy” — each focus on relatively narrow stretches of the relationship since Richard Nixon’s “week that changed the world.”

Pomfret is much more ambitious, covering the years 1776 to 2016.

Most of the volume before the 1930s is filled with fascinating biographical sketches and vignettes, many of which will be new to even his most diligent predecessors. He is a wonderful storyteller, and his research is impressive, in Chinese as well as American sources. He highlights each county’s contribu-

ASSOCIATED PRESS

During his trip to China in 1972, President Richard Nixon chats with a girl in Hangchow while Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai holds her hand.

tions to the other, calling attention to the too-often-neglected importance of China in American modernization.

But the scope of his ambition has liabilities, even with a book that is more than 600 pages. His treatment of government-togovernment relations, generally insignificant before the mid-19th century, is relatively thin before the 1930s — and not altogether satisfactory from the days of the Open Door Notes of 1899 and 1900 through the 1920s, the years when the United States emerged as a power in East Asia.

The 1930s were pivotal for the evolution of U.S. policy toward China, in the context of Japanese aggression and the coming of World War II. Pomfret’s discussion lacks the depth necessary to understand what men like Henry Stimson and Franklin Roosevelt were trying to accomplish, and he fails to see the shoals through which they had to navigate.

He quite rightly challenges Barbara Tuchman’s portrait of Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek in her “Stilwell and the American Experience in China.”

Gen. Joseph Stilwell was not the

heroic figure she described, nor Chiang quite as thuggish. But Pomfret’s defense of Chiang often goes too far, as does his willingness to accept American responsibility for Chiang’s defeat in the civil war. Given the overwhelming military superiority of government forces, even Chiang accepted blame for his failures in his diary.

When he turns to an analysis of the Chinese communists in the 1940s, Pomfret underestimates the tension between Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. He is right to dismiss the “lost chance in China” — whether the United States could have won Mao over had it been less hostile to the communists, a debate I started in 1967 with an article in Orbis.

As a foreign correspondent, Pomfret spent many of the years after rapprochement in China, and his firsthand observations are perceptive. Particularly noteworthy is his reminder of Beijing’s deceit on nonproliferation, how the Chinese first denied their violations and then promised to stop what they had claimed they weren’t doing — specifically assisting Pakistan’s nuclear weapons development, making it possi-

ble for the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan to peddle nuclear secrets around the world.

He also points to the weakening, in the Reagan and Bush years, of American demands for improvement in Chinese respect for human rights. Of course, before them, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, were not known for their concern over human rights issues. Pomfret is very good at exposing unending American expectations that China would adopt American values as its economy improved, expectations nurtured in particular by the U.S. business community and its academic cheerleaders. In 1986, Li Peng, then state councilor for education, told a group of us that much as he welcomed our assistance in the sciences, social as well as physical, China would never adopt American values. He proved that when he presided over the Tiananmen massacres. And Chinese President Xi Jinping has not deviated from Li’s line as his government attacks churches, lawyers, journalists, academics and nongovernmental organizations — civil society in general.

A bit hastily, Pomfret squeezes in some of the events of 2016, none of which — excepting perhaps the climate agreement so dear to President Obama — offered cause for optimism. Pomfret details Chinese espionage, cyberwarfare and assertiveness in the South China Sea. But he won’t give up, insisting in his afterword that there’s a chance for “a lovely concordance emerging between the two nations. . . . . Amid all the discord, there’s beauty in these ties.” n Cohen is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and university distinguished professor emeritus at Michigan State University and the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He is the author of, among other books, “America’s Response to China: A History of Sino-American Relations.”

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BOOKS

KLMNO WEEKLY

A worthy twist on who shot Kennedy

They went to jail but do not get why

F ICTION

N ONFICTION

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REVIEWED BY

P ATRICK A NDERSON

or many of us who lived through the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the event remains both an enduring sorrow and a maddening mystery. For those who cannot accept that someone as insignificant as Lee Harvey Oswald could have ended the life of someone so beloved by so many, the killing in Dallas offers a nearly endless list of possible conspirators: Texas oil barons, American gangsters, Cubans, the Soviets and rogue CIA agents, among others.

Some fine novels have explored the assassination, including Charles McCarry’s “The Tears of Autumn,” Robert Littell’s “The Sisters” and Stephen King’s “11/22/63” — each of which, unsurprisingly, attributes the crime to different culprits. To this list we can now add Tim Baker’s remarkable first novel “Fever City.”

Baker tells his story in three related plots set in 1960, 1963 and 2014, and he constantly shifts among them. Keeping up can be a challenge, but it is one repaid by inspired writing, memorable characters and an exhilarating, all but overpowering story.

In 1960 private detective Nick Alston of Los Angeles is hired to find the kidnapped son of an aging, very rich man named Rex Bannister. Bannister, it turns out, is a political power broker determined to help Richard Nixon defeat Kennedy in that year’s election. Alston comes to suspect that the kidnapping may somehow relate to Bannister’s political schemes. He also becomes infatuated with the old man’s much younger, highly seductive wife.

In 1963 we meet Philip Hastings, who learned to kill on Iwo Jima. (“Hastings was a killer because he had lost his soul. He was a ghost; butchered on the islands of the Pacific.”) Back home, he becomes a professional hit man. A gangster offers Hastings a fortune to kill Kennedy. Hastings says he accepts, but he has another plan.

The intended victim is depicted as less than saintly. Incriminating photos of Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe figure into the plot. Also, in one scene, Hastings, to warn the president of the plot against him, breaks into a hotel room where he is cavorting with another famous actress. The scene ends with the acerbic screen star angered less by the armed intruder than by Kennedy’s failings as a lover. When Kennedy tells her in parting, “Best if we not see each other for a while,” she replies, “Is never long enough for you, Jack?”

In the novel’s third plot, Alston’s son visits Dallas in 2014 to research a book on the assassination. Between interviews with people who embrace bizarre conspiracy theories, he takes a local beauty to lunch: “The restaurant is low-ceilinged and dark, the kind of discreet place you’d steal into with your mistress, only to discover your wife in a corner booth with her lover.”

Baker enhances his plot with vivid prose. Here’s Hastings enraptured: “Mrs. Bannister hadn’t been a love affair, she had been a madness. A contagion. A pandemic of lust. Nothing existed except the next moment with her.” In another scene, “Hastings flicked his cigarette out the window, its golden ash pushing fire through a piece of night, a poor man’s comet, already extinguished.” And Alston’s son, first glimpsing Dealey Plaza in 2014, ponders: “It creates a yearning to go back in time and stay there, to start over, to rediscover one’s youth, to avoid all your mistakes and live your life once more, to be young again.”

The novel climaxes with Hastings’s attempt to prevent the assassination. I might question the identity of those whom Baker makes the masterminds of his elaborate conspiracy, but he tells an exciting story and, let’s face it, his guess is as good as mine. n Anderson regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post.

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FEVER CITY

By Tim Baker Europa. 385 pp.

Paperback; $18

WHY THEY DO IT Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal

By Eugene Soltes PublicAffairs. 448 pp. $29.99

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REVIEWED BY

R ENAE M ERLE

hen Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes set out to discover what motivated white-collar criminals, he unearthed something quite telling, and troubling, about self-perception. For his book, “Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the WhiteCollar Criminal,” he spent years trading letters and phone calls with dozens of former business executives-turned-convicts, such as Ponzi-scheme legend Bernard Madoff and former Enron chief financial officer, Andrew Fastow.

In many cases, Soltes finds, the perpetrators struggle to understand their wrongdoing even after their years in prison. After all, they had not murdered or robbed anyone, and their victims were not in front of them. “None of the former executives I spoke with saw himself as a fraud,” Soltes writes.

Many of the cases Soltes chronicles have already been examined extensively. But he takes a unique approach, looking for the connections between what motivated these men — and yes, they are all men — and asking not what they did but why they did it. The former executives said they were largely driven by their instincts and didn’t see the criminality of their actions.

They were boardroom stars, backed by the confidence of shareholders and employees, and they believed they could do no wrong.

That is the case with Fastow, the former star at Enron who was a key player in concealing massive losses at Enron. Fortune magazine named the company America’s most innovative for six straight years, and Fastow was CFO of the year in 1999. “My intentions were good. I was trying to do what was best for Enron, but the way we as a company defined success was incorrect,” Fastow said.

Enron had a problem, and Fastow found an “anomaly” in the law that he thought allowed him to fix it. And when regulators and the company’s auditors did not push back, Fastow did it again and

again, until, finally, Enron was forced to file what was then the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Fastow is now clear about the cause of his undoing. But at the time, he told Soltes, he was driven by a desire to be the best at his job.

“If at any point in my career I said ‘time out, this is bull----. I can’t do it’ . . . they would have just found another CFO, but that doesn’t excuse it. It would be like saying it’s OK to murder someone because if I didn’t do it someone else would have,” explained Fastow, who served six years in prison.

Of all the criminals Soltes interviewed, Madoff is the most irredeemable and difficult to understand. For five years, he corresponded with Madoff, who is serving a 150-year sentence for bilking billions of dollars from investors.

At no time did Madoff express remorse; he dismissed the financial distress of his victims as overblown. “It’s not like going into a bank with a gun and saying ‘give me your money’ and running out,” Soltes quotes Madoff as saying.

Madoff’s inability to empathize with his victims is bad enough, but his disregard for the pain he caused his family is stunning.

When his son Andrew died of cancer, Madoff called Soltes and asked him to read the obituary. Soltes, feeling the weight of the moment, says he read Madoff the article and did his best to be compassionate.

But “shortly after finding out his son had died, Madoff wanted to discuss interest rates. . . . In some way, it almost seemed as though I was more personally moved by the death of Andrew in those moments than his father.”

Madoff can be dismissed as an oddity, but what is left are men driven by ambition and greed who failed to differentiate between crime and smart business tactics, usually because they weren’t looking for it and assumed they were too intelligent to cross the line. n Merle covers white-collar crime and Wall Street for The Washington Post.

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OPINIONS

A peek into Putin’s soul and his seductive ways DANA MILBANK

“Spare us the kissy­face.”

It was June 2001, and I was covering President George W. Bush’s trip to Slovenia, where he had just met Vladimir Putin for the first time. I and others were struck by Bush’s praise for the Russian leader as “trustworthy.” Bush said, “I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

But back in Washington, my editor had no interest in such talk. He rewrote my lede with other news — a tidbit about missile defense — and he moved the “kissy­face” stuff about Putin’s soul down to Paragraph 18.

In retrospect, that moment in Slovenia defined the Russia relationship for years to come. Putin had seduced Bush, who only slowly came to understand he had misjudged this adversary’s soul. Putin opposed Bush in Iraq and was unhelpful with Iran. He shut down independent television, sent business leaders who criticized him into exile and prison, ousted democratic parties from government, canceled the election of governors, and invaded Georgia.

ISTOCKPHOTO

writes about political theater in the nation’s capital. He joined The Washington Post as a political reporter in 2000.

The kissy-face scenario happened all over again when President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to “reset” relations. Russia responded by working against the United States in Syria, sheltering Edward Snowden, invading and occupying parts of Ukraine, and hacking and meddling in the U.S. election to defeat Clinton.

Now it’s Donald Trump’s turn for kissy-face, and the presidentelect is practically groping the Russian dictator. After Putin gloated last month that Democrats need to learn “to lose with dignity,” Trump tweeted Putin a sloppy kiss: “So true!” he said of Putin’s comments.

Trump also celebrated a letter he received from Putin calling for more collaboration between the two countries. “His thoughts are so correct,” Trump said.

Trump’s blush-inducing

embrace of the strongman has included repeated praise of Putin’s leadership, deflected questions about Putin’s political killings and disparagement of U.S. intelligence for accusing Russia of election meddling.

On Jan. 20, Trump will assume the presidency, and we’ll learn what his embrace of Putin really means. Perhaps Trump is just a dupe and he’ll realize over time that Putin is no friend. The alternative, supported by Trump’s choice of Putin-friendly advisers Michael T. Flynn and Rex Tillerson, is that Trump really is pro-Putin and will grant the Russian dictator more latitude internationally and will emulate his autocratic tendencies at home.

The former would require us to endure some policy failures as Putin proved himself again to be an adversary. The latter would test the limits of our democratic

institutions.

In either case, it would be useful for Americans to have at least a cursory sense of the man our new president proposes to embrace. Here’s a quick glimpse into Putin’s soul to get us started: Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was killed outside the Kremlin as he walked home one night in 2015. Putin’s regime blames Chechens, but Nemtsov’s is one of a dozen high-profile murders of opponents widely thought to have been sanctioned

by Putin’s government.

Another Putin opponent, Alexander Litvinenko, was killed in London by polonium poisoning in 2006. The British government said Putin “probably” approved the hit. That same year, opposition journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot and killed outside her apartment.

In 2009, lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in prison after being denied medical care.

Others working on his investigation of corrupt Russian politicians also died suspiciously.

Among the many business leaders imprisoned or ousted under Putin are Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was head of the oil giant Yukos, and associate Platon Lebedev. The Russian human rights group Memorial says there are 102 people held in Russian prisons for their political or religious beliefs.

The Kremlin has provided funding and training for far-right nationalist parties in Europe, and

it used its state media and an army of hackers and social-media trolls to spread disinformation in the United States, in continental Europe and in Britain before the Brexit vote. The goals: to weaken European unity and the NATO alliance and to keep Europe dependent on Russian energy.

Russia also used disinformation to destabilize the Ukrainian government as Russia annexed Crimea. In Syria, where Russia propped up the Assad regime with indiscriminate bombing in Aleppo and elsewhere, Britain, France and the United States have blamed Putin’s government for the mass slaughter of civilians.

An Amnesty International summary of Putin’s rule leaves no doubt about his totalitarian state: “Journalist Killed . . .

Human Rights Lawyer Killed . . .

Gay Rights Protesters Attacked . . . Exhibition Organizers Sentenced . . . Activists Beaten and Detained . . . Opposition Leader Held in Detention . . .

Repressive Laws Enacted . . .

Fines for ‘Promoting Homosexuality’ Imposed . . .

President Putin Signs Law to Recriminalize Defamation . . .

USAID Expelled . . . Federal Treason and Espionage Act goes into effect . . . Prominent NGOs are Vandalized . . . Moscow Authorities Detain Protesters and Opposition Party Members.”

This, Mr. President-elect, is the man you are embracing. Please spare us the kissy-face. n

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KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

Bloodless Obama, bloody Aleppo RICHARD COHEN writes a weekly political column for The Washington Post.

If Dec. 7, 1941, is the day that Franklin D. Roosevelt said “will live in infamy,” then Dec. 20, 2016, has got to be a close second. No Americans died that day as they did at Pearl Harbor, but the American Century, as Time magazine founder Henry Luce called it, came to a crashing end. Turkey, Iran and Russia met in Moscow to settle matters in the Middle East. The United States was not even asked to the meeting.

Winston Churchill said in 1942 that he had not become Great Britain’s “first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Nonetheless, by the end of the 1940s, much of the empire was gone. Churchill was an unapologetic colonialist, but he was up against liberation movements of all kinds, not to mention the antipathy of the United States to imperialist ambitions — in short, history itself. Churchill had a marvelous way with words, and greatness accompanied him like a shadow, but in certain ways he was a 19th-century man wandering, confounded, in the 20th.

President Obama is quite the reverse. He is a 21st-century man who never quite appreciated the lessons of the 20th. He has been all too happy to preside over the loss of U.S. influence. Aleppo,

Syria, now a pile of rubble, is where countless died — as did American influence. The Russians polished it off from the air, doing for the Syrian regime what the United States could not figure out how to do for the rebels. The city hemorrhaged civilian dead, and the United States, once the preeminent power in the region, did virtually nothing.

It could be that Obama was right. It could be that all along he knew that the rebels were beyond saving — although he predicted that Bashar al-Assad would be toppled — and, anyway, the United States was not going to again get into some Middle Eastern quagmire. America had twice made war in Iraq; it had lost Marines in Lebanon.

Though, perhaps, these were just excuses to do nothing. After all, no one ever recommended

putting soldiers on the ground in Syria. That was Obama’s straw man.

“Time will tell” is the appropriate cliche. But I, along with others, thought the United States could have limited the bloodletting, that it could have established no-fly zones where Syrian government helicopters could not have dropped barrel bombs. It could also have established safe zones for refugees. The Russians managed to do what they wanted to do.

Why not the United States?

The answer has always been clear to me — Obama did not care enough. Not from him ever came a thundering demand that Russia and Iran get out and stay out. Behind the arguably persuasive reasons to do little in Syria was an emotional coldness: This was not Obama’s fight.

Say what you will about Donald Trump, he cares. He cares about things I don’t, and he has some awful ideas, and he is an amoral man in so many ways.

But, in contrast to Obama, his emotions are no mystery. When the Chinese recently fished a U.S. Navy drone from the Pacific Ocean, the White House reacted so coolly you would think freedom of the seas did not matter. Trump, though, tweeted his indignation, finally telling

Beijing it could keep the drone — a way of telling them to stuff it.

Hillary Clinton lost the election for a host of reasons, not the least of them her shortcomings as a candidate.

And Trump won for many reasons, not the least of them his political talents. But Clinton had to defend an administration that was cold to the touch. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway keeps pointing out that Clinton had no message. True. Neither, for that matter, did Obama. He waved a droopy flag. He did not want to make America great again. It was great enough for him already.

That coolness, that no-drama Obama, cost lives in Syria.

Instead of rallying the United States to a worthy cause — intervening to save lives and avoid a refugee crisis that is still destabilizing Europe — he threw in the towel. The banner he flew was one of American diminishment. One could agree.

One could not be proud.

Since the end of World War II, U.S. leadership has been essential to maintaining world peace. Whether we liked it or not, we were the world’s police.

There was no other cop on the beat. Now that leadership is gone. So, increasingly, will be peace. n

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OPINIONS

BY NICK ANDERSON FOR THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE

A stain on the Justice Department PHILIP B. HEYMANN The writer is a former deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton and assistant attorney general under President Jimmy Carter.

He is the James Barr Ames professor of law emeritus at Harvard Law School.

Last month, President Obama granted clemency to 153 individuals who had been incarcerated under mandatory minimum drugsentencing laws, bringing to more than 1,000 the number of clemency petitions the administration has granted. “You don’t just try to hammer everybody for as long as you can, because you can,” Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates told the New York Times.

That is the right attitude for someone tasked with the fair administration of justice.

Unfortunately, Yates and Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch have, for the past year, rebuffed efforts by me and many other former senior Justice Department officials to even discuss another prosecution in which justice fell far short: the case of Sholom Rubashkin, a rabbi who was sentenced to 27 years for bank fraud.

Rubashkin, a 57-year-old father of 10, has already served seven years for the crime, which ordinarily merits no more than three years. Worse, his sentence was based on perjured testimony and prosecutorial misconduct.

If even a few highly respected prosecutors think a particular case was handled unjustly, resulting in a vastly excessive sentence, the department’s representatives should be prepared at least to discuss the

reasons. In Rubashkin’s case, 107 former Justice Department officials, including five former attorneys general, six former deputy attorneys general (myself included) two former FBI directors and other leading jurists, have sought to meet with senior officials of the department.

The response: a form letter from an assistant attorney general stating that no meeting could take place while Rubashkin pursued his case in court.

Rubashkin was vice president of Agriprocessors, a kosher meatpacking plant in Iowa. In 2008, federal immigration agents raided the plant and arrested hundreds of undocumented workers. The raid resulted in the company’s declaring bankruptcy.

Rubashkin was arrested and charged with bank fraud.

And this is where things went terribly wrong. The sentence for bank fraud depends on the

KLMNO WEEKLY

BY DARRIN BELL

amount of the loss to creditors. In this case, the prosecution deliberately increased the amount of the loss — and thus the length of Rubashkin’s sentence.

Independent assessors had valued Agriprocessors’ assets at $68 million. Yet evidence uncovered after the sentencing showed that prosecutors interfered in the bankruptcy proceedings, threatening nine prospective buyers that the company’s assets would be seized by the government if any member of the Rubashkin family stayed active in the firm after the sale.

No other relative has ever been charged by these prosecutors.

Aaron Rubashkin, the founder and family patriarch, was critical to the company’s value. He possessed the institutional knowledge and connections throughout the kosher meatprocessing business. By effectively removing him, prosecutors destroyed the company’s value.

All nine prospective buyers — including one who offered $40 million — walked away.

Agriprocessors sold for $8.5 million, a huge loss to creditors and what is essentially a life sentence for Sholom Rubashkin.

Prosecutors denied at Rubashkin’s sentencing that they

interfered in the sale. The prosecutors knew that the bank, whose collateral was at stake, was upset with the interference. Legal counsel for the bank sent prosecutors a letter complaining about their actions. But prosecutors did not provide that letter to Rubashkin’s attorneys.

Instead, prosecutors offered testimony to support their claims that there was no interference.

But handwritten notes, recently discovered by Rubashkin’s attorneys, prove there was a meeting at which the prosecutors imposed their “no Rubashkins” edict. In determining the amount of the loss to creditors, the sentencing judge explicitly relied on this counsel’s false testimony.

Prosecutors were present, but no none pointed out the falsity.

I am saddened by the unwillingness of the department’s leaders to discuss the injustice.

Experienced former prosecutors and career Justice Department officials view this case as a stain on an institution created to uphold the law. If leadership refuses to act, I hope President Obama pardons Rubashkin and ends this tragedy. The alternative is a display of either blind selfrighteousness or frightened defensiveness that is inconsistent with the department we all have served and respected. n

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THE LIST 2017 People are saying 2016 was a miserable, maggot rot of a year. With the lies, the hacks, the deaths, the ugliness — but who needs it? Reality is OUT. Why have “two Americas” when we each have our own personal Americas, handcrafted by clicks. Block the offensive, block the politically correct, block your mom! Just don’t turn your screens off or you’ll miss the tattered threads of what still unites us: arguing about trivial yet life-or-death matters like what’s IN and what’s OUT. n — Jessica Contrera

OUT Stress coloring Chip & Joanna “Hillbilly Elegy” Lies Camp David Matcha All Hadids Bragging about “Hamilton” tickets Cuba Pulling for the Cubs Food trucks Ghosting National Archives Brookland Elena Ferrante Stars Hollow “The People vs. OJ Simpson” Cory Booker Save the elephants “Lowkey” Slang Teen Vogue Thomas Rhett Panic gun sales Renewal South Caucasus Tomi Lahren Hatchimal Chyna Visual albums Contouring Getting a cat #nomakeup Succulent manicures Bubbles Tiger Woods Almonds Subscription boxes Sia Microbreweries Apple’s Bedtime Nasty woman Atlanta Congressional Research Service Margot Robbie Roblox SoulCycle Not being able to explain bitcoin Daddy Reboots Whether to pay Kirk Cousins @publicschoolnyc Faux freckles Dubrovnik Pop-ups Fiddle-leaf figs “Pretty Little Liars” Capturing capital The return of Jeb Bush Agonizing

IN Rage rooms Martha & Snoop Hillbillies Leaks Mar-a-Lago Tumeric Yara Shahidi Bragging about “Hello Dolly” tickets Taiwan Resenting the Cubs Sidewalk carts Benching Museum of the Bible Deanwood Elena Kagan Twin Peaks Pennsylvania v. William Henry Cosby Jr. Kamala Harris Save the giraffes “Highkey” Moms on Urban Dictionary Clover Letter Kane Brown Panic IUD insertions Retrenchment Freedom Caucus Van Jones Cozmo the robot China Playlists Chicken Connoisseuring Sharing a dog Clown face Green thumbs Bomb shelters Tiger Woods Pecans Memberships Starrah Microdosing Prayer apps Wonder Woman Kansas City Subscriptions to Pravda Kiersey Clemons Lightseekers Orangetheory Not being able to explain blockchain Papa Comebacks How much to pay Kirk Cousins @johnelliottco Tattoo brows Mexico City Drops Oversize cactuses “Big Little Lies” Attracting attention The return of Billy Bush Organizing

DOZENS OF POST STAFFERS CONTRIBUTED TO THE LIST. ILLUSTRATION BY DOM MCKENZIE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

SUNDAY, JANUARY 1, 2017

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Foothills Magazine presents its 5th Annual

PHOTO CONTEST

Enter your photos taken in North Central Washington for the chance to win cash prizes and see your photos published in the magazine! Photos will be judged in two categories – human subjects and landscapes.

Get all the details at photos.ncwfoothills.com Entries must be submitted by January 4, 2017

North Central Washington’s lifestyle magazine foothills.wenatcheeworld.com