The General US Politics Thread

"A purely political, unfriendly act," Putin called it at the time, and he has been railing against it ever since.

Congress wanted to punish Russian human rights abusers by barring them from entering the U.S. This followed the 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died at age 37 in a Moscow prison where he was held — and allegedly beaten — after accusing Russian officials of massive tax fraud.

The law symbolized the deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Russia. Days after Congress passed it, the Russian parliament responded by banning American citizens from adopting Russian orphans.

In a bizarre 2013 trial, a Russian court went even further, convicting Magnitsky of tax fraud — four years after he died.

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News broke Friday that she was accompanied at that meeting by Russian-American Rinat Akhmetshin. He is known as a skilled political operator who has worked in both the former Soviet Union and the United States on behalf of his clients, according to a U.S. journalist who has known him for two decades.

Akhmetshin has also spoken freely about his past in Soviet military intelligence, according to the journalist, Steve Levine, who works for Axios in Washington.

However, in remarks to The Associated Press, Akhmetshin said he served in a military unit that was part of counterintelligence but was not trained as a spy.

Levine first encountered Akhmetshin in Kazakhstan. There, in 1998, he provided Levine with confidential banking and legal documents pointing to financial corruption by the country's president.

Donald Trump Jr.'s Emails About Meeting With Russian Lawyer, Annotated "His signature is to be able to drill very, very deeply in the former Soviet Union, in a very knowing way," Levine said. "Here in Washington, he's this very unusual character, who may be the most skilled lobbyist I've met."

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Akhmetshin, who has become a U.S. citizen, has aggressively lobbied against the Magnitsky Act. Just a few days after his meeting with Trump Jr. in New York last year, Akhmetshin was in Washington to promote a movie called The Magnitsky Act — Behind the Scenes.

The film was shown at the Newseum in Washington on June 13, 2016. It offers the Russian government's version of events and claims that Magnitsky was not mistreated by Russian authorities.

Trump Jr. has also said that — to his disappointment — last year's meeting with the Russians focused on the Magnitsky Act. Trump Jr. was told in advance the meeting would produce critical material on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. When the topic turned out to be the U.S. law, he considered it a waste of time.

Analysts have offered many theories on why Russia wanted to meddle in the U.S. presidential election: to undermine the credibility of the U.S. vote or to harm Hillary Clinton, whom Putin blamed for the protests leading up the Russian presidential election in 2012.

Rarely mentioned is the Magnitsky Act, a relatively obscure matter inside the U.S. but a major frustration for Russia's leadership.

BROWDER: I only met her once, and that was just a few months ago. But I've been on the other side of the barricades from her for the last three and a half years as she has been trying to get the Magnitsky Act overturned. And she's also the representative of a Russian government family who's had their assets frozen in New York by the Department of Justice when the Department of Justice traced those assets back to the crime that Sergei Magnitsky exposed.

MCEVERS: This $230 million dollar corruption scheme we mentioned. Yeah.

BROWDER: Exactly. And so I know her real well.

MCEVERS: Donald Trump Jr. released the emails this week that led to a meeting with Veselnitskaya. He was told by an intermediary she had damaging information about Hillary Clinton. She denies this, and she denies that she works for the Russian government. What do you say about that?

BROWDER: Well, I say it's complete nonsense. She is the representative of a family called the Katsyv family. The Katsyv family, the patriarch of that family is a man named Pyotr Katsyv. Pyotr Katsyv is a senior Russian government official who is closely aligned with Vladimir Putin. And so there's no way that she can - she can say that she has nothing to do with the Russian government when she works for a senior Russian government official.

MCEVERS: Right. But - so, you know, there's a way you can have some deniability, right? I'm not on the government payroll, but I represent somebody who's high up in the government. You know, there is a distinction there.

BROWDER: Well, in Russia, you know, nobody has a business card saying I work for the government. Russia's a very informal place where it's based on relationships and trusted agreements between people. And so...

MCEVERS: Right.

BROWDER: ...There's absolutely no question that she's working for the Russian government and that her objectives are to further the interests of the Russian government.

MCEVERS: And given what you know about the way the Russian government works, the way Russian President Vladimir Putin operates, what do you make of this meeting between her and Donald Trump Jr. and other members of the Trump campaign?

BROWDER: Well - so we have to go back to the Magnitsky case for a second. Vladimir Putin is infuriated by the Magnitsky case. Why is he infuriated by it? It's because he steals a lot of money himself. He ends up terrorizing people himself. And he keeps that money he's stolen offshore. And the Magnitsky Act basically imposes sanctions on people who do those types of things. And so this puts Putin's personal money at risk. So he made the repeal of the Magnitsky Act his single most important foreign policy priority. And if you speak to any Russians in the opposition who are against Putin they'll tell you that the Magnitsky Act is the thing that most upsets him, most infuriates him and he wants changed.

And so what has happened is that this woman, Natalia Veselnitskaya, via various people in the Russian government has become the proxy for Putin's interests in repealing the Magnitsky Act. And she has hired huge numbers of lobbyists and spent millions of dollars on lawyers, on public relations professionals, on smear campaigners with the objective of repealing the Magnitsky Act.

State public health officials released data this week that showed that nearly 96 percent of this year’s kindergartners have received all the required vaccines. That’s a nearly three-point increase over last year, health officials said. The rate is above the level that experts say is needed to prevent measles transmission.

Students entering school in 2016-2017 were the first to be enrolled under a law that abolished the personal-belief exemption to legally required vaccines for school entry. The law was passed after the 2014-2015 measles outbreak in Disneyland.

Compared with the 2015-2016 school year, the proportion of students attending kindergarten in 2016-2017 reported to have received all required vaccines rose from 92.8 percent to 95.6 percent, a 2.8 percentage point increase over one year and a 5.2 percentage point increase over the two years since 2014-2015, according to California health department data. The 2016-2017 rate is the highest reported since the current set of immunization requirements for kindergarten went into effect beginning in the 2001-2002 school year.

Richard Pan, a pediatrician and author of the new legislation, hailed the rise in the kindergarten vaccination rate. “This success is a first step toward reducing the number of unimmunized people putting our families at risk for preventable diseases, thereby restoring community immunity throughout our state in the coming years,” he said.

An increasing number of parents across the United States and in other countries are choosing not to immunize their children because of “personal beliefs.” Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, but the highly contagious disease has made a return in recent years largely because of people who reject vaccinating their children.

Vaccination advocates and health officials said that despite improvements, children in California schools and communities with lower rates of vaccine use remain at higher risk of contracting and transmitting vaccine-preventable diseases. Recent changes to California’s school immunization laws did not apply to earlier groups of children who are no longer of school age. Unimmunized older children and adults were among those who caught measles during the Disneyland outbreak.

Earlier this month, an unvaccinated Laguna Beach High School student was quarantined after contracting measles, county health officials said. The school identified six other unvaccinated students who may have been exposed to the virus when the infected student was on campus March 29. All were barred from attending school and have to stay home until April 18, the Orange County Register reported.

“Neoliberalism” has a second meaning, unrelated to the small faction of Washington Monthly alumni. (Or, at least, the neoliberals of that generation had no awareness of it.) In the international context, “neoliberal” means capitalist, as distinguished from socialist. That meaning has rarely had much application in American politics, because liberals and conservatives both believe (to starkly differing degrees) in capitalism. If “neoliberal” simply describes a belief in some role for market forces, then it is literally true that liberals and conservatives are both “neoliberal.”

It is strange, though, to apply a single term to opposing combatants in America’s increasingly bitter partisan struggle. If the party that created Obamacare and the party trying to destroy it, the party of higher taxes on the rich and the party of lower, the party of tighter pollution limits and the party of allowing oil drillers to write regulations are each “neoliberal,” then neoliberalism is of limited use in describing American politics.

The sudden ubiquity of the term in American politics — at least among left-wing elites — owes itself to two new developments. First, the Bernie Sanders campaign has inspired a new movement to remake the Democratic Party as a social-democratic labor party. Left-wing activists need a label for their opponents.

Conservatives have spent decades turning “liberal” into a smear meaning “left-wing radical,” giving it limited value as a term of opprobrium. (In terms of self-identification, liberals constitute the left wing of the Democratic base, with moderates and conservatives constituting a slightly larger right wing.) In practical terms, people who think of themselves as “liberal” form the constituency the Bernie insurgents need to attract.

Second, the widely publicized influence of neoconservatives within the Bush administration changed the connotation of “neo.” Whereas the prefix had once softened the term it modified — the neoconservatives were once seen as the intellectually evolved wing of the right, in contrast to the Buchananite knuckle-draggers — by the end of Bush’s term, it became an intensifier. A neoconservative was a conservative, but an even scarier one.