Barr, none: the White House’s defiance

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg said this week that he believes the future is private. That means more encrypted messages and fewer public posts, and less information for tailoring the ads that make Facebook billions. Recouping that revenue is going to make the company a lot like its Chinese rival, WeChat. And in recent years, Poland and the Czech Republic have become more stridently anti-immigrant. But they play host to large communities of Vietnamese migrants, whose contributions to society are welcomed. First up, though— William Barr, America's chief law enforcement officer, is under fire.

What is deadly serious about it is the Attorney General of the United States of America was not telling the truth to the Congress of the United States. That's a crime.

The House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made her accusation yesterday following Mr. Barr's appearance before a Senate panel on Wednesday. After releasing his summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian meddling, Mr. Barr had said he wasn't aware of any complaints by Mr. Mueller. But there had been.

Attorney General Barr has informed us that he will not appear today.

Then yesterday, Mr. Barr risked a charge of contempt of Congress by failing to appear before the Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee. He was subpoenaed to answer questions about his handling of the Russia inquiry. Mr. Barr's no-show seems to be part of a White House policy of refusing to comply with congressional demands. President Donald Trump has declared that he and the executive branch will fight all subpoenas. Gerald Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, says that puts the very Constitution of the United States under threat.

Ladies and gentlemen, the challenge we face is that the president of the United States wants desperately to prevent Congress a co-equal branch of government, from providing any check whatsoever to even his most reckless decisions. The very system of government of the United States, the system of limited power, the system of not having a president as a dictator, is very much at stake.

Part of a broader fight that Donald Trump is picking with oversight in general.

John Fassmann is our Washington correspondent.

Over the past couple of months, he has sued two banks to stop them from complying with the subpoena. He has sued the House Oversight Committee. To block a subpoena into an accounting firm he used, he told Carl Kline, who oversaw the office that handled security questions, first to ignore a subpoena and then let him testify only to general questions. So this is part of a brewing fight between Donald Trump and Congress, which has constitutionally mandated oversight power.

I mean, have we seen this kind of general refusal before?

It's not unprecedented. Richard Nixon tried to block the release of recordings. He declined a subpoena. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama fought subpoenas with claims of executive privilege and basically lost. I mean, their claims of blanket executive privilege were rejected. In that sense, what's really unusual about what Trump is doing is he has come out and said publicly, "We're fighting all the subpoenas," which will make any specific battle much harder to win because the reasoning will look like post hoc rationalization. What he has done is sort of picked a fight with the entire idea of congressional oversight of the presidency, and I suspect that's not going to go down well in court.

Well, I mean, that kind of, that kind of sort of baldly saying we're fighting all kinds of oversight sounds dictatorial.

Yeah, it does, it does. But remember that the framers set up the branches of government to compete with each other, so it's not unusual that a president, faced with a request from Congress controlled by the opposition party, that a president says no or fights or puts up a battle at first. Ultimately, Congress's oversight power is constitutionally mandated. I suspect it will get what it wants. If that is not the case, if Donald Trump continues to refuse even after federal courts order him to, then we have a real problem on our hands, but we're not quite there yet.

Look, there has been suggestion from some quarters that what's happening here is Mr. Trump is essentially running down the clock. These matters of legal recourse take time, and all he has to do is get himself past the next election.

Yes, I think that's an extremely well-founded suspicion. I think the White House strategy has two elements at its core. The first is that Donald Trump gets to fight the Democrats, and this is what he is really good at. This is what he likes doing. He's not terribly good at governing and compromising the intricacies of governance. He's good at big public fights. Let's let him do that. The second is it's a play for time. So even sort of legal fights in which the outcome seems clear at the beginning take some time to work their way through the federal courts. And so I think the White House's hope is that this may stretch out past November 2020, at which point the subpoenas will expire, or it will at least stretch until the political salience of the current moment has faded and people have moved on.

Coming back to Mr. Barr, he did testify before the Senate this week, and it was heated. What did you make of the proceedings?

Well, it was quite heated. It was a sort of strange hearing because the stated view— Barr's stated view on Wednesday seemed to be that Robert Mueller conducted a criminal probe and he couldn't find prosecutable charges in the Trump campaign's connections to Russia, and he declined to reach a judgment on the question of obstruction, and General Barr reached that and decided not to prosecute. So in General Barr's stated view, the whole thing should be over. Now, I have a hard time believing that he actually believes this because, as a veteran of Washington, he must know that congressional oversight of the executive is part political, part legal, and he wants to downplay the whole first half of that, the whole political part of that. And as a result, the hearing was quite strange and quite heated. He got into a particular bit of trouble with Senator Harris, who was a prosecutor before she became a senator. So you're saying that it did not need to be reviewed by the career ethics officials in your office? I believe it was. Well, I believe it was reviewed. And I would also point out, this seems to be a bit of a flip-flop, because when the president's supporters were challenging Rosenstein— Sir, the flip-flop, I think, in this case is that you're not answering the question directly. Did the ethics official— And I think he's concerned. The reason he did not appear before the House Judiciary Committee is that he's concerned about facing those types of questions again.

And we've since heard Speaker Nancy Pelosi accuse Mr. Barr of lying to Congress. And that seems to fit this narrative of Mr. Barr actively protecting the president, being the kind of bulwark against oversight that his predecessor, Jeff Sessions, wasn't. What's your view on that?

To me, he's acting more as the president's attorney than as the top law enforcement official in the United States. He released a misleading summary of Robert Mueller's report and then held a news conference just before it was released, which I think was also equally misleading.

And so what do you think will transpire then when Mr. Barr refuses to show up and he is possibly held in contempt? How does this part of the tale play out, do you think?

Well, I suspect that the House Judiciary Committee will subpoena him. He may fight the subpoena. I think ultimately he'll probably lose. You know, and it may be that he doesn't appear for several months, after which all of this looks like old news. But ultimately, if the committee wants him there, he's going to be there.

And will the same go for the rest of the White House's stonewalling? Will Congress eventually get its way, or could all this actually become a constitutional crisis?

Yes. Well, in a sense, this is sort of the culmination of Donald Trump's presidency. He spent the first 2 years at the head of a unified Republican government insisting that he did nothing wrong. Robert Mueller's report came out and revealed that while he may not have done anything that could be prosecuted beyond a reasonable doubt as a criminal offense, he did plenty of stuff wrong. You now have congressional committees looking into his financial records. And so he has spent the first few years of his presidency saying he didn't do anything wrong, and looks like he's going to spend the next two saying nobody has any right to determine whether I did anything wrong. The answer to this fight, the result of this fight, will determine quite possibly the course of his presidency and also the contours of the president and what he's able to get away with for decades to come. And so this is a very consequential fight. We have not reached a constitutional crisis yet, but we can see what that crisis is.

John, thank you very much for joining us.

My pleasure.

Yesterday, Facebook announced it was barring 7 high-profile users from its platform, calling them dangerous. They included conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who runs the website Infowars, and the black nationalist preacher Louis Farrakhan, notorious for his antisemitic comments. It's just the latest in a series of efforts to calm widespread concerns about the world's largest social network. Facebook continues to battle outrage over privacy abuses. It's grappling with its responsibilities surrounding violent content, and the number of new people signing up is slowing down too, especially in rich countries. At the company's annual developer conference in California, Mark Zuckerberg announced some changes to the company's products designed to address some of these concerns.

Hey everyone, welcome to F8.

There was much to talk about.

So Mark Zuckerberg gave a big speech fleshing out his vision of how Facebook should change in the future, and the changes are quite major.

So the basic idea here is that, you know, in all of our lives, we have our public spaces like our town squares, and we have our private spaces like our living rooms.

It's supposed to be a privacy-focused, as he called it, social networking platform. Meaning that all the messages will be encrypted.

And in our digital lives, we also need both public and private spaces.

And also that means that the core of this new Facebook will be messages and no longer posts on Facebook or on news feeds.

Ludwig Ziegler is The Economist's US technology editor.

So everything you do will be centered around your message stream, a bit like when you use WhatsApp or Messenger.

And is this a response to the privacy concerns of its user base, or is this just a good business plan for Facebook? For Facebook, full stop?

There are lots of reasons why Mark Zuckerberg is trying to do this. Privacy, the pressure on Facebook to provide more privacy is one reason. But another reason is, and I think the more important reason, is that what people want to do online, in which type of social network they want to move and express themselves, is changing. So Zuckerberg calls conventional Facebook, calls it a town square.

Digital equivalence of the town square, where you can do almost anything that you'd want with a lot of people at once. You can stay in touch with all your friends, meet new people who share your interests, start businesses, organize fundraisers.

And people seem to be more interested now, especially younger people, to have a social network that is more intimate, more private. So that is why they started to use Snapchat. That is the service that pioneered the idea of sending around pictures which then disappear, and those messages or pictures are sent to a smaller group of people. And so what Zuckerberg wants to do is reinvent Facebook around messaging and turning into what he calls a living room, a digital living room.

So that's the kind of the market pressure, if you like. But how does this look in terms of the much bigger questions being asked about Facebook now in terms of privacy and sort of its weaponization and so on?

It changes things on a number of levels. So in this new privacy-focused platform, all the messages will be encrypted. So it's not like the conventional Facebook —where they're basically public and Facebook can also read them and perhaps use them to target advertising to you. Also, on the conventional Facebook, it's as I said a town square and people can contact you or yell at you in a way as they please. In this new privacy-focused platform, that's no longer possible because the number of friends is smaller or supposed to be smaller. You send messages directly, the messages are encrypted, which makes it more difficult to target ads, and so on and so forth. So I think what Zuckerberg said when he talks about town square versus the digital living room, that is quite apt comparison. So when you're in the digital living room, you can expect that the messages are private, no government, no Facebook will listen into them, and it's just a much more intimate setting. And also you can expect things to be more ephemeral. That means In a post on Facebook, you can— that's basically there forever and can come to haunt you. But in this new living room Facebook, you can probably set or will be able to set that the messages disappear after 24 hours like they do on Snapchat or like they do when you create stories on WhatsApp and on Instagram now.

Right. But if Facebook makes all of its money by essentially listening to what's going on in the town square and then, you know, directing its advertising on the basis of that, aren't they kind of undercutting their own business model to turn all of that stuff properly private.

That, that is correct. So, so it will be more difficult for them to make money. I mean, Facebook right now is a, is a big money-making machine. It's mostly targeting ads using, using the data that the company collects and then hyper-target ads to people. And that is very successful, and they make billions with that. So in this new world, in this digital living room, that's going to be more difficult because messages will be encrypted, so they cannot use that information. But they can still collect some type of data, and that's called metadata. Metadata is basically the data about contacts, messages being exchanged, and they can use that data to also perhaps send you ads. But that all is not yet decided what the business model is. Zuckerberg wants to move forward, he wants to push this new platform and wants to figure out how to really make money later. I mean, there are a few things he could do. For example, he wants to introduce payment systems and even perhaps and own Facebook currency, and he could then take a cut of all the transactions on the new platforms because that's also a big deal.

I mean, that sounds a lot like WeChat from China, which is that kind of one central place with all of those services.

Yes. I mean, that's basically the model. I mean, Zuckerberg doesn't say that, but— Well, I wouldn't imagine he would. But that's kind of the model. I mean, he actually— yes, he says, yes, that's kind of the model, but we want to do better.

And all of that, though, still depends on everyone being content with around these privacy concerns. Do you think that what he's doing here will calm those concerns sufficiently to make all of this viable?

I mean, that's a big issue for Facebook. Zuckerberg even said the future is private. And they may think it's a bit rich that the company with that history is now trying to fashion itself as a champion of privacy. So that's a big barrier for this platform to be successful. But then again, I mean, Zuckerberg also has a few good arguments to make when he says, yeah, Facebook is actually the company that can do this. So there's not just privacy, there's also safety. So if you have one big platform, a dominant platform, you can police it better, you can kind of filter out bullying or misinformation better as when you have kind of many small platforms. The other thing he also says is that, yes, I can collect this metadata, on what you do on the platform, and I won't store that in countries that don't respect the rule of law. And by this, he basically says, I won't go into China, I won't go into Russia or any other country which is authoritarian. Is that enough to overcome kind of the reluctance of people to believe him? It remains to be seen.

Ludwig, thanks very much for your time. Thanks, Jason. In the wake of Europe's migrant crisis, Poland and the Czech Republic have gained reputations for their hostility to immigrants. But there's a group that's been in these countries for a while and that hasn't been met with the same ill will.

As you drive out of Warsaw, you get to Włóka Kosowska. It's a little village with a lot of sprawling white warehouses.

Maria Vilcek writes about Poland for The Economist.

That's where the Vietnamese trade in food and textiles.

People of Vietnamese heritage are the largest non-European population in Poland. And more or less, they've been welcomed.

Traders zip around the corridors on their scooters. You have to actually be quite careful at the crossings, just so you don't get run over by someone in a rush to sell. The air smells of Vietnamese cooking. The music is often crowded out by intense haggling in Vietnamese. As you look around the walls, you see a lot of signs written both in Polish and Vietnamese which urge the traders not to light incense inside the building. Poland and Czechia are known to be famously homogeneous societies, and in recent years they have become infamous for their opposition to accepting Syrian refugees. And so it's quite interesting that they're also the home of a large Asian community which happens to be thriving.

And how did that large Asian community come to be?

So it started in the 1970s and '80s with student exchanges between Vietnam and the Eastern European members of the Soviet bloc. Many of them came as students and they liked it here, so they decided to settle. They intermarried with Poles, they brought over their relatives from Vietnam, and they started working in small professions such as wholesale trading. And at this point, there are around 40,000 to 50,000 Vietnamese in Poland, and about 60,000 to 80,000 in Czechia, which is the largest proportion in Europe.

And how are the Southeast Asian immigrants getting along then?

Many of them tend to say that language is a problem. The Eastern European languages are famous for being very consonant-heavy. So when they initially arrived, most of them didn't speak Polish, and they were initially forced to work in mute professions such as wholesaling food and textiles. With time, it turned out that that's where they struck gold. For example, who came as a student now runs an Asian condiment import company, and he's one of Poland's richest people. I spoke to Magwiat Hong. She's been in Poland for 27 years, and she started off trading at markets and on the streets. Then slowly she moved up and she opened a restaurant bar, and for the last 10 years she's been an agent in an insurance company. And she even says that she does feel more Polish than Vietnamese. And sometimes when she's hanging out with Polish friends, she will be caught off guard by an earnest question about where she comes from.

So you mentioned that the Czech Republic and Poland are renowned for opposition to immigration. How is it that the anti-immigrant sentiment has not fallen on these Asian immigrants?

Well, the anti-immigrant sentiment definitely still there. The Czechs reelected an anti-immigrant firebrand last year, and according to the Pew Research Center, almost half of Poles think there should be less immigration. So that hasn't changed all that much. But the Vietnamese have come to be perceived as a safe type of migrants. They're often even juxtaposed with Middle Eastern migrants who are perceived as leeching off the state. So in contrast, the Vietnamese are seen as more calm, hardworking, earnest, and thus they're more likely to be welcomed, right?

I mean, this is the kind of situation we've seen elsewhere where the, the Asian part of the community is the sort of model minority, but it's, it's not as straightforward as that.

No, no, it never is. And there are plenty of anecdotes about how tough it is for an ostensibly foreign group to assimilate in a country which is so famously homogeneous. And so there are many instances of bullying in school, finger-pointing on public transport. But things are looking up, especially for the second generation. Most of the Vietnamese children born in Poland are citizens. They attend local Polish schools, they speak without an accent. And I, I spoke to Tran Darek, who is 23 years old, and he grew up in Poland. And when I asked him whether he intends to stay He came up with this line: "Let there be a war the world over, if only the Polish countryside was peaceful." And that took me aback. It's a quote from a play, "The Wedding," by a Polish playwright. But then unfortunately, he also went on to describe a lot of instances of finger-pointing, especially when buses from out of town roll up and people are more surprised to see someone who is Asian-looking and yet speaks Polish without an accent. So he still has to face that on a daily basis, although he does say that things are looking better with time, especially since children in school now mostly either have an Asian friend or know someone else who has an Asian friend, or even on a daily basis just encounter them in the markets. And it's, it's normalizing. Maria, thank you very much for your time. Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/radiooffer. 12 issues for $12 or £12. See you back here on Monday.