Tuesday, April 18, 2017
Technology & Privacy:
Kristine Phillips: ‘Nobody’s got to use the Internet’: A GOP lawmaker’s response to concerns about Web privacy
"A Wisconsin congressman told a town hall attendee who was concerned about the elimination of online privacy protections that using the Internet is a choice — a statement that has since drawn criticism on social media. During the meeting in Wisconsin on Thursday, the attendee asked about the recent decision by Congress to wipe away an Obama-era policy that sought to limit what Internet service providers, such as Verizon, AT&T and Comcast, can do with customers’ Internet browsing history. The concern is similar to one raised by consumer activists: Not all Internet users have options to switch to a different company if they don’t agree with their current provider’s privacy practices. “Facebook is not comparable to an ISP. I do not have to go to Facebook,” the town hall attendee told Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.). “I do have one provider. … I have one choice. I don’t have to go on Google. My ISP provider is different than those providers.” In response, Sensenbrenner, who voted to scrap the Federal Communications Commission’s privacy rules that were set to take effect at the end of this year, said:
“Nobody’s got to use the Internet. … And the thing is that if you start regulating the Internet like a utility, if we did that right at the beginning, we would have no Internet. … Internet companies have invested an awful lot of money in having almost universal service now. The fact is is that, you know, I don’t think it’s my job to tell you that you cannot get advertising for your information being sold. My job, I think, is to tell you that you have the opportunity to do it, and then you take it upon yourself to make that choice. … That’s what the law has been, and I think we ought to have more choices rather than fewer choices with the government controlling our everyday lives.”..."
Kristine Phillips: ‘Nobody’s got to use the Internet’: A GOP lawmaker’s response to concerns about Web privacy
"A Wisconsin congressman told a town hall attendee who was concerned about the elimination of online privacy protections that using the Internet is a choice — a statement that has since drawn criticism on social media. During the meeting in Wisconsin on Thursday, the attendee asked about the recent decision by Congress to wipe away an Obama-era policy that sought to limit what Internet service providers, such as Verizon, AT&T and Comcast, can do with customers’ Internet browsing history. The concern is similar to one raised by consumer activists: Not all Internet users have options to switch to a different company if they don’t agree with their current provider’s privacy practices. “Facebook is not comparable to an ISP. I do not have to go to Facebook,” the town hall attendee told Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.). “I do have one provider. … I have one choice. I don’t have to go on Google. My ISP provider is different than those providers.” In response, Sensenbrenner, who voted to scrap the Federal Communications Commission’s privacy rules that were set to take effect at the end of this year, said:
“Nobody’s got to use the Internet. … And the thing is that if you start regulating the Internet like a utility, if we did that right at the beginning, we would have no Internet. … Internet companies have invested an awful lot of money in having almost universal service now. The fact is is that, you know, I don’t think it’s my job to tell you that you cannot get advertising for your information being sold. My job, I think, is to tell you that you have the opportunity to do it, and then you take it upon yourself to make that choice. … That’s what the law has been, and I think we ought to have more choices rather than fewer choices with the government controlling our everyday lives.”..."
Friday, April 14, 2017
Trump & Co.
Sophia A. McClennen: Beware the Trump brain rot: The cognitive effects of this administration’s actions could be disastrous
"...Each of these tactics has a special impact on cognitive functioning, and until we understand what’s going on, we have no hope of stopping it.
1. An epidemic of lies
The lying of Trump is legendary at this point. But we have paid less attention to the cognitive impact of processing an endless stream of lies. As Maria Konnikova wrote in Politico, all presidents lie, but Trump is in a category of his own, with a whopping 70 percent of his statements coming in as false. The lies are certainly bad, especially when they are the basis for policy. But Konnikova explained that one of the most pernicious effects of a serial liar is on cognitive functioning: “When we are overwhelmed with false, or potentially false, statements, our brains pretty quickly become so overworked that we stop trying to sift through everything.” For Konnikova the frightening reality is that Trump’s endless lying runs the risk of colonizing the brains of those who never even supported him. Political comedian John F. O’Donnell did a bit on this exact issue for “Redacted Tonight,” where he explained that research shows that in order to cognitively process a lie, we first have to provisionally accept it as true. After accepting the lie as an idea, we can then reject it as false. The problem is, though, if we are overloaded with constant lies, our brains may become too exhausted to reject the lie. Before we know it, claims that are obviously false, like allegations of massive voter fraud during the past election, can seem true. But there’s more. Trump’s fabrications are a special type of lying. He is what CNN called the “gaslighter in chief.” Gaslighting relies on creating a parallel universe that blurs any real connection to the truth and it is a common practice for narcissists. “The techniques include saying and doing things and then denying it, blaming others for misunderstanding, disparaging their concerns as oversensitivity, claiming outrageous statements were jokes or misunderstandings, and other forms of twilighting the truth,” according to CNN. Gaslighting is an especially abusive form of lying. Psychologists explain that it “can lead to the victim losing all trust in their own judgment and reality.” It results in self-doubt, angst, turmoil and guilt.
2. An assault on logic
Critical thinking doesn’t just require facts; it requires the ability to reason, deduce, infer and analyze. Those skills are also under attack. Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer impersonation while she rants about “your words” reminds us that circular logic, tautology and flawed thinking rule the arguments made by the White House. Jeet Heer wrote in November that fact-checking Trump was simply not enough to understand the cognitive effects of his statements. Heer keyed into the fact that Trump contradicts himself constantly. Contradictions, though, are only the tip of the illogical iceberg for Trump. President Trump and his team practice an ongoing and incessant assault on all forms of logic. And without logic, we can’t get any real thinking done of any kind. As I wrote before the election, the assault on logic will eventually make us all stupid, but in the short run it will wear us all down.
3. The blustering bully
There is a lot of research on the long-term effects of bullying on children who grow up to be anxious and depressed adults. But increasing attention is being focused on the effects of bullying on adults. Much of that work has explored workplace bullying and the psychological distress it causes. Now we have to contend with the reality that we have a government of bullying and bluster. Trump shows all of the signs of a malignant narcissist and that is the quintessential bully personality. His Twitter rants may be the most visible signs of this behavior, but it is a pervasive and ongoing feature of his policy. Trump has also surrounded himself with bullies: From Steve Bannon to Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway, the Trump team consistently uses a tactic of bluster and bully to shout down, silence, shame and attack their critics. As Jeb Lund explained for Esquire, Trump’s “team is a hammer, and every problem, including you, is shaped like a nail. They have no sympathy.” If there is one constant in the entire array of Trump positions, from the announcing the Muslim ban to eliminating Environmental Protection Agency references to climate change and from authorizing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids to making up terrorist attacks that didn’t happen — it is the bullying within them, the type of bullying that destroys lives and incites fear. While those in the media are clearly on the front lines of these attacks, there is significant evidence to show that bullying is on the rise since the election. In schools, workplaces and communities, Trump-inspired intimidation is out of control. The psychological impact of this sort of harassment is anxiety, hopelessness, fear and anger.
4. The society of the spectacle
French theorist Guy Debord published “The Society of the Spectacle” in 1967. One of his famous theses was “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” For Debord, the society of the spectacle meant that the social relationship between people was mediated by images. But even more important he argued that “passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity.” Writing 50 years ago, Debord accurately imagined life under the first reality-TV president. Almost 20 years after Debord published his book, Neil Postman wrote “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” a study that argued for Aldous Huxley’s vision of a dystopian world, where people voluntarily sacrifice rights because they are too distracted by hedonist consumption to resist. Postman believed control of the population would come from substitution of entertainment for civic engagement. Postman was especially worried about the role that television was playing in shaping public perceptions. Both Debord and Postman recognized that the mass mediated spectacle would have dire consequences for democracy and political action. Psychological research has also confirmed that constantly watching media spectacles has a negative effect on the brain. Consuming an endless stream of spectacle makes it harder for the brain to connect details to a larger context and leads to attention deficits and distractibility. The Trump presidency is the first openly and unabashedly spectacle-driven administration in U.S. history. It depends on destroying the public’s ability to see the bigger picture and relies on substituting bluster for substance and glitz for reality. It becomes that shiny object we can’t stop watching. The longer we are mesmerized by it, the more our critical thinking suffers.
5. The endless barrage
Remember when there was speculation that Trump would win but would immediately outsource his duties as president? Even in our worst nightmare, we could not have imagined that in only one month we would have such a violent flurry of executive orders and other devastating policy decisions. As Jon Stewart put it on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” “The presidency is supposed to age the president not the public.” Trump bragged on the campaign trail about his stamina. Sadly that seems to be the one thing he was not lying about. The endless barrage of Trump is overwhelming us. As Frank Bruni wrote in The New York Times, Trump “has succeeded at nothing so much as devising an analogue to the shock-and-awe military campaign: It’s the appall-and-anesthetize political strategy.” It is leaving us numb, in shock, exhausted and brain dead. We may try taking a break from the news, but then we reconnect only to find out something horrible has happened while we looked away. It’s cognitively overwhelming. Taken together these five strategies are destined to severely mess with our heads. This is your brain on Trump and it is not pretty..."
Sophia A. McClennen: Beware the Trump brain rot: The cognitive effects of this administration’s actions could be disastrous
"...Each of these tactics has a special impact on cognitive functioning, and until we understand what’s going on, we have no hope of stopping it.
1. An epidemic of lies
The lying of Trump is legendary at this point. But we have paid less attention to the cognitive impact of processing an endless stream of lies. As Maria Konnikova wrote in Politico, all presidents lie, but Trump is in a category of his own, with a whopping 70 percent of his statements coming in as false. The lies are certainly bad, especially when they are the basis for policy. But Konnikova explained that one of the most pernicious effects of a serial liar is on cognitive functioning: “When we are overwhelmed with false, or potentially false, statements, our brains pretty quickly become so overworked that we stop trying to sift through everything.” For Konnikova the frightening reality is that Trump’s endless lying runs the risk of colonizing the brains of those who never even supported him. Political comedian John F. O’Donnell did a bit on this exact issue for “Redacted Tonight,” where he explained that research shows that in order to cognitively process a lie, we first have to provisionally accept it as true. After accepting the lie as an idea, we can then reject it as false. The problem is, though, if we are overloaded with constant lies, our brains may become too exhausted to reject the lie. Before we know it, claims that are obviously false, like allegations of massive voter fraud during the past election, can seem true. But there’s more. Trump’s fabrications are a special type of lying. He is what CNN called the “gaslighter in chief.” Gaslighting relies on creating a parallel universe that blurs any real connection to the truth and it is a common practice for narcissists. “The techniques include saying and doing things and then denying it, blaming others for misunderstanding, disparaging their concerns as oversensitivity, claiming outrageous statements were jokes or misunderstandings, and other forms of twilighting the truth,” according to CNN. Gaslighting is an especially abusive form of lying. Psychologists explain that it “can lead to the victim losing all trust in their own judgment and reality.” It results in self-doubt, angst, turmoil and guilt.
2. An assault on logic
Critical thinking doesn’t just require facts; it requires the ability to reason, deduce, infer and analyze. Those skills are also under attack. Melissa McCarthy’s Sean Spicer impersonation while she rants about “your words” reminds us that circular logic, tautology and flawed thinking rule the arguments made by the White House. Jeet Heer wrote in November that fact-checking Trump was simply not enough to understand the cognitive effects of his statements. Heer keyed into the fact that Trump contradicts himself constantly. Contradictions, though, are only the tip of the illogical iceberg for Trump. President Trump and his team practice an ongoing and incessant assault on all forms of logic. And without logic, we can’t get any real thinking done of any kind. As I wrote before the election, the assault on logic will eventually make us all stupid, but in the short run it will wear us all down.
3. The blustering bully
There is a lot of research on the long-term effects of bullying on children who grow up to be anxious and depressed adults. But increasing attention is being focused on the effects of bullying on adults. Much of that work has explored workplace bullying and the psychological distress it causes. Now we have to contend with the reality that we have a government of bullying and bluster. Trump shows all of the signs of a malignant narcissist and that is the quintessential bully personality. His Twitter rants may be the most visible signs of this behavior, but it is a pervasive and ongoing feature of his policy. Trump has also surrounded himself with bullies: From Steve Bannon to Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway, the Trump team consistently uses a tactic of bluster and bully to shout down, silence, shame and attack their critics. As Jeb Lund explained for Esquire, Trump’s “team is a hammer, and every problem, including you, is shaped like a nail. They have no sympathy.” If there is one constant in the entire array of Trump positions, from the announcing the Muslim ban to eliminating Environmental Protection Agency references to climate change and from authorizing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids to making up terrorist attacks that didn’t happen — it is the bullying within them, the type of bullying that destroys lives and incites fear. While those in the media are clearly on the front lines of these attacks, there is significant evidence to show that bullying is on the rise since the election. In schools, workplaces and communities, Trump-inspired intimidation is out of control. The psychological impact of this sort of harassment is anxiety, hopelessness, fear and anger.
4. The society of the spectacle
French theorist Guy Debord published “The Society of the Spectacle” in 1967. One of his famous theses was “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” For Debord, the society of the spectacle meant that the social relationship between people was mediated by images. But even more important he argued that “passive identification with the spectacle supplants genuine activity.” Writing 50 years ago, Debord accurately imagined life under the first reality-TV president. Almost 20 years after Debord published his book, Neil Postman wrote “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” a study that argued for Aldous Huxley’s vision of a dystopian world, where people voluntarily sacrifice rights because they are too distracted by hedonist consumption to resist. Postman believed control of the population would come from substitution of entertainment for civic engagement. Postman was especially worried about the role that television was playing in shaping public perceptions. Both Debord and Postman recognized that the mass mediated spectacle would have dire consequences for democracy and political action. Psychological research has also confirmed that constantly watching media spectacles has a negative effect on the brain. Consuming an endless stream of spectacle makes it harder for the brain to connect details to a larger context and leads to attention deficits and distractibility. The Trump presidency is the first openly and unabashedly spectacle-driven administration in U.S. history. It depends on destroying the public’s ability to see the bigger picture and relies on substituting bluster for substance and glitz for reality. It becomes that shiny object we can’t stop watching. The longer we are mesmerized by it, the more our critical thinking suffers.
5. The endless barrage
Remember when there was speculation that Trump would win but would immediately outsource his duties as president? Even in our worst nightmare, we could not have imagined that in only one month we would have such a violent flurry of executive orders and other devastating policy decisions. As Jon Stewart put it on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” “The presidency is supposed to age the president not the public.” Trump bragged on the campaign trail about his stamina. Sadly that seems to be the one thing he was not lying about. The endless barrage of Trump is overwhelming us. As Frank Bruni wrote in The New York Times, Trump “has succeeded at nothing so much as devising an analogue to the shock-and-awe military campaign: It’s the appall-and-anesthetize political strategy.” It is leaving us numb, in shock, exhausted and brain dead. We may try taking a break from the news, but then we reconnect only to find out something horrible has happened while we looked away. It’s cognitively overwhelming. Taken together these five strategies are destined to severely mess with our heads. This is your brain on Trump and it is not pretty..."
Sunday, April 09, 2017
Trump & Co.
David Brooks: The Coming Incompetence Crisis
"...On his worst days Sean Spicer can produce more errors than 10 normal men on their best days. Kellyanne Conway can flail her way through television confrontations 24/7 and still have the stamina to lose to the Teletubbies on Saturday morning. The White House staffing system is successfully answering the question, How many scorpions can you fit in a bottle? And in general, the personnel process has been so rigorous in its selection of inexperience that those who were hired on the basis of mere nepotism look like Dean Acheson by comparison...
Now I’m not underestimating the president’s own capacity for carrying on in an incompetent manner almost indefinitely. I don’t think we’ve reached peak Trump. The normal incompetent person flails and stammers and is embarrassed about it. But the true genius at incompetence like our president flails and founders and is too incompetent to recognize his own incompetence. He mistakes his catastrophes for successes and so accelerates his pace toward oblivion. Those who ignore history are condemned to retweet it...
...But Trump’s ignorance is not just an absence; it is a rich, intricate and entirely separate universe of negative information, a sort of fertile intellectual antimatter with its own gravitational pull. It’s not so much that he isn’t well informed; it’s that he is prodigiously learned in the sort of knowledge that doesn’t accord with the facts of our current dimension. It is in its own way a privilege to be alive at the same time as a man who is the Albert Einstein of confirmation bias, a man whose most impressive wall is the one between himself and evidence, a man who doesn’t need to go off in search of enemies because he is already his own worst one...
...One of the things I’ve learned about incompetence over the past few months is that it is radically nonlinear. Competent people go in one of a few directions. But incompetence is infinite. The human imagination is not capacious enough to comprehend all the many ways the Trumpians can find to screw this thing up."
Paul Krugman: The Bad, the Worse and the Ugly
"This week’s New York Times interview with Donald Trump was horrifying, yet curiously unsurprising. Yes, the world’s most powerful man is lazy, ignorant, dishonest and vindictive. But we knew that already. In fact, the most revealing thing in the interview may be Mr. Trump’s defense of Bill O’Reilly, accused of sexual predation and abuse of power: “He’s a good person.” This, I’d argue, tells us more about both the man from Mar-a-Lago and the motivations of his base than his ramblings about infrastructure and trade. First, however, here’s a question: How much difference has it made, really, that Donald Trump rather than a conventional Republican sits in the White House? The Trump administration is, by all accounts, a mess. The vast majority of key presidential appointments requiring Senate confirmation are unfilled; whatever people are in place are preoccupied with factional infighting. Decision-making sounds more like palace intrigues in a sultan’s seraglio than policy formulation in a republic. And then there are those tweets. Yet Mr. Trump’s first great policy and political debacle — the ignominious collapse of the effort to kill Obamacare — owed almost nothing to executive dysfunction. Repeal-and-replace didn’t face-plant because of poor tactics; it failed because Republicans have been lying about health care for eight years. So when the time came to propose something real, all they could offer were various ways to package mass loss of coverage. Similar considerations apply on other fronts. Tax reform looks like a bust, not because the Trump administration has no idea what it’s doing (although it doesn’t), but because nobody in the G.O.P. ever put in the hard work of figuring out what should change and how to sell those changes. What about areas where Mr. Trump sometimes sounds very different from ordinary Republicans, like infrastructure?..."
David Brooks: The Coming Incompetence Crisis
"...On his worst days Sean Spicer can produce more errors than 10 normal men on their best days. Kellyanne Conway can flail her way through television confrontations 24/7 and still have the stamina to lose to the Teletubbies on Saturday morning. The White House staffing system is successfully answering the question, How many scorpions can you fit in a bottle? And in general, the personnel process has been so rigorous in its selection of inexperience that those who were hired on the basis of mere nepotism look like Dean Acheson by comparison...
Now I’m not underestimating the president’s own capacity for carrying on in an incompetent manner almost indefinitely. I don’t think we’ve reached peak Trump. The normal incompetent person flails and stammers and is embarrassed about it. But the true genius at incompetence like our president flails and founders and is too incompetent to recognize his own incompetence. He mistakes his catastrophes for successes and so accelerates his pace toward oblivion. Those who ignore history are condemned to retweet it...
...But Trump’s ignorance is not just an absence; it is a rich, intricate and entirely separate universe of negative information, a sort of fertile intellectual antimatter with its own gravitational pull. It’s not so much that he isn’t well informed; it’s that he is prodigiously learned in the sort of knowledge that doesn’t accord with the facts of our current dimension. It is in its own way a privilege to be alive at the same time as a man who is the Albert Einstein of confirmation bias, a man whose most impressive wall is the one between himself and evidence, a man who doesn’t need to go off in search of enemies because he is already his own worst one...
...One of the things I’ve learned about incompetence over the past few months is that it is radically nonlinear. Competent people go in one of a few directions. But incompetence is infinite. The human imagination is not capacious enough to comprehend all the many ways the Trumpians can find to screw this thing up."
Paul Krugman: The Bad, the Worse and the Ugly
"This week’s New York Times interview with Donald Trump was horrifying, yet curiously unsurprising. Yes, the world’s most powerful man is lazy, ignorant, dishonest and vindictive. But we knew that already. In fact, the most revealing thing in the interview may be Mr. Trump’s defense of Bill O’Reilly, accused of sexual predation and abuse of power: “He’s a good person.” This, I’d argue, tells us more about both the man from Mar-a-Lago and the motivations of his base than his ramblings about infrastructure and trade. First, however, here’s a question: How much difference has it made, really, that Donald Trump rather than a conventional Republican sits in the White House? The Trump administration is, by all accounts, a mess. The vast majority of key presidential appointments requiring Senate confirmation are unfilled; whatever people are in place are preoccupied with factional infighting. Decision-making sounds more like palace intrigues in a sultan’s seraglio than policy formulation in a republic. And then there are those tweets. Yet Mr. Trump’s first great policy and political debacle — the ignominious collapse of the effort to kill Obamacare — owed almost nothing to executive dysfunction. Repeal-and-replace didn’t face-plant because of poor tactics; it failed because Republicans have been lying about health care for eight years. So when the time came to propose something real, all they could offer were various ways to package mass loss of coverage. Similar considerations apply on other fronts. Tax reform looks like a bust, not because the Trump administration has no idea what it’s doing (although it doesn’t), but because nobody in the G.O.P. ever put in the hard work of figuring out what should change and how to sell those changes. What about areas where Mr. Trump sometimes sounds very different from ordinary Republicans, like infrastructure?..."
Tuesday, April 04, 2017
The Trump-Putin Connection:
Washington Post: Blackwater founder held secret Seychelles meeting to establish Trump-Putin back channel
"The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials. The meeting took place around Jan. 11 – nine days before Trump’s inauguration – in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, officials said. Though the full agenda remains unclear, the UAE agreed to broker the meeting in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria, a Trump administration objective that would likely require major concessions to Moscow on U.S. sanctions. Though Prince had no formal role with the Trump campaign or transition team, he presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump to high-ranking Emiratis involved in setting up his meeting with the Putin confidant, according to the officials, who did not identify the Russian. Prince was an avid supporter of Trump who gave $250,000 last year to support the GOP nominee’s campaign, records show. He has ties to people in Trump’s circle, including Stephen K. Bannon, now serving as the president’s chief strategist and senior counselor. Prince’s sister Betsy DeVos serves as education secretary in the Trump administration. And Prince was seen in the Trump transition offices in New York in December. U.S. officials said the FBI has been scrutinizing the Seychelles meeting as part of a broader probe of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and alleged contacts between associates of Putin and Trump. The FBI declined to comment. The Seychelles encounter, which one official said spanned two days, adds to an expanding web of connections between Russia and Americans with ties to Trump – contacts that the White House has been reluctant to acknowledge or explain until they have been exposed by news organizations..."
Washington Post: Blackwater founder held secret Seychelles meeting to establish Trump-Putin back channel
"The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials. The meeting took place around Jan. 11 – nine days before Trump’s inauguration – in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, officials said. Though the full agenda remains unclear, the UAE agreed to broker the meeting in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria, a Trump administration objective that would likely require major concessions to Moscow on U.S. sanctions. Though Prince had no formal role with the Trump campaign or transition team, he presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump to high-ranking Emiratis involved in setting up his meeting with the Putin confidant, according to the officials, who did not identify the Russian. Prince was an avid supporter of Trump who gave $250,000 last year to support the GOP nominee’s campaign, records show. He has ties to people in Trump’s circle, including Stephen K. Bannon, now serving as the president’s chief strategist and senior counselor. Prince’s sister Betsy DeVos serves as education secretary in the Trump administration. And Prince was seen in the Trump transition offices in New York in December. U.S. officials said the FBI has been scrutinizing the Seychelles meeting as part of a broader probe of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and alleged contacts between associates of Putin and Trump. The FBI declined to comment. The Seychelles encounter, which one official said spanned two days, adds to an expanding web of connections between Russia and Americans with ties to Trump – contacts that the White House has been reluctant to acknowledge or explain until they have been exposed by news organizations..."
