A Different World

President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was paid $10 million a year by a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin from 2005 to at least 2009, the AP’s Jeff Horwitz and Chad Day report. A strategy memo that Manafort wrote said he would aim to influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the U.S, Europe and the former Soviet republics to benefit the Putin government. The AP says it obtained both strategy memoranda and records showing international wire transfers for millions of dollars.

Manafort told the AP he did indeed work with Oleg Deripaska, the Putin ally who is an aluminum magnate, but said he was “representing him on business and personal matters in countries where he had investments…[and] did not involve representing Russia’s political interests.” Manafort did not register as a foreign lobbyist with the Justice Department, as required under federal law, during this period.

The AP also notes that “Manafort and his associates remain in Trump’s orbit. Manafort told a colleague this year that he continues to speak with Trump by telephone. Manafort’s former business partner in eastern Europe, Rick Gates, has been seen inside the White House on a number of occasions. Gates has since helped plan Trump’s inauguration and now runs a nonprofit organization, America First Policies, to back the White House agenda.”

It’s hard to understand how anyone who pays attention to politics thinks that there can be business as usual in Washington when there is so much evidence of Trump campaign ties to Russia surfacing. As Jeff Hauser wrote recently for Rewire, what’s needed is a special prosecutor, a select congressional committee investigation, and the publication of Trump’s tax returns. If Senate Democrats had spines, they would be withholding consent on any Senate business going forward until such steps are taken.

Why does Trump behave the way he does? The Times’ Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman report that “The two most influential role models in Mr. Trump’s youth were men who preached the twin philosophies of relentless self-promotion and the waging of total war against anyone perceived as a threat. Mr. Trump, according to one longtime adviser, is perpetually playing a soundtrack in his head consisting of advice from his father, Fred, a hard-driving real estate developer who laid the weight of the family’s success on his son’s shoulders. Mr. Trump’s other mentor was the caustic and conniving McCarthy-era lawyer Roy Cohn, who counseled Mr. Trump never to give in or concede error.”

Noting Trump’s delusional behavior, the editors of the Wall Street Journal (!!!) decry the “damage” he is doing to his presidency with “his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods.” Folks, they’re worried that they won’t get the tax cuts for the rich if this continues! (The post-election stock market rally hit a bump yesterday; coincidence?)

The Republican health care bill is leaking air, and Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) says one reason why GOP whip efforts aren’t working is the internet. “This isn’t the 1990s,” he told the Huffington Post’s Matt Fuller, “There’s an internet now. They used to be able to corral people much more easily. Today we’re in a different world.”

CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen reports on a diehard Trump supporter who followed him to 45 rallies who no longer backs him because he opposes Trumpcare.

Remember the story that the Trump team wanted military equipment like tanks included in his inaugural parade? At the time the incoming administration denied it, but the Huffington Post’s Jessica Schulberg now has internal Pentagon emails showing that the request was indeed made. And fortunately deflected. Tanks for the memories.

What sharing economy? Sexual harassment isn’t a “systemic problem” at Uber, board member Arianna Huffington tells Sarah Ashley O’Brien of CNN. During a conference call with reporters, Huffington also said that “the board is confident in Travis [Kalanick, its CEO], and we are proceeding ahead with the search for the C.O.O.”

The future is here, just unevenly distributed: American farmers are “tractor hacking,” using cracked firmware from the Ukraine in order to get around DRM-style restrictions on their farm equipment imposed by John Deere and other manufacturers, Jason Koebler reports for Motherboard.

Facebook is starting to alert users to news feed stories that are disputed by third-part fact checkers, Elle Hunt reports for The Guardian.

New York is “moving aggressively” to bring broadband to its small towns and rural counties, Michael Reilly reports for Technology Review.

This is civic tech: Myanmar’s Phandeeyar civic tech hub gets profiled by Casey Hynes of Forbes.

CivicScape, a predictive policing data start-up, is publishing its algorithms online, in an effort to respond to critics of the approach who say that such efforts simply encode existing discrimination, Ben Miller reports for GovTech. “We don’t want to say, ‘Trust us, and we’re going to build an algorithm behind closed doors,’” Anne Milgram, former New Jersey attorney general and chair of CivicScape’s board of directors, told GovTech. Ezekiel Edwards, the ACLU’s director of the Criminal Law Reform Project, said ““From my understanding, CivicScape is putting a premium on transparency,” he said. “They are doing something that no other major developer of predictive policing has done yet to my knowledge, which is to make the method, the algorithm [and] the weighting system transparent.”

Motherboard’s Corin Faife profiles Eva Galperin, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s director of cybersecurity.

Next week’s “Member Show-and-Tell” at Civic Hall March 29 will focus on demos of work “that is helping to defend civil society, human rights and constitutional democracy since the election of 2016.

Your moment of zen: Republican Senator Jeff Flake of New Mexico asked Supreme Court nominee Neil grouch the Reddit horse-duck question at yesterday confirmation hearing.