Donald Trump Chats With Russian and Chinese Spies Each Night

The New York Times reports today that our commander-in-chief uses a personal iPhone that’s insecure and routinely surveilled by Russian and Chinese intelligence agencies. Despite being warned repeatedly about this, he continues to use it to call up his friends and yak all night long:

White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them….They said they had further confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities.

My spirit has been crushed over the past two years and I am no longer truly surprised by anything Donald Trump does or by how the Republican Party collectively shrugs about it. I meet each new revelation with a thousand-yard stare and then a robotic move of the mouse to see if there’s any other news I might be interested in.

And yet. Occasionally something still produces a tiny flicker of neurotransmitters somewhere in the vicinity of my amygdala. When that happens, I blink my eyes as if awakening from a stupor and take a closer look at the text on my computer screen. Text like this:

White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them.

Trump is a Republican, right? This is the party that spent two years pretending to be outraged that Hillary Clinton used an unclassified network to respond to an email about a phone call to the newly-elected president of Malawi. But their reaction to the president of the United States chatting merrily away on a phone that we know the Russians and Chinese are listening in on? Apparently nothing.

But, you know, President Obama once saluted a Marine while holding a coffee cup in his hand. So I guess there’s plenty of justified outrage on both sides, amirite?

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

payment methods

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