In May 2017, Robert Mueller was tapped to lead an inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, coordination by foreign agents with Donald Trump's campaign, and obstruction of justice by the president. Mueller assembled a "dream team" of top prosecutors, and for the next twenty-two months, the investigation was a black box and the subject of endless anticipation and speculation--until April 2019, when the special counsel's report was released. In Where Law Ends, legendary prosecutor Andrew Weissmann--a key player in the Special Counsel's Office--finally pulls back the curtain to reveal exactly what went on inside the investigation, including the heated debates, painful deliberations, and mistakes of the team--not to mention the external efforts by the president and Attorney General William Barr to manipulate the investigation to their political ends. Weissmann puts the reader in the room as Mueller's team made their most consequential decisions, such as whether to subpoena the president, whether to conduct a full financial investigation of Trump, and whether to explicitly recommend obstruction charges against him. Weissmann also details for the first time the debilitating effects that President Trump himself had on the investigation, through his dangling of pardons and his constant threats to shut down the inquiry and fire Mueller, which left the team racing against the clock and essentially fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. In Where Law Ends, Weissmann conjures the camaraderie and esprit de corps of the investigative units led by the enigmatic Mueller, a distinguished public servant who is revealed here, in a way we have never seen him before, as a manager, a colleague, and a very human presence. Weissmann is as candid about the team's mistakes as he is about its successes, and is committed to accurately documenting the historic investigation for future generations to assess and learn from. Ultimately, Where Law Ends is a story about a team of public servants, dedicated to the rule of law, tasked with investigating a president who did everything he could to stand in their way.

Is social media destroying democracy? Are Russian propaganda or "Fake news" entrepreneurs on Facebook undermining our sense of a shared reality? A conventional wisdom has emerged since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that new technologies and their manipulation by foreign actors played a decisive role in his victory and are responsible for the sense of a "post-truth" moment in which disinformation and propaganda thrives. Network Propaganda challenges that received wisdom through the most comprehensive study yet published on media coverage of American presidential politics from the start of the election cycle in April 2015 to the one year anniversary of the Trump presidency. Analyzing millions of news stories together with Twitter and Facebook shares, broadcast television and YouTube, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the architecture of contemporary American political communications. Through data analysis and detailed qualitative case studies of coverage of immigration, Clinton scandals, and the Trump Russia investigation, the book finds that the right-wing media ecosystem operates fundamentally differently than the rest of the media environment. The authors argue that longstanding institutional, political, and cultural patterns in American politics interacted with technological change since the 1970s to create a propaganda feedback loop in American conservative media. This dynamic has marginalized centre-right media and politicians, radicalized the right wing ecosystem, and rendered it susceptible to propaganda efforts, foreign and domestic. For readers outside the United States, the book offers a new perspective and methods for diagnosing the sources of, and potential solutions for, the perceived global crisis of democratic politics

"If you want to understand not only what happened in 2016, but what's going to happen tomorrow, this book is essential reading. Susan Bordo brings a scholar's rigor and a lioness' heart to this important work." --Paul Begala "Among the best books I've read on the 2016 election . . . the perfect companion to Clinton's What Happened ." --Peter Daou The Destruction of Hillary Clinton is an answer to the question many have been asking: How did an extraordinarily well-qualified, experienced, and admired candidate--whose victory would have been as historic as Barack Obama's--come to be seen as a tool of the establishment, a chronic liar, and a talentless politician? In this masterful narrative of the 2016 campaign year and the events that led up to it, Susan Bordo unpacks the Rights' assault on Clinton and her reputation, the way the left provoked suspicion and indifference among the youth vote, the inescapable presence of James Comey, questions about Russian influence, and the media's malpractice in covering the candidate. Urgent, insightful, and engrossing, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton is an essential guide to understanding the most controversial presidential election in American history.

"With vivid storytelling and access to insider accounts, Weiner sets out to trace the roots of Russian-American political warfare--conflict waged without weapons--over the last seven decades to understand how a president landed in the White House with the help of an expansive, covert Russian campaign. Russia's modern revival of Soviet-era intelligence operations constitutes one of the most significant threats to democracy in the United States and around the world, and yet the US has not engaged its own political warfare methods in defense, even as our own justice department has concluded unequivocally that Russia influenced the 2016 election. To get to the heart of what's at stake and find potential solutions, Weiner examines long-running twentieth century CIA operations, political machinations by the Soviet KGB around the world, the erosion of American political warfare after the Cold War, and why twenty-first century Russia has returned to the practice while the US has not. Weiner takes us behind closed doors and into the deliberation rooms of past and present Russian and American intelligence operations that directly led to-and help illuminate-the current administration and the future of American democracy"--

Every week on the public radio show On the Media , the award-winning journalist Brooke Gladstone analyzes the media and how it shapes our perceptions of the world. Now, from her front-row perch on the day’s events, Gladstone brings her genius for making insightful, unexpected connections to help us understand what she calls—and what so many of us can acknowledge having—“trouble with reality.” Reality, as she shows us, was never what we thought it was—there is always a bubble, people are always subjective and prey to stereotypes. And that makes reality actually more vulnerable than we ever thought. Enter Donald J. Trump and his team of advisors. For them, as she writes, lying is the point . The more blatant the lie, the easier it is to hijack reality and assert power over the truth. Drawing on writers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Walter Lippmann, Philip K. Dick, and Jonathan Swift, she dissects this strategy, straight out of the authoritarian playbook, and shows how the Trump team mastered it, down to the five types of tweets that Trump uses to distort our notions of what’s real and what’s not. And she offers hope. There is meaningful action, a time-tested treatment for moral panic. And there is also the inevitable reckoning. History tells us we can count on it. Brief and bracing, The Trouble with Reality shows exactly why so many of us didn’t see it coming, and how we can recover both our belief in reality—and our sanity.

"James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, which sold approximately 36K copies, returns with a new book exploring the looming collapse of the techno-industrial economy, featuring profiles of individuals who have drastically altered their lives due to financial difficulties"--