He is, for lack of a better comparison, the Donald Trump of lawyering.
.. A walk through Mr. Kasowitz’s office at Kasowitz Benson Torres in Midtown shows magazine covers and framed pictures of him. He’s quick to tell you about his latest accomplishment and never shies from publicity. The first paragraph of the online biography on his firm’s website, before mentioning any of his work, cites the dozens of media outlets that have written about him, and how they have described him as the “toughest lawyer on Wall Street,” an “uberlitigator” and “the toughest of the tough guys.”
.. In case you didn’t get the message, he likes a good fight, the nastier the better.
.. Mr. Kasowitz was largely responsible for helping Liggett settle the huge class action suits it faced over the health impact of tobacco
.. Mr. Kasowitz’s firm was on the other side of Mr. Icahn in a dispute over casinos. The client? Mr. Trump, along with his daughter Ivanka.
.. Mr. Kasowitz recently added Sberbank, a Russian state-controlled bank, as a client in a case that accused it of conspiring to take over a Russian granite company — and asserting that the conspiracy involved lieutenants of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. The complaint called it a “textbook case of Russian corporate raiding.”
The big question in Washington is whether Mr. Kasowitz, who is not a criminal lawyer or a political hand, is the right person to be at Mr. Trump’s side. Some of Mr. Trump’s friends and advisers have privately raised questions about his hiring.
.. he does know about Mr. Trump — and he does know about the news media and the 24-hour news cycle.
.. He’s currently representing Bill O’Reilly
.. Mr. Kasowitz sent a letter to the paper threatening to sue over the publication of accusations from two women that Mr. Trump sexually harassed them.
.. Mr. Kasowitz’s law partner, David M. Friedman, was Mr. Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel.
.. And another of Mr. Kasowitz’s partners — one of his newest — is Joseph I. Lieberman
.. “I don’t read much. Mostly I read contracts, but usually my lawyers do most of the work.”
U.S. Charges Contractor With Leaking NSA Document on Russian Hacking
the Intercept, which on Monday afternoon posted online a document that it said was produced by the National Security Agency and which concluded Russian spies hacked computers of a U.S. company “to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions.”
.. In an article published Monday, the Intercept said it had received the NSA report anonymously and had authenticated its contents. It said the NSA report details Russian efforts to hack the computers of a U.S. company and steal information about election-related software and hardware, data that was then likely used to launch cyberattacks against local U.S. governments. U.S. intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials have said that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a campaign to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. election to help the prospects of Donald Trump, then the Republican nominee.
Donald Trump Poisons the World
This week, two of Donald Trump’s top advisers, H. R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote the following passage in The Wall Street Journal: “The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a cleareyed outlook that the world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.”
That sentence is the epitome of the Trump project. It asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs. It grows out of a worldview that life is a competitive struggle for gain. It implies that cooperative communities are hypocritical covers for the selfish jockeying underneath.
.. This essay explains why Trump gravitates toward leaders like Vladimir Putin, the Saudi princes and various global strongmen: They share his core worldview that life is nakedly a selfish struggle for money and dominance.
.. It explains why people in the Trump White House are so savage to one another. Far from being a band of brothers, their world is a vicious arena where staffers compete for advantage.
.. In this worldview, morality has nothing to do with anything. Altruism, trust, cooperation and virtue are unaffordable luxuries in the struggle of all against all. Everything is about self-interest.
.. People are wired to cooperate. Far from being a flimsy thing, the desire for cooperation is the primary human evolutionary advantage we have over the other animals.
.. You don’t have to teach a child about what fairness is; they already know. There’s no society on earth where people are admired for running away in battle or for lying to their friends.
.. Jonathan Haidt has studied the surges of elevation we feel when we see somebody performing a selfless action.
.. Good leaders like Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt and Reagan understand the selfish elements that drive human behavior, but they have another foot in the realm of the moral motivations. They seek to inspire faithfulness by showing good character. They try to motivate action by pointing toward great ideals.
.. By behaving with naked selfishness toward others, they poison the common realm and they force others to behave with naked selfishness toward them.
.. By treating the world simply as an arena for competitive advantage, Trump, McMaster and Cohn sever relationships, destroy reciprocity, erode trust and eviscerate the sense of sympathy, friendship and loyalty that all nations need when times get tough.
.. By looking at nothing but immediate material interest, Trump, McMaster and Cohn turn America into a nation that affronts everybody else’s moral emotions. They make our country seem disgusting in the eyes of the world.
.. I wish H. R. McMaster was a better student of Thucydides. He’d know that the Athenians adopted the same amoral tone he embraces: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The Athenians ended up making endless enemies and destroying their own empire.
Megyn Kelly saw an aggressive, peeved Vladimir Putin. That behavior could hurt him.
Russians probably liked Putin’s combative performance: That’s part of his brand, and he’s indisputably popular at home. But the day’s events also showed how allegations of Russian meddling abroad, though they’re seen here as evidence of Russia’s revived power, also cloud Putin’s efforts to lure more foreign investment and expand Russia’s global role.
.. Kelly questioned Putin bluntly and repeatedly about hacking and other controversial topics. This drew various pained responses, including an exasperated jab at “hysterical” critics: “Maybe someone has a pill that will stop this.” At another point, he said that the U.S. media should “stop this idle prattle” about Russia, which was harming diplomacy.