The New York Times - USA (2020-12-07)

THE NEW YORK TIMES OP-EDMONDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2020 N A

I

T HAS been four weeks since Joe Bi-

den was declared the winner of a

hard-fought election. The votes have

been counted in Georgia. Three

times. Yet the incumbent refuses to ad-

mit defeat and released a 46-minute vid-

eo alleging “massive fraud.” He’s made it

clear that he’s not going to go quietly. So

I’m sure you’re all wondering what I’ve

been wondering: When is the interna-

tional community going to step in and re-

solve this crisis?

Sure, Joe Biden won both the Electoral

College votes and the popular vote. But

the president refuses to give up. He’s got

some militias in the North and the South

solidly behind him, along with large sec-

tions of the country. You know what that

means. Conditions are ripe for the secre-

tary of state of some foreign country to

parachute in and broker a power-sharing

deal, as John Kerry did in Afghanistan in

2014. Maybe Mr. Trump could serve as
      chief executive officer of a unity govern-
      ment. Or he could be put in charge of na-
      tional reconciliation.
      Perhaps some Middle Eastern law-
      maker out there is already hard at work
      on a proposal for our political salvation,
      based on partitioning our country into
      semiautonomous ethno-states, just like
      Mr. Biden’s plan for Iraq. But I don’t think

so. Aside from a few foreign officials ex-

pressing sadness or scorn, there’s been

mostly a deafening (and awkward) si-

lence from the rest of the world in our

hour of need.

Where are the threats of sanctions un-

less the president respects the results of

the election? Where are the stern warn-

ings that the recommendations of inter-

national election observers must be car-

ried out? If Mr. Trump barricades him-

self in the White House, as the Philippine

leader Ferdinand Marcos did in the pres-

idential palace in 1986, who is going to

play the role of Paul Laxalt and advise

him that “the time has come”?

“If the United States were a regular

country, Joe Biden would be getting mas-

sive pressure right now from major pow-

ers to update and upgrade the antiquat-

ed American electoral system,” Dov H.

Levin, assistant professor of interna-

tional relations at the University of Hong

Kong, told me. “There would be hun-

dreds of electoral experts descending to

tell the U.S. how to do this. They could re-

quire, for example, that the U.S. set up an

independent election committee to be in

charge of determining who won instead

of Fox News and CNN.”

We are not a regular country. We are

an exceptional one, so much so that we

participate regularly in everybody else’s

elections. One out of every 11 elections

around the world between 1946 and 2000

featured some sort of U.S. intervention,

according to Dr. Levin’s new book, “Med-

dling in the Ballot Box.” That made me

feel all the more neglected. We invaded

Iraq to free them from a despot. We

helped redesign Kenya’s entire electoral

system after its disputed election. Isn’t it

time they returned the favor? After all

we have done for democracy every-

where, how could the world abandon us

now?

Caroline Hartzell, the head of the polit-

ical science department at Gettysburg

College, who is an expert on power-shar-

ing agreements, said Americans could

take some pointers from other countries

that managed to evict unwanted leaders.

Some countries entice them into step-

ping down by promising them fancy ti-

tles or symbolic cabinet posts. Others let

them leave family members in positions

of power. In Nicaragua in 1990, President

Daniel Ortega left power after defeat at

the ballot box — and after a deal left his

brother in charge of the military. That’s a

little bit like Mr. Trump vacating the

White House but leaving Javanka in

charge of the State Department or Rudy

Giuliani responsible for mowing the

grass.

Dr. Hartzell convinced me that we

might get by without the African Union

or the Organization of American States

swooping in to rescue us.

“Thus far, with no thanks to the Repub-

licans in Congress, at the state level, the

system is working,” she said. “Even [At-

torney General William] Barr finally

said there’s no evidence of things going

awry.”

But she admitted that it might be a lit-

tle awkward in the future when, say, Sec-

retary of State Mike Pompeo tries to

chide another country’s leaders for

“election irregularities” (as he did to

Tanzania last month) after working for a

man who declared himself the winner of

the election with millions of votes still un-

counted.

What if the ranks of our local election

officials looked more like Monica Palmer

and William Hartmann, the Republican

canvassers who tried to stop the certifi-

cation of votes from Detroit, than like Ga-

briel Sterling, the Republican official in

Georgia who passionately demanded

that the president “stop inspiring people

to commit potential acts of violence”?

What then?

Could the world dislodge an American

dictator, if it ever came to that? Would

France swoop in and spirit him away, like

it helped send Laurent Gbagbo to face

criminal charges outside of Ivory Coast?

Would Spain or the Seychelles make a

tempting offer of luxurious exile, like

American officials offered Haiti’s leaders

in 1994? Would the Sudan-born telecom-

munications billionaire Mo Ibrahim set

up a prestigious fellowship for American

presidents who peacefully give up

power? Would someone just offer Mr.

Trump a pile of money to leave? Bill

Maher already tried that. It didn’t work.

The reality is that if Donald Trump re-

ally did refuse to leave office, there isn’t a

whole lot the world could do about it. And

Mr. Trump knows that.

“The realist in me says there are no

tools that could be used in the U.S.” to

pressure an American president to abide

by the results of an election, said Daniela

Donno, the author of “Defending Demo-

cratic Norms: International Actors and

the Politics of Electoral Misconduct.”

Most countries that get rescued from

their aspiring despots are poor and

weak, easily swayed by the threat of

withholding aid or loan guarantees or

foreign investment.

“The reason it works in other coun-

tries has to do with economic vulnerabil-

ity that’s just not present in this in-

stance,” Dr. Donno told me. “If the elec-

tion had been closer than it was, Trump

might be making a play for this. There

would be a lot of diplomatic pressure and

symbolic moves. But I don’t see the E.U.

or France or Germany wielding any kind

of major economic stick or carrots.”

In other words: The world’s not going

to save us, America. So we damn well

better save ourselves. 0

President Emmanuel Macron of France with President Trump at the White House in 2018.

LUDOVIC MARIN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Send In the Peace Brokers

An absurd political

moment calls for an

absurd political solution.

FARAH STOCKMANis a member of the

editorial board.

Farah Stockman

T

HE decision by Attorney General
William Barr last week to name
John Durham, the U.S. attorney
for Connecticut appointed by
President Trump, as special counsel to in-
vestigate matters from the 2016 election
violates the rules for special counsels and
fundamental democratic principles.
There may be reasons the inquiry — an
investigation that Mr. Durham began in
2019 into the roots of the Trump-Russia in-
quiry — should continue, but there is no
reason to permit a departing attorney
general to enshrine his preferred person-
nel at the investigation’s helm in the new
administration. It is entirely appropriate
for President-elect Joe Biden to appoint
all the prosecutors in his new administra-
tion, just as his predecessors have done.
The special counsel regulations, which I
drafted in 1999 as a Justice Department
staff member, were written with the idea
that some investigations require a person
from outside the department to assure the
public of sufficient independence. We had
in mind circumstances in which, for exam-
ple, a president was alleged to have en-
gaged in wrongdoing and having his attor-
ney general conduct the investigation
could cause a problem with impartiality.
That is why the rules expressly require
someone “outside the United States gov-
ernment” to serve as special counsel. Do-
ing so helps reassure the public of an inde-
pendent investigation.
There are other models; sometimes a
person from inside the department inves-
tigates, as the Justice Department did in
2003 with the Valerie Plame scandal. But
none of these models, special counsel or
otherwise, were meant to let an attorney
general “burrow” his handpicked pros-
ecutor into a new administration. And no
internal Justice Department regulation
can prevent a new president from dismiss-
ing a prosecutor, including Mr. Durham.
The reason for using any of these mod-
els, especially the special counsel one, is
really the opposite of Mr. Barr’s apparent

goal. The models are designed to insulate
from politics serious investigative work
that needs to be done.
But Mr. Barr has asked Mr. Durham to
cover ground that has already been ex-
plored in detail by the department’s in-
spector general. As if that wasn’t enough,
Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham denigrated an
element of the inspector general’s find-
ings even as Mr. Durham’s own investiga-
tion continued, in a remarkable break with
a longstanding department norm of not
commenting on a continuing criminal in-
vestigation andnot simply rejecting the
findings of an inspector general.
So far as anyone can tell, after months
of work, Mr. Durham’s effort appears not
to be investigative work that requires in-
sulation from politics but political work
that Mr. Barr now wants to insulate from
investigative scrutiny. That stands the
special counsel model on its head and un-
derscores why he should not have re-
ceived the “special counsel” designation.
There are two other glaring problems
with the Durham appointment. One is that
the predicate for the appointment of a spe-
cial counsel is a “conflict of interest for the
department or other extraordinary cir-
cumstances” and that it be “in the public
interest to appoint an outside special
counsel.” Mr. Barr did not meet these
rules.
A second problem is that a special coun-
sel must be “a lawyer with a reputation for
integrity and impartial decision making.”
Mr. Durham entered this inquiry with that
reputation, earned for work under Repub-
lican and Democratic administrations.
But Mr. Durham’s top aide in the inves-
tigation, the well-respected Nora Dan-
nehy, “quietly resigned — at least partly
out of concern that the investigative team
is being pressed for political reasons to
produce a report before its work is done,”
The Hartford Courant reported. Whatever
the circumstances of Ms. Dannehy’s de-
parture, the special counsel regulations
are all about public perception, and here
they all stink.
In this case, all three of the Durham ap-
pointment’s conflicts with the special
counsel rules are mutually reinforcing.
Mr. Durham, as a political appointee from
inside the U.S. government, has a serious
appearance issue in conducting this inves-
tigation. The predicate for a special coun-
sel does not appear to be triggered — in-
stead it looks like the willful act of a de-
parting attorney general.
And when the Dannehy resignation is
layered on top of that, it makes this special
counsel appointment more dubious than
any I can recall. It’s a devious move aimed
at entrenching a politically appointed
prosecutor and making it hard for Presi-
dent Biden to oust him.
Mr. Durham, for his part, exists as a le-
gal patchwork — an amalgamation of
some special counsel rules and some rules
of Mr. Barr’s own doing. In the end, this
jury-rigged prosecutor is one with little le-
gal precedent or authority. He can easily
be dismissed by the new administration
and, if needed, replaced by someone who
adheres to all the special counsel regula-
tions in his stead. 0

Barr Abuses

The Rules

On Counsels

The attorney general’s

appointment for the

Russia inquiry is dubious.

NEAL K. KATYAL, a former acting solicitor
general of the United States and the
author of “Impeach: The Case Against
Donald Trump,” is a law professor at
Georgetown.

Neal K. Katyal

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER,officials in South

Korea announced an ambitious plan to

vaccinate 30 million people against the flu

— 10 million more than last year, an in-

crease aimed at keeping down rates of the

flu while the country battled the coronavi-

rus.

But as The Times reported last week,

the internet soon got in the way. As the

vaccine was distributed, a few logistical

problems popped up, and South Koreans

began circulating grave stories online —

pictures of vaccine boxes that looked like

they had been stored unsafely, reports of

vaccine contaminated with mysterious

white particles.

Then things got more serious. A 17-

year-old died after getting the vaccine.

Stories of more deaths began to pour in.

“By Oct. 22, the reported death count had

reached 28 and it was rising by the day,”

The Times reported. “Singapore briefly

suspended the use of a South Korean vac-

cine after the deaths were reported.”

Health officials were confident that the

vaccine was safe, and they eventually de-

termined that the deaths were co-

incidental; people die every day from a

wide variety of causes, so it’s not surpris-

ing that among millions of people receiv-

ing vaccinations, some would die soon af-

terward for unrelated reasons. But online,

the fear would not bend to rational expla-

nation.

As the government took the time to

thoroughly investigate the cases, “anxiety

grew, trust fell and the vaccination pro-

gram suffered,” Dr. Ki Mo-ran, an epidemi-

ologist, told The Times.

This, I worry, is a taste of things to come

in the United States.

In the last few weeks we’ve been

blessed by spectacular news. “Operation

Warp Speed,” the Trump administration’s

program to expedite coronavirus vac-

cines, has been an amazing feat of science

and public policy. Clinical trials suggest

that vaccines made by Pfizer and Mod-

erna are each safe and effective at pre-

venting illness from the coronavirus; a

third company, AstraZeneca, has also re-

ported positive results with its vaccine,

though scientists are less confident about

its findings. The three vaccines were all

created in less than a year, a blistering

pace for vaccines.

Yet we might still snatch defeat from the

jaws of victory. A vaccine is most effective

if a large portion of Americans take it.

Americans in 2020 exist in splintered

realities. A large number of us believe one

truth about Ukraine, face masks, hydroxy-

chloroquine, climate change and the re-

sults of the presidential election; perhaps

almost as large a number of us believe the

opposite.

How can we prevent the coronavirus

vaccines from falling into that perilous re-

ality gap? The next few months could be

pivotal, vaccine experts told me. With a

new president in the White House, a loose-

cannon ex-president who retains a hold on

public attention and an internet-driven

media ecosystem adept at minting rumor

and outrage, there will be ample room for

missteps.

What worries me most is that Ameri-

cans’ decisions about whether to get vac-

cinated against the coronavirus might be-

come less about science than about iden-

tity.

Getting people to trust vaccines is a

long-studied question in public health. Jo-

nas Salk’s vaccine for polio, one of the

most devastating communicable diseases

of the 20th century, was popular after it

was tested and declared safe in 1955; rates

of polio quickly fell.

But even the polio vaccine was plagued

by distribution and manufacturing prob-

lems, and rates of vaccination in some ur-

ban and other low-income communities

remained low for more than a decade. Po-

lio was eliminated in the United States by

the late 1970s.

Other vaccines gained traction more

slowly. Though vaccinations against mea-

sles, whooping cough, diphtheria and ru-

bella were first offered much earlier, it

took until the 1990s for vaccination rates

to eclipse 90 percent.

More recently, the internet has acceler-

ated a global movement against vaccines

— the so-called anti-vaxxers. Their num-

bers are relatively small, and the United

States still has high rates of immunization.

But because vaccine skeptics tend to be

savvy about marshaling social media,

they’ve wielded outsize influence in de-

bates over vaccines, leading to a re-

surgence of measles and other prevent-

able diseases in some communities. Now

they could cause trouble in the rollout of

coronavirus vaccines, too.

“The anti-vaxxers were very involved

in the reopen movement, and in the anti-

mask movement, and in the reject-all-sci-

entific-evidence” movement, said Renée

DiResta, the technical research manager

at the Stanford Internet Observatory and

a longtime scholar of how these groups

use the internet. While DiResta expects

that Americans are sick of isolation and

will be eager to get vaccinated, she fears

that in some geographic or social circles,

anti-vaccine activists will wreak havoc.

“In certain communities, the low rates

could mean that the vaccine is not as effec-

tive as it could be, and so diseases contin-

ue to take hold,” she said.

There are other worries. Noel Brewer, a

professor at the Gillings School of Global

Public Health at the University of North

Carolina who studies why people choose

to get vaccinated, told me that he hates the

name of the program that accelerated

work on the vaccines. “Warp speed” was a

good way to emphasize its speedy devel-

opment — but emphasizing speed could

also sow doubt about the vaccine’s quality.

In September, a poll by the Kaiser Family

Foundation found that two-thirds of

Americans worried that President Trump

was rushing the vaccines for political rea-

sons.

Brewer also fears a slide into partisan

warfare. “We don’t have much history

with vaccination being a right or left issue

— vaccination is pretty well embraced

across the political spectrum,” he said. But

on the right, there is a strong resistance to

government mandates, which might play

into increased skepticism about getting

vaccinated.

South Korea’s public health officials

have been praised for the transparent way

they investigated and shut down misinfor-

mation about the flu vaccine, but rates of

vaccination remain low — only 19 million

people have gotten the flu shot, far short of

the goal of 30 million. Still, Bruce Gellin,

the president of global immunization at

the Sabin Vaccine Institute, told me that

Americans should allow scientists, rather

than politicians, to take the lead in com-

municating about vaccines, as the Kore-

ans did.

“If you do the math, you can anticipate

that strokes and heart attacks will occur

within days and weeks of being vacci-

nated, and since these are common occur-

rences, every media market will have a

story about this — the person was fine,

and then following vaccination they had a

stroke,” Gellin told me. “That speaks to

the need to keep our eyes open for things

like this — to anticipate them and to look

into them.”

Preparing for these incidents requires

setting up monitoring systems early and

quickly and transparently investigating

problems in a way that solidifies public

trust — in other words, exactly the sort of

competence that has been missing from

the Trump administration’s coronavirus

plans.

I expect the Biden administration to be

more rigorous and transparent. And

Brewer told me that making the vaccines

free and easy for Americans to get will be

a much more effective way of promoting

their use than devising some clever public

relations campaign.

Still, I’m gloomy. We’ve had a hard time

getting Americans on the same page

about anything related to this virus. Now,

we might have a magic bullet — or we

might not, depending on whomever you

choose to believe. 0

FARHAD MANJOO

South Korea Can Teach Us About Vaccine Hesitancy

A poster encouraging people to get an influenza vaccine in Seoul.

KIM HONG-JI/REUTERS

Vaccination could become

another battle in

America’s culture war.