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Adele M. Stan

Adele M. Stan is a columnist for The American Prospect. She is the winner of the 2017 Hillman Prize for Opinion & Analysis Journalism.

Recent Articles

America Glimpses the End Times in the Age of Trump

Adele M. StanJul 19, 2017
(AP Photo/Jacqueline Martin)
(AP Photo/Jacqueline Martin) Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the Justice Department's National Summit on Crime Reduction and Public Safety in Bethesda, Maryland, on June 21, 2017. I n a speech delivered behind closed doors to an anti-LGBT hate group, the attorney general of the United States held forth with his philosophy of religious freedom. It wasn’t “the government’s job to immanentize the eschaton,” he said. The reason we know that is an actual thing that Jeff Sessions said—or at least planned to say—in his July 11 speech to the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is that Buzzfeed’s Dominic Holden prepared a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the speech, which apparently prompted the Department of Justice to release the text, as prepared for delivery, to a right-wing website, The Federalist . The ADF earned is classification as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its work as “a legal advocacy and training group that specializes in supporting the...

Snakes on a Plane -- And Under the Capitol Dome

Adele M. StanJul 12, 2017
(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
(AP Photo/Alex Brandon) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, accompanied by Senators John Barrasso, John Thune, and Majority Whip John Cornyn, on April 25, 2017 T o call Donald Trump and his administration corrupt and mendacious is to make the most obvious of statements. Too easy, really. Because if Trump and his boys have tread the path toward treason, so too has the entire Republican Party. It was a busy Tuesday night. As the president’s son and capo bastone Donald Trump Jr. took to the airwaves to defend his meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer during the presidential campaign on the tantalizing possibility of gleaning opposition research on Hillary Clinton, word broke that the president and his team together crafted a false statement about the nature of that meeting, issued under Junior’s name and delivered to The New York Times . It was later revealed that the Rob Goldstone , the meeting’s broker, made clear in an email to Trump Jr., a prominent surrogate in the Trump campaign...

Very Dangerous Times: Press Attacked by Authoritarian White House

Adele M. StanJun 28, 2017
(AP Photo: Andrew Harnik)
(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders talks to the media on June 5, 2017, at the White House. I f there were ever a doubt that a traitor now occupies the Oval Office, Tuesday’s assault on the exercise of a free press, guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, should dispel it. This particular attack was prompted by a screw-up at CNN, a favorite punching-bag for President Donald J. Trump, but was quickly extended to the whole of the political press. It’s a timeworn strategy of authoritarian regimes. As Jill Lepore recounted in the June 5 issue of the The New Yorker , Edmund Taylor, writing in 1940 of Nazi strategy in France, reported on “the propaganda campaign waged by Nazi agents to divide the French people, by leaving them uncertain about what to believe, or whether to believe anything at all.” CNN’s June 24 retraction of a story about Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge fund billionaire and member of the Trump transition team whom the...

Health Care, Taxes, and Everything Else: Secrecy in the Service of Trump’s Plunder

Adele M. StanJun 21, 2017
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks after a closed-door session at the Capitol on June 20, 2017. He is joined by Republican Senators John Barrasso, John Thune, and Majority Whip John Cornyn. I n a republic such as that we are rumored to have, looting the nation’s resources, and the money of its people, can be a little complicated. Sunlight can poison the plot; darkness is critical to its successful execution. Just ask Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, or White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer. Oops, never mind, what was I thinking? Their lips, of course, are sealed. The Trump-branded Project Plunder is well under way. As the week began, Spicer told reporters assembled for one of his press briefings that they could not record it , on either video or audio. Note that this June 19 briefing was held in lieu of what was once a daily, open briefing that has been a staple of White House communication with the public for decades. (Spicer and his...

Sessions Must Go, But It Can’t End There

Adele M. StanJun 14, 2017
(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
(AP Photo/Alex Brandon) Attorney General Jeff Sessions testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 13, 2017. E very time Kamala Harris, the United States senator from California, opens her mouth in a high-profile hearing, it seems that some old white man tells her to be quiet. That’s what happened on Tuesday when, for the second time in a week, an old white man with a gavel stopped Harris, a woman of African American and Indian heritage, when she dared to demand that Attorney General Jeff Sessions explain to the American people the legal underpinnings for his refusal to answer questions put to him by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russian officials and businessmen. Prompted by Senator John McCain, Committee Chair Richard Burr interrupted Harris, telling her to “allow the witness to answer the question.” It was also Burr who interrupted Harris ’s questioning of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein during a...

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