Silicon Valley Men Behaving Badly / The Lost Bush Emails
IN THE
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OF
TRUMP
09.23.2016
IF HE WINS,
HIS MANY
OVERSEAS
DEALS WILL
CREATE A
NATIONAL
SECURITY
NIGHTMARE
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09.23.2016
VOL.167
NO.11
+
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE: Gurbaksh Cha-
hal at the Sikh Awards
in London in 2010. The
Silicon Valley entrepreneur faces 12 months
in jail, three years after
being charged with
smacking his then-girlfriend 117 times.
22 Civil Rights
Clenched Fists
Across the Ocean
26 North Korea
North Korea’s
Endless Loop
28 Tampons
A Generous
Monthly Allowance
NEW WORLD
46 Innovation
Got Milk
(Packaging)?
48 Tech
The BlinkingVCR Candidates
FEATURES
30
DEPARTMENTS
The Man Who Sold the World
BIG SHOTS
If Donald Trump gets into the White House, his
many foreign business deals will create a national
security nightmare. by Kurt Eichenwald
FEL IPE TRUEBA / UPPA / PHOTOSHOT/NEWSCOM
40
4 New York City
Stumble on the Trail
6 Douma, Syria
Cease-Fire
8 Diyarbakir, Turkey
Life Lessons
10 Port-au-Prince,
Haiti
Zika Looms
To Be Young, Gifted and Wack
Gurbaksh Chahal is the best of Silicon
Valley—a brilliant entrepreneur—and the
worst of Silicon Valley—a man who likes
to beat women. by Nina Burleigh
50 Happiness
Smile, Damn It!
DOWNTIME
54 Games
The Hurt Login
58 Animals
Czech Mates
60 Books
The Battle of
Jack Lemmon
and Yoko Moto
64 Rewind
PAG E O N E
COVER CREDIT: PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD BURBRIDGE/ART + COMMERCE
12 Politics
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A ‘Lost’ Generation
18 Medicine
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50 Years
Syrian Superbugs
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BIG
SHOTS
USA
Stumble
on the Trail
BRIAN SNYDER
B R I A N S N Y D E R / R EU T E RS
New York City—
Democratic presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton waves
outside her daughter’s apartment a few
hours after she left
the September 11 memorial service early
feeling overheated
and dehydrated. Amateur video showed
her being helped
into a van, her knees
apparently buckling.
Her doctor later said
she’d been diagnosed
with pneumonia two
days earlier. Republican critics saw that
as further evidence
that the 68-year-old
Clinton has been
covering up serious
health problems, as
they have been saying
for months, even
though she has released more detailed
information about her
medical records than
the 70-year-old Republican candidate,
Donald Trump.
BIG
SHOTS
SYRIA
Cease-Fire
SA M E E R A L- D OU M Y/A F P/G E T T Y
Douma, Syria—
A Syrian rescue worker carries a wounded
boy after airstrikes on
the rebel-held town,
east of Damascus, on
September 9. Hours
later, the United
States and Russia
agreed to a cease-fire
that was to take effect
on September 12, but
fighting continued,
including a strike on
a busy market in Idlib
that killed dozens of
civilians. Residents in
the area told Reuters
they believed the
warplanes were Russian. The latest truce
is supposed to bring
unrestricted humanitarian access and
joint Russian-U.S.
military action
against the Islamic
State militant group,
also known as ISIS,
and the Nusra Front.
SAMEER AL-DOUMY
BIG
SHOTS
TURKEY
Life
Lessons
I LYAS A K E N G I N /A F P/G E T T Y
Diyarbakir, Turkey—
Police detain a protester in the southeastern
city on September 9,
after Turkish authorities suspended more
than 11,000 teachers
over alleged links to
the banned Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK).
President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan said
Turkey had launched
the largest operations
in its history against
the group, which it
considers a terrorist
force. Authorities also
removed two dozen
elected mayors in
Kurdish-run municipalities. Since surviving a coup attempt
in July, Erdogan has
cracked down on both
the PKK and supporters of U.S.-based
Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom he
accuses of orchestrating the coup.
ILYAS AKENGIN
BIG
SHOTS
HAITI
Zika
Looms
Port-au-Prince,
Haiti—Government
health workers
fumigate the streets
of Haiti’s capital on
September 7 in an effort to stop the spread
of mosquitoes that
carry Zika and other
diseases. Budget constraints and a strike by
health workers have
hindered prevention
efforts in the country,
and the World Health
Organization warned
that experts were expecting an epidemic
on the island, where
the health system is
still recovering from
the 2010 earthquake.
Haiti has reported
3,000 suspected cases
of Zika, or about 30
per 100,000 people,
compared with 82 per
100,000 in Brazil,
but the WHO said it
believes the government has been
underreporting.
ANDRES MARTINEZ CASARES
ANDRES MARTINE Z CASARES/ REUTERS
P
MEDICINE
A
G
POLITICS
E
NORTH KOREA
O
CIVIL RIGHTS
N
TAMPONS
E
BUSINESS
A ‘LOST’ GENERATION
George W. Bush’s White House
failed to account for millions of
emails. Where’s the outrage?
FOR 18 MONTHS, Republican strategists, political pundits, reporters and Americans who follow
them have been pursuing Hillary Clinton’s personal email habits, and no evidence of a crime
has been found. But now they at least have the
skills and interest to focus on a much larger and
deeper email conspiracy, one involving war, lies,
a private server run by the Republican Party and
contempt of Congress citations—all of it still
unsolved and unpunished.
Clinton’s email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoenadodging, email-hiding, private-server-using
George W. Bush administration. Between 2003
and 2009, the Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails. This included millions of emails
written during the darkest period in America’s
recent history, when the Bush administration
was ginning up support for what turned out to
be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims
that the country possessed weapons of mass
destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was
NEWSWEEK
firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.
Like Clinton, the Bush White House used
a private email server—its was owned by the
Republican National Committee. And the Bush
administration failed to store its emails, as
required by law, and then refused to comply with
a congressional subpoena seeking some of those
emails. “It’s about as amazing a double standard
as you can get,” says Eric Boehlert, who works
with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. “If
you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails
were on a private email system set up by the
RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we
had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails
set up on a private DNC server?”
Most troubling, researchers found a suspicious pattern in the White House email system blackouts, including periods when there
were no emails available from the office of Vice
President Dick Cheney. “That the vice president’s office, widely characterized as the most
12
0 9 / 2 3 / 2016
BY
NINA BURLEIGH
@ninaburleigh
+
S M I T H CO L L ECT I O N /GA D O/G E T T Y
RADIO SILENCE:
Researchers
found a suspicious pattern in
White House email
system blackouts,
including periods
when no emails
were available
from the office of
Dick Cheney.
NEWSWEEK
13
0 9 / 2 3 / 2016
+
DON’T DELETE: In
2008, the Senate
Judiciary Committee found Karl
Rove, center, in
contempt of Congress for refusing
to comply with
subpoenas in the
investigation of
fired attorneys.
NEWSWEEK
14
0 9 / 2 3 / 2016
powerful vice president in history, should have
no archived emails in its accounts for scores of
days—especially days when there was discussion of whether to invade Iraq—beggared the
imagination,” says Thomas Blanton, director
of the Washington-based National Security
Archive, a nonprofit devoted to obtaining and
declassifying national security documents. It is
one of the key players in the effort to recover the
supposedly lost Bush White House emails.
The media paid some attention to the Bush
email chicanery but spent considerably less ink
and airtime than has been devoted to Clinton’s
digital communications in the past 18 months.
According to the Boston social media analytics firm Crimson Hexagon, which ran a study
for Newsweek, there have been 560,397 articles
mentioning Clinton’s emails between March
2015 and September 1, 2016.
In 1978, Congress passed the Presidential
Records Act (PRA), which mandated that all presidential and vice presidential records created after
January 20, 1981, be preserved and that the public,
not the president, owned the records.
The following year, the Reagan administration installed the White House’s
rudimentary first email system.
Despite the PRA, neither the Reagan nor the George H.W. Bush administration maintained email records,
even as the number of White House
emails began growing exponentially.
(The Bush administration would produce around 200 million.) In 1989,
a federal lawsuit to force the White
House to comply with the PRA was
filed by several groups, including the National
Security Archive, which at the time was mostly
interested in unearthing the secret history of the
Cold War. The suit sparked a last-minute court
order, issued in the waning hours of the first
Bush presidency, that prevented 6,000 White
House email backup tapes from being erased.
When Bill Clinton moved into the White House,
his lawyers supported the elder Bush in his effort
to uphold a side deal he’d cut with the National
Archives and Records Administration to allow him
to treat his White House emails as personal. At the
time, George Stephanopoulos—then the White
House communications director—defended the
resistance, saying his boss, like Bush, didn’t want
subsequent, and potentially unfriendly, administrations rooting around in old emails.
The Clinton White House eventually settled
the suit, and White House aide John Podesta—
now Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman—
even invited members of the National Security
PAGE ONE /POLI T I C S
Archive into the White House to demonstrate
how the new system worked. If anyone tried
to delete an email, a message would pop up on
screen indicating that to do so would be in violation of the PRA.
“We were happy with that,” recalls Blanton,
who edited a book on the Reagan-Bush email evasion, White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Messages
the Reagan/Bush White House Tried to Destroy.
Eight years later, in 2003, a whistleblower told
the National Security Archive that the George
W. Bush White House was no longer saving its
emails. The Archive and another watchdog group,
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Wash-
M I C H A E L RO B I N SO N - C H AV E Z /
T H E WAS H I N GTO N P OST/G E T T Y
NINETY-FIVE PERCENT OF
[BUSH’S] CHIEF ADVISERS’
EMAILS WERE ON A
PRIVATE EMAIL SYSTEM
SET UP BY THE RNC.
NEWSWEEK
ington (which had represented outed CIA agent
Valerie Plame in her case against the Bush administration), refiled their original lawsuit.
The plaintiffs soon discovered that Bush aides
had simply shut down the Clinton automatic
email archive, and they identified the start date
of the lost emails as January 1, 2003. The White
House claimed it had switched to a new server
and in the process was unable to maintain an
archive—a claim that many found dubious.
Bush administration emails could have aided
a special prosecutor’s investigation into a White
House effort to discredit a diplomat who disagreed with the administration’s fabricated Iraq
WMD evidence by outing his CIA agent wife,
Plame. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald,
who was brought in to investigate that case,
said in 2006 that he believed some potentially
relevant emails sent by aides in Cheney’s office
were in the administration’s system but he
couldn’t get access to them.
15
0 9 / 2 3 / 2016
on a different track but having no more luck. In
a bipartisan vote in 2008, the committee found
White House aides Karl Rove and Joshua Bolten in
contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with
subpoenas in the investigation of the fired U.S.
attorneys. The penalties for contempt are fines
and possible jail time, but no punishment was
ever handed down because a D.C. federal appeals
court stayed the Senate’s ruling in October 2008,
while the White House appealed. Rove’s lawyer
claimed Rove did not “intentionally delete” any
emails but was only conducting “the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes
orderly,” according to the Associated Press.
By then, Obama was weeks away from winning the election, so the Bush administration
basically ran out the clock. And neither the
Obama administration nor the Senate committee pursued the matter.
The committee’s final report on the matter was
blunt: “[T]his subversion of the justice system
has included lying, misleading, stonewalling and
ignoring the Congress in our attempts to find out
precisely what happened. The reasons given for
PAGE ONE /POLITICS
The supposedly lost emails also prevented
Congress from fully investigating, in 2007, the
politically motivated firing of nine U.S. attorneys.
When the Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed related emails, Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, said many were
inaccessible or lost on a nongovernmental private
server run by the RNC and called gwb43.com.
The White House, meanwhile, officially refused
to comply with the congressional subpoena.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy
(D-Vt.) called the president’s actions “Nixonian
stonewalling” and at one point took to the floor
in exasperation and shouted, “They say they
have not been preserved. I don’t believe that!”
His House counterpart, Judiciary
Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.),
said Bush’s assertion of executive
privilege was unprecedented and
displayed “an appalling disregard for
the right of the people to know what
is going on in their government.”
In court in May 2008, administration lawyers contended that the White
House had lost three months’ worth of
email backups from the initial days of
the Iraq War. Bush aides thus evaded
a court-ordered deadline to describe
the contents of digital backup believed to contain
emails deleted in 2003 between March—when
the U.S. invaded Iraq—and September. They also
refused to give the NSA nonprofit any emails
relating to the Iraq War, despite the PRA, blaming
a system upgrade that had deleted up to 5 million
emails. The plaintiffs eventually contended that
the Bush administration knew about the problem
in 2005 but did nothing to fix it.
Eventually, the Bush White House admitted
it had lost 22 million emails, not 5 million. Then,
in December 2009—well into Barack Obama’s
administration—the White House said it found
22 million emails, dated between 2003 and 2005,
that it claimed had been mislabeled. That cache
was given to the National Archives, and it and
other plaintiffs agreed, on December 14, 2009,
to settle their lawsuit. But the emails have not yet
been made available to the public.
The Senate Judiciary Committee was operating
“[T]HIS SUBVERSION OF
THE JUSTICE SYSTEM HAS
INCLUDED LYING, MISLEADING, STONEWALLING AND
IGNORING THE CONGRESS.”
NEWSWEEK
these firings were contrived as part of a cover-up,
and the stonewalling by the White House is part
and parcel of that same effort.”
At the time, some journalists and editorialists complained about a lack of transparency
on the White House’s part, but The Washington
Post, in an editorial, accepted the White House
explanation that the emails could have been
lost due to flawed IT systems.
The mystery of what was in the missing Bush
emails and why they went missing is still years
away from being solved—if ever. They won’t
be available to the public until 2021, when the
presidential security restrictions elapse. Even
then, with currently available archiving and sorting methods, researchers will still have years of
work to figure out whether Cheney deleted days’
worth of emails around the time of the WMD
propaganda campaign that led to war.
“To your question of what’s in there—we
16
0 9 / 2 3 / 2016
+
FRUSTRATED:
W I N M C N A M E E /G E T T Y
Senate Judiciary
Committee
Chairman Patrick
Leahy described
the Bush White
House’s failure to
provide emails to
Congress as “Nixonian stonewalling.”
don’t know,” the National Security Archive’s
Blanton says. “There was not a commitment at
the top for saving it all. Now was that resistance
motivated by political reasons? Or was it ‘We
gotta save money’?”
Like Leahy, Blanton has doubts that the emails
were ever truly “lost,” given that every email
exists in two places, with the sender and with
the recipient. But unlike watchdog group Judicial Watch, which has been relentless about
forcing the State Department to publicly release
Hillary Clinton’s emails, Blanton and his fellow
researchers have decided not to press their fight
for the release of the Bush emails.
Blanton says he has no idea whether the Bush
email record will be found intact after 2021,
when his group will be allowed to do a systematic search and recovery process in the National
Archives. “Did they find all of them? We don’t
know,” he says. “Our hope is that by that time,
NEWSWEEK
the government and the National Archives will
have much better technology and tools with
which to sift and sort that kind of volume.”
Blanton says he’s not expecting that kind of
upgrade, though. “Their entire budget is less
than the cost of a single Marine One helicopter,”
he says. “It’s an underfunded orphan.”
Meanwhile, the episode has been nearly forgotten by almost everyone but the litigants. A
source involved with the stymied congressional
investigation recalled the period as “an intense
time,” but the Obama administration didn’t
encourage any follow-up, devoting its political
capital to dealing with the crashing economy
rather than investigating the murky doings that
took place under his predecessor. Since then, no
major media outlet has devoted significant—or,
really, any—resources to obtaining the emails, or
to finding out what was in them, or what, exactly,
the Bush administration was hiding (or losing).
17
0 9 / 2 3 / 2016
PA G E O N E/ M E D I C INE
SYRIAN SUPERBUGS
Bashar al-Assad’s war in Syria could
produce something far more deadly
than ISIS: the end of antibiotics
MOHAMMED ABU ARA is the face of a grave new
threat, but propped up on his bed in an airy segregated hospital ward in Jordan, there’s not a
hint of menace about him. With his left arm cut
off above the elbow and one of his legs encased
in a metal splint, he looks like thousands of others whose lives have been shredded by the violence of the Syrian civil war.
Yet for many regional health analysts, Abu Ara
and several others at the Doctors Without Borders Special Hospital for Reconstructive Surgery
in Amman are part of a terrifying new trend: the
growing number of Syrians who are immune to
almost all antibiotics. The only way to treat them
is to amputate their affected limbs and inject
them with last-resort drugs. For those suffering
from less peripheral wounds, the prognosis is
even grimmer. “If the infection is in the chest or
brain, he will die,” says Rashid Fakhri, surgical
coordinator for the organization, known internationally as Médecins sans frontières (MSF), in
Amman. “You can’t amputate there.”
After five and a half years of death and destruction, those working at hospitals and makeshift
clinics along the Syrian border thought they’d
seen every injury imaginable—from chest wounds
stanched with hookah pipes to twin brothers
whose skulls were dented by an undetonated
rocket-propelled grenade. But as the conflict escalates and conditions worsen for civilians and soldiers alike, doctors and aid workers fear antibiotic
NEWSWEEK
resistance could soon become deadlier than the
Islamic State group (ISIS) or Bashar al-Assad’s
dreaded air force. And with resistant bacteria
spreading fast, Syria might even become the place
where antibiotics, one of the biggest lifesavers of
the 20th century, stop working altogether.
There are few reliable statistics on the
number of fatalities in Syria related to failing
drugs, and for now the problem seems manageable. Last month, a 14-year-old boy from
a barrel-bombed Damascus suburb, whose
body had rejected all available antibiotics, succumbed to multiple infections not long after he
arrived at a Jordanian clinic. At a field hospital
in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, medics say ineffective antibiotics appear to have increased the
death rate over the past year. “In 2015, we lost
two people,” says Mariam Mohamed, a volunteer nurse at an emergency refugee clinic outside Chtoura, halfway between Beirut and the
Syrian border. “So far this year, we’ve already
lost four who weren’t responding to treatment.”
Frazzled medical professionals believe the
problem is quickly getting worse, especially in
besieged swathes of Syria that doctors can’t reach.
At MSF’s hospital in Amman, half of the patients
now arrive with some sort of chronic infection; of
those, 60 percent are resistant to multiple drugs.
United Nations officials are so concerned they
recently called for an emergency General Assembly summit on superbugs in late September. “If
18
0 9 / 2 3 / 2016
BY
PETER
SCHWARTZSTEIN
@PSchwartzstein