Here’s an interesting study. An Oxford researcher compared military intervention in the Middle East to the number of Islamist terrorist casualties by country. Unsurprisingly, the correlation was positive:

The sample size is small, the correlation is so-so, and this result wasn’t peer-reviewed. That said, it sure looks as if the answer to Islamist terrorist attacks is to stop invading Muslim countries.

The Republican-controlled Senate might not be allowing their committee counsel to question Attorney General William Barr, but they can’t stop the next best thing: having former prosecutor Kamala Harris question him. Maggie Haberman of the New York Times provides the play-by-play:

Harris now asks Barr whether the president or anyone else has suggested that the Justice Department open an investigation into someone.

Barr is hedging. “They have not asked me to open an investigation, but…”

“Hinted?” Harris says. “Inferred?” She, then, moves on.

We all know the answer. Barr just can’t figure out a way to deny it entirely in a way that doesn’t quite constitute perjury. But I wonder why Harris didn’t press him further?

UPDATE: This post originally included a tweet that summarized the exchange between Harris and Barr. However, it’s been deleted, presumably because it wasn’t completely accurate. I’ve replaced it with Haberman’s account.

UPDATE 2: Here’s the full exchange:

.@KamalaHarris: “Has the president or anyone at the White House ever asked or suggested that you open an investigation of anyone?”

Barr stumbles over his answer before saying he’s “trying to grapple with the word ‘suggest'” pic.twitter.com/SKpDTzVIbu

— TicToc by Bloomberg (@tictoc) May 1, 2019

Bill Clark/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA

Robert Mueller’s letter to Attorney General William Barr complaining about Barr’s “summary” of the Mueller report has now been released. It doesn’t explain what Mueller’s concerns are, but it does provide something of a timeline:

March 5: Mueller meets with Barr and tells him that the introduction and executive summaries of his report “accurately summarize this Office’s work and conclusions.”

March 24, early afternoon: Mueller reiterates his position that the introduction and executive summaries of his report are accurate

March 24, late afternoon: Barr releases his own summary of the Mueller report.

March 25, morning: Mueller tells Barr his summary “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions.”

March 25, afternoon: Mueller sends redacted versions of the introduction and executive summaries to Barr and asks that they be released.

March 27: Mueller sends a memo to Barr saying once again that he would like the introduction and executive summaries to be publicly released. The redaction process for the full report “need not delay” this, he says, and “release at this time would alleviate the misunderstandings that have arisen.”

In other words, Mueller immediately objected to Barr’s summary, saying that it had created “misunderstandings,” and repeatedly asked that the report’s introduction and executive summaries be released to the public right away. Barr declined to do this.¹

As an aside, Barr is testifying before the Republican-controlled Senate right now, but is still declining to testify before the Democrat-controlled House. Why? Because the House plans to have its committee counsel question Barr. The thing is, Barr knows that he can easily dodge any question he finds inconvenient if he’s being questioned by politicians in five-minute chunks. But half an hour of questioning from a trained professional? That’s a little harder.

¹Needless to say, Barr had created these “misunderstandings” quite deliberately, and he had no desire to clear them up. Mueller never seemed to get this.

The US government has banned Huawei, China’s biggest supplier of network equipment, from bidding on federal business. It looks like that was probably a good call:

Vodafone Group Plc has acknowledged to Bloomberg that it found vulnerabilities going back years with equipment supplied by Shenzhen-based Huawei for the carrier’s Italian business….Europe’s biggest phone company identified hidden backdoors in the software that could have given Huawei unauthorized access to the carrier’s fixed-line network in Italy, a system that provides internet service to millions of homes and businesses, according to Vodafone’s security briefing documents from 2009 and 2011 seen by Bloomberg, as well as people involved in the situation.

Vodafone asked Huawei to remove backdoors in home internet routers in 2011 and received assurances from the supplier that the issues were fixed, but further testing revealed that the security vulnerabilities remained, the documents show. Vodafone also identified backdoors in parts of its fixed-access network known as optical service nodes, which are responsible for transporting internet traffic over optical fibers, and other parts called broadband network gateways, which handle subscriber authentication and access to the internet, the people said.

It’s bad enough that the backdoors were there in the first place, but even worse that Huawei claimed it had fixed them when they hadn’t. If they were doing this back in 2011, who’s to say if they’re still doing it today?

Stefani Reynolds/CNP via ZUMA; James Berglie/ZUMAPRESS

Remember that memo “summarizing” the Mueller report that was released last month by Attorney General William Barr? It turns out that Robert Mueller wasn’t very happy about it:

Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, wrote a letter in late March to Attorney General William P. Barr objecting to his early description of the Russia investigation’s conclusions that appeared to clear President Trump on possible obstruction of justice, according to the Justice Department and three people with direct knowledge of the communication between the two men.

The letter adds to the growing evidence of a rift between them and is another sign of the anger among the special counsel’s investigators about Mr. Barr’s characterization of their findings, which allowed Mr. Trump to wrongly claim he had been vindicated.

The Times doesn’t seem to know why Mueller objected to Barr’s memo, just that he was unhappy about it. Maybe one of these days Mueller will testify under oath before Congress and we’ll find out.

UPDATE: The Washington Post has a more detailed story based on a review of the letter Mueller wrote to Barr:

Days after Barr’s announcement, Mueller wrote the previously undisclosed private letter to the Justice Department, laying out his concerns in stark terms that shocked senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the discussions.

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

….A day after Mueller sent his letter to Barr, the two men spoke by phone for about 15 minutes, according to law enforcement officials. In that call, Mueller said he was concerned that media coverage of the obstruction investigation was misguided and creating public misunderstandings about the office’s work….In some team members’ view, the evidence they had gathered — especially on obstruction — was far more alarming and significant than how Barr had described it.

It sure sounds like Mueller thought Donald Trump committed obstruction of justice, which should have been referred to Congress for impeachment proceedings.

Jeff Malet/Newscom via ZUMA

Herman Cain is already history and now Stephen Moore is close to following him:

President Trump’s plan to put ally Stephen Moore on the Federal Reserve Board appeared on the edge of failure on Tuesday, after one Republican Senator said she was “very unlikely” to vote for Moore and several others sharply criticized him.Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) became the first senator to go on record as a likely “no” vote.

….Beyond Ernst, three other female Republican senators — Susan Collins (Maine), Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and Shelley Moore Capito (W. Va.) — expressed serious concerns about Moore. They cited his comments saying there would be societal problems if men were not the breadwinners in the family, denouncing co-ed sports and saying female athletes do “inferior work” to men.

Look, if Moore fails to be confirmed, I’ll take the win no matter the reason. But are we really at the point where even massive incompetence and lack of qualification isn’t enough to get Republicans to stand up to Donald Trump? Instead we have to waste our time digging up troglodyte comments about women?

There’s no need to answer. It was a rhetorical question. And I have another one: are there any Republican men who object to Moore’s views about women?

No need to answer that either.

POSTSCRIPT: So what will be Trump’s revenge? Nominating Ivanka to the Fed? Or maybe Oliver North?

Here’s the last of my Caltech pictures. This is Mudd Labs, one of the old south campus buildings inspired by Spanish mission architecture. When you see someone from the Caltech Seismology Laboratory on TV after an earthquake, it’s probably someone with an office in this building.

The lab, by the way, is named for Seeley G. Mudd, who was a cancer researcher at Caltech before he moved to USC. Nearby Harvey Mudd College, one of the Claremont Colleges, is named for his brother. According to the font of all knowledge, “The college was funded by Mudd’s friends and family, and named in his honor.”

Well, in theory, anyway:

Apparently all the Democrats have to do is give that 55 percent no reason to change their minds. For what it’s worth, a similar poll in mid-2016 found that 48 percent of Americans “definitely” wouldn’t vote for Trump. And that turned out to be true. In the end, an additional 4 percent joined the crowd and 52 percent of the electorate didn’t vote for him. If the same dynamic holds next year, Trump will receive about 41 percent of the two-party vote and be turned out of office in one of the biggest landslides ever. Wouldn’t that be great?

Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi talk with reporters this morning after meeting with President Trump and agreeing on a $2 trillion infrastructure plan that will become reality as soon as someone finds $2 trillion. Chuck and Nancy both pretended to be delighted and the press pretended to believe them.Douglas Christian/ZUMA

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer emerged from the White House this morning to report that President Trump had agreed to a $2 trillion infrastructure plan. Hallelujah! There’s just one teensy weensy detail to be worked out:

“The ball is in their court,” Schumer said. “We told him that, it was repeated over and over again, that unless he is willing to come up with the pay-fors for this large package, it will never get done, and he agreed. And so we agreed to meet in three weeks, the same group, and they would present what their pay-fors would be, and I thought that was encouraging.”

Let’s see. A $2 trillion project probably means $200 billion per year over ten years. So Trump has to either (a) raise taxes by $200 billion or (b) cut other spending by $200 billion or (c) resort to smoke and mirrors. Option A is, of course, a laughable impossibility, and Option B is no better with an election year coming up. So that means smoke and mirrors is the winner! I can’t wait.

Compare and contrast:

Mick Mulvaney in 2015: “There is no honest way to justify not paying for spending, no matter how often my fellow Republicans try.”

Mick Mulvaney in 2019: “He also said the nation’s $22 trillion in debt is not holding the U.S. back. Quite a morning for the acting COS.”

I wonder what changed between 2015 and 2019? Hmmm . . .