[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 72 (Monday, May 9, 2016)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2650-S2652]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            THE PUBLIC TRUST

  Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, I rise this evening to read into the Record 
a portion of the New York Times Magazine profile yesterday of Ben 
Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama.
  Before reading the article, though, titled ``The Story-Teller and the 
President,'' I wish to explain briefly why I think this piece is so 
important for us to consider in this Chamber.
  We live in a time of precipitous change, both in American Government 
and in communications more broadly. We don't admit it enough in this 
body, but the Congress in the last decade-plus is extraordinarily weak 
by historical standards. At the same time, the media is rapidly 
fragmenting. These two vacuums are being filled by the executive branch 
in ways that are badly damaging, both to the separation of powers and 
to the idea of a meaningfully engaged citizenry. There can be little 
doubt that our Founders would be troubled by what is occurring in our 
time.
  Washington is in the process of replacing self-evident truths with 
self-serving spin, and this is dangerous, for no one is entitled to his 
or her own facts. I sit intentionally at the desk of Daniel Patrick 
Moynihan in this body precisely because he was committed to the idea of 
a shared set of facts before our debates began. Yet this story makes 
clear that the executive branch feels empowered to proclaim its own 
narratives.
  This is bigger than Republicans and Democrats. This is about the 
legislature's check on the Executive, and it is about all of our 
accountability in this city to the people. To my Democratic colleagues 
who supported the Iran deal, does it trouble you at all that the White 
House displays obvious contempt for you? For your voters and for my 
voters, will you stand for this kind of fundamentally dishonest spin 
from future Republican administrations--because I pledge to you that I 
will not from any administration of either party.
  Some will say this is just one story of one staffer who wanted to 
brag and got carried away--someone who wanted to boast about if the 
whole world could be his canvas, but we should be clear that it is 
ultimately elected officials who bear responsibility for the ongoing 
evaporation of public trust in our time.
  I want to underscore this point. These, my comments tonight, are not 
about whether you share the President's view that the Iranian nuclear 
deal was a prudent move or whether you share my view that it was a 
disaster. That is not the point at issue today. Obviously, foreign 
policy is critically important, but this story tonight is about whether 
we take truth seriously. It is about whether we care about the public 
trust.
  There is a widespread view around here that our chief job is ``to 
pass legislation.'' That is incorrect. Our main job, and indeed the 
oath we took, is to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, 
which is about limited government and about the separation of powers.
  Our job is to ensure that the Nation is well governed and that the 
public can believe that the public can have trust and confidence that 
the Nation is well governed. This necessarily means that oversight is 
at least as important as passing or repealing particular pieces of 
legislation. This horrific story should be a screaming siren to all of 
us of both parties.
  Newsrooms are obviously still struggling to understand what vigorous 
and independent reporting will look like in the digital age, but it 
remains true that freedom that ordered liberty will remain dependent on 
an informed citizenry, and that requires a serious and a free press. 
Good journalism, serious journalism, that takes actual facts seriously 
and then grapples with those facts honestly, is an important and a high 
calling.
  I plan to read about one-fourth of this New York Times piece into the 
Record, but please note that I will skip over many proper names for 
ease of audible understanding. Picking up then about 40 percent of the 
way into the profile, the story continues:

       The job he [Ben Rhodes] was hired to do, [was] namely to 
     help the President of the United States communicate with the 
     public, [and this job] was changing in equally significant 
     ways, thanks to the impact of digital technologies that 
     people in Washington

[[Page S2651]]

     were just beginning to wrap their minds around. It is hard 
     for many of us to absorb the true magnitude of the changes in 
     the news business--40 percent of newspaper industry 
     professionals have lost their jobs [inside] the last decade--
     in part because readers can absorb all [forms of new] news 
     they want from social media platforms like Facebook, which 
     are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars 
     and pay nothing for the [so-called] ``content'' they provide 
     to their readers. You have to have skin in the game--[that 
     is] to be in the news business, or depend in a life-or-death 
     way on its products--to understand the radical 
     and qualitative ways in which words appear in familiar 
     typefaces [but have yet] been changed. Rhodes [was 
     singling] out a key example to me one day, laced with the 
     brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private 
     utterances. ``All these newspapers used to have foreign 
     bureaus,'' he said. ``[But] now they don't. They call us 
     to explain to them what's happening in Moscow [or in] 
     Cairo. [And] most of the outlets are reporting on world 
     events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 
     [just] 27 years old, and their only reporting experience 
     consists of being around [a few] political campaigns. 
     That's a sea change. They literally know nothing.''
       In this environment, Rhodes has become adept at 
     ventriloquizing many people at once. Ned Price, Rhodes's 
     assistant, gave me a primer on the way it's done. The easiest 
     way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is 
     [just] from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own 
     dedicated press corps. ``But then there are [all of these 
     force] multipliers,'' he said, adding, ``We have our 
     compadres, [and I] reach out to a couple [of] people, and you 
     know I wouldn't wanted to name them--''
       [I interrupt him and I say] ``I can name them,'' [and I 
     tick] off a few names of prominent Washington reporters and 
     columnists who often tweet in sync with [the] White House['s] 
     messaging [operation].
       Price [laughs]. ``I'll say, `Hey, look, some people are 
     spinning this narrative that this is a sign of . . . 
     weakness,' '' he [continues].
       [And I interrupt again] ``but--''
       ``In fact, it's a sign of strength!'' I [say, chuckling 
     with him].
       ``And I'll give them some color,'' Price [continues] ``and 
     the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com 
     publishing space, and [they] have [their] huge Twitter 
     followings, and [then] they'll be putting this message [as 
     their own].''
       This is something different from old-fashioned spin, which 
     tended to be an art best practiced in person. In a world 
     where experienced reporters competed for scoops and where 
     carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no 
     matter which party was in power, it was much harder to 
     sustain a ``narrative'' over any serious period of time. Now 
     the most effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote 
     will almost always carry the day, and it [will be] very 
     difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where 
     the spin is coming from or why.
       When I later visited Obama's former campaign mastermind 
     David Axelrod in Chicago, I brought up the soft Orwellian 
     vibe of an information space where old media structures and 
     hierarchies have been erased by Silicon Valley billionaires 
     who convinced the suckers that information was ``free'' and 
     everyone with access to Google was now a reporter. Axelrod, a 
     former newspaperman, sighed. ``It's not as easy as standing 
     in front of a press conference and speaking to 70 million 
     people like past presidents have been able to do,'' he said. 
     The bully pulpit by and large doesn't exist anymore, he 
     explained. ``So more and more, over the last couple of years, 
     there's been an investment in alternative means of 
     communication: using digital more effectively, going to 
     nontraditional sources, understanding where on each issue 
     your constituencies are going to be found,'' he said. ``I 
     think they've approached these major foreign policy 
     challenges as campaign challenges, and they've run campaigns, 
     and [their] campaigns have been very sophisticated.''
       Rhodes's innovative campaign to sell the Iran deal is 
     likely to be a model for how future administrations explain 
     foreign policy to the Congress--

  Note that. The administration is going to have to campaign to the 
Congress--

     and the public. The way in which most Americans have heard 
     the story of the Iran deal presented--that the Obama 
     administration began seriously engaging with the Iranian 
     officials in 2013 in order to take advantage of a new 
     political reality in Iran, which came about because of 
     elections that brought [so-called] moderates to power in that 
     country--[this story of 2013] was largely manufactured 
     [``manufactured'' is their verb] for the purpose of selling 
     the deal. Even where the particulars of that story are true, 
     the implications that readers and viewers are encouraged to 
     take away from those particulars are often misleading [and] 
     false. Obama's closest advisers always understood him to be 
     eager [for] a deal with Iran [back in 2012] and even since 
     the beginning of his presidency. ``It's the center of the 
     arc,'' Rhodes explained to me two days after the deal, 
     officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, 
     was implemented. He then checked off the ways in which the 
     administration's foreign policy aims and priorities converged 
     [in] Iran. ``We don't have to be [in the kind of] cycles of 
     conflict if we can find other ways to resolve these issues,'' 
     he said. ``We can do things that challenge the conventional 
     thinking that, you know, `AIPAC doesn't like this,' or `the 
     Israeli government doesn't like this,' or `the gulf countries 
     don't like it.' It's the possibility of improved relations 
     with adversaries. It's nonproliferation. So all these threads 
     that the president's been spinning--[and in this sense I 
     don't mean it] in the press sense [of spinning, spinning] for 
     almost a decade, they kind of all converged around Iran.''
       In the narrative that Rhodes shaped, the ``story'' of the 
     Iran deal began in 2013, when a ``moderate'' faction inside 
     the Iranian regime led by Hassan Rouhani beat a regime of 
     [so-called] ``hardliners'' in an election and then began to 
     pursue a policy of ``openness,'' which included a newfound 
     willingness to negotiate the dismantling of its [so-called] 
     nuclear weapons program. The president set out the timeline 
     himself in his speech announcing the nuclear deal on July 14, 
     2015, [President Obama]: ``Today, after two years of 
     negotiations, the United States, together with our 
     international partners, has achieved something that decades 
     of animosity has not.'' While the president's statement was 
     technically accurate--there had in fact been two years of 
     formal negotiations leading up to the signing of the 
     J.C.P.O.A.--it was also actively misleading, because the most 
     meaningful part of the negotiations with Iran [were from mid-
     2012] many months before Rouhani and the ``moderate'' camp 
     were chosen in an election among candidates handpicked by 
     Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah. . . . The idea that 
     there was a new reality in Iran was politically useful to the 
     Obama administration. By obtaining broad public currency for 
     the thought that there was a significant split in the regime, 
     and that the administration was reaching out to moderate-
     minded Iranians who wanted peaceful relations with their 
     neighbors and with America, Obama was [therefore] able to 
     evade what might have otherwise been a divisive but 
     clarifying debate over the actual policy choices that [the] 
     administration was making.

  I want to repeat that sentence, by misleading the public on the date 
on which negotiations began and therefore seizing upon this election 
that happened a year later, ``Obama was able to evade what might have 
otherwise been a divisive but clarifying debate over the actual policy 
choices that [the] administration was making.''

       By eliminating the fuss about Iran's nuclear program, the 
     administration hoped to eliminate a source of structural 
     tension between the two countries, which would create the 
     space for America to disentangle itself from its established 
     system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, 
     Israel and Turkey. With one bold move, the administration 
     would effectively begin the process of a large-scale 
     disengagement from the Middle East.
       The nerve center for the selling of the Iran deal to 
     Congress, which took place in a concentrated three-month 
     period between July and September of last year, was located 
     inside the White House, and is referred to by its former 
     denizens as ``the war room.'' The White House Office of 
     Legislative Affairs helped run the team, which included three 
     to six people from each of several agencies . . . which were 
     the State Department, Treasury, the American delegation to 
     the United Nations (i.e., Samantha Power), at times . . . the 
     Department of Defense and also the Department of Energy and 
     the National Security Council. Rhodes ``was kind of like the 
     quarterback,'' running the daily video conferences and coming 
     up with lines of attack and parry. ``He was extremely good 
     about immediately getting to a phrase or a way of getting the 
     message out that just made more sense,'' [staff members 
     report]. Framing the deal as a choice between peace and war 
     was Rhodes's go-to move--and proved to be a winning argument.

  And just to be clear, that wasn't the choice. The choice wasn't 
between war and peace, and they knew it. They were spinning the public, 
the press, and the Congress.

       The person [credited] with running the digital side of the 
     campaign . . . the director of digital response for the White 
     House Office of Digital Strategy, . . . became known in the 
     war room and on Twitter as @TheIranDeal.

  That is the Twitter handle.

       Early on, Rhodes asked her to create a rapid-response 
     account that fact-checked everything related to the Iran 
     deal. ``So, we developed a plan that was like: The Iran deal 
     is literally going to be the tip of everything we stand up 
     online,'' [we were told]. ``And we're going to map it onto 
     what we [already] know about the different audiences we're 
     dealing with: the public, pundits, experts, the right wing, 
     Congress.'' By applying 21st century data and networking 
     tools to the white glove world of foreign affairs, the White 
     House was

[[Page S2652]]

     able to track what United States senators and the people who 
     worked for them, and influenced them, were seeing [at 
     different moments] online--and make sure that no potential 
     negative comment passed without a tweet.
       As she explained how the process worked, I was struck by 
     how naive the assumption of a ``state of nature'' must seem 
     in an information environment that is mediated less and less 
     by experienced editors and reporters with any real prior 
     knowledge of the subjects they write about. ``People 
     construct their own sense of source and credibility now,'' 
     [the staffer told me]. ``They elect whoever they're going to 
     believe.'' For those in need of more traditional-seeming 
     forms of validation, handpicked Beltway insiders like Jeffrey 
     Goldberg of The Atlantic and Laura Rozen of Al-Monitor helped 
     retail the administration's narrative. ``Laura Rozen was my 
     RSS feed,'' [the staffer said]. ``She would just find 
     everything and retweet it.''
       Rhodes's messaging campaign was so effective not simply 
     because it was a perfectly planned and executed example of 
     digital strategy, but also because he was personally involved 
     in guiding the deal itself.

  In the interest of time, I am going to skip over a few paragraphs 
that tell how Jake Sullivan and other administration players traveled 
to Oman to secretly meet with the Iranians in the summer of 2012.

       The White House point person during the later stage of the 
     negotiations was Rob Malley, a favored troubleshooter who is 
     currently running negotiations that could keep the Syrian 
     dictator Bashar al-Assad in power. During the course of the 
     Iran talks, Malley told me, he always kept in close contact 
     with Rhodes. ``I would often just call him and say, `Give me 
     a reality check,' '' Malley explained. ``He could say, `Here 
     is where I think the president is, and here is where he will 
     be.' '' He continued, ``Ben would try to anticipate: Does it 
     make sense policywise? But then he would also ask himself: 
     How do we sell it Congress? How do we sell it to the public? 
     What is it going to do to our narrative?''
       Malley is a particularly keen observer of the changing art 
     of political communication; his father . . . who was born in 
     Cairo, edited [a] politics magazine . . . and proudly 
     provided a platform for Fidel Castro and Yasir Arafat, in the 
     days when the leaders' words might take [several] weeks to 
     travel from Cuba or Cairo to Paris. ``The Iran experience was 
     the place where I saw firsthand how policy, politics and 
     messaging all had to be brought together, and I think that 
     Ben is really at the intersection of all three. He reflects 
     and he shapes [all three] at the same time.''
       As Malley and representatives of the State Department, 
     including Wendy Sherman and Secretary of State John Kerry, 
     engaged in formal negotiations with the Iranians, to ratify 
     details of a framework that had already been agreed upon, 
     Rhodes's war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with 
     reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-
     control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social 
     media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-
     clueless reporters. ``We created an echo chamber,'' he 
     admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of 
     freshly minted experts [who were] cheerleading for the deal. 
     [He continued:] ``They were saying things that validated what 
     we had given them to say.''
       When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play 
     seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America's 
     future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. ``In the absence of 
     rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] 
     out of this,'' he said. ``We had test drives to know who was 
     going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to 
     use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and 
     whomever else [they needed to use]. So we knew the tactics 
     that worked'' [he said]. He is [very] proud of the way he 
     sold the Iran deal. ``We drove them crazy,'' he said of the 
     deal's opponents.
       Yet Rhodes bridled at the suggestion that there has been 
     anything deceptive about the way the agreement itself was 
     sold. ``Look,'' [he said] ``with Iran, in a weird way, these 
     are state-to-state issues. They're agreements between 
     governments. Yes, I would prefer that it turns out that 
     Rouhani and Zarif . . . are real reformers who are going to 
     be steering this country into the direction I believe it can 
     go in, because their public is educated and, in some 
     respects, pro-American. But we are not betting on [any of] 
     that.''

  Do you all remember what we heard last summer when they were 
testifying before us? We never heard this. We never heard this was the 
spin, but they didn't actually believe it. But now here, when the guy's 
thinking about his next step in life, we hear the real story. I will 
continue.

       In fact, Rhodes's passion seems to derive not from any 
     investment in the technical specifics of sanctions or 
     centrifuge arrays, or any particular optimism about the 
     future course of Iranian politics and society. Those are 
     matters for the negotiators and area specialists. Rather, it 
     derived from his own sense of urgency of radically 
     reorienting American policy in the Middle East in order to 
     make the prospect of American involvement in the region's 
     future wars a lot less likely. When I asked him whether the 
     prospect of this same kind of far-reaching spin campaign 
     being run by a different administration is something that 
     scares him, he admitted that it does. ``I mean, I'd prefer a 
     sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of 
     Congress reflect and take a vote. . . . But that's 
     impossible'' [he concluded].

  Mr. President, truth is bigger than talking points, and self-
government deserves more than spin. Does President Obama think there is 
such a thing as domestic propaganda? Does he think it is OK? Do we in 
this Chamber think it is OK?
  I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

                          ____________________