Zelenskyy explained, “I told him that if he gave us the weapons we need and stopped supporting Putin, we would let him build Trump-branded hotels and other Trump-branded buildings in Ukraine’s ten largest cities, as well as Trump golf courses in the countryside. He was quite excited.”   read more

Badrising joined Suriname’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1989, then moved to the office of Suriname’s president in 1998. She was senior adviser and chief coordinator for international affairs under three presidents. In 2010, she also served as assistant coordinator for free and fair elections. She came to Washington in 2011 as ambassador to the Organization of American States and represented Suriname at the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank.   read more

Inch was sent overseas to Kabul, Afghanistan, from 2013 until 2014, as deputy commanding general and then commanding general of Combined Joint Interagency Task Force 435, which was responsible for prisoner operations after control of U.S.-run prisons had been transferred to Afghan authorities. According to a UN report, between February 2013 and December 2014, 35% of prisoners held in Afghanistan reported being subjected to mistreatment or torture, which the UN considered an improvement.   read more

After three years as a refugee coordinator in a danger zone in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Hushek served as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Kolonia, Micronesia, in the Pacific, from 2002 to 2004. Later, after a stint in Washington, he returned to Afghanistan as the director for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement in Kabul from 2012 to 2013, and then served as deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Mission to the International Organizations in Vienna from 2013 to 2015.   read more

As Mitch McConnell's policy advisor, Chatterjee took a leading role in fighting any policies that might lead to a reduction in the use of coal, as that industry has been a major supporter of McConnell. Chatterjee backed the Keystone pipeline and opposed Obama regulations from the EPA. In 2016, he warned that if a Republican regained the White House, the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement that Obama had signed, which is exactly what happened when Donald Trump became president.   read more

After serving in Beijing, Kritenbrink, in 2015, was put in a key role, serving as Asia policy adviser to the National Security Council. In the waning days of the Obama administration, Kritenbrink addressed such issues as North Korea’s nuclear program, the lifting of the U.S. arms embargo on Vietnam and China’s construction of islands in the South China Sea. His last assignment before his nomination to be ambassador was senior adviser for North Korean policy.   read more

Fossil-fuel giant Exxon Mobil has knowingly misled the public for nearly 40 years about the dangers of climate change, according to a new study. Researchers found “gaping, systematic discrepancy” between what Exxon said about climate change in private and in academic circles and what it said to the public. The study found Exxon "contributed to advancing climate science—by way of its scientists’ academic publications—but promoted doubt about it in advertorials."   read more

As acting coordinator for counterterrorism, Siberell charged in 2016 that Iran was the leading government sponsor of terrorism. In 2017, he said that the majority of the world's 2016 terrorist attacks took place in Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Under Siberell’s watch, Cuba was dropped from the report for the first time in 33 years. Siberell also led the secret briefing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on “Beyond Iraq and Syria: ISIS' Global Reach.”   read more

A Dutch American born in the Netherlands, Hoekstra will soon find himself at odds with his homeland as President Trump’s ambassador to the Netherlands. On a broad range of issues, including marriage equality, gay and transgender rights, marijuana use, NATO spending, anti-terrorism, refugees and immigration, and trade, Hoekstra and Trump hold views opposed by most Dutch and by their government. Hoekstra’s bizarre and false comments about the Netherlands already raised concerns there in 2015.   read more

Representing the U.S. at the UN, Sison found herself in the thick of the action in 2016 when the Obama administration clashed with the Russian government over the war in Syria. In 2017, she made it clear the Trump administration did not intend to contribute to a UN trust fund to fight Haiti’s cholera epidemic because the U.S. had already contributed more than $100 million to the anti-cholera effort. She also accused South Sudan of using man-made famine as a tactic in that country’s civil war.   read more

Obama and Trump’s rhetoric suggests that the prime mover of government is not separation of powers, political parties or the bureaucracy – but the will of the president. The differences between their rhetorical styles seem stark. Yet, looking more carefully at the words Trump used in his first months in office, we discovered that, in certain ways, these two presidents are remarkably like each other. Here’s what we found – and why Obama and Trump have more in common than you would think...   read more

McCourt, who is one of the most reviled figures in Los Angeles Dodgers’ history, has no experience in international diplomacy, but she did donate a lot of money to Trump’s campaign and to the Republican Party. As owners of the Dodgers, she and her husband alienated fans with higher parking prices, uniform changes and, because of a huge amount of team debt, failure to pay for talent. Jamie was made the team’s CEO in 2009 but quit in 2011 after receiving a $130-million divorce settlement.   read more

Dodman took his first “hardship post” when he served as economic counselor at the embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, in 2008–2009, then headed back to Europe to serve as economic counselor and chargé d'affaires at the U.S. mission to the European Union in Brussels, Belgium. Dodman took a second hardship post at one of the most dangerous U.S. diplomatic locations in the world, serving from July 2012 to August 2014 as consul general at the U.S. consulate in Karachi, which is Pakistan’s largest city.   read more

As U.S. consul in Tokyo in 2002, Barlerin signed documents compensating the victims of a collision the previous year between a Japanese fishery school boat and the attack submarine USS Greeneville. The U.S. agreed to pay more than $11 million to the survivors of the accident and the families of those killed. Barlerin spent two years in Paris as economic policy advisor and later worked in the Office of Regional and Security Affairs and served as the State Dept’s Chad Task Force coordinator.   read more

President Obama chose Bass to be U.S. ambassador to Georgia at a time when Georgia was recovering from a military conflict with the Russian government. When France approved the sale of two amphibious assault ships to Russia, Bass, in 2009, authored a cable calling it “'the wrong ship from the wrong country at the wrong time.” In 2011, Bass was charged by the Tbilisi government’s opposition with “meddling in Georgia’s domestic affairs” by encouraging the government’s crackdown on protests.   read more

In his third try at naming a Secretary of the Army, President Trump has turned to a longtime lobbyist for the arms industry, raising serious questions of ethics and conflicts of interest that are nothing new to this administration. Mark Esper has been vice president for government relations at Raytheon, a major weapons contractor, since July 2010. In a July 2017 conference call with investors, Raytheon CEO Tom Kennedy enthused that the Trump administration “has opened several doors for us.”   read more

Attorneys said the Trump administration will “lose badly” for failing to respond to a family’s petition regarding Border Patrol agents' killing of their loved one at the border. The family claims human rights abuses over the agents’ extrajudicial killing and an allegedly botched investigation by U.S. officials. The U.S. has remained silent – breaking decades of tradition of cooperating with the human rights agency IACHR, even with regard to abuse of prisoners kept at Guantanamo Bay.   read more