Tag: Scrambles

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Politics

Trump’s Authorized Group Scrambles to Discover an Argument

Trump’s Legal Team Scrambles to Find an Argument

On May 25, one of former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyers sent a letter to a top Justice Department official, laying out the argument that his client had done nothing illegal by holding onto a trove of government materials when he left the White House.

The letter, from M. Evan Corcoran, a former federal prosecutor, represented Mr. Trump’s initial defense against the investigation into the presence of highly classified documents in unsecured locations at his members-only club and residence, Mar-a-Lago. It amounted to a three-page hodgepodge of contested legal theories, including Mr. Corcoran’s assertion that Mr. Trump possessed a nearly boundless right as president to declassify materials and an argument that one law governing the handling of classified documents does not apply to a president .

Mr. Corcoran asked the Justice Department to present the letter as “exculpatory” information to the grand jury investigating the case.

Government lawyers found it deeply puzzling. They included it in the affidavit submitted to a federal magistrate in Florida in their request for the search warrant they later used to recover even more classified materials at Mar-a-Lago — to demonstrate their willingness to acknowledge Mr. Corcoran’s arguments, a person with knowledge of the decision said.

As the partial release of the search warrant affidavit on Friday, including the May 25 letter, illustrated, Mr. Trump is going into the battle over the documents with a hastily assembled team. The lawyers have offered up a variety of arguments on his behalf that have yet to do much to fend off a Justice Department that has adopted a determined, focused and so far largely successful legal approach.

“He needs a quarterback who’s a real lawyer,” said David I. Schoen, a lawyer who defended Mr. Trump in his second Senate impeachment trial. Mr. Schoen called it “an honor” to represent Mr. Trump, but said it was problematic to keep lawyers “rotating in and out.”

Often tinged with Mr. Trump’s own bombast and sometimes conflating his powers as president with his role as a private citizen, the legal arguments put forth by his team sometimes strike lawyers not involved in the case as more about setting a political narrative than about dealing with the possibility of a federal prosecution.

“There seems to be a huge disconnect between what’s actually happening — a real live court case surrounding a real live investigation — and what they’re actually doing, which is treating it like they’ve treated everything else, recklessly and thoughtlessly,” Chuck Rosenberg, a former US attorney and FBI official, said of Mr. Trump’s approach. “And for an average defendant on an average case, that would be a disaster.”

Mr. Trump’s team had a few small procedural wins. On Saturday, a federal judge in Florida signaled that she was inclined to support Mr. Trump’s request for a special master to review the material seized by the government in the search of Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8.

It is not clear how much the appointment of a special master would slow or complicate the government’s review of the material. Mr. Trump’s team has suggested that it would be a first step toward challenging the validity of the search warrant; but it also gives the Justice Department, which is expected to respond this week, an opportunity to air new details in public through their legal filings.

Takeaways From the Affidavit Used in the Mar-a-Lago Search

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Takeaways From the Affidavit Used in the Mar-a-Lago Search

The release on Aug. 26 of a partly redacted affidavit used by the Justice Department to justify its search of former President Donald J. Trump’s Florida residence included information that provides greater insight into the ongoing investigation into how he handled documents he took with him from the White House. Here are the key takeaways:

Takeaways From the Affidavit Used in the Mar-a-Lago Search

The government tried to retrieve the documents for more than a year. The affidavit showed that the National Archives asked Mr. Trump as early as May 2021 for files that needed to be returned. In January, the agency was able to collect 15 boxes of documents. The affidavit included a letter from May 2022 showing that Trump’s lawyers knew that he might be in possession of classified materials and that the Justice Department was investigating the matter.

Takeaways From the Affidavit Used in the Mar-a-Lago Search

The material included highly classified documents. The FBI said it had examined the 15 boxes Mr. Trump had returned to the National Archives in January and that all but one of them contained documents that were marked classified. The markings suggested that some documents could compromise human intelligence sources and that others were related to foreign intercepts collected under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Takeaways From the Affidavit Used in the Mar-a-Lago Search

Prosecutors are concerned about obstruction and witness intimidation. To obtain the search warrant, the Justice Department had to lay out possible crimes to a judge, and obstruction of justice was among them. In a supporting document, the Justice Department said it had “well-founded concerns that steps may be taken to frustrate or otherwise interfere with this investigation if facts in the affidavit were prematurely disclosed.”

Some of the Trump lawyers’ efforts have also appeared ineffective or misdirected. Mr. Corcoran, in his May 25 letter, made much of Mr. Trump’s powers to declassify material as president, and cited a specific law on the handling of classified material that he said did not apply to a president. The search warrant, however, said federal agents would be seeking evidence of three potential crimes, none of which relied on the classification status of the documents found at Mar-a-Lago; the law on the handling of classified material cited by Mr. Corcoran in the letter was not among them.

Two lawyers who are working with Mr. Trump on the documents case — Mr. Corcoran and Jim Trusty — have prosecutorial experience with the federal government. But the team was put together quickly.

Mr. Trusty was hired after Mr. Trump saw him on television, people close to the former president have said. Mr. Corcoran came in during the spring, introduced by another Trump adviser during a conference call in which Mr. Corcoran made clear he was willing to take on a case that many of Mr. Trump’s other advisers were seeking to avoid, people briefed on the discussion said.

What we consider before using anonymous sources.
How do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even satisfied with these questions, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.

Mr. Trump’s allies have reached out to several other lawyers, but have repeatedly been turned down.

Mr. Corcoran in particular has raised eyebrows within the Justice Department for his statements to federal officials during the investigation documents. People briefed on the investigation say officials are uncertain whether Mr. Corcoran was intentionally evasive, or simply unaware of all the material still kept at Mar-a-Lago and found during the Aug. 8 search by the FBI

Mr Corcoran did not respond to a request for comment. Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said only that Mr. Trump and his legal team “continue to assert his rights and expose the Biden administration’s misuse of the Presidential Records Act, which governs all pertinent facts, has been complied with and has no enforcement mechanism.”

Even before Mr. Corcoran joined the team, Mr. Trump’s legal filings in various cases read like campaign rally speeches that he had dictated to his lawyers. The former president has a history of approaching legal proceedings as if they are political conflicts, in which his best defense is the 74 million people who voted for him in the 2020 election.

The closest thing to a legal quarterback in Mr. Trump’s orbit is Boris Epshteyn, a onetime lawyer at the Milbank firm who was a political adviser to Mr. Trump in 2016, ultimately becoming a senior staff member on his inaugural effort and then a strategic adviser on the 2020 campaign.

Mr. Epshteyn has championed Mr. Trump’s claims, dismissed by dozens of courts, that the election was stolen from him, and has risen to a role he has described to colleagues as an “in-house counsel,” helping to assemble Mr. Trump’s current legal team.

Mr. Trump’s advisers continue to insist that he was cooperating before the search in returning the documents. They have also suggested that they were quick to respond to Justice Department concerns, citing what they described as a request in June that a stronger lock be placed on the door leading to the storage area where several boxes of presidential records had been kept.

Yet the unsealed affidavit showed a portion of a letter from a Justice Department lawyer sent to Mr. Trump’s lawyers that did not specify anything about a lock and read less like a request than a warning.

The classified documents taken from the White House “have not been handled in an appropriate manner or stored in an appropriate location,” the letter read. “Accordingly, we ask that the room at Mar-a-Lago where the documents had been stored be secured and that all of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago (along with any other items in that room ) be preserved in that room in their current condition until further notice.”

During the Aug. 8 search, the FBI found additional documents in that area and also on the floor of a closet in Mr. Trump’s office, people briefed on the matter said.

Mr. Trump and a small circle within his group of current advisers maintain that he was entitled to keep documents he took from the White House, or that he had already declassified them, or that they were packed up and moved by the General Services Administration — an assertion flatly denied by that federal agency.

Mr. Trump, people familiar with his thinking say, sees the attorney general, Merrick B. Garland, not as the federal government’s chief law enforcement officer, but merely as a political foe and someone with whom he can haggle with about how much anger exists over the situation.

Shortly before Mr. Garland announced that he was seeking to unseal the search warrant, an intermediary for Mr. Trump reached out to a Justice Department official to pass along a message that the former president wanted to negotiate, as if he were still a New York developers.

The message Mr. Trump wanted conveyed, according to a person familiar with the exchange, was: “The country is on fire. What can I do to reduce the heat?”

A Justice Department spokesman would not say if the message ever made it up to Mr Garland; but the senior leadership was befuddled by the message, and had no idea what Mr. Trump was trying to accomplish, according to an official.

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World News

C.I.A. Scrambles for New Method in Afghanistan

C.I.A. Scrambles for New Approach in Afghanistan

WASHINGTON — The rapid U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan is creating intense pressure on the C.I.A. to find new ways to gather intelligence and carry out counterterrorism strikes in the country, but the agency has few good options.

The C.I.A., which has been at the heart of the 20-year American presence in Afghanistan, will soon lose bases in the country from where it has run combat missions and drone strikes while closely monitoring the Taliban and other groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The agency’s analysts are warning of the ever-growing risks of a Taliban takeover.

United States officials are in last-minute efforts to secure bases close to Afghanistan for future operations. But the complexity of the continuing conflict has led to thorny diplomatic negotiations as the military pushes to have all forces out by early to mid-July, well before President Biden’s deadline of Sept. 11, according to American officials and regional experts.

One focus has been Pakistan. The C.I.A. used a base there for years to launch drone strikes against militants in the country’s western mountains, but was kicked out of the facility in 2011, when U.S. relations with Pakistan unraveled.

Any deal now would have to work around the uncomfortable reality that Pakistan’s government has long supported the Taliban. In discussions between American and Pakistani officials, the Pakistanis have demanded a variety of restrictions in exchange for the use of a base in the country, and they have effectively required that they sign off on any targets that either the C.I.A. or the military would want to hit inside Afghanistan, according to three Americans familiar with the discussions.

Diplomats are also exploring the option of regaining access to bases in former Soviet republics that were used for the Afghanistan war, although they expect that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would fiercely oppose this.

Recent C.I.A. and military intelligence reports on Afghanistan have been increasingly pessimistic. They have highlighted gains by the Taliban and other militant groups in the south and east, and warned that Kabul could fall to the Taliban within years and return to becoming a safe haven for militants bent on striking the West, according to several people familiar with the assessments.

As a result, U.S. officials see the need for a long-term intelligence-gathering presence — in addition to military and C.I.A. counterterrorism operations — in Afghanistan long after the deadline that Mr. Biden has set for troops to leave the country. But the scramble for bases illustrates how U.S. officials still lack a long-term plan to address security in a country where they have spent trillions of dollars and lost more than 2,400 troops over nearly two decades.

William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, has acknowledged the challenge the agency faces. “When the time comes for the U.S. military to withdraw, the U.S. government’s ability to collect and act on threats will diminish,” he told senators in April. “That is simply a fact.”

Mr. Burns made an unannounced visit in recent weeks to Islamabad, Pakistan, to meet with the chief of the Pakistani military and the head of the directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, the country’s military intelligence agency. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III has had frequent calls with the Pakistani military chief about getting the country’s help for future U.S. operations in Afghanistan, according to American officials familiar with the conversations.

Mr. Burns did not bring up the base issue during his trip to Pakistan, according to people briefed on the meeting; the visit focused on broader counterterrorism cooperation between the two countries. At least some of Mr. Austin’s discussions have been more direct, according to people briefed on them.

A C.I.A. spokeswoman declined to comment when asked about Mr. Burns’s travel to Pakistan.

Two decades of war in Afghanistan have helped transform the spy agency into a paramilitary organization: It carries out hundreds of drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, trains Afghan commando units and maintains a large presence of C.I.A. officers in a string of bases along the border with Pakistan. At one point during President Barack Obama’s first term, the agency had several hundred officers in Afghanistan, its largest surge of personnel to a country since the Vietnam War.

These operations have come at a cost. Night raids by C.I.A.-trained Afghan units left a trail of abuse that increased support for the Taliban in parts of the country. Occasional errant drone strikes in Pakistan killed civilians and increased pressure on the government in Islamabad to dial back its quiet support for C.I.A. operations.

Douglas London, a former head of C.I.A. counterterrorism operations for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said that the agency was likely to rely on a “stay behind” network of informants in Afghanistan who would collect intelligence on the Taliban, Al Qaeda, the stability of the central government and other topics. But without a large C.I.A. presence in the country, he said, vetting the intelligence would be a challenge.

“When you’re dealing offshore, you’re dealing with middlemen,” said Mr. London, who will soon publish a book, “The Recruiter,” about his C.I.A. experience. “It’s kind of like playing telephone.”

In the short term, the Pentagon is using an aircraft carrier to launch fighter planes in Afghanistan to support the troop withdrawal. But the carrier presence is unlikely to be a long-term solution, and military officials said it would probably redeploy not long after the last U.S. forces leave.

Updated 

June 4, 2021, 7:27 p.m. ET

The United States is stationing MQ-9 Reaper drones in the Persian Gulf region, aircraft that can be used by both the Pentagon and the C.I.A. for intelligence collection and strikes.

But some officials are wary of these so-called over the horizon options that would require plane and drones to fly as many as nine hours each way for a mission in Afghanistan, which would make the operations more expensive because they require more drones and fuel, and also riskier because reinforcements needed for commando raids could not arrive swiftly during a crisis.

Pakistan is a longtime patron of the Taliban; it sees the group as a critical proxy force in Afghanistan against other groups that have ties to India. Pakistan’s spy agency provided weapons and training for Taliban fighters for years, as well as protection for the group’s leaders. The government in Islamabad is unlikely to sign off on any U.S. strikes against the Taliban that are launched from a base in Pakistan.

Although some American officials believe Pakistan wants to allow U.S. access to a base as long as it can control how it is used, public opinion in the country has been strongly against any renewed presence by the United States.

Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, told lawmakers last month that the government would not allow the U.S. military to return to the country’s air bases. “Forget the past, but I want to tell the Pakistanis that no U.S. base will be allowed by Prime Minister Imran Khan so long he is in power,” Mr. Qureshi said.

Some American officials said that negotiations with Pakistan had reached an impasse for now. Others have said the option remains on the table and a deal is possible.

The C.I.A. used the Shamsi air base in western Pakistan to carry out hundreds of drone strikes during a surge that began in 2008 and lasted during the early years of the Obama administration. The strikes focused primarily on suspected Qaeda operatives in Pakistan’s mountainous tribal areas, but they also crossed the border into Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s government refused to publicly acknowledge that it was allowing the C.I.A. operations, and in late 2011 it decided to halt the drone operations after a series of high-profile events that fractured relations with the United States. They included the arrest of a C.I.A. contractor in Lahore for a deadly shooting, the secret American commando mission in Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden and an American-led NATO airstrike on the Afghan border in November 2011 that killed dozens of Pakistani soldiers.

The Americans and the Pakistanis “will want to proceed cautiously” with a new relationship, said Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to the United States who is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. But, he said, Mr. Biden’s announcement of a withdrawal “has the C.I.A. and the Defense Department, as well as Pakistanis, scrambling.”

American diplomats have been exploring options to restore access to bases in Central Asia, including sites in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan that housed American troops and intelligence officers during the war.

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke this month with his counterpart in Tajikistan, though it is not clear if base access was discussed during the call. Any negotiations with those countries are likely to take considerable time to work out. A State Department spokeswoman would say only that Mr. Blinken was engaging partner countries on how the United States was reorganizing its counterterrorism capabilities.

Russia has opposed the United States using bases in Central Asia, and that is likely to make any diplomatic effort to secure access to bases for the purposes of military strikes a slow process, according to a senior American official.

While the C.I.A. in particular has long had a pessimistic view of the prospects of stability in Afghanistan, those assessments have been refined in recent weeks as the Taliban has made tactical gains.

While military and intelligence analysts have previously had assessments at odds with one another, they now are in broad agreement that the Afghan government is likely to have trouble holding on to power. They believe the Afghan security forces have been depleted by high casualty rates in recent years. The announcement of the U.S. withdrawal is another psychological blow that could weaken the force.

Intelligence assessments have said that without continued American support, the Afghan National Security Forces will weaken and could possibly collapse. Officials are working to develop options for continuing that support remotely, but the Pentagon has not yet come up with a realistic plan that officials believe will work.

Some current and former officials are skeptical that remote advising or combat operations will succeed. Collecting intelligence becomes far more difficult without a large presence in Afghanistan, said Mick P. Mulroy, a retired C.I.A. officer who served there.

“It doesn’t matter if you can drop ordnance,” he said, “if you don’t know where the target is.”

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

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Politics

Dealing with Stress, Biden Administration Scrambles to Shelter Migrant Kids

Facing Pressure, Biden Administration Scrambles to Shelter Migrant Children

Republicans refer to the situation as a crisis causing Mr. Biden and signal a goal of using his immigration agenda as a political weapon against him in 2022. California representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, plans to take other Republicans on a trip to the border to highlight the problem. Republican James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky, called the surge in migration a signal “to the world that our immigration laws can be violated with little or no consequence” on Wednesday.

However, Mr Biden has continued to apply a Trump-era rule to quickly turn away most migrants at the border, with the exception of unaccompanied minors. The government last week ordered shelters to return the children to normal capacity despite the coronavirus pandemic.

To find extra space for the kids, the Biden government is considering moving them to disused school buildings, military bases, and even on NASA’s Moffett Federal Airfield in Mountain View, California. This emerges from a memo from the Times. The NASA site would “remain unoccupied but would be available for use when HHS urgently needs additional shelter,” the memo said.

Darryl Waller, a NASA spokesman, confirmed in a statement that the government is considering moving migrant children to “currently vacant lots” on the site. “These efforts will not affect NASA’s ability to conduct its main missions,” he said.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr Biden advocated a more humane approach to border immigration, with priority investing in Central America to prevent illegal immigration. But it has resulted in those who have fled poverty and persecution and see a better chance of entering the United States than they did under the Trump administration.

“One of the things I think is important is that we’ve seen waves before,” said Ms. Jacobson. “Surges tend to respond to hope. And there was great hope for a more humane policy. “

Part of the Obama administration’s response was to create a program to allow Central American children to seek protection from their home countries.

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Business

Brexit Deal Completed, Britain Now Scrambles to See if It Can Work

Brexit Deal Done, Britain Now Scrambles to See if It Can Work

LONDON – For weary Brexit negotiators on both sides of the English Channel, a Christmas Eve trade deal sealed eleven months of careful deliberation on Britain’s exit from the European Union, which included details as arcane as the species of fish that could be used to catch the boats on either side of the British Waters.

For many others – including bankers, traders, truckers, architects and millions of migrants – Christmas was just the beginning, day 1 of a high-level and unpredictable experiment on how to unravel a tight web of trade ties across Europe.

The deal, far from closing the book on Britain’s turbulent partnership with Europe, has opened a new one, starting on its first pages with what analysts say will be the biggest shift in modern trade relations overnight.

In the four years since the British decided to sever half a century of ties with Europe, many migrants have stopped moving to the UK for work and British firms have sent employees to Paris and Frankfurt to settle on the continent. With all these preparations now, there are now only seven days between companies and an avalanche of new trade barriers on January 1st.

“We have to learn how to do that,” said Shane Brennan, executive director of the Cold Chain Federation, a UK group that represents logistics companies. “Let’s hope it gets for the better in the end, but it’s going to be slow, complex and expensive.”

British traders, spared the catastrophe of a no-deal breakup, nevertheless endeavored to prepare the first of hundreds of thousands of new export certifications so that their meat, fish and dairy products could be sold to the block. British food that was once exempt from such onerous controls is now subjected to the same controls as European imports from countries like Chile or Australia.

The UK service sector, which includes not only London’s powerful financial industry but also lawyers, architects, consultants and others, was largely excluded from the 1,246-page deal, despite the fact that the sector accounts for 80 percent of the UK’s economic activity.

The deal has also done little to reassure European migrants, some of whom left the UK during the pandemic and are now struggling to determine if they need to rush to establish a right to settle in the UK before the split on Dec. December is completed.

“As of January 1st, the landscape is changing and the transition period security blanket is gone,” said Maike Bohn, co-founder of the3million, which supports European citizens in the UK, voicing her fears that Europeans will be unfairly denied jobs and rental homes of confusion about the rules. “There is concern and also numbness.”

The negotiators have not officially published the extensive trade deal, despite both sides offering summaries, leaving analysts and ordinary citizens unsure of some of the details, even as lawmakers in the UK and Europe prepare to vote on it within days.

It has long been clear, however, that the deal would offer the City of London, a hub for international banks, asset managers, insurance companies and hedge funds, few assurances of future trade across the English Channel. The UK sells around £ 30 billion or $ 40 billion in financial services to the European Union each year and benefits from an integrated market that in some cases makes it easier to sell services from one member country to another than services from one member country to sell American state to another.

The new trade agreement smoothes the flow of goods across British borders. However, financial firms don’t have the greatest benefit of being a member of the European Union: the ability to easily serve clients across the region from a single base. This has long allowed a bank in London to lend to a company in Venice or to trade bonds for a company in Madrid.

That loss is particularly painful for the UK, which had a 2019 surplus of £ 18 billion or US $ 24 billion in financial and other services trade with the European Union but a deficit of £ 97 billion or US $ 129 billion from trading in goods.

“The result of the deal is that the European Union retains all of its current advantages in trade in goods, especially goods, and Britain loses all of its current advantages in trade in services,” said Tom Kibasi, former director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, a research institute. “The result of these trade negotiations is exactly what happens with most trade deals: the larger party gets what it wants and the smaller party turns around.”

After January 1, sales of such services will depend on European regulators deciding that the new UK financial rules are close enough to their own to be trustworthy. This process excludes some common banking activities and leaves other policy considerations open. British residents living in Europe who have bank accounts in the UK have already been notified that their accounts will be closed.

“Imagine taking the UK and moving it to Canada or Australia,” said Davide Serra, general manager of Algebris Investments, a wealth management firm with offices across Europe. “That’s what this means for services. Great Britain has become a third country. “

When announcing the trade deal earlier this week, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson admitted that it does not give financial firms “as much” access as “we would have liked”. However, according to analysts, he was not as straightforward about the difficulties even UK retailers were facing as part of the deal.

When he promised there would be “no non-tariff barriers” to the sale of goods after Brexit, he ignored the tens of millions of customs declarations, health checks and other controls that businesses will now be responsible for.

The UK lacks the customs brokers needed to process these documents and even the veterinarians to do health checks, industry experts say. And in the past few days, European truckers have received an alarming preview of the chaos caused by shipping delays of just a few days when they were stranded in UK ports due to travel bans related to the new variant of coronavirus.

“It’s a massive problem that will cost the industry millions of pounds and euros,” said Alex Altmann, partner for Blick Brexit issues at Blick Rothenberg, an accounting and tax practice. “Ultimately, that’s passed on to consumers.”

For European citizens living in the UK, the conclusion of a Brexit deal did little to allay fears about how the country’s new immigration rules could complicate their lives. Migrants were allowed to apply for so-called “settlement status” in the UK. However, little provision has been made for people unable to complete the process online, let alone people who do not know they need permission to stay in a country they have lived in for decades.

“There is a risk of a crisis in the next year or two regarding EU migrants who have been here and have been here for a long time but fallen through the cracks in the registration system,” said Robert Ford, professor of politics at the university from Manchester.

The Brexit deal’s limitations reflect the fact that despite the increasing complexity of financial and other regulations in recent years, trade deals have struggled to keep up, said David Henig, an analyst at the European Center for International Political Economy.

However, the UK also limited what it was aiming for in the deal to a few key areas, making the emergence of a bare bones deal almost inevitable, analysts said.

In addition to a no-deal split, which brought enormous blockages at the borders and deep insecurity for companies, the agreement was an ointment. But even with such a deal, the way forward is uncertain.

“Brexit has always been a long-term blow to the UK’s competitiveness,” said analyst Kibasi. “But the way it’s going to turn out is to ruin investments in the UK. So it’s a slow flat tire, not a quick crash.”