IN TRUMP’S CALL Plan to Update FOR TAIWAN … › images › 2016 › 12 › 07 › nytfrontpage...
1
Today, drizzle early, mostly cloudy, high 49. Tonight, rather cloudy, low 38. Tomorrow, clouds and occasional sunshine, seasonable, high 44. Weather map appears on Page A18. VOL. CLXVI . . . No. 57,439 © 2016 The New York Times Company NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2016 Late Edition $2.50 U(D54G1D)y+\!"!@!#!. In congressional hearing rooms and on national television, Wells Fargo has vowed to make things right for the thousands of customers who were defrauded with sham accounts. The bank’s new chief executive, Timothy J. Sloan, in his first week on the job, said his “immediate and highest priority is to restore trust in Wells Fargo.” But in federal and state court- rooms across the country, Wells Fargo is taking a different tack. The bank has sought to kill law- suits that its customers have filed over the creation of as many as two million sham accounts by moving the cases into private ar- bitration — a secretive legal process that often favors corpora- tions. Lawyers for the bank’s customers say the legal motions are an attempt to limit the bank’s accountability for the widespread fraud and deny its customers their day in open court. Some of those customers were charged improp- er fees, had money withdrawn from their bank accounts, or took negative hits to their credit re- ports. At least 5,000 Wells Fargo employees have been fired for their actions. Under intense pressure to meet sales goals, Wells employees used customers’ personal information to create unauthorized banking Wells Fargo Moves to Smother Lawsuits Over Sham Accounts By MICHAEL CORKERY and STACY COWLEY Continued on Page A3 HAM LAKE, Minn. — One morning last week, Larry Laugh- lin, a retired business owner, opened his shiny black Dell laptop and scrolled through Facebook. Most of the posts were ordinary news stories from conservative sites: Donald J. Trump’s deal with the Carrier company. The political tussle over the recount. But a few items were his guilty pleasures. “I like this guy,” said Mr. Laugh- lin, looking at a post by the conser- vative commentator and author Mark Dice. Mr. Dice has promoted conspir- acy theories that the Jade Helm military training exercise last year was preparation for martial law and that the Sept. 11 attacks were an “inside job.” But Mr. Laughlin likes him for what he said was his humorous political commentary and his sarcastic man-on-the-street interviews. “I just like the satisfaction,” said Mr. Laughlin, who started his own business and lives in an affluent Twin Cities suburb. “It’s like a hockey game. Everyone’s got their goons. Their goons are push- ing our guys around, and it’s great to see our goons push back.” The proliferation of fake and hy- perpartisan news that has flooded into Americans’ laptops and living rooms has prompted a national As Fake News Spreads Lies, More Readers Shrug at Truth By SABRINA TAVERNISE Continued on Page A20 DADO GALDIERI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES A riverboat carries the rule of law to remote outposts where mob justice is still common. Page A4. A Floating Courtroom in Brazil KABUL, Afghanistan — Fif- teen years, half a trillion dollars and 150,000 lives since going to war, the United States is trying to extricate itself from Afghanistan. Afghans are being left to fight their own fight. A surging Taliban insurgency, meanwhile, is flush with a new inflow of money. With their nation’s future at stake, Afghan leaders have re- newed a plea to one power that may hold the key to whether their country can cling to democracy or succumbs to the Taliban. But that power is not the United States. It is Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is critical because of its unique position in the Af- ghan conflict: It is on both sides. A longtime ally of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia has backed Islam- abad’s promotion of the Taliban. Over the years, wealthy Saudi sheikhs and rich philanthropists have also stoked the war by pri- vately financing the insurgents. All the while, Saudi Arabia has officially, if coolly, supported the American mission and the Afghan government and even secretly sued for peace in clandestine ne- gotiations on their behalf. The contradictions are hardly accidental. Rather, they balance conflicting needs within the king- dom, pursued through both offi- cial policy and private initiative. The dual tracks allow Saudi offi- cials plausibly to deny official sup- port for the Taliban, even as they have turned a blind eye to private funding of the Taliban and other hard-line Sunni groups. The result is that the Saudis — through private or covert chan- nels — have tacitly supported the Taliban in ways that make the Saudis Fund Taliban and Back Government, Too By CARLOTTA GALL A hilltop overlooking Kabul, the planned site for a $100 million Saudi-financed mosque and education complex that foundered. SERGEY PONOMAREV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES Continued on Page A12 SECRETS OF THE KINGDOM Playing Both Sides ESSEN, Germany — To loud applause, Chancellor Angela Merkel told her party members on Tuesday that Germany should ban full-face veils “wherever le- gally possible” and that it would not tolerate any application of Shariah law over German justice. Accepting her party’s nomina- tion as its candidate for another four-year term, the chancellor used the moment to broaden her stance on banning the veil, trying to deflect challenges from far- right forces that have made some of their deepest gains since World War II. In welcoming nearly one mil- lion asylum seekers to Germany a year ago, Ms. Merkel emerged as a powerful voice for tolerance across a Europe gripped by anxi- ety over waves of arriving mi- grants and fears of terrorism. Now, as anti-immigrant parties have advanced at the expense of mainstream parties, including her own, Ms. Merkel tried a tricky bal- ancing act between holding fast to Western values and tilting farther right to avoid being outflanked by populist challengers. In the 80-minute speech, she re- peated the same catalog of beliefs in freedom and equal treatment she had made as an implicit criti- cism of President-elect Donald J. Trump, but also stiffened her posi- tion on the veil and suggested that Germany would be more cautious Merkel Urges A German Ban On Face Veils By ALISON SMALE Continued on Page A8 WASHINGTON — President- elect Donald J. Trump took a shot on Tuesday at one of the nation’s largest manufacturers, Boeing, sharply criticizing a pending or- der for a new Air Force One and suggesting that the company was “doing a little bit of a number” with the cost of the next genera- tion of presidential aircraft. “Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presi- dents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “Cancel order!” Although his post attracted at- tention because it was about the most famous airplane in the world, the significance may be broader: For perhaps the first time since President John F. Ken- nedy took on the steel industry in the early 1960s, the heads of big American companies are being confronted by a leader willing to call them out directly and publicly for his policy and political aims. Although President Obama forcefully criticized Wall Street and the financial industry after Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, he tended not to single out individual companies. But Mr. Trump is now targeting Boeing a week after he pushed Carrier and its parent company, United Tech- nologies, to keep about 1,000 man- ufacturing jobs in Indiana, and three weeks after he singled out a Ford plant in Kentucky. Executives who give him what he wants may also be rewarded. On Tuesday afternoon, the presi- dent-elect escorted the billionaire Japanese businessman Masayo- shi Son to the lobby of Trump Tower to announce that the tech- nology conglomerate SoftBank Group would be investing $50 bil- lion in the United States. He called Mr. Son one of “the great men of industry.” Mr. Son promised the invest- ment, which will come from a pre- viously announced $100 billion fund, as he is pressing to merge the wireless company Sprint, Trump Attacks Plan to Update Air Force One Sending a Signal in Singling Out Boeing By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and CHRISTOPHER DREW Continued on Page A21 WASHINGTON — Former Senator Bob Dole, acting as a for- eign agent for the government of Taiwan, worked behind the scenes over the past six months to estab- lish high-level contact between Taiwanese officials and Presi- dent-elect Donald J. Trump’s staff, an outreach effort that culminated last week in an unorthodox tele- phone call between Mr. Trump and Taiwan’s president. Mr. Dole, a lobbyist with the Washington law firm Alston & Bird, coordi- nated with Mr. Trump’s cam- paign and the transition team to set up a series of meetings be- tween Mr. Trump’s advis- ers and officials in Taiwan, ac- cording to dis- closure documents filed last week with the Justice Department. Mr. Dole also assisted in successful ef- forts by Taiwan to include lan- guage favorable to it in the Repub- lican Party platform, according to the documents. Mr. Dole’s firm received $140,000 from May to October for the work, the forms said. The disclosures suggest that President-elect Trump’s decision to take a call from the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, was less a ham-handed diplomatic gaffe and more the result of a well-orches- trated plan by Taiwan to use the election of a new president to deepen its relationship with the United States — with an assist from a seasoned lobbyist well versed in the machinery of Wash- ington. DOLE WAS AGENT FOR TAIWAN AIDES IN TRUMP’S CALL EX-SENATOR IS LOBBYIST Behind the Scenes, a High-Level Effort to Deepen Relations By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS and ERIC LIPTON Continued on Page A19 Bob Dole FIRED OVER TWEETS The son of Mr. Trump’s choice for national securi- ty adviser was fired for spreading a fake news story. PAGE A20 OUT OF STOCKS President-elect Donald J. Trump is said to have sold all of his stock holdings, which were a small slice of his wealth. PAGE A20 Phil Jackson, who introduced mindful- ness exercises after becoming team president, now leads the regular ses- sions with the players himself. PAGE B13 SPORTSWEDNESDAY B11-15 Zen and the Knicks Trevor Noah PAGE A29 EDITORIAL, OP-ED A28-29 The economic backdrop of a fire that killed at least 36 people in Oakland, Calif., shows how rising rents and fears of eviction can push vulnerable people to unsafe spaces. PAGE A14 NATIONAL A14-22 From Housing Crisis, Tragedy Anti-establishment parties around Europe are exploiting rural voters’ resentments against urban residents viewed as elites. PAGE A4 Rural Populism in Europe Libyan fighters declared victory over the Islamic State at its coastal strong- hold of Surt, ending the extremist group’s ambitions on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. PAGE A6 INTERNATIONAL A4-13 An ISIS Defeat in Libya The Supreme Court said prosecutors could pursue legal action against people who shared inside information with friends or relatives. PAGE B1 BUSINESS DAY B1-9 Ruling Backs Insider Cases Beyoncé garnered the most Grammy nominations, with nine for her album “Lemonade,” while Drake and Rihanna are each up for eight awards. PAGE C1 ARTS C1-8 Beyoncé Tops Grammy List A $265 million project would use the Trans World Flight Center at Kennedy International Airport as the public entrance to a new hotel. PAGE A23 NEW YORK A23-26 Reviving a Relic of the Jet Age A special holiday section offers advice and recipes (think cookies and cheese balls) as well as a gift guide, and Pete Wells reviews Aska, above. PAGE D1 FOOD D1-12 Treats for the Holidays
Transcript of IN TRUMP’S CALL Plan to Update FOR TAIWAN … › images › 2016 › 12 › 07 › nytfrontpage...
C M Y K Nxxx,2016-12-07,A,001,Bs-4C,E2
Today, drizzle early, mostly cloudy,high 49. Tonight, rather cloudy, low38. Tomorrow, clouds and occasionalsunshine, seasonable, high 44.Weather map appears on Page A18.
VOL. CLXVI . . . No. 57,439 © 2016 The New York Times Company NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2016
Late Edition
$2.50
U(D54G1D)y+\!"!@!#!.
In congressional hearing roomsand on national television, WellsFargo has vowed to make thingsright for the thousands ofcustomers who were defraudedwith sham accounts.
The bank’s new chief executive,
Timothy J. Sloan, in his first weekon the job, said his “immediateand highest priority is to restoretrust in Wells Fargo.”
But in federal and state court-rooms across the country, WellsFargo is taking a different tack.
The bank has sought to kill law-suits that its customers have filedover the creation of as many astwo million sham accounts by
moving the cases into private ar-bitration — a secretive legalprocess that often favors corpora-tions.
Lawyers for the bank’scustomers say the legal motionsare an attempt to limit the bank’saccountability for the widespreadfraud and deny its customers theirday in open court. Some of thosecustomers were charged improp-
er fees, had money withdrawnfrom their bank accounts, or tooknegative hits to their credit re-ports. At least 5,000 Wells Fargoemployees have been fired fortheir actions.
Under intense pressure to meetsales goals, Wells employees usedcustomers’ personal informationto create unauthorized banking
Wells Fargo Moves to Smother Lawsuits Over Sham AccountsBy MICHAEL CORKERY
and STACY COWLEY
Continued on Page A3
HAM LAKE, Minn. — Onemorning last week, Larry Laugh-lin, a retired business owner,opened his shiny black Dell laptopand scrolled through Facebook.
Most of the posts were ordinarynews stories from conservativesites: Donald J. Trump’s deal withthe Carrier company. The politicaltussle over the recount. But a fewitems were his guilty pleasures.
“I like this guy,” said Mr. Laugh-lin, looking at a post by the conser-vative commentator and authorMark Dice.
Mr. Dice has promoted conspir-acy theories that the Jade Helmmilitary training exercise lastyear was preparation for martial
law and that the Sept. 11 attackswere an “inside job.” But Mr.Laughlin likes him for what hesaid was his humorous politicalcommentary and his sarcasticman-on-the-street interviews.
“I just like the satisfaction,” saidMr. Laughlin, who started his ownbusiness and lives in an affluentTwin Cities suburb. “It’s like ahockey game. Everyone’s gottheir goons. Their goons are push-ing our guys around, and it’s greatto see our goons push back.”
The proliferation of fake and hy-perpartisan news that has floodedinto Americans’ laptops and livingrooms has prompted a national
As Fake News Spreads Lies,More Readers Shrug at Truth
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Continued on Page A20
DADO GALDIERI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
A riverboat carries the rule of law to remote outposts where mob justice is still common. Page A4.A Floating Courtroom in Brazil
KABUL, Afghanistan — Fif-teen years, half a trillion dollarsand 150,000 lives since going towar, the United States is trying toextricate itself from Afghanistan.Afghans are being left to fighttheir own fight. A surging Talibaninsurgency, meanwhile, is flushwith a new inflow of money.
With their nation’s future atstake, Afghan leaders have re-newed a plea to one power thatmay hold the key to whether theircountry can cling to democracy orsuccumbs to the Taliban. But thatpower is not the United States.
It is Saudi Arabia.Saudi Arabia is critical because
of its unique position in the Af-ghan conflict: It is on both sides.
A longtime ally of Pakistan,Saudi Arabia has backed Islam-abad’s promotion of the Taliban.Over the years, wealthy Saudisheikhs and rich philanthropistshave also stoked the war by pri-vately financing the insurgents.
All the while, Saudi Arabia hasofficially, if coolly, supported theAmerican mission and the Afghan
government and even secretlysued for peace in clandestine ne-gotiations on their behalf.
The contradictions are hardlyaccidental. Rather, they balanceconflicting needs within the king-dom, pursued through both offi-cial policy and private initiative.
The dual tracks allow Saudi offi-cials plausibly to deny official sup-port for the Taliban, even as theyhave turned a blind eye to privatefunding of the Taliban and otherhard-line Sunni groups.
The result is that the Saudis —through private or covert chan-nels — have tacitly supported theTaliban in ways that make the
Saudis Fund Taliban and Back Government, TooBy CARLOTTA GALL
A hilltop overlooking Kabul, the planned site for a $100 million Saudi-financed mosque and education complex that foundered.SERGEY PONOMAREV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Continued on Page A12
SECRETS OF THE KINGDOM
Playing Both Sides
ESSEN, Germany — To loudapplause, Chancellor AngelaMerkel told her party members onTuesday that Germany shouldban full-face veils “wherever le-gally possible” and that it wouldnot tolerate any application ofShariah law over German justice.
Accepting her party’s nomina-tion as its candidate for anotherfour-year term, the chancellorused the moment to broaden herstance on banning the veil, tryingto deflect challenges from far-right forces that have made someof their deepest gains since WorldWar II.
In welcoming nearly one mil-lion asylum seekers to Germany ayear ago, Ms. Merkel emerged asa powerful voice for toleranceacross a Europe gripped by anxi-ety over waves of arriving mi-grants and fears of terrorism.
Now, as anti-immigrant partieshave advanced at the expense ofmainstream parties, including herown, Ms. Merkel tried a tricky bal-ancing act between holding fast toWestern values and tilting fartherright to avoid being outflanked bypopulist challengers.
In the 80-minute speech, she re-peated the same catalog of beliefsin freedom and equal treatmentshe had made as an implicit criti-cism of President-elect Donald J.Trump, but also stiffened her posi-tion on the veil and suggested thatGermany would be more cautious
Merkel UrgesA German Ban
On Face Veils
By ALISON SMALE
Continued on Page A8
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump took a shoton Tuesday at one of the nation’slargest manufacturers, Boeing,sharply criticizing a pending or-der for a new Air Force One andsuggesting that the company was“doing a little bit of a number”with the cost of the next genera-tion of presidential aircraft.
“Boeing is building a brand new747 Air Force One for future presi-dents, but costs are out of control,more than $4 billion,” Mr. Trumpwrote on Twitter. “Cancel order!”
Although his post attracted at-tention because it was about themost famous airplane in theworld, the significance may bebroader: For perhaps the firsttime since President John F. Ken-nedy took on the steel industry inthe early 1960s, the heads of bigAmerican companies are beingconfronted by a leader willing tocall them out directly and publiclyfor his policy and political aims.
Although President Obamaforcefully criticized Wall Streetand the financial industry afterLehman Brothers collapsed in2008, he tended not to single outindividual companies. But Mr.Trump is now targeting Boeing aweek after he pushed Carrier andits parent company, United Tech-nologies, to keep about 1,000 man-ufacturing jobs in Indiana, andthree weeks after he singled out aFord plant in Kentucky.
Executives who give him whathe wants may also be rewarded.On Tuesday afternoon, the presi-dent-elect escorted the billionaireJapanese businessman Masayo-shi Son to the lobby of TrumpTower to announce that the tech-nology conglomerate SoftBankGroup would be investing $50 bil-lion in the United States. He calledMr. Son one of “the great men ofindustry.”
Mr. Son promised the invest-ment, which will come from a pre-viously announced $100 billionfund, as he is pressing to mergethe wireless company Sprint,
Trump AttacksPlan to Update
Air Force One
Sending a Signal inSingling Out Boeing
By MICHAEL D. SHEARand CHRISTOPHER DREW
Continued on Page A21
WASHINGTON — FormerSenator Bob Dole, acting as a for-eign agent for the government ofTaiwan, worked behind the scenesover the past six months to estab-lish high-level contact betweenTaiwanese officials and Presi-dent-elect Donald J. Trump’s staff,an outreach effort that culminatedlast week in an unorthodox tele-phone call between Mr. Trumpand Taiwan’s president.
Mr. Dole, a lobbyist with theWashington law firm Alston &Bird, coordi-nated with Mr.Trump’s cam-paign and thetransition teamto set up a seriesof meetings be-tween Mr.Trump’s advis-ers and officialsin Taiwan, ac-cording to dis-closure documents filed last weekwith the Justice Department. Mr.Dole also assisted in successful ef-forts by Taiwan to include lan-guage favorable to it in the Repub-lican Party platform, according tothe documents.
Mr. Dole’s firm received$140,000 from May to October forthe work, the forms said.
The disclosures suggest thatPresident-elect Trump’s decisionto take a call from the president ofTaiwan, Tsai Ing-wen, was less aham-handed diplomatic gaffe andmore the result of a well-orches-trated plan by Taiwan to use theelection of a new president todeepen its relationship with theUnited States — with an assistfrom a seasoned lobbyist wellversed in the machinery of Wash-ington.
DOLE WAS AGENTFOR TAIWAN AIDES
IN TRUMP’S CALL
EX-SENATOR IS LOBBYIST
Behind the Scenes, aHigh-Level Effort toDeepen Relations
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVISand ERIC LIPTON
Continued on Page A19
Bob Dole
FIRED OVER TWEETS The son of Mr. Trump’s choice for national securi-ty adviser was fired for spreading a fake news story. PAGE A20
OUT OF STOCKS President-elect Donald J. Trump is said to have sold allof his stock holdings, which were a small slice of his wealth. PAGE A20
Phil Jackson, who introduced mindful-ness exercises after becoming teampresident, now leads the regular ses-sions with the players himself. PAGE B13
SPORTSWEDNESDAY B11-15
Zen and the Knicks
Trevor Noah PAGE A29
EDITORIAL, OP-ED A28-29
The economic backdrop of a fire thatkilled at least 36 people in Oakland,Calif., shows how rising rents and fearsof eviction can push vulnerable peopleto unsafe spaces. PAGE A14
NATIONAL A14-22
From Housing Crisis, Tragedy
Anti-establishment parties aroundEurope are exploiting rural voters’resentments against urban residentsviewed as elites. PAGE A4
Rural Populism in Europe
Libyan fighters declared victory overthe Islamic State at its coastal strong-hold of Surt, ending the extremistgroup’s ambitions on the southernshores of the Mediterranean. PAGE A6
INTERNATIONAL A4-13
An ISIS Defeat in Libya
The Supreme Court said prosecutorscould pursue legal action against peoplewho shared inside information withfriends or relatives. PAGE B1
BUSINESS DAY B1-9
Ruling Backs Insider Cases
Beyoncé garnered the most Grammynominations, with nine for her album“Lemonade,” while Drake and Rihannaare each up for eight awards. PAGE C1
ARTS C1-8
Beyoncé Tops Grammy List
A $265 million project would use theTrans World Flight Center at KennedyInternational Airport as the publicentrance to a new hotel. PAGE A23
NEW YORK A23-26
Reviving a Relic of the Jet AgeA special holiday section offers adviceand recipes (think cookies and cheeseballs) as well as a gift guide, and PeteWells reviews Aska, above. PAGE D1
FOOD D1-12
Treats for the Holidays
