It seems like every story you read about Secretary of State Mike Pompeo always includes the sentence that he graduated “first in his class” from West Point. That is not a small achievement. But it is even more impressive in Pompeo’s case when you consider that he finished No. 1 even though he must have flunked all his courses on ethics and leadership. I guess he was really good in math.

I say that because Pompeo has just violated one of the cardinal rules of American military ethics and command: You look out for your soldiers, you don’t leave your wounded on the battlefield and you certainly don’t stand mute when you know a junior officer is being railroaded by a more senior commander, if not outright shot in her back.

The classes on ethics and leadership at West Point would have taught all of that. I can only assume Pompeo failed or skipped them all when you observe his cowardly, slimy behavior as the leader of the State Department. I would never, ever, ever want to be in a trench with that man. Attention all U.S. diplomats: Watch your own backs, because Pompeo won’t.

Public impeachment hearings by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence begin this week. Charge d’Affaires to Ukraine William Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent are scheduled to testify on Nov. 13. Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch is scheduled to testify on Nov. 15. These witnesses and others have already been deposed by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence behind closed doors. Eight deposition transcripts were released publicly last week, totalling 2,677 pages of sworn testimony.

To make these voluminous pages more digestible, Lawfare contributors have summarized each of the released eight deposition transcripts. We have published summaries of all eight. The summaries are available below and include links to the relevant deposition transcripts:
* Amb. Marie Yovanovitch

* Michael McKinley

* Amb. Kurt Volker

* Amb. Gordon Sondland

* George Kent

* Amb. William Taylor

* Fiona Hill

* Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman

We (they) will add more summaries as further transcripts are released. They will be available at the first link shown at the top of this.

The Strategic Case for Minimalism Does Not Ultimately Hold Up
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It might be possible that one article of impeachment can be stripped down to the very minimum for Democrats to defend, but that will then leave them open to the claim from Republicans that there is not enough substance to the case against Trump to remove him from office. “This is all you have? That’s nuthin’—and certainly not enough to end a presidency!”

In the end, the Democrats might be talking themselves into a strategy that leaves them without a “simple and clean” case even as they opt not to pursue the strongest possible case against Donald Trump. As so often happens, focusing on the clever public relations-friendly approach might well be a fools’ errand that would have catastrophic consequences.
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The Substantive Case for Minimalism Is Irresponsible and Wrong
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This, not to pull any punches, is simply bonkers. Before exploring why, I will note that The Times’s editors did make the good point that the Democrats had no choice but to pursue impeachment once it became clear that Trump was trying to rig next year’s election. If impeachment is for nothing else, they point out, it must be used in situations in which the President is committing impeachable offenses that stop him from being held accountable by voters.

Fair enough, but impeachment is not “for nothing else.” Impeachable offenses – treason, bribery, and high crimes and misdemeanors – should not simply be tolerated until the next election so long as that election will be fair. What if the President commits treason or accepts bribes but does not rig an election? And what if he shows every indication that he will keep committing those offenses – and also that he will begin to pardon all of his partners in crime?

Half of the battle against disinformation campaigns is educating people about how they work. And that's why the Finnish public broadcasting company Yle—Finland's equivalent of the BBC—has created a game called Troll Factory. The game, which recently won the European Journalism Centre and Google News Initiative's Global Youth and News Media Prize for promoting media literacy, puts the player in the role of a disinformation operative working for an Internet Research Agency-like organization with an anti-immigrant agenda.

The gamification of education on disinformation campaigns has been shown to help build up a resistance to fake news in the past. The University of Cambridge conducted a study in 2018 using a browser game called "Bad News" and found that completing the 15-minute game increased "psychological resistance" to fake news on social media, reducing the perceived credibility of fake news headlines by an average of 21 percent across 15,000 participants.

Troll Factory takes Bad News' approach a step further by using real samples of memes, conspiracy theories, and fake news articles used in such campaigns that infect social media and heighten the polarization of public discourse around the world—and in the US and Western Europe in particular. With the increasing reliance on social media for news, Yle's interactive team sought to create more awareness of how weaponized social media has become and more understanding among social media users of how they could be drawn into unintentionally spreading false information.
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The result can be somewhat eye-opening for those who haven't tracked disinformation campaigns. "People have described Troll Factory experience to be 'scary awful' but informative and enlightening," Koponen said, "something that's needed in order to illustrate the reality, motives, intentions and potential effects, of different forms of information operations."