Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
The Real Point of the Arizona Audit
It’s all a big show.
by AMANDA CARPENTER JULY 12, 2021 5:30 AM
https://thebulwark.com/the-real-point-of-the-arizona-audit/
If you’re waiting to read the Cyber Ninjas’ report about Maricopa County’s election counts to find out what happens next in Donald Trump’s rigged election narrative, don’t bother.
The sham audit itself is the endgame. The audit, which began on April 23, was supposed to end by May 14. Now, nearly two months after blowing past that deadline, a spokesman says people shouldn’t expect anything until August. But, really, who knows when, or if, it all will ever end.
It’s not like anyone in MAGA land is in any hurry to call curtains on the big show. That’s because the performance, as incompetent as it is, is the point. It’s what’s keeping Trump’s election delusions alive and well; not what will prove or disprove whether the fantasy has merit. The play’s the thing.
Besides, haven’t they already won, on some level? It’s not every day a couple of partisans are able to seize millions of ballots and a bunch of expensive election equipment to put on a big, months-long show at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Everybody came, too. Politicos, reporters, elected officials. MAGA propagandists are still capitalizing on all the free content. And donations keep pouring into the coffers of Trump-adjacent grifters all around. Why end it now?
The auditors haven’t even drafted a report and already, there’s lots of breathless talk from MAGA land about taking the show on the road to Pennsylvania. The dominos are falling, just as the prophecy foretold!
Arizona GOP Chairwoman Kelli “Stop the Counting” Ward couldn’t be happier. “It is good to know that the Arizona audit is already inspiring others to take important steps to ensure election integrity,” she said in a video on Friday. “Even before its completion, the Arizona audit, America’s audit, is bearing good fruit.”
Joy! The sequel is being planned before the first release even wraps its maiden run! Election Integrity Forever!
There are plenty of financial, legal, and political costs associated with the spectacle, none of which seem to worry the audit’s proponents much. They’re having too much fun.
They’re not concerned about sticking Arizona taxpayers with the bill for voting equipment that will need to be replaced at a yet-to-be-determined cost. They’re not thinking about the implications of using private funds to finance what was billed as a public, government-run enterprise before spiraling into bamboo-sniffing, Cheeto-dust-hunting ridiculousness. The Department of Justice has warned about possible legal exposure that Arizona Republicans have for violating federal laws requiring the preservation of election records. But that hasn’t slowed them down, either.
More than likely, the audit will damage the Republican brand even further in the critical swing state of Arizona, where it lost both its marquee races—the presidency and U.S. Senate—in 2020. A recent Bendixen & Amandi International poll found roughly half of Arizona voters oppose the recount effort and that the “intensity of opposition to the audit exceeded the intensity of support, with those strongly opposed to it outnumbering those strongly in favor by 5 percentage points.”
Considering that Maricopa County delivers about two-thirds of Arizona’s votes, someone ought to start writing a political thriller for 2022. Title it: “Backlash.”
There’s about as much chance of the Arizona audit producing anything that resembles a credible report as there is George Strait selling an oceanfront property there anytime soon.
Karen Fann, the Republican president of the Arizona Senate, who is—as I explained here last week—one of two people solely responsible for the audit, already gave the game away. “Contrary to what you see and what you hear, I have said from Day One, I have never, ever said there was fraud,” she recently told the Arizona Republic. “This was about election integrity.”
Ah, yes. “Election integrity” again. What a magical phrase.
It’s what MAGA lawyers, activists, elected officials, and insurrectionists alike have all used to justify their actions in hopes of overturning the 2020 election. It’s the catch-all code phrase under which all unfounded aspersions about the election are cast without ever producing a shred of evidence to back it up.
Sadly, it ain’t no passing craze. It’s all coming straight from the top, from the man whom Republican party officials still call their leader.
Over the weekend, in press releases, media appearances, and a CPAC speech in Texas, Donald Trump continued to spread his election conspiracy theories and engage in January 6 insurrection whitewashing, seeking an audience for his lies wherever he could find one.
Guess where he’s going next.
Arizona. The former president will be in Phoenix on July 24 for an event billed as a “rally to protect our elections.”
The show, you see, must go on. And on. And on.
Amanda Carpenter
Bulwark political columnist Amanda Carpenter is a CNN contributor, author, and former communications director to Sen. Ted Cruz and speechwriter to Sen. Jim DeMint.
https://thebulwark.com/the-real-point-of-the-arizona-audit/
The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller Insurrectionist Pauline Bauer on January 6th: “Bring Nancy Pelosi out here now… we want to hang that fucking bitch”
Pauline Bauer in court: *Uses scripture as her defense, claims to be a divinely empowered entity immune from laws*
Capitol rioter who demanded Pelosi be turned over to be lynched cites Bible in court defense
Tom Boggioni
July 11, 2021
https://www.rawstory.com/capitol-riot-2653744510/
7:13 PM · Jul 11, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
Insurrectionist Pauline Bauer on January 6th: “Bring Nancy Pelosi out here now… we want to hang that fucking bitch”
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) July 11, 2021
Pauline Bauer in court: *Uses scripture as her defense, claims to be a divinely empowered entity immune from laws* 😵💫https://t.co/pPBV135Re6
Over the weekend, Trump expressed his support for the January 6 Capitol rioters, calling them “great people.” That followed several supportive statements for Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran and Trump supporter who was killed during riots inside the Capitol when she tried to storm the Speaker’s lobby, where lawmakers were running for protection from the mob. Babbitt promoted QAnon conspiracy theories on her social media pages, and has emerged as a Q martyr. Her profile has only risen as Trump has raised questions about why she was killed by a Capitol police officer, who was acting in self defense, and why the officer’s identity has not been revealed.
“The person that shot Ashli Babbitt ... there was no reason for that. And why isn’t that person being opened up, and why isn’t that being studied? They’ve already written it off. They said that case is closed. If that were the opposite, that case would be going on for years and years, and it would not be pretty,” Trump said during a press conference in Bedminster, N.J. on Wednesday.
What has fed Trump’s interest in the Babbitt story is unclear. But she isn’t the only area of overlapping interest between QAnon and Trump. Instead, a community that once revolved around Satanic ritual-based conspiracies now seems driven by the belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by a vast conspiracy of shadowy elites, assisted by voting machine companies, a slavish mainstream media, secretive government agencies, and, perhaps, the Chinese government.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Wednesday, April 14, 2021
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/department-justice-closes-investigation-death-ashli-babbitt
Department of Justice Closes Investigation into the Death of Ashli Babbitt
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice will not pursue criminal charges against the U.S. Capitol Police officer involved in the fatal shooting of 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt, the Office announced today.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia’s Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section and the Civil Rights Division, with the Metropolitan Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division (IAD), conducted a thorough investigation of Ms. Babbitt’s shooting. Officials examined video footage posted on social media, statements from the officer involved and other officers and witnesses to the events, physical evidence from the scene of the shooting, and the results of an autopsy. Based on that investigation, officials determined that there is insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution. Officials from IAD informed a representative of Ms. Babbitt’s family today of this determination.
The investigation determined that, on January 6, 2021, Ms. Babbitt joined a crowd of people that gathered on the U.S. Capitol grounds to protest the results of the 2020 presidential election. Inside the Capitol building, a Joint Session of Congress, convened to certify the results of the Electoral College vote, was underway. Members of the crowd outside the building, which was closed to the public during the Joint Session, eventually forced their way into the Capitol building and past U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) officers attempting to maintain order. The Joint Session was stopped, and the USCP began evacuating members of Congress.
The investigation further determined that Ms. Babbitt was among a mob of people that entered the Capitol building and gained access to a hallway outside “Speaker’s Lobby,” which leads to the Chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives. At the time, the USCP was evacuating Members from the Chamber, which the mob was trying to enter from multiple doorways. USCP officers used furniture to barricade a set of glass doors separating the hallway and Speaker’s Lobby to try and stop the mob from entering the Speaker’s Lobby and the Chamber, and three officers positioned themselves between the doors and the mob. Members of the mob attempted to break through the doors by striking them and breaking the glass with their hands, flagpoles, helmets, and other objects. Eventually, the three USCP officers positioned outside the doors were forced to evacuate. As members of the mob continued to strike the glass doors, Ms. Babbitt attempted to climb through one of the doors where glass was broken out. An officer inside the Speaker’s Lobby fired one round from his service pistol, striking Ms. Babbitt in the left shoulder, causing her to fall back from the doorway and onto the floor. A USCP emergency response team, which had begun making its way into the hallway to try and subdue the mob, administered aid to Ms. Babbitt, who was transported to Washington Hospital Center, where she succumbed to her injuries.
The focus of the criminal investigation was to determine whether federal prosecutors could prove that the officer violated any federal laws, concentrating on the possible application of 18 U.S.C. § 242, a federal criminal civil rights statute. In order to establish a violation of this statute, prosecutors must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the officer acted willfully to deprive Ms. Babbitt of a right protected by the Constitution or other law, here the Fourth Amendment right not to be subjected to an unreasonable seizure. Prosecutors would have to prove not only that the officer used force that was constitutionally unreasonable, but that the officer did so “willfully,” which the Supreme Court has interpreted to mean that the officer acted with a bad purpose to disregard the law. As this requirement has been interpreted by the courts, evidence that an officer acted out of fear, mistake, panic, misperception, negligence, or even poor judgment cannot establish the high level of intent required under Section 242.
The investigation revealed no evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the officer willfully committed a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 242. Specifically, the investigation revealed no evidence to establish that, at the time the officer fired a single shot at Ms. Babbitt, the officer did not reasonably believe that it was necessary to do so in self-defense or in defense of the Members of Congress and others evacuating the House Chamber. Acknowledging the tragic loss of life and offering condolences to Ms. Babbitt’s family, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and U.S. Department of Justice have therefore closed the investigation into this matter.
Component(s):
USAO - District of Columbia
Press Release Number:
21-052
Updated April 14, 2021
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/department-justice-closes-investigation-death-ashli-babbitt
Biden’s clean energy plan would cut emissions and save 317,000 lives
A new report has found that a policy standard would be most effective to reach the goal of 80% renewable energy use by 2030
Oliver Milman @olliemilman
Mon 12 Jul 2021 00.01 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/11/biden-administration-clean-energy-climate-crisis
A Biden administration plan to force the rapid uptake of renewable energy would swiftly cut planet-heating emissions and save hundreds of thousands of lives from deadly air pollution, a new report has found amid growing pressure on the White House to deliver a major blow against the climate crisis.
Of various climate policy options available to the new administration, a clean energy standard would provide the largest net benefits to the US, according to the report, in terms of costs as well as lives saved.
A clean energy standard would require utilities to ratchet up the amount of clean energy, such as solar and wind, they use, through a system of incentives and penalties. The Biden administration hoped to include the measure in its major infrastructure bill but it was dropped after compromise negotiations with Republicans.
But the new report, conducted by a consortium of researchers from Harvard University, Georgia Institute of Technology and Syracuse University, suggests it would be the most effective tool in reaching a White House goal of 80% renewable energy use by 2030. Joe Biden has said he wants all electricity to be renewable by 2035.
A clean energy standard to get to the 80% goal by the end of the decade would save an estimated 317,500 lives in the US over the next 30 years, due to a sharp reduction in air pollution from the burning of coal, oil and gas. In 2030 alone, 9,200 premature deaths would be avoided once the emissions cut is achieved. The number of lives saved would be “immediate, widespread and substantial”, the report states.
A total of $1.13tn in health savings due to cleaner air would be achieved between now and 2050, with air quality improvements most acutely felt by black people who currently face disproportionate harm from living in close proximity to highways and power plants.
Every state in the US would gain better air quality, the report found, although the greatest benefits would go to Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania and Illinois, all states with substantial fossil fuel infrastructure.
The rapid switch to renewables would cost around $342bn until 2050, via capital and maintenance costs, although fuel costs would dwindle as renewables are cheaper to run than fossil fuels. The study added, however, the financial benefits from addressing climate crisis would dwarf this figure, at nearly $637bn.
“The cost are much lower than we expected and the deaths avoided are much higher; there really is a huge opportunity here to address climate change and air quality,” said Kathy Fallon Lambert, a study co-author and an expert at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
“This would be a huge leap in ambition and we’d see that in the health impacts, there would be millions of fewer asthma attacks, for example. And this doesn’t even consider the health impacts from heat and other climate-related causes.”
Lambert said a clean energy standard would be “extremely effective” at slashing emissions, far more so than other proposals such as a carbon tax.
Biden is facing pressure from environmentalists, as well as major companies such as Apple and Google, to implement the new standard after it was dropped from the infrastructure bill. The president has said the measure will be included in a new reconciliation bill that can pass along party lines, although that will require every single Democratic senator to vote for it, which will prove a challenge.
The White House is determined this will happen however, with Gina McCarthy, Biden’s top climate adviser, saying the measure is a “non-negotiable” in the next infrastructure package.
“We need to make sure that we’re sending a signal that we want renewable energy and that it’s going to win,” McCarthy told Punchbowl News last week.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/11/biden-administration-clean-energy-climate-crisis
Trumpworld wants distance from QAnon even as the ex-president winks at it
Trump isn’t disavowing the conspiracy theory. But his team doesn’t want the association.
By TINA NGUYEN and MERIDITH MCGRAW
07/12/2021 04:30 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/12/trump-world-distance-qanon-499242
This past weekend, two promoters of QAnon conspiracy theories were given press credentials to Donald Trump’s MAGA rally in Sarasota, Fla.
The men took selfies with their badges, taunted journalists covering the event as “fake news,” showed off their wristbands printed with the movement’s slogan — “#WWG1WGA” — and generally reveled in the access they’d scored.
Not everyone was happy to see them there.
Trump’s press team said the two men, Jeffrey Pedersen and his podcast co-host Shannon Shadygroove:, were not welcome, and had registered for the rally with “Red State Talk Radio,” a network that has sent people who, a Trump aide said, “appear to be legitimate” to events before.
Pederson and Grooove were later identified as QAnon followers by Alex Kaplan of progressive watchdog group Media Matters, after which Trump’s team said they are considering a new policy to verify reporters ahead of events to prevent people like the two men from gaining access. On top of that, they said they will continue efforts to tamp down on the proliferation of swag that promotes the conspiracy at Trump events and rallies.
“Rally organizers make a valiant effort to dispel Q merchandise such as t-shirts, flags, and signs at the rallies,” said a Trump spokesperson.
Scott Adams from Red State Talk Radio said their network allows “show hosts to use our name, image, and likeness to acquire press credentials upon request.”
“Content of our individual shows and hosts is not necessarily an endorsement of our station. We support and endorse content in line with America First policies,” said Adams.
Trump and his aides have made efforts to keep QAnon from becoming a prominent feature of Trump events for years. There had been a longstanding (though not always successfully executed) policy at Trump rallies to remove any signs or slogans relating to non-Trump causes, and QAnon merchandising fell into that blanket policy. But as the web of QAnon falsehoods and supporters continues to grow, Trump allies have increasingly viewed the movement, which holds that a satanic sect of pedophiles is secretly controlling the government, as toxic.
“If we let in one Q shirt out of hundreds of shirts,” the negative press would be astounding, said one person close to Trump.“A picture that's on the cover of New York Times, with a hundred [QAnon] t-shirts behind him, would be worse” than him talking about QAnon.
Trump associates also told POLITICO that they had attempted to weed out any QAnon influences — both adherents and postings — getting close to him. As a larger matter, they have downplayed the impact that QAnon has on the MAGA movement overall.
The attempts at creating distance from QAnon have been complicated, however, by the former president, who has refused to disavow the movement even when described to him as a conspiracy. During the campaign, Trump told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie that he knew “very little” of the group except for their dislike of pedophiles. His non-answer was seen by QAnon adherents as a confirmation of his support. In recent months, he has met with QAnon-supporting figures.
Over the weekend, Trump expressed his support for the January 6 Capitol rioters, calling them “great people.” That followed several supportive statements for Ashli Babbitt, the Air Force veteran and Trump supporter who was killed during riots inside the Capitol when she tried to storm the Speaker’s lobby, where lawmakers were running for protection from the mob. Babbitt promoted QAnon conspiracy theories on her social media pages, and has emerged as a Q martyr. Her profile has only risen as Trump has raised questions about why she was killed by a Capitol police officer, who was acting in self defense, and why the officer’s identity has not been revealed.
“The person that shot Ashli Babbitt ... there was no reason for that. And why isn’t that person being opened up, and why isn’t that being studied? They’ve already written it off. They said that case is closed. If that were the opposite, that case would be going on for years and years, and it would not be pretty,” Trump said during a press conference in Bedminster, N.J. on Wednesday.
What has fed Trump’s interest in the Babbitt story is unclear. But she isn’t the only area of overlapping interest between QAnon and Trump. Instead, a community that once revolved around Satanic ritual-based conspiracies now seems driven by the belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by a vast conspiracy of shadowy elites, assisted by voting machine companies, a slavish mainstream media, secretive government agencies, and, perhaps, the Chinese government.
“They are still 100 percent dedicated to believing Donald Trump is the rightful president, so the prophecy of what they’re waiting for has changed,” said Mike Rothschild, the author of the recently published book "The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything."
Unlike other QAnon obsessions, their view that the 2020 election was stolen — while not supported by any evidence — can not be described as fringe. A June poll from Monmouth University found that one third of Americans believe Joe Biden won the election due to voter fraud, and over one in ten Americans will never accept Biden as president. More strident adherents have gone further, attempting to audit state elections and filing lawsuits against Secretaries of State nationwide.
Even further afield, Trumpism adherents like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell have conjured up theories about how the former president will be reinstalled in the West Wing within months.
Lindell said in an interview that by the time of an upcoming election symposium he’s throwing in South Dakota on August 13, he would have marshaled enough evidence to prove that China had launched a cyberattack that swung the election to Biden, and that it would be so compelling that the Supreme Court would rule 9-0 to switch the election results to Trump.
“I said before, a couple months ago, he should be back in by August. I did say that,” he clarified. “That's me being hopeful there. It could be September. I don't know. It'll be whenever the Supreme Court protects our country and gets this thing pulled down after they see it really happened.”
Some Trump associates said they have been displeased with Lindell’s appearances at rallies and communications with the former president. They are also fearful that his wild talk of reinstallment will lead to QAnon followers lashing out in August, when Trump does not resume his presidency.
“You want to tell people you think the election was stolen? Well that’s your opinion,” said a former Trump adviser. “But if you say in August Trump’s coming back to office, that’s no longer your opinion, now some crazy s--- is going to happen and you're not offering any proof. And it’s beyond just saying ‘Hey, I’m personally convinced the election is stolen.’”
But if Lindell’s continued public appearances are worrying some in Trump World, they don’t appear to be bothering Trump himself. Recently, the former president tipped his hat to the conspiracy theories about his imminent reinstallment, by hinting that he would return to the White House in “2024, or before.” He has also been closely monitoring the ongoing “audit” in Arizona that was described by one QAnon expert as the conspiracy theorists “Super Bowl,” and at a recent rally in Ohio, name-dropped Lindell and called him a “patriot.”
Lindell said he had not spoken to Trump since he left office, nor had he been in communication with Trump’s team, but believed that Trump was watching his news appearances.
“They see the same thing you do on TV,” he said. “I don't call anybody up from there and go ‘What do you guys think?’ You guys know I haven't done that. I've been my own person. Because you know what, this isn't about them. This is about our country.”
The persistence of QAnon has been problematic enough that the Department of Homeland Security recently told members of Congress during a closed-door briefing that they are following discussions about the theory online — though they did not have reports of any specific threats. Experts on QAnon say it may just be a matter of time before the threat materializes.
“When they don’t win, that will work into their sense of grievances that they’ve had building up over the past few years and I think that will be a very dangerous moment,” said Rothschild. “I think there will be QAnon believers who have spent so much time building up to this moment where the dominoes are going to start falling and when they don’t people will get upset.”
FILED UNDER: DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, DONALD TRUMP,
POLITICO
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/12/trump-world-distance-qanon-499242
The Family Secrets Fueling the Trump Organization Indictment
Jose Pagliery
Mon, 12 July 2021, 9:11 am·7-min read
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/family-secrets-fueling-trump-organization-081114422.html
While the Manhattan District Attorney’s office undertook a years-long, high-stakes battle to obtain Donald Trump’s tax records—twice returning to the Supreme Court—some of the most damning evidence was quietly in the possession of someone who was more than willing to turn it over: the ex-daughter-in-law of a top Trump Organization executive.
Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer, has always been key to unlocking the finances of the Trump family business. For years, prosecutors have been looking for documents that would show what exiled insiders like Trump’s ex-consigliere Michael Cohen have claimed: that the Trump Organization was fudging numbers and dodging taxes.
What investigators didn’t know was that the proof was in the hands of Jennifer Weisselberg, the woman once married to Barry Weisselberg, the son of Allen Weisselberg. And it wasn’t until November 2020 that city and state investigators connected with her to acquire the evidence.
The Daily Beast has obtained some of the records that, according to Ms. Weisselberg and her lawyer, have proved pivotal to last week’s indictment of the Trump Organization CFO.
Corporate Perks
The top finance executive at the Trump Organization was indicted for dodging taxes by receiving pay in unaccounted corporate perks. Among them: redirecting his salary to cover tuition payments for his grandkids.
As prosecutors would discover, Barry Weisselberg explained it all in sworn testimony he made during a deposition in his divorce case in August 2018.
Grandpa Weisselberg paid more than $50,000 a year for each of the two kids to attend a top-rated private academy, the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School. He’d been doing it for at least six years, Barry Weisselberg told his wife’s lawyer, Clifford Petroske.
New York investigators would later ask Jennifer Weisselberg about that financial arrangement, according to two people in the room. They said prosecutors’ eyes widened when she explained that Trump himself would sign a check that she would hand deliver to the school.
That detail made its way into page seven of last week’s indictment: “as part of the scheme to defraud, Trump Corporation personnel, including Weisselberg, arranged for tuition expenses for Weisselberg’s family members to be paid by personal checks drawn on the account of and signed by Donald J. Trump.”
In the indictment, the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. noted that tuition payments “constituted employee compensation and taxable income to Allen Weisselberg,” but it claims he hadn’t reported that additional $359,058 in his taxes over the years.
Luxury Living On A Budget
The indictment also mentions “a family member” of the CFO who took part in “the scheme to defraud” the government by getting a company apartment—again, without reporting it on personal income taxes.
This, too, stemmed from the Barry-Jennifer divorce case. Investigators found that the CFO’s son, a fellow Trump Organization employee in charge of its Wollman ice skating rink at Central Park, was keeping his official salary artificially low. In his divorce case, Barry Weisselberg testified that he didn’t even get a monetary raise in years, and according to investigators, he received the extra compensation in the form of fringe benefits.
The documents lay it out. Barry and Jennifer Weisselberg’s joint 2010 tax return lists his combined “wages, salaries, and tips” at $132,811. In New York, that’s enough for a couple to live in a comfortable one-bedroom apartment in Queens with a view of the city.
But in actuality, the Weisselbergs were staying at the ritzy 100 Central Park South, premium real estate at a coveted spot in the heart of Manhattan. The cost of living at the Trump-owned building is several times higher than what Weisselberg could afford on that salary, where monthly rent nowadays ranges from $5,300 to $20,000.
The answer? Donald Trump picked up the tab for more than six years.
“It was a corporate apartment, so we didn’t have rent,” Barry Weisselberg said in his deposition.
His wife’s lawyer kept pressing with questions to reveal the value of this luxurious corporate perk.
“What would the rent have been if that apartment would have been rented to a third party?” Petroske asked.
“I have no idea,” Barry Weisselberg replied.
When asked whether he’d reported the apartment perk on his taxes from 2005 to 2011, he said he didn’t “recall.”
This is the same arrangement that the longtime Trump ice rink manager had for his next place: a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s expensive Upper East Side, on the same block as the Trump Plaza building.
In his divorce deposition, Barry Weisselberg described this other spot as “a corporate apartment” and said he simply didn’t know who was paying the rent, if it were being paid at all.
In the indictment, prosecutors said that second apartment also “constituted income” that should have been taxes, but that the Trump Organization “intentionally failed to do so.”
Barry Weisselberg was not charged in last week’s indictment, but the investigation is ongoing and the government could still target him. It’s a looming threat that could be understood as a strategy: applying additional pressure on the CFO, so that he cooperates with law enforcement to spare his son from the probe.
All The Way To The Top
The Manhattan District Attorney and New York Attorney General, which have struck a rare partnership to prosecute this together, have hinted that there’s more to come. Questions asked of witnesses, who spoke to The Daily Beast on condition of anonymity, show that investigators are interested in other executives as well.
And as the current case centers on questions about untaxed “fringe benefits,” the DA and AG will have to prove who tweaked salaries—and whether they knew about tax rules.
Once again, Jennifer Weisselberg’s divorce case shows the path.
Barry Weisselberg’s testified that his pay—which remained flat for “numerous years” while the corporate perks added up—was decided by his own father, Allen Weisselberg, and Trump’s Chief Operating Officer, Matthew Calamari.
Trump’s bodyguard-turned-COO was not named in the indictment, nor has he been charged with a crime. But investigators are probing Calamari’s activity, according to two people familiar with the investigation.
Prosecutors also have reason to examine Trump’s involvement more closely as well. In his divorce testimony, Barry Weisselberg made clear that his pay was once determined by the head honcho himself.
“Personally Donald Trump would make that decision?” his wife’s lawyer asked.
“Yes,” Barry Weisselberg responded.
Trump only stopped personally overseeing the skating rink manager’s pay when Trump became president of the United States, Barry Weisselberg claimed. If true, that would rope in Trump, who called himself “king of the tax code” for years and is now trying to walk that back and play dumb.
A Familiar Name
In the several boxes of evidence that investigators received from Jennifer Weisselberg, they came across one name they knew well: Donald Bender.
For years, the DA’s office had been seeking Trump’s tax returns held at his trusted outside accounting firm, Mazars USA. The Trump Organization had them prepared by Bender, a partner at Mazars USA’s Long Island office, and always in close consultation with Allen Weisselberg, according to a source familiar with the arrangement.
Jennifer Weisselberg’s records show that Bender also prepared the couple’s taxes back in 2009 and 2010, when he was at a previous iteration of the firm.
Jennifer Weisselberg’s lawyer, Duncan Levin, credited his client with gifting investigators a mountain of evidence.
“Jen has shown a great deal of bravery in coming forward with the information that she has,” he said. “She has been 100 percent cooperative with prosecutors for many months. She’s met with prosecutors more than a half dozen times, and has really done a thorough job of culling through a huge volume of materials to give to prosecutors. I’m very confident she is a pivotal witness to the district attorney’s office and in large measure responsible for where things stand today.”
Jennifer Weisselberg told The Daily Beast that her guiding principle was the example that her actions would set for her kids.
“Justice matters to me,” she said. “I always wanted to teach my kids right from wrong. Accountability. And that if you don’t cheat and lie, you can still succeed with dignity.”
Read more at The Daily Beast.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-family-secrets-fueling-the-trump-organization-indictment?source=articles&via=rss
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/family-secrets-fueling-trump-organization-081114422.html
How Do You Stop Robocalls?
An F.C.C. rule that went into effect last month is meant to help put a stop to those relentless calls about your extended warranty, and others.
By Christine Hauser
July 12, 2021, 6:04 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/article/stop-robocalls-scam-fcc.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
The calls look vaguely familiar, as if they could be coming from a neighbor’s phone. Sometimes they’re ominous warnings about your Social Security number. A friendly voice pretends to be concerned about the warranty on a car you don’t have.
Americans get millions of illegal robocalls every month, despite attempts by the telecommunications industry and government agencies to stop them.
The latest effort by the Federal Communications Commission — the government agency that regulates communications — to cut down on the calls uses a technology called Stir/Shaken, which went into effect on June 30. While it has nothing to do with James Bond and martinis, it is meant to add to the arsenal of defenses against “bad guys” who trick people.
Here’s how it works.
What is the F.C.C. doing to stop scam calls?
In short, the F.C.C. is trying to make sure that if you’re getting a call, the network on which it is being made is verifying the caller. Many unwelcome calls that fill your screen are scams that try to get money, or that manipulate the caller ID to appear as if a government agency or a neighbor is on the line, a disguise called spoofing.
The F.C.C.’s first step was setting a June 30 deadline for what it calls “voice service providers” (you know them as phone companies) to register their efforts to reduce the scourge of scams in a public Robocall Mitigation Database. So far, more than 1,500 of them have, the F.C.C. said.
Starting on Sept. 28, phone companies must refuse calls from providers that have not registered with the F.C.C.
At the center of the effort is Stir/Shaken, the technology that aims to verify calls as they move through networks to recipients. (The name Stir/Shaken is derived from Secure Telephone Identity Revisited and Signature-Based Handling of Asserted Information Using Tokens. You can see why they went with the nickname.)
“This is a good day for American consumers who — like all of us — are sick and tired of illegal spoofed robocalls,” Jessica Rosenworcel, the commission’s acting chairwoman, said in a June 30 statement.
But she warned there was “no silver bullet in the endless fight against scammers.”
How to recognize a scam
The industry has been trying to deter phone infiltrators for years. The nation’s largest providers, including T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon, announced in 2019 that they had been experimenting with Stir/Shaken. Tools like block functions, or apps like Robokiller, have been created to address the problem.
But the calls kept coming.
The F.C.C. hopes to get all providers, including smaller regional networks, on board. That would reduce spoofing by verifying calls as they pass through different networks, from the caller to the recipient.
While some robocalls are legal — such as recorded messages about school closings and political campaigns — most are not, according to industry estimates.
YouMail, a call-blocking company, estimates that 4.4 billion robocalls were placed to consumers in the United States in June, about 573 million of them auto warranty and health-related scams.
The scams often keep in step with seasons or events. On Friday, Katherine Fernández Rundle, the state attorney for Miami-Dade County, warned people about unsolicited calls from charities claiming to help the victims and families of Champlain Towers South, the condo building that partly collapsed in Surfside, Fla.
“Unfortunately, even in these most devastating moments, there are some individuals who may see the kindness and generosity of our community as a potential source of easy cash by running a charitable scam,” she said.
This year, there was a rise in vaccine-related scams. Health insurance scams appeared around enrollment periods, the F.C.C. said. The F.C.C. said it received the most complaints about auto warranty scams.
“Seeing a local number or the name of a government agency or local law enforcement may, unfortunately, encourage consumers to answer the call and to trust, or fear, the robocallers,” Will Wiquist, an F.C.C. spokesman, said.
The new plan is not a silver bullet
Some businesses legitimately use caller ID to show their switchboard number or toll-free number, rather than a specific department or extension.
Scammers exploit that by creating a spoof ID that looks as if it is coming from a police station or another neighborhood source.
The Stir/Shaken technology targets that manipulation. The carrier uses it to create a digital signature that authenticates the number’s path from start to finish, said Jim McEachern, the principal technologist for Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions, which focuses on industry problems.
“At the end they can say ‘Ah, this call is actually from this number,’” he said. “There is end-to-end verification, which gives you insight into the caller and how legitimate they are.”
“The key thing here is it was never intended to be a silver bullet,” he said, speaking of the F.C.C.’s new push with Stir/Shaken. “It was intended to be a tool to help.”
Add tools to your arsenal
Mr. McEachern said if someone knocked on your door wearing a mask, you’d be unlikely to answer. If they show their face and identification you can still get scammed, “but you have a whole lot of information to work with,” he said.
Alex Quilici, the chief executive of YouMail, the call blocking company, said “bad guys” could create a scam behind authentic numbers that are conveyed to the consumer as verified.
“Stir/Shaken is supposed to stop calls from spoofed phone numbers,” he said. “It is a significant speed bump. But it is not a wall.”
The approach should be a layered defense. Unwanted sales calls can be blocked by registering your phone number on the National Do Not Call Registry. Phone companies offer verification labeling on cellphones or indicate that it is a likely scam. Apps can block a scam call or dump it in voice mail.
It is also important to understand the policy of federal departments. One scam showed the IRS and its toll-free number as the caller ID, the F.C.C. said. But the Internal Revenue Service does not initiate contact that way, or by email, texts or social media, or demand payment by threatening a police or immigration response.
You can report a scam call to the Federal Trade Commission, which will analyze it to identify trends used by illegal callers. If you have lost money to a scam, it should be reported to the Federal Trade Commission, the consumer protection agency. (Use ReportFraud.ftc.gov. )
Mr. McEachern said he never trusts a call, such as from a bank or credit card company, that he does not initiate. Instead, he might call back using the number on his card. Another red flag is if someone demands money or information using pressure. And if an offer sounds too good to be true, he said, it probably is.
Apps can be helpful, but like email scams and computer viruses, new phone scams will emerge. Mr. McEachern likened Stir/Shaken to putting security lights outside your house, only to find an intruder had ferreted out an alternative dark place.
“It is going to be a moving target,” he said.
Christine Hauser is a reporter, covering national and foreign news. Her previous jobs in the newsroom include stints in Business covering financial markets and on the Metro desk in the police bureau. @ChristineNYT
https://www.nytimes.com/article/stop-robocalls-scam-fcc.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
Trump lawyers might be penalized over Michigan election case
By ED WHITE
today
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-government-and-politics-elections-michigan-e45f806062edd8a7ba81cefd8f3f2638
DETROIT (AP) — A federal judge is considering whether to order financial penalties or other sanctions against some of former President Donald Trump’s lawyers who signed onto a lawsuit last year challenging Michigan’s election results.
The lawsuit alleging widespread fraud was voluntarily dropped after a judge in December found nothing A federal judge is considering whether to order financial penalties or other sanctions against some of former President Donald Trump’s lawyers who sibut “speculation and conjecture” that votes for Trump somehow were destroyed or switched to votes for Joe Biden, who won Michigan by 2.8 percentage points.
Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and the city of Detroit now want the plaintiffs and a raft of attorneys, including Trump allies Sidney Powell and L. Lin Wood, to face the consequences of pursuing what they call frivolous claims.
“It was never about winning on the merits of the claims, but rather (the) purpose was to undermine the integrity of the election results and the people’s trust in the electoral process and in government,” the attorney general’s office said in a court filing.
U.S. District Judge Linda Parker in Detroit is holding a hearing by video conference Monday.
There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Indeed, election officials from both political parties have stated publicly that the election went well, and international observers confirmed there were no serious irregularities.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of six Republican voters who wanted Parker to decertify Michigan’s election results and impound voting machines. The judge declined, calling the request “stunning in its scope and breathtaking in its reach.”
The case appeared to be mostly handled by Detroit-area attorneys. But the lawsuit also carried the names of Powell, Wood and four more lawyers from outside Michigan.
The roles of Powell and Wood are unclear; they never filed a formal appearance in the case, according to the docket. But they’ve been targeted in the request for penalties.
Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, also a Democrat, want the state to receive at least $11,000 in legal fees. Detroit is asking the judge to disgorge any money that lawyers have collected through a post-election fundraising campaign. The city also wants the lawyers to face disciplinary hearings in their respective states.
In response, attorney Stefanie Lambert Junttila insisted there was plenty of evidence to support the lawsuit.
“They are a new form of political retribution,” she said of possible sanctions. “Such abuse of the law has no place in this court and is contrary to the law it hypocritically invokes.”
In New York, Rudy Giuliani has been suspended from practicing law because he made false statements while trying to get courts to overturn Trump’s election loss.
___
Follow Ed White at http://twitter.com/edwritez
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-government-and-politics-elections-michigan-e45f806062edd8a7ba81cefd8f3f2638
Spooked review: exposé of murky world of private spies is a dodgy dossier itself
Barry Meier brings distasteful characters and episodes to light but is happy to leave out that which does not suit his aims
Charles Kaiser
Sun 11 Jul 2021 01.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/11/spooked-review-private-spies-steele-dossier-russia-trump-black-cube
When Christopher Steele’s dossier about Donald Trump’s connections to Russia was published by BuzzFeed News, the salacious part got more attention than anything else.
But there was something else several reporters thought was much more intriguing: a description of a meeting between Carter Page, a Trump aide, and Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin collaborator and head of the Russian energy giant Rosneft.
The dossier reported that Sechin “was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered PAGE/TRUMP’s associates the brokerage of up to a 19% (privatised) stake in Rosneft in return. PAGE had expressed interest and confirmed that were TRUMP elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.”
As the Mueller report pointed out, the dossier was wrong about the identity of the Rosneft official Page met: it was actually one of Sechin’s deputies, Andrey Baranov. The dossier was also off by half a percentage point about the size of the privatization.
But just five months after Page’s Moscow meeting, Rosneft did in fact announce the privatization of 19.5% of the giant company, the largest privatization in Russian history. And Carter Page flew to Moscow the day after the deal was announced, for reasons that remain shrouded in mystery.
Reuters assigned no fewer than 11 reporters to try to find out who actually purchased the shares in the company and where the financing came from. But the resulting story said the “full identity of the new owners of the Rosneft stake” remained “a mystery”, as did “the complete source of the funds with which they bought it”.
In testimony before the House intelligence committee, Page denied discussing “specifics” about sanctions with the Rosneft official. But when he was asked if they discussed the privatization of the energy giant, he said Baranov “may briefly have mentioned it”.
As Martin Longman wrote for Washington Monthly: “When we try to assess whether the Steele dossier is ‘fake news’, as [Trump] insists that it is, we should keep this Rosneft deal in mind. Someone who was just making things up and didn’t have real sources could never have invented something so close to the truth.”
Spooked, by the former New York Times reporter Barry Meier, identifies the Trump dossier as one of its three principal subjects. One might think Steele’s correct prediction of an imminent privatization of Rosneft, and Page’s confirmation that he “may” have been told about it five months before it happened, would at least deserve a paragraph. But only a glancing reference to this story appears.
Asked about this omission, Meier cited an FBI report that quoted a “sub-source” of Steele’s “primary sub-source”, who said there was no evidence Page had been involved in any kind of bribery scheme. Meier concluded there was no evidence that Page had done anything wrong, so he omitted the whole subject.
Another reason for the omission is that including it might have contributed to a more nuanced view of the Steele dossier. Nuance is not one of Meier’s specialties.
Steele was a collaborator of Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who became a private spy. The purpose of Meier’s book is to prove that all private spies are evil, a clear and present danger to ethical journalists like himself. He says he wrote the book because he “wanted to understand how a predatory industry was operating unchecked”.
While Meier never hesitates to attack the speculations of other reporters, the author treats his own guesses as dispositive. He dismisses the idea of an incriminating tape of Trump with Moscow prostitutes because “blackmail works best when only a few people know about it”. If such a tape actually existed, “it was unlikely it would have been the talk of Moscow”. Therefore, it should have been “clear from the start” to Steele that there was a “basic problem with the story”.
However, actual Russian experts have reached the opposite conclusion. John le Carré, for one, told told the New York Times: “As far as Trump, I would suspect they have [kompromat] because they’ve denied it. If they have it and they’ve set Trump up, they’d say, ‘Oh no, we haven’t got anything.’ But to Trump they’re saying, ‘Aren’t we being kind to you?’”
Meier told the Guardian the fact the tape has never become public is another reason to believe it doesn’t exist.
Spooked is both a clip job, frequently relying on other people’s stories, and a hatchet job, making its subjects as unattractive as possible. Meier disparages anyone who has written a story which hasn’t been confirmed by other news outlets, including a reporter for this newspaper.
No detail is too small to contribute to the author’s character assassinations. Simpson, he writes, “had an unhealthy pallor, the apparent result of too much drinking, too little exercise or both … he appeared stiff and slightly robotic”. Simpson is said to have thrown frequent parties in Washington “fueled by lots of alcohol and plenty of pot”.
The book does describe some genuinely loathsome activities, including the alliance between the law firm of the noted litigator David Boies and Black Cube, a private investigation company that employed former Israeli spies.
Boies claimed he was unaware of his firm’s deal with Black Cube, which promised a $300,000 bonus if it stopped the New York Times publishing an exposé of Harvey Weinstein. After Ronan Farrow published details of the deal in the New Yorker, it turned out Boies was representing the Times in an unrelated libel case. The newspaper immediately cut ties.
Meier includes dozens of other anecdotes that make private spies look very bad. But nearly all have been reported elsewhere, usually with more coherent narratives.
Not surprisingly, two of the book’s principal victims, Simpson and Peter Fritsch, hit back as soon as Spooked was published, alleging Meier had repeatedly asked them for help in his reporting.
Meier acknowledges this at the end of his book, writing: “While I was at the New York Times, I spoke with Glenn Simpson on several occasions though I don’t recall writing anything based on our discussions.” He insisted to the Guardian that the one tip he got from Simpson about the location of court documents pointed him in the wrong direction.
Simpson and Fritsch also accuse Meier of an obvious conflict of interest, because an excerpt from Spooked was published in the business section of the Times, which is edited by Meier’s wife, Ellen Pollock.
Meier told the Guardian there was no conflict, because his wife hadn’t commissioned the excerpt. That was done by one of her colleagues.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/11/spooked-review-private-spies-steele-dossier-russia-trump-black-cube
Baby gets go-ahead for world’s most expensive drug from NHS
NHS approved to use gene therapy to treat baby born with spinal muscular atrophy
Clea Skopeliti
Sun 11 Jul 2021 02.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jul/11/baby-gets-go-ahead-for-worlds-most-expensive-drug-from-nhs
The parents of a baby with a fatal condition have succeeded in their campaign for their son to be treated with the world’s most expensive drug.
A new gene therapy, Zolgensma, will be used to treat 10-month-old Edward, from Colchester, who has severe spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), after his parents were given the green light earlier this week. The genetic condition, which is caused by a missing protein, weakens the muscles and affects movement and breathing.
About 65 babies are born with SMA in England each year, and most do not live past the age of two without intervention.
Edward’s mother, Megan Willis, who campaigned for her baby to be given the treatment, which costs £1.79m per patient, told the Guardian she was “thankful and ecstatic” to get the news on Wednesday.
“I’m exhausted. It’s been such a long ride and a rollercoaster,” the 29-year-old said. “When I think back to myself in November, newly diagnosed, I didn’t think there was an option for him – I thought he was dying because that’s that all it said when I read up on SMA, that 95% of children die, or are severely disabled. I didn’t think he had a future.”
The drug contains a copy of the missing gene SMN1, allowing it to halt the condition’s progression. Willis said that after learning about the treatment, the family had a “glimmer of hope” but felt crushed when they learned the extortionate cost of the treatment. After “countless sleepless” night she felt hugely relieved to get the news that the NHS would treat Edward by the middle of August.
As the drug is far more effective when administered at a young age, “time is massively of the essence”, Willis said. “Zolgensma just transforms a baby – it just really does. Children are walking, talking, eating, standing. It’s incredible.”
Edward, who was diagnosed at two months, is currently being treated with Spinraza, which is administered by injection every four months. Unlike the one-off injection of Zolgensma, it is a treatment carried out for life.
Zolgensma was approved for use by the NHS in March, but guidelines set by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence said it should only be used for babies under six months old who were not already being treated. However, it added a decision on whether to give it to other babies, including those who like Edward were already receiving other treatment, would be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
“We are so lucky,” Willis said. “Edward has a future whereas so many children before him didn’t have options. We’re in a new age of SMA. The fact that it is an option to our children is a blessing.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jul/11/baby-gets-go-ahead-for-worlds-most-expensive-drug-from-nhs
The Jan. 6 Capitol attack was, in fact, a violent insurrection
Opinion by the Editorial Board
Yesterday at 8:00 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/10/jan-6-capitol-attack-was-fact-violent-insurrection/
In the six months since the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, former president Donald Trump has played down the violence, even painting the insurrectionists as the victims. But the facts prosecutors have revealed since this national disgrace suggest that the insurrection was actually better planned and more dangerous than it seemed on live television.
The Justice Department announced this week that law enforcement authorities have arrested more than 535 people, an average of about three every day since Jan. 6. The rioters did $1.5 million of damage to the Capitol building. The insurrectionists allegedly assaulted some 140 police officers. So far, authorities have charged 50 people with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer. But far more appear to have been involved: The FBI is still trying to identify more than 300 people investigators believe committed violent acts, including more than 200 believed to have assaulted police officers. These were not tourists.
Court documents unsealed Thursday, relating to the June 30 arrest of four Florida residents, provided harrowing details of some of these alleged assaults. One of the defendants allegedly “charged the line of police officers and began throwing punches.” Another allegedly stole a police officer’s shield after he pulled the officer down the Capitol steps, then charged into a police line. And another allegedly thrust a flagpole into an officer’s chest, before raising it over his head and apparently striking an officer in the back of his head. The attack resulted in the death of one police officer, and 138 were reported injured.
These are just a few of countless examples of mayhem that have emerged since Jan. 6. Indeed, the alleged violence was not just directed at police. Authorities have arrested six people for assaulting journalists or destroying their equipment.
Prosecutors also argue that the havoc was far from spontaneous, assembling evidence that far-right activists planned for violence, even preparing a “quick reaction force” site. Testimony from alleged participants suggests that members of the Oath Keepers stashed guns in a Virginia hotel, brought paramilitary gear, used military-style formations to assault the Capitol, conducted tactical training meetings in advance of Jan. 6 and moved to erase what they described as “all signal comms about the op” afterward.
Because Republican senators rejected a Jan. 6 commission, some questions about the assault might never be answered definitively, such as exactly what Mr. Trump did and did not do while insurrectionists attacked lawmakers. But prosecutors are showing that this was not some run-of-the-mill riot; it was a violent incursion into the nation’s seat of government conducted by dangerous extremists and encouraged by the president, who asked them to descend on Washington. This should not be another issue for partisan disagreement. No American should minimize or forget the horror of Jan. 6.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/10/jan-6-capitol-attack-was-fact-violent-insurrection/
Texas Republicans rush to guard the Alamo from the facts
Opinion by Jason Stanford
July 5, 2021|Updated July 5, 2021 at 6:15 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/05/texas-republicans-rush-guard-alamo-facts/
Jason Stanford is the Austin-based writer of the Substack newsletter the Experiment and the co-author, with Bryan Burrough and Chris Tomlinson, of “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth.”
With more than 300 RSVPs, the event hosted by the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin was shaping up to be the highlight of our virtual book tour for “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth.” But about four hours before showtime last Thursday, my co-authors, Bryan Burrough and Chris Tomlinson, and I received an email from our publisher. The Bullock had backed out, citing “increased pressure on social media.” Apparently, the state history museum was no place to discuss state history.
This isn’t how things are supposed to work, even in Texas, but the truth turned out to be even worse. The state history museum wasn’t bowing to social media pressure but to political pressure from the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, who claimed credit for the kill the next day.
“As a member of the Preservation Board, I told staff to cancel this event as soon as I found out about it,” tweeted Patrick, adding, “This fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place @BullockMuseum.”
Minor umbrage compels me to defend the book as well as the museum, which currently is hosting a Jim Crow exhibition. As The Post noted in its review of our book, we “challenge the traditional view” of the Alamo saga, one popularized by Disney and John Wayne and cemented by politicians in the Texas school curriculum.
The Heroic Anglo Narrative is that in 1836, about 200 Texians (as White settlers were known, to distinguish them from Tejanos) fought a doomed battle at a Spanish mission in San Antonio against thousands of Mexican troops, buying Gen. Sam Houston enough time to defeat tyranny in the form of Mexican ruler Santa Anna and win freedom for Texas. The myth leaves much out, most notably that Texians opposed Mexican laws that would free the enslaved workers they needed to farm cotton.
Politicians barricading the figurative doors of the Alamo in defense of the myth are nothing new. In 2018, a panel reviewing the state history curriculum suggested not requiring seventh-graders to learn that those who died at the Alamo were “heroic.” Republican state political leaders, including Sen. Ted Cruz and Land Commissioner George P. Bush — the nephew and grandson of presidents and the state officeholder with oversight of the historic site — reacted as if the Alamo were once again besieged.
“Stop political correctness in our schools,” tweeted the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott. “Of course Texas schoolchildren should be taught that Alamo defenders were ‘Heroic’!”
In the past few years, the boogeyman for these self-appointed defenders of ersatz history has evolved from a generalized “political correctness” to the New York Times’s 1619 Project and other efforts to center slavery and the role of racism in the American story. More than 20 states have introduced or passed legislation that attempts to prescribe how racial matters can be taught. In Texas last month, Abbott signed into law an act establishing a committee called the 1836 Project (get it?) to “promote patriotic education.”
Texas conservatives continue to appear quite exercised about the possibility of public-school students learning more about slavery and racism. So much so that Abbott has added further discussion about a ban on the teaching of critical race theory to the agenda for an upcoming special legislative session.
This is the political flotsam in which our virtual book event was snagged. A couple of days before the scheduled talk, the head of a right-wing think tank in Austin took to Twitter to attack the Bullock Museum for using public resources to provide a platform for our “trashy non-history book,” taking care to tag the governor, lieutenant governor and house speaker. They sit on the State Preservation Board, which oversees the museum.
On the day of the event, July 1, the think tank posted: “Like the New York Times’s debunked 1619 Project, this is an effort to diminish the great figures of history and place slavery at the center of every story.” As it happens, several of the central figures in the story of the Alamo, including William Barret Travis and Jim Bowie, either enslaved people or had attested to the importance of slavery. A few hours after the think tank’s post, the event was canceled.
I’ll leave it to First Amendment scholars to say whether forbidding a state facility to host a conversation because of the contents of a book constitutes censorship. As a Texan, I’m just embarrassed to be governed by politicians who quaver at the prospect of a single uncomfortable conversation. If Texans were tough enough to fight at the Alamo, they should be tough enough to talk about why.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/05/texas-republicans-rush-guard-alamo-facts/
Inside the FBI, Russia, and Ukraine’s failed cybercrime investigation
Russia and Ukraine promised to cooperate and help catch the world’s most successful hackers. But things didn’t quite go to plan.
by Patrick Howell O'Neillarchive page
July 8, 2021
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/08/1027999/fbi-russia-ukraine-cybercrime-investigation-ransomware/
The American cops took the slower, cheaper train from Kyiv to Donetsk.
After repeatedly traveling between Ukraine and the United States, there were more comfortable ways to make this final, 400-mile journey. But the five FBI agents felt like luxury tourists compared to most travelers onboard. They could afford spacious private rooms while locals were sleeping 10 to a cabin. The train moved haltingly, past empty country and villages that, to the Americans at least, looked as if they’d been frozen in the Cold War.
The overnight trek was set to take 12 hours, but it had truly begun two years earlier, in 2008, at the FBI offices in Omaha, Nebraska. That’s where the agents had started trying to understand a cybercrime explosion that was targeting Americans and pulling in millions of dollars from victims. At that point, with at least $79 million stolen, it was by far the biggest cybercrime case the FBI had ever seen. Even today, there are few to match its scale.
Bit by bit, the American investigators began to sketch a picture of the culprits. Soon Operation Trident Breach, as they called it, homed in on a highly advanced organized-crime operation that was based in Eastern Europe but had global reach. As evidence came in from around the world, the Bureau and its international partners slowly put names and faces to the gang and started plotting the next step.
As the train made its way across Ukraine, Jim Craig, who was leading his very first case with the FBI, couldn’t sleep. He passed the time moving between his cabin and the drinks car, a baroque affair with velvet curtains. Craig stayed awake for the entire trip, staring out the window into the darkness as the country passed by.
For more than a year, Craig had traveled all over Ukraine to build a relationship between the American, Ukrainian, and Russian governments. It had been an unprecedented effort to work together and knock down the rapidly metastasizing cybercrime underworld. US agents exchanged intelligence with their Ukrainian and Russian counterparts, they drank together, and they planned a sweeping international law enforcement action.
That moment of unity is worth remembering today.
It would be a wild understatement to say that in the decade since Craig took that trip to Ukraine, cybercrime has grown dramatically. Last month, Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin made the ransomware crisis—which has struck governments, hospitals, and even a major American oil pipeline—a centerpiece of their first face-to-face summit. Now that critical infrastructure is being hit, the Americans are calling on Moscow to control the criminals within Russia’s borders. During that meeting, in response to new pressure from Washington, Putin talked to Biden about doing more to track down cybercriminals.
“Criminal activity rising to the level of international summits shows you the degree to which the threat has grown,” says Michael Daniel, the former White House cybersecurity coordinator for Barack Obama. “It also shows that the current international situation is not at equilibrium. It’s not sustainable.”
Days later, the head of Russia’s FSB intelligence agency said the country would work with the United States to find and prosecute cybercriminals. Inside the White House, top American officials are figuring out what to do next. Some are deeply skeptical and think that Moscow would rather turn requests for help on cybercrime into recruiting opportunities than aid an American investigation.
To begin to understand why they are so concerned, we have to go back to the investigation that put Jim Craig on that train in Ukraine in 2010, and to the case that had him meeting Russian agents and planning raids in Moscow and other cities across multiple countries.
The operation was a unique chance to disrupt one of the world’s most successful cybercrime gangs. It was an opportunity to put away some of the most important operators in the vast underground hacking economy operating in Russia and Ukraine. It was so important, in fact, that the agents began referring to September 29, 2010—the day of planned coordinated police raids in Ukraine, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—as D-Day.
That was also the day when things went sideways.
Larger than life
Operation Trident Breach had dozens of targets worldwide. Three men were at the top of the list.
First was Evgeniy Bogachev, a prolific hacker known as “Slavik.” A Russian with a contradictory taste for anonymity and outrageous luxury, he wrote a piece of malware called Zeus. It infected computers with the goal of silently opening the door to people’s bank accounts. And it was a hit: simple, stealthy, effective, regularly updated, able to compromise all sorts of targets, and flexible enough to fit into any kind of cybercrime operation.
The investigation detailed how Bogachev had used Zeus to build an opaque cybercriminal empire with the kind of precision and ambition that felt more characteristic of a multinational corporation.
Second on Trident Breach’s list was one of Bogachev’s most important customers, Vyacheslav Penchukov. A Ukrainian known online as “Tank,” he ran his own criminal hacking crew using the Zeus malware, purchasing it from Bogachev for thousands of dollars per copy and raking in millions in profit. He’d assembled a crew that used a particularly tasty flavor of the program that integrated with the instant messaging software Jabber. It gave the hackers instant updates on their efforts: when an infection occurred, clients got a message and then moved the money as desired—as easy as that.
The third target was Maksim Yakubets, a Russian known as “Aqua,” who orchestrated a massive laundering operation. Using thousands of accomplices and front companies, he moved money stolen from hacked bank accounts back to Eastern Europe.
Tank’s crew ran out of Donetsk, a city of nearly a million people in southeast Ukraine. They would use Zeus to drain bank accounts and send the money to mules in the target countries, including the United States—who would then wire the proceeds to Ukraine.
The rise of this kind of professional operation, combining the nimble smarts of tech startups and the callousness of organized crime, might seem to have been inevitable. Today, the ransomware business makes headlines daily, and its hacker entrepreneurs rely on a whole sub-industry of white-glove criminal services. But in the mid-2000s, organizations like this were extremely unusual: the Zeus crew was a pioneer.
Tank was so closely involved in directing the inner workings of the scheme that for a time, the FBI thought he was in charge. It eventually became clear, however, that Tank was Slavik’s VIP customer—and apparently the only one who talked personally to Bogachev himself.
Tank “would always be the first person to receive alerts,” says Jason Passwaters, a former FBI contractor who worked for years in both the US and Europe on the case. “Somebody would get popped, and it would be a particularly juicy one. He’d be the first to go into the bank account, say ‘We’ve got a good one,’ and then he’d pass it along to others to do the more manual work.”
Tank was no enigma to the feds. He had a family that was growing increasingly used to wealth and a very public side hustle as “DJ Slava Rich,” playing sweaty midnight raves drenched in neon lights. The agents hoped that the confidence to live so large would be his downfall.
Vodka diplomacy
To catch Tank, the FBI needed to expand its reach. The criminal operation they were targeting spanned the globe: there were victims and money mules in the United States and Europe, and the attacks were directed by kingpins and hackers across Ukraine and Russia. The FBI needed help from their counterparts in those two countries.
Securing those partnerships wasn’t easy. When Craig arrived in Kyiv, he was told that Russian FSB agents hadn’t set foot inside Ukraine since the Orange Revolution of 2004, when anticorruption protests reversed the country’s fraudulent presidential election results. But now he needed everyone in the same room.
Their inaugural in-person meeting took place at the boutique Opera Hotel in Kyiv. The conversations were tentative, mutual trust was low, and expectations were even lower. To Craig’s surprise, though, the four Russian agents who came were friendly and encouraging. They said they wanted to exchange information on hackers of interest and even offered to bring FBI agents into Russia to get a closer look at suspects.
The Americans explained that the driving engine of their investigation was a Jabber chat server they had located and started watching in 2009. It gave them a peek into the Zeus crew’s communications; details about operations and business deals appeared next to personal chatter about toys and expensive vacations that the crew had bought with the proceeds of their crimes.
Passwaters—now a cofounder and executive at the American cybersecurity firm Intel 471, where Craig also works—says it was practically a full-time job to review the chat logs and share the information with the FSB and the SBU, Ukraine’s chief security and intelligence service.
In April 2010, as he was sifting through the data, Passwaters saw a message he’d never forget. Another hacker had written to Tank: “You guys are fucked. The FBI is watching. I’ve seen the logs.”
Passwaters knew the logs in question were the ones he was reading at that exact moment—and that their existence was known only to a handful of agents. Somehow, they had been leaked. The agents suspected Ukrainian corruption.
“What was obvious was that someone within the unit privy to key details of the case had passed information on to the very cybercriminals that were being investigated,” says one former SBU officer, who spoke to MIT Technology Review on the condition of anonymity. “Even the terminology used in their conversation was uncommon for cybercriminals and appeared to have come straight from a case file."
Tank’s initial reaction was fear, especially at the possibility of being sent to the United States. But Passwaters remembers that the person who tipped Tank off then tried to calm him in another message: “This is the life we chose. Live by the sword, die by the sword."
Tank’s next reaction was strange. Instead of immediately burning the server and moving operations elsewhere, as the FBI expected, he and his crew changed their nicknames but continued to use the compromised system for another month. Eventually, the server went dark. But by then, the investigation seemed to have gained unstoppable momentum.
In June 2010, about 20 officers from multiple countries met in the woods outside Kyiv at an outrageously opulent residence owned by SBU director Valeriy Khoroshkovsky. The house was often used by the agency to entertain its most important visitors. Everyone gathered in a lavish conference room to plan the particulars of D-Day. They discussed the suspects in detail, went over the roles each agency would play, and traded information about the operation’s targets.
After a day of planning, the drinks started to flow. The group sat down to a multicourse dinner served with wine and vodka. No matter how much they drank, their glasses stayed full. Each person was obligated to give a toast during the marathon event. After the festivities, the SBU officers took their counterparts on a tour of the city. The Americans don’t remember much about what they saw.
The next morning, despite the vodka ringing in their ears, the overall plan was clear enough. On September 29, police from five countries—the US, the UK, Ukraine, Russia, and the Netherlands—would simultaneously arrest dozens of suspects in an operation that promised to outshine all cybercrime investigations before it.
Headaches
The air was dark and malignant when Agent Craig and his team arrived in Donetsk on the train. Nearby, coal plants were burning, identifiable by the mark their smoke left on the sky. As the agents drove to the upscale Donbass Palace Hotel, Craig thought of the Russian border, just an hour away.
His mind turned to the Jabber Zeus victims he had met back in America. A woman in Illinois had her bank account drained while her husband was on life support; a small business in Seattle had lost all its money and shut its doors; a Catholic diocese in Chicago got hit, and a bank account operated by nuns was emptied. No one was spared.
When they arrived at their hotel, there was no time to rest. The Americans waited for the SBU—which was now in charge, since the operation was taking place in its own backyard—to give the green light.
But nothing happened. The Ukrainians pushed the date back again and again. The Americans started to wonder what was causing the delays. Was it the kind of dysfunction that can strike any complex law enforcement investigation, or was it something more worrying?
“We were supposed to be down there for two days,” says Craig. “We were down there for weeks. They kept delaying, delaying, delaying.”
The SBU said agents were trailing Tank around the city, watching closely as he moved between nightclubs and his apartment. Then, in early October, the Ukrainian surveillance team said they’d lost him.
The Americans were unhappy, and a little surprised. But they were also resigned to what they saw as the realities of working in Ukraine. The country had a notorious corruption problem. The running joke was that it was easy to find the SBU’s anticorruption unit—just look for the parking lot full of BMWs.
Although Tank was no longer in their sights, the Ukrainians were still tracking five of his lieutenants. The local police seemed ready to change gears. The SBU suddenly gave the green light, and the raids began.
Knock knock
It was the dead of night when Craig’s team made its first stop at the apartment of Ivan Klepikov, known as “petr0vich.” He was the crew’s systems administrator, handling technical duties behind the scenes—mundane but critical work that kept the criminal operation running.
The SBU’s heavily armed SWAT team breached Klepikov’s door but kept the unarmed Americans waiting outside the apartment. When Craig finally got inside, Klepikov was sitting comfortably in the living room in his underwear and a smoking jacket. The Ukrainians asked Craig to introduce himself. The implied threat was that the cops might send Klepikov to the United States, which has much harsher criminal sentencing laws than most of the world. But the Ukrainian constitution forbids extradition of citizens. Klepikov’s wife, meanwhile, held their baby in the kitchen and laughed as she spoke with other officers on the raid. Klepikov was taken into custody by police.
Next, the operation moved on to Tank’s apartment. The same pattern took place: SBU officers went inside first, while the FBI agents waited outside. Once Craig was allowed in, Tank was missing and the apartment looked unnaturally clean—as though a maid had just been through, he thought. “It was quite obvious no one had been there for a few days,” Craig says.
He thought back to reports from just a few hours earlier, when the Ukrainian surveillance team said they were tracking Tank and had intelligence that the suspect had been at home recently. None of it seemed believable.
Five individuals were detained in Ukraine on that night, but when it came to Tank, who police alleged was in charge of the operation, they left empty-handed. And none of the five people arrested in Ukraine stayed in custody for long.
Somehow, the operation in Ukraine—a two-year international effort to catch the biggest cybercriminals on the FBI’s radar—had gone sideways. Tank had slipped away while under SBU surveillance, while the other major players deftly avoided serious consequences for their crimes. Craig and his team were livid.
But if the situation in Ukraine was frustrating, things were even worse in Russia, where the FBI had no one on the ground. Trust between the Americans and Russians had never been very strong. Early in the investigation, the Russians had waved the FBI off Slavik’s identity.
“They try to push you off target,” Craig says. “But we play those games knowing what’s going to happen. We’re very loose with what we send them anyway, and even if you know something, you try to push it to them to see if they’ll cooperate. And when they don’t—oh, no surprise.”
Even so, while the raids happened in Donetsk, the Americans hoped they would get a call from Russia about an FSB raid on the residence of Aqua, the money launderer Maksim Yakubets. Instead, there was silence.
The operation had its successes—dozens of lower-level operators were arrested across Ukraine, the United States, and the United Kingdom, including some of Tank’s personal friends who helped move stolen money out of England. But a maddening mixture of corruption, rivalry, and stonewalling had left Operation Trident Breach without its top targets.
“It came down to D-Day, and we got ghosted,” Craig says. “The SBU tried to communicate with [the Russians]. The FBI was making phone calls to the embassy in Moscow. It was complete silence. We ended up doing the operation anyway, without the FSB. It was months of silence. Nothing.”
Well-connected criminals
Not everyone in the SBU drives a BMW.
After the raids, some Ukrainian officials, who were unhappy with the corruption and leaks happening within the country’s security services, concluded that the 2010 Donetsk raid against Tank and the Jabber Zeus crew failed because of a tip from a corrupt SBU officer named Alexander Khodakovsky.
At the time, Khodakovsky was the chief of an SBU SWAT unit in Donetsk known as Alpha team. It was the same group that led the raids for Trident Breach. He also helped coordinate law enforcement across the region, which allowed him to tell suspects in advance to prepare for searches or destroy evidence, according to the former SBU officer who spoke to MIT Technology Review anonymously.
When Russia and Ukraine went to war in 2014, Khodakovsky defected. He became a leader in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, which NATO says receives financial and military aid from Moscow.
The problem wasn’t just one corrupt officer, though. The Ukrainian investigation into—and legal proceedings against—Tank and his crew continued after the raids. But they were carefully handled to make sure he stayed free, the former SBU officer explains.
“Through his corrupt links among SBU management, Tank arranged that all further legal proceedings against him were conducted by the SBU Donetsk field office instead of SBU HQ in Kyiv, and eventually managed to have the case discontinued there,” the former officer says. The SBU, FBI, and FSB did not respond to requests for comment.
Tank, it emerged, was deeply entangled with Ukrainian officials linked to Russia’s government—including Ukraine’s former president Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in 2014.
Yanukovych’s youngest son, Viktor Jr., was the godfather to Tank’s daughter. Yanukovych Jr. died in 2015 when his Volkswagen minivan fell through the ice on a lake in Russia, and his father remains in exile there after being convicted of treason by a Ukrainian court.
When Yanukovych fled east, Tank moved west to Kyiv, where he is believed to represent some of the former president’s interests, along with his own business ventures.
“Through this association with the president’s family, Tank managed to develop corrupt links into the top tiers of Ukrainian government, including law enforcement,” the SBU officer explains.
Ever since Yanukovych was deposed, Ukraine’s new leadership has turned more decisively toward the West.
“The reality is corruption is a major challenge to stopping cybercrime, and it can go up pretty high,” Passwaters says. “But after more than 10 years working with Ukrainians to combat cybercrime, I can say there are plenty of really good people in the trenches silently working on the right side of this fight. They are key."
Warmer relations with Washington were a major catalyst for the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine. Now, as Kyiv tries to join NATO, one of the conditions of membership is eliminating corruption. The country has lately cooperated with Americans on cybercrime investigations to a degree that would have been unimaginable in 2010. But corruption is still widespread.
“Ukraine overall is more active in combating cybercrime in recent years,” says the former SBU officer. “But only when we see criminals really getting punished would I say that the situation has changed at its root. Now, very often we see public relations stunts that do not result in cybercriminals’ ceasing their activities. Announcing some takedowns, conducting some searches, but then releasing everyone involved and letting them continue operating is not a proper way of tackling cybercrime.”
And Tank’s links to power have not gone away. Enmeshed with the powerful Yanukovych family, which is itself closely aligned with Russia, he remains free.
A looming threat
On June 23, FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov was quoted as saying his agency would work with the Americans to track down criminal hackers. It didn’t take long for two particular Russian names to come up.
Even after the 2010 raids took down a big chunk of his business, Bogachev continued to be a prominent cybercrime entrepreneur. He put together a new crime ring called the Business Club; it soon grew into a behemoth, stealing more than $100 million that was divided among its members. The group moved from hacking bank accounts to deploying some of the first modern ransomware, with a tool called CryptoLocker, by 2013. Once again, Bogachev was at the center of the evolution of a new kind of cybercrime.
Around the same time, researchers from the Dutch cybersecurity firm Fox-IT who were looking closely at Bogachev’s malware saw that it was not just attacking targets at random. The malware was also quietly looking for information on military services, intelligence agencies, and police in countries including Georgia, Turkey, Syria, and Ukraine—close neighbors and geopolitical rivals to Russia. It became clear that he wasn’t just working from inside Russia, but his malware actually hunted for intelligence on Moscow’s behalf.
The exact details of Bogachev’s relationship with Russian intelligence agencies is unknown, but experts say it looks as if those authorities used his worldwide network of more than 1 million hacked computers as a powerful spying tool.
Today, the FBI offers a $3 million reward for information leading to Bogachev’s arrest. It’s a small fraction of the total amount he’s stolen, but the second-highest reward for a hacker ever. He remains free.
Weeks after the Russians went silent during the Donetsk raids, a search warrant was belatedly executed in Moscow on Maksim Yakubets. The Russians shared only a fraction of the information the Americans asked for, Craig says. So in 2019, the FBI offered a $5 million reward for Yakubets’ arrest, officially topping the bounty on Bogachev as the Americans’ biggest reward for a hacker.
Even with such a price tag on his head, Yakubets has remained free and even expanded his operations. He’s now wanted for running his own cybercrime empire—a group he branded Evil Corp. According to a 2019 indictment, it is responsible for at least $100 million in theft. In the two years since, that number has grown: today, the syndicate is one of the world’s top ransomware gangs.
And, like Bogachev, Yakubets seems to be doing more than just profit-seeking. According to the US Treasury Department, which has imposed sanctions on Evil Corp, he had begun working for the Russian FSB by 2017. “To bolster its malicious cyber operations, the FSB cultivates and co-opts criminal hackers,” the 2019 sanctions announcement said, “enabling them to engage in disruptive ransomware attacks and phishing campaigns.”
Given this—and the history of Trident Breach—Washington officials were deeply skeptical when Bortnikov offered the FSB’s assistance. Few in the US government believe what Moscow says, and vice versa. But still, there is some hope in Washington that the calculus driving the Kremlin’s decisions is changing.
“We feel like we have emerged from this trip with a common strategy with our allies,” said US national security advisor Jake Sullivan in a press conference following the Biden-Putin summit, “As well as having laid down some clear markers with Russia, some clear expectations, and also communicated to them the capacities that we have should they choose not to take action against criminals who are attacking our critical infrastructure from Russian soil.”
Translation: The White House is applying pressure on the Kremlin as never before. But how much does that change the math for Moscow? From President Biden down, the Americans have never devoted as much energy, money, and staff resources to fighting hacking as they are doing today. Now the Americans are wondering if they could actually see the FSB make arrests.
A sacrificial lamb or two from the Russians is one thing, but what would it take to actually solve the problem of cybercrime? What will Washington do to follow through, and how much pain is Moscow willing to endure?
“There have been some tactical wins over the years, but to this day I still see some of the same folks pop up again and again,” Passwaters says. “We call them the ‘old wolves’ of cybercrime. I personally think that if Tank, Aqua, and Slavik had been nabbed in 2010, things would look quite a bit different today. But the reality is cybercrime will continue to be a massive problem until it is accepted as the serious national security threat that it is.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/08/1027999/fbi-russia-ukraine-cybercrime-investigation-ransomware/
Covid news – live: Government adviser warns of mutation risk as doctors voice concern over rising cases
Sam Hancock 33 mins ago
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/covid-news-%E2%80%93-live-doctors-profoundly-concerned-about-19-july-amid-dramatic-rise-in-cases/ar-AALZwsv
There is a risk of more coronavirus mutations developing as cases continue to rise across the UK, a government adviser has warned.
Dr Mike Tildesley said the rise in infections “challenges the virus” and gives it the opportunity to mutate into a form which could make vaccines less effective.
“We need to be careful. We can’t just say once we’ve broken the link between cases and hospital admissions that we are pretty much safe and no-one gets really sick so it’s fine to have a big wave of cases,” he told Times Radio earlier.
It comes as the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AoMRC) warned Covid-19 will get worse before it gets better as cases continue to rise “dramatically” across the UK. Bosses said in a statement that despite vaccines preventing spikes in hospital admissions and deaths, people should continue to take measures such as wearing face masks indoors.
Boris Johnson is expected to confirm on Monday that stage four of England’s roadmap out of lockdown will go ahead in nine days.
Key points
Rising Covid cases increase mutation risk, warns govt adviser
Covid ‘to get worse before it gets better,’ warn doctors
Pfizer boss ‘comfortable’ with easing measures but will ‘continue to wear a mask’
Medical leader ‘concerned’ about 19 July end of restrictions
Vaccine passports ‘could be mandatory in pubs, bars and restaurants’
Covid in Scotland ‘really quite fragile,’ professor admits
...
MORE
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/covid-news-%E2%80%93-live-doctors-profoundly-concerned-about-19-july-amid-dramatic-rise-in-cases/ar-AALZwsv
Donald Trump’s Lawyers Believed Rudy Giuliani Was Always DRUNK
By Jacky On Jul 10, 2021
https://whatsnew2day.com/donald-trumps-lawyers-believed-rudy-giuliani-was-always-drunk/
According to an explosive new book by Michael Wolff, Donald Trump’s aides believed Rudy Giuliani was usually drunk and on the verge of senility.
The former president’s personal lawyer regularly demonstrated “focus problems, memory problems” and “simple logical errors” while serving in the White House, it is alleged.
Wolff wrote in Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump: “Giuliani was, many in the Trump circle thought, always buzzed, if not, in the sense Steve Bannon made famous in the Trump White House, hopeless” in the mumble tank”.
“Many believed he had the beginnings of senility: difficulty concentrating, memory problems, simple logical errors. An enormous disorganization of papers and files and technical failures followed in its wake.’
Giuliani was Trump’s personal attorney. His license to practice in Washington DC was recently revoked
The book – an excerpt of which was obtained by Business Insider — said the former New York mayor’s weight “lifted” during Trump’s tenure.
Quoting administration insiders, Wolff added that “his popping eyes and poorly dyed hair made him look like a pre-television-era character, a former government official of his day and hanging at the seams around the courthouse steps and anyone who will listen rejoices. with tall tales and wild theories about the shameful secrets and gothic underbelly of politics’.
Trump’s personal attorney was infamously filmed with hair dye dripping down his face during a speech at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia, where he reiterated baseless allegations that the 2020 presidential election had been “rigged.”
Wolff said Giuliani’s life was “supported in a special way by his presence on television” and that he enjoyed unrestricted access to Trump by telling him only what he wanted to hear.
Wolff made the claims in Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency
He added that despite their best efforts, Trump’s aides were unable to stop Giuliani from appearing in the White House, especially after the loss of his boss.
Wolff wrote that he could see the former president whenever he wanted because he was “willing to tell Trump not just that he could do what he wanted to do, but that he could move on” and “offered Trump an enormous amount of power, right, and discretion than even Trump himself thought possible.”
The book claims that despite his loyalty, Trump would criticize his lawyer by accusing him of being drunk and saying things that weren’t true.
“But Rudy would fight,” Wolff wrote. “He could be counted on to fight, even if others wouldn’t. And he would work for free too.’
The report – which Giuliani has not yet commented on – emerged when an appeals court suspended him from practicing law in Washington DC after he was temporarily out of license for making “demonstrably false” statements in court. regarding the 2020 elections.
The Washington court suspended Giuliani, 77, from working as a lawyer in the city “pending the final decision” of his New York case, according to disciplinary court records obtained by CNN.
Giuliani was suspended last month by an appeals court in New York for making “demonstrably false and misleading statements” while pushing Donald Trump’s election fraud allegations and “threatening the public interest.”
.....
MUCH MORE
https://whatsnew2day.com/donald-trumps-lawyers-believed-rudy-giuliani-was-always-drunk/
The insane 'path to Trump' conspiracy theory whiteboard used by Mike Lindell and Michael Flynn showing a maze of 'connections' between the ex-president and Jesus, Bill Barr, Ivanka, Bobby Kennedy Sr. and Lin Wood
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9764987/MyPillow-CEO-Mike-Lindell-Michael-Flynn-pose-bizarre-path-Trump-diagram.html
CPAC Contestant Hands Out Seven-Point Plan To Install Donald Trump In White House
By Jacky On Jul 10, 2021
https://whatsnew2day.com/cpac-contestant-hands-out-seven-point-plan-to-install-donald-trump-in-white-house/
Andrew Solender @AndrewSolender CPAC attendee sent me this pic of a card they were handed about a “7-pt. plan to restore Donald J. Trump in days, not years,” which involves installing Trump as speaker and ousting Biden & Harris.
10:35 PM · Jul 9, 2021 from Washington, DC·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
https://twitter.com/AndrewSolender/status/1413612849952395265
Trump in Days, Not Years!
https://media.patriotssoar.com/pdf/TrumpInDays.pdf
Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews ·19h ! ALERT - newly released video court exhibit in US Capitol Insurrection case appears to show police being dragged into the mob.
Trigger warning on this video... it's difficult to watch. This footage was released by US Justice Dept under court order
VIDEO
! ALERT - newly released video court exhibit in US Capitol Insurrection case appears to show police being dragged into the mob.
— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) July 9, 2021
Trigger warning on this video... it's difficult to watch. This footage was released by US Justice Dept under court order pic.twitter.com/1ZPw9yB2ji
! ALERT - newly released video court exhibit in US Capitol Insurrection case appears to show police being dragged into the mob.
— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) July 9, 2021
Trigger warning on this video... it's difficult to watch. This footage was released by US Justice Dept under court order pic.twitter.com/1ZPw9yB2ji
Mitch McConnell, naked and afraid
Opinion by Dana Milbank Columnist
July 9, 2021|Updated yesterday at 4:38 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/09/mcconnell-biden-desert-island/
On rare occasions, Mitch McConnell can summon the ability to mimic human emotions.
Ten days ago, for example, the Senate Republican leader was asked, at a Chamber of Commerce event, to imagine: “You’re stranded on a desert island and you can only have one companion. Your choices are Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter. Who do you choose?
McConnell had little hesitation. “Biden and I did four bipartisan deals during the Obama administration. I consider him a personal friend,” he said. “I was the only Republican who went to his son Beau’s funeral. So that would be an easy choice. I think Biden is a first-rate person.”
McConnell’s desert-island answer gave me the unfortunate mental image of the two septuagenarians competing together on Discovery’s reality TV show “Naked and Afraid,” in which an unclothed pair are dropped in the wilderness for 21 days with only one survival item apiece. For reasons of good taste, I picture our contestants clothed: marooned Biden wearing Ray-Bans and shirtsleeves and marooned McConnell in pinstriped suit. Biden’s survival item is a cup for boiling water. McConnell’s survival item is a filibuster. Instead of squabbling over campsite placement, they’re bickering about covid relief.
That’s just what our two castaways did this week. At an event in his home state, McConnell complained about Biden’s “wildly out of proportion” $2 trillion American Rescue Plan — while in the same breath mentioning what a boon it will be for Kentucky: “Not a single member of my party voted for it,” he said. “I didn’t vote for it. But you’re going to get a lot more money. Cities and counties in Kentucky are getting close to seven or 800 million dollars. If you add up the total amount that’ll come into our state, $4 billion, that’s twice what we sent in last year.”
I hate this windfall that will be so awesome for my constituents!
McConnell’s struggle for coherence prompted Biden to needle his desert-island pal. “Mitch McConnell loves our programs,” he teased. “He’s bragging about it in Kentucky.”
The confusion isn’t limited to covid relief. McConnell takes every opportunity to undermine this “first-rate person” and “personal friend” — both politically and personally.
McConnell waited more than five weeks before acknowledging Biden’s victory, allowing Donald Trump and his allies to delegitimize Biden — and the election — in the eyes of tens of millions of Trump supporters. McConnell didn’t speak up because he wanted Republicans to win Senate runoffs in Georgia. “Look, we need the president in Georgia and so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now,” McConnell told the attorney general, according to Jonathan Karl of ABC News.
McConnell withheld support for the new Senate’s organizing resolution for weeks, delaying consideration of his friend Biden’s nominees.
Asked about Trump’s election lies, McConnell instead attacked his friend. “One hundred percent of my focus is on stopping this new administration,” he said, also tagging friend Biden with the “socialist” moniker.
McConnell vowed to fight the covid relief legislation “in every way that we can.” He filibustered bipartisan legislation to create a commission to examine the Jan. 6 insurrection. He filibustered equal-pay legislation requiring employers to show that they don’t discriminate against women. He filibustered voting rights legislation and upended bipartisan talks on legislation to address police brutality.
He has so far failed to endorse bipartisan infrastructure legislation, while saying he would wage a “hell of a fight” if Democrats go it alone.
And he stands by as his staff portrays Biden as senile. McConnell aides “have taken to describing the White House chief of staff as ‘Prime Minister Klain,’” the Hill reported, attempting “to undercut public perception of Biden as a leader who is totally with it.”
With friends like these …
McConnell is not a man you’d want in your foxhole — or on your desert island. But his treachery would make for good television. I propose a “Naked and Afraid” spinoff: "In the Swamp.”
Episode One: Biden erects a tent. McConnell knocks it down. Biden builds a hut. McConnell burns it down. Biden digs a shelter in the ground. McConnell fills it with scorpions and snakes.
Episode Two: The survivalists go fishing. Biden spears a fish. Biden goes foraging for kindling to cook the fish but returns to discover that McConnell has eaten the whole fish raw. McConnell blames Biden for his upset stomach.
Episode Three: McConnell introduces Biden to an orangutan he has befriended with blaze-orange fur. The orangutan destroys their camp, eats all their food, contaminates their water supply, then attacks the Discovery camera crew. But McConnell tells Biden he cannot stop the orangutan because there is a Senate runoff in Georgia.
Episode Four: Biden “taps out” and calls for a helicopter evacuation. McConnell, chased by the orangutan, clambers aboard, too. The men have survived only three days together. Each ends with a PSR (Primitive Survival Rating) score of zero.
Opinion by Dana Milbank
Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/09/mcconnell-biden-desert-island/
Biden’s bid to take on big business sets off battle over who holds power in U.S. economy
The order outlines 72 initiatives to rein in the corporate powerhouses that control markets, which the White House links to higher prices and fewer choices for consumers
By Jeff Stein, Aaron Gregg and Cat Zakrzewski
July 9, 2021|Updated today at 6:29 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/09/biden-executive-order-promoting-competition/
President Biden signed an executive order on Friday taking aim at industries where certain companies dominate the market, kicking off a major new battle between the administration and corporate titans that could reshape aspects of the U.S. economy.
The executive order — which contains 72 initiatives — is striking in its scope and ambition, challenging the business practices of America’s enormous technology, health-care, agricultural and manufacturing firms while also aiming to shake up smaller sectors dominated by only a handful of companies, such as the hearing aid industry.
“The heart of American capitalism is a simple idea: open and fair competition,” Biden said in remarks before signing the order, accompanied by several members of his Cabinet. “…Competition keeps the economy moving and keeps it growing. Fair competition is why capitalism has been the world’s greatest force for prosperity and growth.”
The effort reflects a major change in Democratic policymaking circles, where a new generation of economists has produced research and advocacy arguing that corporate consolidation has harmed workers and consumers. It also tees up a major challenge for the administration, which is likely to face sharp resistance from businesses that may seek relief through courts that have shown skepticism about competition arguments in the past.
Late last month, for instance, a federal court threw out antitrust cases brought against Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general.
What’s more, many big companies have only grown in power in the past 18 months, as size became a major asset in navigating the financial and economic turbulence of the coronavirus pandemic.
The executive order identifies a wide range of sectors that it says are in need of reform.
It encourages federal regulators to craft new rules on tech companies’ data collection and user surveillance practices, targeting the path that such giants as Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon took to dominance. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Biden wants to reduce broadband providers’ market control by restoring net neutrality rules that were dropped during the Trump administration and limiting their ability to cut exclusive deals with landlords.
The order also tells the Food and Drug Administration to work toward allowing the importation of cheaper drugs from Canada and calls for new rules limiting “noncompete” agreements, which prevent employees from switching jobs.
Other recommendations include compelling airlines to disclose “add-on fees” for seating and baggage and making it easier for consumers to get refunds on flights, as well as requiring banks to let customers take their financial transaction data when they switch to a competitor. The order also aims to allow hearing aids to be sold over the counter, which Biden said Friday would save consumers hundreds of dollars.
Perhaps the most impactful part of the order relates to Silicon Valley. It recommends greater scrutiny of acquisitions by major tech companies, especially those of nascent rivals. That focus comes after the Federal Trade Commission brought an antitrust complaint against Facebook last year challenging its purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram. A federal judge last month dismissed that suit, but the FTC can refile it within 30 days.
FTC Chair Lina Khan, who appeared beside Biden as he signed the order, and Richard A. Powers, the acting chief of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, said Friday that they would launch a joint review of merger guidelines, with the goal of making them more rigorous.
“The current guidelines deserve a hard look to determine whether they are overly permissive,” they said in a joint statement.
The order also calls on the FTC to set new rules to combat “unfair competition” in online marketplaces. Critics have raised concerns about the dual role that tech companies like Amazon and Apple play as marketplace operators and participants within them, competing with smaller retailers or app developers. Congressional investigators in a report last year called out Amazon’s relationship with third-party sellers, accusing the company of exploiting its access to their data and information.
The Biden administration also wants to see new guidelines on surveillance and the accumulation of data in the wake of major privacy scandals involving data held by Facebook and other tech titans. The order also encourages the restoration of Obama-era net neutrality rules, which require Internet providers to treat all Web traffic equally. And it calls on the Federal Communications Commission to revive plans to implement a “broadband nutrition label,” which would make clearer how much people are paying for Internet service.
Khan, a prominent tech critic, took the helm of the FTC last month, which suggests some directives are likely to be issued. However, key vacancies in other top tech regulation roles may impede implementation of the order. Biden has yet to name someone to run the Justice Department’s antitrust division or install an FCC chair. The FCC currently is deadlocked, with two Democratic commissioners and two Republicans.
The order does not itself put these policies into effect, and none will be enacted overnight. Instead, it directs federal agencies to begin work on their own rules, a process that probably would lead to a comment period, which experts say can take three or four months. The administration also is issuing only recommendations to independent agencies crucial to much of the antitrust push, such as the FTC, that are not subject to directives from the White House.
The FTC probably can limit noncompetes only “on the margins,” diminishing its effectiveness, but Biden’s support bolsters bipartisan legislation on the matter currently moving through Congress, said John Lettieri, president of the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan public policy organization. “This is just a first step,” Lettieri said.
An issue once confined to the liberal fringe, antitrust policy has entered the center of political life and played a major role in the 2020 Democratic presidential race amid increasing concerns about the political and economic clout of a handful of private actors.
The White House’s executive order states that 75 percent of U.S. industries are more consolidated than they were 20 years ago. That, officials say, has helped triple prices for many household necessities, while making it harder for workers to bargain against competing employers for better wages and benefits.
A growing body of evidence has pointed to corporate consolidation as a culprit in persistently stagnant wages and the decline of the American middle class. A 2018 study in the Harvard Law Review found that median compensation for workers would be as much as $10,000 higher if markets were less concentrated. A University of Chicago paper in 2016 found that the decline in workers’ share of corporate income is largely tied to increasing corporate consolidation.
“This represents a massive change in how mainstream Democrats are thinking about the economy. It identifies concentrated corporate power — something both parties previously encouraged — as actually contributing to a broad range of harms for workers, innovation, prosperity and a resilient democracy overall,” said Sarah Miller, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, which supports antitrust efforts.
“This is not a Warren or a Sanders administration, but they have fully embraced the need to take on concentrated corporate power across the economy.”
Conservatives are likely to blast the measure as ineffective and excessive government intervention in private markets. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican budget expert, said the executive order was “all over the place” — pointing to the wide discrepancy in impact between incremental measures, such as limiting excessive broadband fees, and massive changes, such as unwinding prior corporate mergers.
“There’s a presumption of lack of competition but no evidence of it, and we’re going to do something on the presumption — which is not a great way to do business,” Holtz-Eakin said. “They provide no evidence this is going to change quality of competition.”
The Biden administration brought in experts with ties to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party to help spearhead the order, including Bharat Ramamurti, deputy director of the White House National Economic Council; Tim Wu, an National Economic Council antitrust advocate; and Hannah Garden-Monheit, a senior policy adviser for the council.
Ramamurti was a senior aide to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), while Wu is a longtime critic of Big Tech at Columbia University. Council Director Brian Deese also was closely involved in the process.
Business groups are likely to oppose sweeping regulations that emerge from this order. But any new regulations will probably be ironed out within each implementing agency, giving the affected industries time to provide input.
Neil Bradley, chief policy officer for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, accused Biden of taking a “government-knows-best approach” with the order. He noted that large and small businesses are both needed for the economy to thrive, and he said the business lobby opposes “centralized government dictates” to plan the economy.
“The Chamber always will applaud efforts to promote small business, and we will vigorously oppose calls for government-set prices, onerous and legally questionable rulemakings, efforts to treat innovative industries as public utilities, and the politicization of antitrust enforcement,” he said in a statement.
Other liberal economic experts are skeptical about the extent to which antitrust and other pro-competition practices will genuinely boost worker power and wages. While acknowledging the importance of antitrust policy, some experts say there’s a need to reverse the decades-long decline in union density among workers — and Biden’s labor agenda, including the Pro Act, is largely stalled in Congress.
“This will do some things — it all seems fine to me — but will it increase wage growth for the bottom fifth of workers? I doubt it,” said Matt Bruenig, founder of the People’s Policy Project, a left-leaning think tank. “The most important thing for workers’ wages is that they are able to coordinate what they’ll be — to do that you need better union laws — and the dynamics of competition within firms is a much less significant factor.”
Parts of the plan won some bipartisan praise Friday. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), a conservative, told KSN-TV that farmers had been hurt by the consolidation of meatpacking plants, adding, “I do think that this executive order is going to help Kansas farmers and ranchers.”
Marshall Steinbaum, an economist at the University of Utah, said the executive order reflects growing skepticism of big business. While prominent left-leaning and union-affiliated Democrats have long made campaign talking points out of curbing the abuses of big business, elements within the Republican Party are now increasingly critical of business executives.
“The White House is responding to the growing evidence of the overwhelming corporate control of every aspect of the economy,” Steinbaum said. “Since the 1970s, the bipartisan consensus has been that corporate power is not a big problem and monopolies will take care of themselves. … This really reflects an ideological transformation.”
By Jeff Stein
Jeff Stein is the White House economics reporter for The Washington Post. He was a crime reporter for the Syracuse Post-Standard and, in 2014, founded the local news nonprofit the Ithaca Voice in Upstate New York. He was also a reporter for Vox. Twitter
By Aaron Gregg
Business reporter Twitter
Image without a caption
By Cat Zakrzewski
Cat Zakrzewski is a technology policy reporter and authors the Washington Post's Technology 202 newsletter. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/09/biden-executive-order-promoting-competition/
Biden fires head of Social Security Administration, a Trump holdover who drew the ire of Democrats
By Lisa Rein
July 9, 2021|Updated yesterday at 6:20 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/andrew-saul-social-security-/2021/07/09/c18a34fa-df99-11eb-a501-0e69b5d012e5_story.html
President Biden on Friday fired Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul, a holdover from the Trump administration who had alienated crucial Democratic constituencies with policies designed to clamp down benefits and an uncompromising anti-union stance.
Saul was fired after refusing a request to resign, White House officials said. His deputy, David Black, who was also appointed by former president Donald Trump, resigned Friday upon request.
Biden named Kilolo Kijakazi, the current deputy commissioner for retirement and disability policy, to serve as acting commissioner until a permanent nominee is selected.
But Saul said in an interview Friday afternoon that he would not leave his post, challenging the legality of the White House move to oust him. As the head of an independent agency whose leadership does not normally change with a new administration, Saul’s six-year term was supposed to last until January 2025. The White House said a recent Supreme Court ruling gives the president power to replace him.
Saul disputed that. “I consider myself the term-protected Commissioner of Social Security,” he said, adding that he plans to be back at work on Monday morning, signing in remotely from his New York home. He called his ouster a “Friday Night Massacre.”
“This was the first I or my deputy knew this was coming,” Saul said of the email he received from the White House Personnel Office Friday morning. “It was a bolt of lightning no one expected. And right now it’s left the agency in complete turmoil.”
Saul’s firing came after a tumultuous six-month tenure in the Biden administration during which advocates for the elderly and the disabled, and Democrats on Capitol Hill pressured the White House to dismiss him. He had clashed with labor unions that represent his 60,000 employees, who said he used union-busting tactics. Angry advocates say he dawdled while millions of disabled Americans waited for him to turn over files to the Internal Revenue Service to release their stimulus checks — and accused him of an overzealous campaign to make disabled people reestablish their eligibility for benefits.
“Since taking office, Commissioner Saul has undermined and politicized Social Security disability benefits, terminated the agency’s telework policy that was utilized by up to 25 percent of the agency’s workforce, not repaired SSA’s relationships with relevant Federal employee unions including in the context of COVID-19 workplace safety planning, reduced due process protections for benefits appeals hearings, and taken other actions that run contrary to the mission of the agency and the President’s policy agenda,” the White House said in a statement.
Saul, 74, a wealthy, former women’s apparel executive and prominent Republican donor — who served on the board of a conservative think tank that has called for cuts to Social Security benefits — had overseen one of the biggest operations in the federal government since his 2019 Senate confirmation. The Social Security Administration pays out more than $1 trillion a year to about 64 million beneficiaries, which include seniors, the disabled and low-income Americans.
In the interview, Saul described himself as “very upset” about his sudden dismissal and cited two years of progress modernizing the agency’s day-to-day operations on his watch, including digitizing online payments, replacing old information technology systems and reining in a workforce that had abused telework before the pandemic force him to send employees home to work.
“There was terrible abuse,” he said.
As word spread of Saul’s possible dismissal, congressional Republicans on Friday accused the administration of politicizing the Social Security Administration and noted that Saul had been confirmed by the Senate by a wide margin.
“This removal would be an unprecedented and dangerous politicization of the Social Security Administration,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tweeted.
The Social Security Administration, which began in 1935, was later folded into Health and Human Services but regained it status as an independent agency in the mid-1990s to insulate it from politics, with a commissioner’s six-year term designed to straddle White House administrations. Under the Social Security Act, an incoming president can fire the commissioner only for cause.
Last year, the court ruled that a law protecting the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from presidential supervision violated the separation of powers, leading Biden to remove Trump’s appointee his first day in office.
The court issued a similar decision in late June, ruling that the president has the authority to remove the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Biden replaced the Trump-appointed agency head on that same day.
The June decision raised the prospect that the head of the Social Security Administration would be next.
“The SSA has a single head with for-cause removal protection,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in an opinion, “so a betting person might wager that the agency's removal provision is next on the chopping block.”
After Biden was inaugurated, Saul shifted course somewhat to align his actions with the new president’s priorities. He boosted outreach to vulnerable populations to help them access benefits after applications plunged during the coronavirus pandemic and agreed to renegotiate contracts with the unions.
But his continued tenure alarmed many Democrats, who noted that the Trump holdover was in a position to put his imprint on one of the government’s biggest agencies.
“President Biden needs someone who can fulfill his promise of protecting and strengthening Social Security,” Rep. John B. Larson (D-Conn.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee’s Social Security subcommittee, said in an interview Thursday. “Here’s the nation’s most important insurance benefit.”
Alice Crites contributed to this report.
By Lisa Rein
Lisa Rein covers federal agencies and the management of government in the Biden administration. At The Washington Post, she has written about the federal workforce; state politics and government in Annapolis, and in Richmond; local government in Fairfax County, Va.; and the redevelopment of Washington and its neighborhoods. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/andrew-saul-social-security-/2021/07/09/c18a34fa-df99-11eb-a501-0e69b5d012e5_story.html
Biden Warns Putin to Act Against Ransomware Groups, or U.S. Will Strike Back
Mr. Biden’s phone call appeared to be a pointed ultimatum to stop the hackers, who have attacked computer networks in the United States with relative impunity.
By David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth
July 9, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/us/politics/biden-putin-ransomware-russia.html
President Biden warned President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Friday that time was running out for him to rein in the ransomware groups striking the United States, telegraphing that this could be Mr. Putin’s final chance to take action on Russia’s harboring of cybercriminals before the United States moved to dismantle the threat.
In Mr. Biden’s starkest warning yet, he conveyed in a phone call to Mr. Putin that the attacks would no longer be treated only as criminal acts, but as national security threats — and thus may provoke a far more severe response, administration officials said. It is a rationale that has echoes of the legal justification used by the United States and other nations when they cross inside another country’s borders to rout terrorist groups or drug cartels.
“I made it very clear to him that the United States expects, when a ransomware operation is coming from his soil, even though it’s not sponsored by the state, we expect them to act if we give them enough information to act on who that is,” Mr. Biden told reporters.
Later, as he was leaving for Delaware for the weekend, Mr. Biden appeared to specify one of the ways the United States could respond. Asked if it might attack the servers Russian cybercriminals have used to hijack American networks — meaning knock them offline — Mr. Biden responded, “Yes,” according to a pool report.
The heightened tension over the ransomware attacks highlights the complexity of a new type of conflict unfolding between the United States and Russia, one in which the well-established rules and understandings of the Cold War no longer apply. Administration officials say Mr. Biden is conscious of the need to avoid an escalating series of actions that could damage both nations, but also of maintaining his credibility after repeatedly warning Mr. Putin, so far without success.
The very nature of the attacks also makes responding and deterring them difficult. While the ransomware criminals in this case may be operating from Russian territory as they devise their attacks and collect their ransoms in cryptocurrency transactions, the attacks themselves can be launched from computer servers anywhere around the world. And unlike U.S. military incursions into Afghanistan to rout terrorists, or joint drug enforcement actions in Colombia or Mexico to dismantle drug cartels, the United States is not protected from retaliation by oceans or missile defenses when it comes to cyberattacks.
Mr. Biden is under increasing pressure to take action to stem the costly hacks that threaten critical American infrastructure. After weeks of generic warnings and diplomatic maneuvering, the phone call on Friday appeared to be a pointed ultimatum in advance of some kind of effort to dismantle the criminal enterprises that have threatened the flow of gasoline, the production of beef and now the networks that connect American businesses.
But that would be a complex and potentially risky task. Briefing reporters after the call between the two leaders, a senior administration official said any actions would be a mix of clandestine and public. “Some of them will be manifest and visible,” said the official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named, “some of them may not be. But we expect that those take place in the days and weeks ahead.”
Mr. Biden’s ultimatum was prompted by a sophisticated ransomware attack last weekend by the Russian-speaking ransomware group REvil, short for “Ransomware Evil,” that officials contend operates with impunity from inside Russia.
Friday’s call came only three weeks after the onslaught of ransomware attacks dominated their first summit, in Geneva. Immediately after that meeting, Mr. Biden said he told the Russian president he would respond “in a cyber way” against Russia if Mr. Putin failed to take action against groups operating on its territory.
But that three-hour meeting was largely a generic discussion of the issue, and an effort to convince Mr. Putin that the presence of the criminal cybergroups on Russian networks was not in Moscow’s interest, either. By calling right after REvil’s latest attack, he was essentially creating a test of Mr. Putin’s willingness to act. But Mr. Biden declined to say whether the United States had asked for specific action against individuals that it believes are part of REvil.
While the United States and Russia have long sparred over state-sponsored attacks — including the SolarWinds espionage operation by Russia’s elite S.V.R. intelligence agency, or the Russian military intelligence unit’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee and its release of embarrassing emails in 2016 — ransomware attacks are of a different nature. Administration officials fear that, if left unaddressed, they could cripple key sectors of the U.S. economy. And they suspect that Russian authorities are tolerating the groups — and sometimes dipping into their talent pool for intelligence and other cyberoperations.
The White House blamed a Russian ransomware group, called DarkSide, for the attack on Colonial Pipeline that halted gasoline and jet fuel deliveries up the East Coast this spring. REvil is believed to have been behind the attack against one of the country’s largest meat processors, JBS, that briefly shut down production in late May. The company paid REvil $11 million in cryptocurrency.
But REvil’s attack over the Fourth of July holiday was an escalation, officials said, not only for its timing, following the Geneva summit, but because the attack was unusually advanced in technique and aggressive in scope. Instead of targeting one company directly, REvil breached a Florida technology company that holds high-level access to tech firms that service thousands of other companies. Had the company, Kaseya, not caught the attack quickly, the effects could have been cataclysmic, officials and cybersecurity experts say.
Mr. Biden’s challenge to Mr. Putin could pose a major credibility test in coming weeks — and further escalate a Cold War-like series of confrontations between the United States and Russia, now fought in cyberspace rather than across the Berlin Wall.
Until recently, the United States has largely treated ransomware as a criminal problem, indicting leading actors if it could identify them. Few ever saw the inside of an American courtroom.
But the Colonial Pipeline attack crystallized a change in thinking. While the ransomware attack was aimed at the company’s business operations — encrypting data, then demanding millions of dollars for a key to decrypt it — the firm took the pre-emptive step of shutting down the pipeline. The attack set off panic buying and gas shortages and could have halted chemical refineries and mass transit had the shutdown lasted even two days longer. Mr. Biden and his staff grew increasingly alarmed, knowing that ransomware actors — and governments — learn from each attack and often accelerate them.
That sped a shift already underway toward treating cybercriminals like terrorists or cartels that pose a fundamental threat to the United States — and thus put the response into hands of U.S. Cyber Command, the military’s cyber arm, to disrupt their operations, even if that means acting on networks inside Russian territory. Mr. Biden handed Mr. Putin, in Geneva, the Department of Homeland Security’s list of 16 critical sectors, and warned him these had to be off-limits — the beginning of an effort to put what his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, called “guardrails” on malicious action.
Officials said Mr. Biden did not specify to Mr. Putin which actions the United States might take against a target. But based on recent history, he could order Cyber Command to shut down the group’s command and control servers, freeze their bank accounts or seize their cryptocurrency wallets to deprive them of the illicit gains of their ransom demands.
Cyber Command took similar action in the run-up to the 2020 election, when it feared a Russian criminal group, called TrickBot, might lease out its infrastructure to ransomware groups, or the state, to freeze voter registration data or other systems to disrupt the presidential election. More recently, the F.B.I. was able to grab back more than half of a $4 million ransom paid by Colonial Pipeline, in an operation still shrouded in some mystery.
But those moves failed to deter future attacks. After the TrickBot takedown, the group reassembled and its operators launched an aggressive ransomware assault on American hospitals. It froze patient records and prevented cancer patients from getting timely treatment.
And the F.B.I. seizure of a Bitcoin wallet used by Darkside did not deter REvil from accelerating its ransomware attacks. (The F.B.I. has yet to recoup a subsequent $11 million ransom that JBS, the meat producer, said it paid REvil in its attack).
Before gaining the attention of the White House, REvil accounted for less than ten percent of known ransomware victims; now it accounts for 42 percent, according to Recorded Future, a cybersecurity company.
“It might feel like this problem is new but it’s been exhausting security teams for years now,” said John Hultquist, a director of threat intelligence at FireEye. “Ransoms have exploded and actors have become more audacious. Where we are now was entirely predictable. It has been like watching a slow motion car crash.”
Inside the White House, Mr. Biden’s senior aides acknowledge that America’s cyberdefenses have been woefully neglected over the past three administrations, a period of time that includes Mr. Biden’s service as vice president. Now they say it is up to Mr. Biden to shore up those defenses and make adversaries, state or criminal, pay a price for attacks on American targets.
But unlike strong-arm states like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, the United States has less authority over how critical systems like gas, power and water — the vast majority of which are run by the private sector — are defended. Many still lack basic protections like multifactor authentication and still use decade-old software that software makers, like Microsoft, stopped patching long ago.
Until his administration finds a way to shore up its defense, the risk of blowback from a U.S. cyberstrike remains high. On Saturday, the same day REvil’s latest attack was underway, Mr. Putin pledged to “take symmetrical and asymmetric measures” to prevent “unfriendly actions” by foreign states.
As Michael Sulmeyer, now a senior adviser to U.S. Cyber Command, put it before he entered government, America still “lives in the glassiest of glass houses.”
Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.
David E. Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent. In a 38-year reporting career for The Times, he has been on three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. His newest book is “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age.” @SangerNYT • Facebook
Nicole Perlroth is a cybersecurity and digital espionage reporter. She is the bestselling author of the book, “This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends,” about the global cyber arms race. @nicoleperlroth
A version of this article appears in print on July 10, 2021, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Biden Cautions Putin to Control Cybercriminals. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/us/politics/biden-putin-ransomware-russia.html
Oath Keepers Leader Sits for F.B.I. Questioning Against Legal Advice
In a bold move, Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the right-wing militia group, sat for an interview with federal agents after they seized his phone in May.
By Alan Feuer
July 9, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/us/politics/stewart-rhodes-oath-keepers-fbi.html
It was shortly after federal agents confronted him in May outside a boutique hotel in Lubbock, Texas, seizing his cellphone with a warrant, that Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, made a bold decision: Even though he had just gotten undeniable proof that he was under investigation, he agreed to be questioned about his — and his militia’s — role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Against the advice of a lawyer, Mr. Rhodes spoke freely with the agents about the Capitol assault for nearly three hours, he said in an interview on Friday. Mr. Rhodes said that he denied that he or any other Oath Keepers had intended to disrupt Congress’s certification of the Electoral College vote — the chief accusation the government has lodged against 16 members of the group who are charged with conspiracy.
He also said he told the agents that members of his militia went into the building only after they had heard that someone had been shot inside and wanted to render aid. (A New York Times visual investigation of the events of Jan. 6 did not find evidence of Mr. Rhodes’s claims.)
“I did express frustration that some of my guys went in,” Mr. Rhodes said, noting that he told the F.B.I. that those who breached the Capitol had “gone off mission.” But then he quickly added, “There were zero instructions from me or leadership to do so.”
For months, the government has quietly acknowledged that investigators have been scrutinizing the role that Mr. Rhodes played in the Jan. 6 assault, but the fact that he voluntarily submitted to an F.B.I. interview was a new step in the inquiry. In court papers connected to the case of his associates, Mr. Rhodes has been identified as Person 1 and prosecutors have described how he was in direct communication with some suspects before, during and after the assault.
They have also said that he sent members of the group encrypted messages assuring them that “well-equipped Q.R.F.s” — or quick-reaction forces — would be standing by outside of Washington on Jan. 6 “in case of worst case scenarios.”
Speaking with investigators in the middle of a criminal inquiry is a risk even though Mr. Rhodes had a lawyer, Kellye SoRelle, present with him. Mr. Rhodes said that he was not the only Oath Keeper leader to have talked with federal agents in recent weeks. After he was questioned, one of his top lieutenants, a man he identified as Whip (and who is known as Person 10 in court papers), also spoke voluntarily with the F.B.I.
“We’ve got nothing to hide,” Mr. Rhodes explained. “We did nothing wrong.”
A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment on the interviews.
The revelation that two Oath Keeper leaders — who have not been charged — have been questioned by the F.B.I. comes at a kind of inflection point for the Oath Keepers’ case, one of the most prominent prosecutions stemming from the Capitol assault.
Earlier this month, most of the defendants challenged the viability of the government’s charges and one asked the presiding judge, Amit P. Mehta, to move his trial out of Washington, arguing that too many local residents suffered from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Judge Mehta issued an order on Tuesday saying that the 16 defendants would be tried in two groups, one tentatively set to begin in January, the other three months later.
At the same time, however, at least three Oath Keepers have pleaded guilty in the case and have agreed to cooperate with the government’s sprawling investigation of the group. At a recent hearing, prosecutors told Judge Mehta that they were in plea negotiations with several other members and could not rule out further charges.
Despite the flurry of activity, prosecutors overseeing the investigation of Mr. Rhodes have long admitted that they have struggled to make a case against him. His activities seemed to stay within the boundaries of the First Amendment, one official with knowledge of the matter said.
Known for his black eye patch — the result of a gun accident — Mr. Rhodes, who attended Yale Law School after serving in the military, founded the Oath Keepers in 2009, after the election of former President Barack Obama. For years, he has earned a reputation as a leader in the right-wing “patriot” movement, often spewing incendiary rhetoric.
But after Donald J. Trump was elected, he and his members seemed to pivot from their anti-government views and embrace the new spirit of nationalism and suspicions of a deep-state conspiracy that had taken root in Mr. Trump’s administration.
Mr. Rhodes was particularly vocal in supporting the former president’s repeated lies that the 2020 elections were marred by fraud and that President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory was illegitimate.
One week after Election Day, for instance, Mr. Rhodes told the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that he had men stationed outside Washington prepared to act at Mr. Trump’s command. And at a rally in the city on Dec. 12, he called on Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.
Then, two days before the Capitol attack, Mr. Rhodes issued a “call for action” on the Oath Keepers’ website, urging “all patriots who can be in D.C.” to “stand tall in support of President Trump’s fight to defeat the enemies foreign and domestic who are attempting a coup.”
In the same communiqué, he announced that the Oath Keepers would be sending “security teams” to provide protection to “V.I.P.s” at events surrounding the political rallies in Washington on the day before and the day of the riot. Members of the group, including some who have been charged, did work as guards for Mr. Trump’s close ally and adviser Roger J. Stone Jr.
Mr. Rhodes has long predicted his own arrest, noting at a speech at the Texas-Mexico border in March that he might face charges in connection with the Jan. 6 attack.
“I may go to jail soon,” he told the crowd. “Not for anything I actually did, but for made-up crimes.”
Alan Feuer covers courts and criminal justice for the Metro desk. He has written about mobsters, jails, police misconduct, wrongful convictions, government corruption and El Chapo, the jailed chief of the Sinaloa drug cartel. He joined The Times in 1999. @alanfeuer
A version of this article appears in print on July 10, 2021, Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: Leader of Militia Met F.B.I. To Tell of Role in Jan. 6 Riot. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/us/politics/stewart-rhodes-oath-keepers-fbi.html
Stewart Rhodes, founder of right-wing Oath Keepers militia, spotted at CPAC
Multiple federal agencies are investigating the Oath Keepers for their alleged role in the Jan. 6 insurrection
By ZACHARY PETRIZZO
PUBLISHED JULY 9, 2021 10:05PM (EDT) Salon
https://www.salon.com/2021/07/09/stewart-rhodes-founder-of-right-wing-oath-keepers-militia-spotted-at-cpac/?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
IMAGES
Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the right-wing Oath Keepers militia, was spotted by a Salon reporter at CPAC in Dallas Friday, sporting an official CPAC pass (left). (Zachary Petrizzo)
DALLAS — Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of right-wing militia group the Oath Keepers, was spotted by a Salon reporter Friday evening strolling the halls of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, Texas.
Multiple federal agencies are currently investigating the Oath Keepers for their alleged role in the planning and execution of the Jan. 6 insurrection — and though Rhodes did not himself enter the U.S. Capitol building that day, several members of his group did, according to news reports. As of this week, 16 Oath Keepers have been charged for their involvement in the storming of the Capitol building.
In the months since Jan. 6, Rhodes has voluntarily turned himself over for questioning by federal agents — against the advice of his attorneys, according to a New York Times. He reportedly told authorities that the only reason Oath Keeper members entered the Capitol that day was to provide aid after hearing someone inside had been shot, though the Times notes that an extensive investigation of visual evidence conducted by reporters was not able to verify the claims.
When asked why he was in attendance at the conservative conference, Rhodes quickly became enraged and yelled, "f**k off." A female associate, identified as Marcia Strickler on her CPAC pass, also came within inches of this reporter, yelling various obscenities.
CPAC security also approved Rhodes for an official pass, which was photographed by Salon Friday before the encounter.
Yet according to a high-ranking CPAC official that spoke with Salon exclusively on Friday evening, conference leaders have been in touch with federal law enforcement authorities to seek guidance as to whether Rhodes is considered a threat to attendees' safety and well being.
https://www.salon.com/2021/07/09/stewart-rhodes-founder-of-right-wing-oath-keepers-militia-spotted-at-cpac/?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4
The long read : The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?
Caffeine makes us more energetic, efficient and faster. But we have become so dependent that we need it just to get to our baseline
by Michael Pollan
Tue 6 Jul 2021 01.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/jul/06/caffeine-coffee-tea-invisible-addiction-is-it-time-to-give-up
Southern Water fined record £90m for dumping raw sewage
9 July 2021
https://www-bbc-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-kent-57777935.amp
Southern Water has been fined a record £90m for deliberately dumping billions of litres of raw sewage into the sea.
The company admitted 6,971 illegal spills from 17 sites in Hampshire, Kent and West Sussex between 2010 and 2015.
His Honour Mr Justice Jeremy Johnson said the offences had been "committed deliberately" by Southern Water's board of directors at the time.
Lawyers for the company had told Canterbury Crown Court the spills were the result of "negligence".
The offences were discovered as part of the Environment Agency's largest ever criminal investigation, which began after shellfish were found to be contaminated with E. coli.
Raw sewage had been diverted away from treatment works and into the environment, allowing the company to avoid financial penalties and the costs of upkeep and upgrades, the court heard.
Mr Justice Johnson said Southern Water "showed a shocking and wholesale disregard for the environment, for the precious and delicate ecosystems along the north Kent and Solent coastlines, to human health and to the fisheries and other legitimate businesses that depend on the vitality of the coastal waters".
'Occurring events'
The total volume of untreated sewage dumped into the environment was estimated between 16 to 21 billion litres, or 7,400 Olympic-sized swimming pools, the court heard.
In Bedhampton Creek, in Havant, Hampshire, anglers reported finding sanitary towels, condoms and tissues in the water, along with a strong smell of sewage, the court heard.
Residents in Swalecliffe, Kent, said discharges from the sewage works were "occurring events", the court heard.
The "sheer scale" of offending meant it was "inherently unlikely this was due to a small number of rogue employees".
"It is far more likely to be due to deliberate disregard for the law from the top down," the judge said.
The offences had been aggravated by Southern Water's "persistent pollution of the environment" which had led to 168 previous convictions and cautions, he said.
He said the scale of the fine was intended to "bring home to the management of this and other companies the need to comply with laws that are designed to protect the environment".
It is the largest sentence issued by a court after an Environment Agency investigation, exceeding a £20m fine received by Thames Water in 2017.
In March 2020, Southern Water admitted 51 counts at Maidstone Crown Court, covering discharges of untreated sewage from sites in:
____
Eastchurch on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent
Slowhill Copse in Marchwood, Hampshire
Beaulieu, Hampshire
Millbrook, Hampshire
Budds Farm in Havant, Hampshire
Swalecliffe, Kent
Queenborough, Kent
Sittingbourne, Kent
Teynham, Kent
Herne Bay, Kent
Ashlett Creek, Fawley, Hampshire
Bosham, West Sussex
Chichester, West Sussex
Portswood in Southampton, Hampshire
Thornham in Emsworth, Hampshire
Woolston in Southampton, Hampshire
Diamond Road, Whitstable, Kent
______
During periods of heavy rain, water companies are permitted to divert untreated waste water away from treatment plants, discharging sewage straight into the environment to prevent sewers backing up.
However, the Environment Agency found that on thousands of occasions untreated sewage had left Southern Water sites through this route during periods of lower rainfall.
Directing sewage straight into rivers and seas improved the quality of treated water leaving the works, which is regularly tested and can lead to heavy fines if standards fall, the court heard.
Mr Justice Johnson said the offences had been motivated by a desire to "focus the company's attention on those metrics that increase its income, disregarding its wider compliance obligations".
Chief executive Ian McAulay, who was appointed in 2017, was in court on Friday alongside chairman Keith Lough, who joined in 2019.
After the hearing, Mr McAulay said: "We have heard what the judge has said today and will reflect closely on the sentence and his remarks.
"He has rightly put the environment front and centre which is what matters to all of us. "
Mr McAulay said the fine would not affect customers' bills or infrastructure investments, with shareholders due to bear the cost.
----
Follow BBC South East on Facebook, on Twitter, and on Instagram. Send your story ideas to southeasttoday@bbc.co.uk
https://www-bbc-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-kent-57777935.amp
Public polling carried out by Ipsos Mori for the Economist suggested high support for continuing some restrictions in the short term, with 70% of people saying compulsory mask-wearing in shops and on public transport should continue for at least a month after 19 July, and 66% saying the same for social distancing at venues such as pubs and theatres.
With work-from-home guidance also expected to be dropped from 19 July, a Sage subcommittee suggested in a report on Friday that working from home reduces the risk of catching Covid by in the range of 54% to 76%.
“Working from home currently occurs in the context of a wide range of other measures that also reduce the number of effective contacts that allow for viral transmission. While individually these other measures may not contribute much, together they do add up to a significant impact, the report said. “There is scope for the epidemic to grow considerably more quickly if all these mitigating factors are relaxed over a short period of time.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/10/boris-johnson-may-tone-down-freedom-rhetoric-amid-reopening-jitters
Boris Johnson may tone down ‘freedom’ rhetoric amid reopening jitters
PM expected to urge public to behave responsibly as polls show widespread concern over end of rules in England
Heather Stewart, Aubrey Allegretti, Natalie Grover and Libby Brooks
Sat 10 Jul 2021 01.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/10/boris-johnson-may-tone-down-freedom-rhetoric-amid-reopening-jitters
Boris Johnson is expected on Monday to urge the public to behave responsibly as he confirms plans for the 19 July reopening in England amid government jitters about the risks of the big-bang approach.
The final decision about 19 July will be taken on Monday morning, based on modelling from the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) about Covid cases and pressures on the NHS.
The prime minister still believes it is “now or never”, with a later reopening potentially posing even higher risks as cases could peak as children return to school and winter looms.
Two Whitehall sources told the Guardian that ministers had been spooked by internal polling. One said the data showed just 10% of the public support the policy of scrapping all restrictions at once, while another said substantially more people believed the government was moving too quickly than at the last reopening step on 17 May. These accounts were denied by No 10.
A cabinet minister said the health secretary Sajid Javid’s admission that there could be 100,000 new Covid cases a day over the summer had raised eyebrows among some colleagues. Medical advisers were fighting a rearguard action to slow down the reopening plan, they added.
Government sources conceded that while Johnson had warned the public at last Monday’s press conference not to be “demob happy”, his cautious message had “got slightly lost” as he announced the scrapping of all restrictions, including mandatory mask-wearing and social distancing.
The UK reported 35,707 new cases on Friday and the deaths of another 29 people within 28 days of a positive test. The cumulative number of cases across the UK throughout the pandemic has now exceeded 5m.
One in 160 people in England tested positive for Covid in the week ending 3 July, Office for National Statistics figures showed, up 58% in a week. In Scotland the figure was one in 100.
On Monday ministers are likely to continue to stress that while an increase in cases will be inevitable whenever restrictions are lifted, the link between cases, deaths and hospitalisations has been broken.
Several sources said the most likely outcome of Monday’s deliberations was for the government to press ahead with 19 July but tone down the “freedom day” rhetoric. One said it “would be political suicide” to U-turn.
The government has already sought to assuage concerns about what Labour has called a “summer of chaos” with millions of people potentially isolating, by promising to tweak the NHS Covid-19 app to make it less sensitive.
But Keir Starmer said on Friday that that approach was like “taking the batteries out of the smoke alarm”. Speaking as he completed a three-day visit to Northern Ireland, the Labour leader said: “It is so obviously to weaken the defences that we have – and if the consequence of the prime minister’s decision is that people are deleting the NHS app, or the app is being weakened, then that’s a pretty good indicator that the decision of the prime minister is wrong.”
Starmer said he did not want to preempt the data, which is expected to be published on Monday, but said: “The prime minister’s approach [is] lifting protections in one go at the same time, notwithstanding that infection rates are rising at a pretty alarming rate.”
Public polling carried out by Ipsos Mori for the Economist suggested high support for continuing some restrictions in the short term, with 70% of people saying compulsory mask-wearing in shops and on public transport should continue for at least a month after 19 July, and 66% saying the same for social distancing at venues such as pubs and theatres.
With work-from-home guidance also expected to be dropped from 19 July, a Sage subcommittee suggested in a report on Friday that working from home reduces the risk of catching Covid by in the range of 54% to 76%.
“Working from home currently occurs in the context of a wide range of other measures that also reduce the number of effective contacts that allow for viral transmission. While individually these other measures may not contribute much, together they do add up to a significant impact, the report said. “There is scope for the epidemic to grow considerably more quickly if all these mitigating factors are relaxed over a short period of time.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jul/10/boris-johnson-may-tone-down-freedom-rhetoric-amid-reopening-jitters
Fox’s New Channel Changes the Climate for Weather TV
As viewers tune out cable news, Rupert Murdoch is preparing the debut of Fox Weather, a potentially powerful new player in a sphere long dominated by the Weather Channel.
By Michael M. Grynbaum
Published July 6, 2021 Updated July 7, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/06/business/media/fox-weather-channel-plus.html
Weather is taking the media industry by storm.
Later this year, Rupert Murdoch is set to debut Fox Weather, a 24-hour streaming channel that promises to do for seven-day forecasts what Fox has done for American politics, financial news and sports. Not to be outdone, the Weather Channel — granddaddy of television meteorology — announced the creation of a new streaming service, Weather Channel Plus, that the company believes could reach 30 million subscribers by 2026.
Amid a waning appetite for political news in the post-Trump era, media executives are realizing that demand for weather updates is ubiquitous — and for an increasing swath of the country, a matter of urgent concern. In the past week alone, temperatures in the Pacific Northwest broke records, wildfires burned in Colorado and Tropical Storm Elsa strengthened into a hurricane over the Atlantic Ocean.
At CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, average viewership for the first half of 2021 fell 38 percent from a year prior. The audience for the Weather Channel was up 7 percent.
“All the networks are ramping up for this,” said Jay Sures, a co-president of United Talent Agency who oversees its TV division. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that climate change and the environment will be the story of the next decade.” One of his firm’s clients, Ginger Zee, the chief meteorologist at ABC News, now has 2.2 million Twitter followers — more than any ABC News personality besides George Stephanopoulos.
Fox Weather’s impending debut opens a new front in the media wars, but Byron Allen, the comedian-turned-media-baron whose Allen Media Group bought the Weather Channel for $300 million in 2018, insists that he welcomes the competition. “Rupert Murdoch is very smart; he is the best of the best,” Mr. Allen said in an interview. “I am not surprised he’s coming into the weather space. Honestly, I would have been disappointed if he didn’t.”
Mr. Allen said that he and Mr. Murdoch recently met for an hour in the latter mogul’s office on the Fox lot in Los Angeles. “We had a great time together,” he recalled. “Now the world will understand how big of a business the weather business is and how important it is.” (A spokeswoman for Mr. Murdoch did not comment on the meeting.)
The weather media ecosystem — from iPhone apps to localized subscription sites and umbrella-toting personalities on the local 10 o’clock news — is a lucrative, if often overlooked, corner of the industry, where the battle for attention is increasingly fierce. Advertisers weary of the choppy politics and brand boycotts of the Trump years see weather as a relatively uncontroversial port in the squall.
“Everyone in media is trying to figure out habitual behavior; everyone wants you addicted,” said Rich Greenfield, a partner at LightShed Ventures and a veteran media analyst. “The reason why weather is so interesting to so many people is it’s something you actually open up every day — daily, hourly, if not minute by minute.”
Much of the recent flurry of activity is motivated by the weather world’s big new interloper: Fox, whose unlikely entry into 24/7 weather broadcasting is part of a digital push by the Murdoch family.
Sean Hannity will not be giving a forecast (yet). But Fox Weather, which will be funded by advertisers, is aggressively poaching star meteorologists from Houston, Seattle, St. Louis and other markets. It is also taking a run at major talent at the Weather Channel, with several Hollywood agents recounting frenzied bidding wars. A top Weather Channel meteorologist — Shane Brown, whose title was “senior weather product architect” — defected to Fox last month despite efforts to keep him.
Inside Mr. Murdoch’s company, the view is that the sometimes-staid world of weather TV is ripe for disruption. Fox is hiring a throng of meteorologists and weather data analysts for the venture, which includes a flashy multimillion-dollar studio at its Midtown Manhattan headquarters. The service will cover major national weather events and integrate dozens of local forecasters from Fox’s regional affiliate stations.
The Weather Channel is already throwing some shade.
“They couldn’t even get a headline right about Tropical Storm Bill,” said Nora Zimmett, the network’s chief content officer, referring to a FoxNews.com article that some meteorologists criticized because it claimed that a relatively benign storm posed a “massive” risk to the Eastern Seaboard.
“I applaud Fox getting into the weather space, but they should certainly leave the lifesaving information to the experts,” said Ms. Zimmett, who worked at Fox News in the 2000s. She called climate change “a topic that is too important to politicize, and if they do that, they will be doing Americans a disservice.”
“They couldn’t even get a headline right about Tropical Storm Bill,” said Nora Zimmett, the network’s chief content officer, referring to a FoxNews.com article that some meteorologists criticized because it claimed that a rcize, and if they do that, they will be doing Americans a disservice.”
A Fox Weather spokeswoman shot back: “While the Weather Channel is focused on trolling FoxNews.com for unrelated stories, Fox Weather is busy preparing the debut of our innovative platform to deliver critical coverage to an incredibly underserved market.”
Climate change is a broad-based concern. A Pew Research survey in April found that 59 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believed that human activity contributes to climate change. (The figure is 91 percent for Democrats and those with Democratic-leaning views.)
Still, some of Fox News’s conservative commentators, including Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson, have a track record of downplaying, if not denying, the threat of climate change. The subject has even generated division within the Murdoch family: James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s younger son, rebuked his father last year after Murdoch-owned media outlets in Australia dismissed climate change as a culprit for deadly wildfires that ravaged the country.
Brian Wieser, the lead analyst at GroupM, the media investing arm of the ad giant WPP, laughed at the notion that weather could be considered apolitical. “You would think — except I’m sitting here in Portland, Ore., in 115 degrees,” he said. “I don’t know that it’s an uncontroversial topic.”
Referring to Fox Weather, he added: “How do you address the fact that weather changes are caused to some degree by humans when you have a media property with a history of challenging that fact?”
Fox Weather will be overseen by Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, and Sharri Berg, a longtime Fox executive who helped launch Fox News at its inception in 1996. Fox declined to make either executive available for interviews. But its spokeswoman said the service would have “a dedicated team of leading meteorologists and experts” that would offer “in-depth reporting surrounding all weather conditions, and we are excited to showcase to viewers what a full-service comprehensive weather platform can deliver beginning this fall.”
The Weather Channel, which started broadcasting in 1982, has some reason to be nervous. Cord-cutting has eroded the audience for cable TV as viewers migrate to digital platforms. Last month, the Weather Channel revamped its morning programming to focus more on storytelling and forecasters’ personalities. A new slate of shows about climate change is planned, including a documentary series, “Frozen Gold,” focused on amateur miners in Greenland, where melting ice has exposed mineral deposits.
Mr. Allen, the chairman of the company that owns the Weather Channel, said in the interview that he was unbothered by Fox’s poaching of his talent. “Business is a contact sport,” he said. “So they took a couple of our producers. That’s OK. What I’ve always found is that whenever we hire new people, we usually get better.”
Rivalries, he added, can be mutually beneficial.
“There’s no Ali without George Foreman,” Mr. Allen said. “I just love the fact that one of the best to ever live in the business of media wants to be a partner in this space with me.”
Michael M. Grynbaum is a media correspondent covering the intersection of business, culture and politics. @grynbaum
A version of this article appears in print on July 6, 2021, Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Fox Wants to Do for TV Weather What It Did for Cable News. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/06/business/media/fox-weather-channel-plus.html
Biden Spoke to Russian President Putin About Ransomware Attacks
President said U.S. will take action to defend infrastructure
By Catherine Lucey
July 9, 2021 1:13 pm ET
President Biden spoke Friday with Russian President Vladimir Putin amid rising concern over ransomware attacks in the U.S.
The White House said the president stressed the need for Russia to disrupt ransomware groups operating there and said the U.S. will take “any necessary action to defend its people and its critical infrastructure.”
(More to come.)
Write to Catherine Lucey at catherine.lucey@wsj.com
https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-spoke-to-russian-president-putin-about-ransomware-attacks-11625850786?mod=politics_lead_pos11
Inside Donald Trump’s Last Days in the White House and Plans for a Comeback
The president’s effort to overturn the election alienated much of his inner circle—but solidified his dominance of the GOP. Now he’s planning his return.
THE SATURDAY ESSAY
By Michael C. Bender
July 8, 2021 11:58 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-donald-trumps-last-days-in-the-white-house-and-plans-for-a-comeback-11625759920
On the morning of Nov. 7, 2020, the Saturday after the presidential election, President Donald Trump had just approached the tee box at the seventh hole of his golf course in Sterling, Va., when an aide’s phone rang with news from Jared Kushner : All of the major media outlets, including Fox News, were about to call the presidential election for Democrat Joe Biden.
Mr. Trump had tweeted on the way to the course that he’d won “BY A LOT!” But he displayed none of that all-caps energy as he pressed the phone to his ear. Wearing a dark pullover and slacks with white golf shoes and a matching MAGA cap, Mr. Trump calmly listened to his son-in-law as he strolled across the manicured grass under a clear blue sky. He hung up, nonchalantly handed the phone back to an aide and finished the final 12 holes, as more than a dozen golf carts filled with government aides and Secret Service agents trailed behind him.
When Mr. Trump finally pulled up to the clubhouse in his customized cart—complete with a presidential seal stitched into the seat—club members cheered him on the back patio. “Don’t worry,” Mr. Trump told them. “It’s not over yet.”
But the election was, in fact, over. What wasn’t finished was the term he’d won four years earlier, and on Nov. 7, one of the most pressing questions for staffers was how to fill his calendar. “Let’s do all the things we didn’t get to do because of all of the distractions, and have fun,” Hope Hicks, a longtime Trump aide, said to the president’s team gathered inside campaign headquarters in Arlington, Va.
Mr. Trump had won far more votes than his team projected, with surprising support from Black and Hispanic men. He was immediately the runaway favorite for the party’s 2024 nomination, and Ms. Hicks was expressing that vibe with her suggestion for a jaunty curtain call. But around the table in a glass-encased conference room, the eldest Trump sons channeled their father’s reaction. “What you’re talking about isn’t even an option,” responded Donald Trump, Jr., who had called into the meeting. “It’s a nonstarter,” Eric Trump added.
Ms. Hicks wasn’t an outlier, however. After the election was called, Trump World mostly assumed that the president would behave rationally at the end of the day. Vice President Mike Pence and Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, both met with Mr. Trump in early November and separately told others that he just needed space to process the loss. Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and a senior adviser, left some White House officials with the hope her father would invite Mr. Biden to the West Wing.
But Mr. Trump wasn’t interested in taking a bow. The decision from his team to give him space only created an opening for outside advisers like Rudy Giuliani, and behind the scenes, Mr. Trump was frantically moving personnel in and out of the administration.
Early on, he attempted to oust Attorney General William Barr. By mid-November, the president secretly offered Mr. Barr’s job to John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence. Running the Justice Department was Mr. Ratcliffe’s dream job in Washington, but not like this. If Mr. Ratcliffe accepted, he’d be expected to refute the same briefings he’d provided the president as national intelligence director, which stated that no foreign powers had conspired to corrupt the nation’s voting machines. He turned it down.
Mr. Barr, meanwhile, had reached his breaking point. On Dec. 1, he was meeting with White House counsel Pat Cipollone when they were summoned to the Oval Office. Both knew the sudden meeting was about Mr. Barr’s declaration earlier that day that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud, contradicting the president’s claims. The two attorneys briefly discussed, only half-jokingly, whether Mr. Barr should hotfoot it for the exits.
Mr. Trump erupted as soon as Mr. Barr walked in the room, ripping through a greatest hits reel of debunked claims of fraud and a more historical inventory of grievances. But the attorney general made clear that he wouldn’t subject himself—or his agency—to repeated insults and accusations, and White House officials panicked that he was about to quit. The West Wing had mostly emptied by December, and some viewed Mr. Barr as one of the few remaining adult voices in the administration. Others knew it was a better look for Mr. Trump to push someone out than to have them walk away.
Mr. Barr left the West Wing. His black sedan was pulling out of the parking lot when Mr. Cipollone suddenly appeared and banged his hand on the back window. The White House attorney climbed into the car and cautioned against making any rash decisions. Mr. Barr agreed. But he regretted it, and resigned two weeks later.
By then, the president was personally phoning U.S. attorneys—against Justice Department protocol—urging them to focus on election fraud. He’d replaced a lineup of veteran defense and intelligence officials with inexperienced loyalists hungry to appease the boss. Gen. Mark Milley asked some Pentagon officials whether the new hires had ties to neo-Nazi groups.
“The crazies have taken over,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned a colleague. Privately, the nation’s top diplomat worried that foreign adversaries might try to exploit the domestic instability. He conveyed concern to others that Mr. Trump might be more willing to engage in an international conflict to strengthen his political argument for remaining in office. Mr. Pompeo organized a daily call with Gen. Milley and Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff.
By January, Mr. Trump’s attention had turned to his vice president, who was responsible for presiding over the Jan. 6 congressional certification of the election. The two men had debated for weeks whether Mr. Pence could reject the results.
But the vice president wasn’t practiced in confronting Mr. Trump. The only example some administration officials could remember was in 2018, when Mr. Pence’s political committee hired Corey Lewandowski, the president’s ubiquitous adviser. Mr. Trump was holding a newspaper article about the hiring and said it made him look weak, like his team was abandoning him as he was probed for his campaign’s role in Russian election meddling. He crumpled the article and threw it at his vice president. “So disloyal,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Pence lost it. Mr. Kushner had asked him to hire Mr. Lewandowski, and he had discussed the plan with Mr. Trump over lunch. Mr. Pence picked up the article and threw it back at Mr. Trump. He leaned toward the president and pointed a finger a few inches from his chest. “We walked you through every detail of this,” Mr. Pence snarled. “We did this for you—as a favor. And this is how you respond? You need to get your facts straight.”
Three years later, the moment seemed to call for another get-your-facts-straight lesson from Mr. Pence. But the vice president’s team believed he’d been clear with the president that he didn’t have the constitutional authority to overturn the vote. “Anything you give us, we’ll review,” Mr. Pence told the president during a meeting on Jan. 5. “But I don’t see how it’s possible.” Mr. Trump later insisted that his vice president never told him no.
That night, after meeting with Mr. Pence, the president summoned aides into the Oval Office. He opened the door to the colonnade and told staff to sit and listen to his supporters celebrating near the Ellipse, the site of the Save America rally the following day. As aides shivered in the wintry breeze that filled the room, Mr. Trump signed a stack of legislation and bobbed his head to the classic rock blaring outside—precisely the kind of music he’d play ahead of his rallies.
Mr. Trump praised his supporters’ energy and asked his team if the following day would be peaceful. “Don’t forget,” Mr. Trump told them, “these people are fired up.”
Within an hour of Mr. Trump’s speech the next afternoon, a mob of his supporters pressed up against the Capitol doors and police declared a riot. A piece of lumber smashed through a window at about 2 p.m. and rioters swarmed inside, where they prowled across the waxed sandstone floors beneath the iconic cast-iron dome—in search of Mr. Trump’s running mate.
Secret Service agents hustled Mr. Pence off the Senate floor and into a nearby hideaway. If the insurgents had arrived on the second-floor landing just seconds earlier, he would have been within their reach. The frenzied crowd had overrun the Capitol Police and the Metropolitan Police Department, and Mr. Pence’s safety—and that of just about everyone else in the Capitol—rested on the arrival of the National Guard. “I want them down here—and I want them down here now,” Mr. Pence firmly instructed during a call with the Pentagon.
Initially, Mr. Trump seemed to be enjoying the melee. Heartened to see his supporters fighting so vigorously on his behalf, he ignored the public and private pleas from advisers who begged him to quell the riots. Terrified Republican lawmakers called White House aides and the president’s children for help. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser twice personally implored Mr. Meadows to intervene. Mr. Trump didn’t call off the intruders until almost 4:30 p.m. “Go home—we love you, you’re very special,” Mr. Trump said in a social media video, but he didn’t denounce the violence.
The backlash against Mr. Trump was immediate. He was suspended from Twitter and Facebook the next day. A flood of White House officials resigned. The House impeached him on Jan. 13 for inciting an insurrection—becoming the only president to be impeached twice—in a bipartisan vote that included support from 10 Republicans. Top Republicans both inside and outside of Trump World believed that the man who had positioned himself as the party’s kingmaker—potentially for the next decade—was now finished.
But days after Mr. Trump left office, polls showed that he maintained high levels of support inside his party. House Republicans who had voted to impeach him found themselves the target of censure and primary challenges. Republican leaders made plans to visit him at Mar-a-Lago—a steady stream of supplicants bowing before their exiled king.
In March, during the first of my two visits with Mr. Trump in south Florida, I found him amid a transition. Once the leader of the free world, he was coming to terms with his ceremonial role as president of Palm Beach. He had arrived at Mar-a-Lago in January entirely unprepared for the post-presidency. “What am I going to do all day?” he asked one aide after stepping off Air Force One for the final time. He inquired whether friends blamed him for the Capitol riots. “You don’t think I wanted them to do that, do you?” he asked.
He peppered aides about whether he should run for president again, but few believed he would. There seemed to be a new melancholy to the former president. He told friends that his wife, Melania Trump, loved it at Mar-a-Lago and how she looked more beautiful than ever. He acknowledged that other factors might catch up with him, like his advanced age and obesity. “At least that’s what they say,” he’d always add about his excessive weight.
Slowly, he found relief in the new routine. He golfed every day and reveled in the attention during the dinner hour at the club. “Did you have the meat or the fish? Was it good?” he asked guests. He lost some weight, and a warm tone had reappeared in his face. He’d just finished golfing with PGA player Ernie Els when I arrived and took a call from Sean Hannity during our interview. Shockingly, he said he was glad to be off Twitter. His prewritten statements, now issued via emails, were “much more elegant.” “It’s really better than Twitter,” Mr. Trump told me. “I didn’t realize you can spend a lot of time on this. Now I actually have time to make phone calls, and do other things and read papers that I wouldn’t read.”
He’d reorganized his inner circle of political advisers. Donald Trump, Jr., replaced Mr. Kushner as the top family adviser. Mr. Trump became less reliant on his final campaign manager, Bill Stepien, and elevated Susie Wiles, who oversaw both Trump victories in Florida. He was in constant contact with Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Rick Scott, the Republicans in charge of the House and Senate races in 2022.
His advisers have pushed him to carefully cultivate his political power and delay deciding whether to run again in 2024 until after the midterms. Still, Mr. Trump has followed the chatter like a day trader monitoring his portfolio. When Ron DeSantis performed well in a straw poll of an obscure gathering of conservatives last month, Mr. Trump asked advisers whether the Florida governor would challenge him in a primary if he were to run. (The majority opinion was yes.) And he said on Fox News last week that he’d decided whether to run in 2024 but wouldn’t reveal the verdict.
When Mr. Trump and I talked, he avoided multiple queries about his plans. Instead, he redirected almost every question back to his claims of a stolen election. Our second interview was interrupted by a call from an attorney with a status update from his ongoing pursuit of fraud allegations in Arizona.
Mr. Trump’s plan, for now, is to display his political prowess by influencing the midterms. He’s already endorsed more than two dozen candidates, from congressional contests to an election for Staten Island borough president. Advisers have urged him to focus endorsements on winnable races, but he’s discarded that guidance in several instances.
He backed Kelly Tshibaka, who launched an uphill battle to unseat Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a fellow Republican who has won three terms in the state—but who voted to convict Mr. Trump on impeachment charges in February. In North Carolina, Mr. Trump repeatedly pushed his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, to run for the open Senate seat, but she declined. He then decided—on the flight last month to Greenville, N.C., where he spoke at a state party event—to back Rep. Ted Budd in a competitive Republican primary race. The president’s announcement stunned aides and candidates, including Rep. Mark Walker, who became emotional when he learned about the endorsement while seated with his family in the audience. Mr. Trump has spoken to advisers about backing a primary challenger against Rep. Liz Cheney, who voted to impeach him, and plans to campaign against her in Wyoming next year.
On June 26, Mr. Trump held his first rally since Jan. 6, drawing thousands to the Lorain County fairgrounds near Cleveland. The event was to support Max Miller, a former aide who has waged a primary challenge against Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, who supported impeachment charges. But Mr. Trump spent much of his 90-minute speech fixated on the 2020 results.
Mr. Trump’s new team could only shrug their shoulders. They, too, will give him space to process the loss, with the hope that he’ll find some measure of closure. His political future may depend on it. “He’ll never move on, but at least it won’t be half of his speech at some point,” one Trump aide said.
“We won the election twice,” Mr. Trump said in Ohio. “And it’s possible that we’ll have to win it a third time.”
Write to Michael C. Bender at Mike.Bender@wsj.com
Mr. Bender is The Wall Street Journal’s senior White House reporter. This essay is adapted from his new book, “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” which will be published by Twelve next week.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-donald-trumps-last-days-in-the-white-house-and-plans-for-a-comeback-11625759920
Former GOP Hill aide pleads guilty in child porn case
Ruben Verastigui, 27, faces 12 years or more in prison under a deal with prosecutors.
By JOSH GERSTEIN
07/09/2021 10:36 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/09/former-hill-aide-pleads-guilty-child-porn-498937
A former GOP staffer and Republican National Committee aide pleaded guilty Friday to a child pornography charge and is facing 12 years or more in prison under a plea deal with prosecutors.
Ruben Verastigui, 27, entered the guilty plea from jail during a video conference hearing before U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C.
Verastigui admitted to possession of 152 videos and 50 images of child pornography and to receiving and distributing sexual depictions of children.
According to an affidavit filed in the case in February by a Department of Homeland Security investigator, Verastigui sought out images of rape of children during an online chat last year. Prosecutors said Verastigui also fantasized online about killing children while abusing them.
The investigation, focused on a ring of at least 18 people trading child pornography via a chat group on an unnamed website, appears to have zeroed in on at least one other political staffer in Washington.
Last November, a Trump Commerce Department political appointee, Adam Hageman, was arrested on charges he shared a child pornography video and commented on sexually abusing children. Hageman appears to have been set to enter a guilty plea in April, but court records do not indicate that hearing was ever held.
Mehta accepted Verastigui’s guilty plea, but deferred a decision on whether to accept the roughly 12-to-15-year sentencing range prosecutors and Verastigui agreed to. Sentencing in his case is set for Oct. 12.
Prosecutors said earlier this year that Verastigui could also face charges in Arizona over his online conduct, but the plea agreement he signed with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., precludes further charges in that state.
Verastigui worked as digital director for the Joint Economic Committee in 2018 and as digital strategist for the Senate Republican Conference from 2019 to 2020, congressional payroll records show. He was also on the payroll of the RNC from 2017 to 2018, according to Federal Election Commission reports.
FILED UNDER: RNC, REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE, LEGAL
POLITICO
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/09/former-hill-aide-pleads-guilty-child-porn-498937
Trump Organization Indictment May Spell Trouble for Trump Spawn
Roger Sollenberger
Fri, 9 July 2021, 10:07 am
https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/trump-organization-indictment-may-spell-090727184.html
The indictment filed last week against the Trump Organization and its long-time chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg isn’t heavy on names, but there’s one major exception: a list of seven Trump Organization companies—including one where Ivanka Trump held an executive role for eight years.
While it’s impossible to know what charges are still to come, legal experts say the indictment for Weisselberg last week suggests bigger targets are in line, potentially including the former president’s adult children.
“Since this indictment is in a New York state court, prosecutors are allowed to name these companies, whereas in federal court they could not,” Melissa Jampol, a former assistant U.S. attorney who now practices business law at Epstein Becker Green, told The Daily Beast. “Based on my experience, everything’s in there for a reason.”
Prosecutors say the seven companies, along with unnamed Trump entities, exhibited a pattern of paying “a substantial portion” of year-end bonuses to Weisselberg and “other executives” as if they weren’t employees, but independent contractors. Prosecutors also claim the companies and executives knew the practice was wrong, and the amounts appear to be substantial. For instance, Weisselberg allegedly broke the law by putting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonus money in a tax-free pension plan.
But experts say the arrangement also implicates the companies—and possibly the executives who ran them.
That could spell major trouble for Trump’s children, as well as Trump himself, who has already adopted a legal strategy of ignorance of the tax laws.
“In general, if you work for a company, you get a W2 form for your taxes,” David Sands, partner at accounting firm Buchbinder Tunick, told The Daily Beast. “Some companies try to skirt that by having a related company say, ‘Oh that’s not my employee, so give them a 1099 instead.’”
Tunick continued that employees and businesses get benefits for deductions and often try to shield that income. “It’s a practice that’s frowned upon by the IRS, and skirts tax laws,” he said.
The federal flat withholding tax on employee bonus pay is 22 percent. Other payroll taxes would apply as well. The Trump companies running the scheme alleged by prosecutors would have denied that money to the government. And that alone may be enough to bring down a number of members of the Trump family.
“The section about the bonuses may have at first seemed like a small deal compared to some of the other charges, but it could actually be one of the keys,” said Ed McCaffrey, a tax law expert and Robert C. Packard Trustee Chair in Law at the University of Southern California.
That key, he said, is the indictment’s allegation that the bonus scheme was a matter of “practice” at the Trump Organization, something “you generally don’t see in major American corporations.”
“That establishes a pattern,” McCaffrey continued. “A one-off may not normally draw government attention. But this is year-in and year-out tax fraud over decades, across the organization.”
McCaffrey added that if the whole organization were “infected” with “tax-evasion fever,” and if prosecutors could establish that picture, it would be easier to climb the net to other executives. “The question here is, what’s the exposure to the executives on the organization side,” he said.
Trump’s Claims of Tax Genius May Undermine Legal Defense of Ignorance
In the indictment for the Trump Organization that came out last week, prosecutors single out seven companies: Wollman Rink Operations LLC, Trump International Golf Club LLC, Mar-a-Lago, Trump Productions LLC, VH Property Corp. (the parent company of Trump National Golf Club in Los Angeles), Trump Las Vegas Development LLC, and Trump CPS LLC.
Former federal prosecutor Barb McQuade told The Daily Beast that the decision to single out these companies may be part of an attempt to secure further cooperation ahead of future charges.
“Sometimes prosecutors hold back some charges to permit an opportunity to explore cooperation before playing all of their cards,” she said.
While the indictment only names Weisselberg, the “other executives” mentioned in the indictment could include Trump’s children, who held top roles in these organizations—specifically his eldest daughter, former senior White House adviser Ivanka Trump.
Ivanka’s financial disclosures show that from 2009 to 2017, she was vice president of one of the companies named in the indictment—Trump Las Vegas Development LLC. According to federal disclosures, that company was established to collect development fees on Trump Ruffin Tower, a combination hotel-condo building in Las Vegas.
But those disclosures also show the company’s underlying value isn’t clear, and its income has swung wildly. The business posted no income at all in 2014 and 2015, then hauled $8.1 million in 2016 before reporting no income again in 2017, the year Ivanka left the company. It pulled in a little over $3 million annually for the next two years, then went dormant.
“There has to be a real business purpose to the company,” Jampol said. “So what are these entities doing? Are they actually engaging in business, or are they just there to pay compensation some years? You really have to be performing consulting services to qualify as a consultant.”
McCaffrey said the Trump children and other executives would “almost certainly” not qualify as consultants. “The IRS has a rule book. If you’re already an employee, you’re not gonna be an independent contractor,” he said.
Last September, The New York Times reported that Trump’s tax returns show Ivanka Trump appeared to have received nearly $750,000 in consulting fees from a different Trump company where she was also an executive. After that report, New York Attorney General Letitia James, who partnered with Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance on the Trump Organization investigation, subpoenaed the Trump Organization for records related to those transactions.
But most businesses don’t see much tax incentive to pay contractor fees, according to McCaffrey. Companies can deduct salaries as business costs. But he noted that Trump entities may look at this differently.
“Trump businesses don’t turn profits. And if a business doesn’t show a profit, they may not care about losing those deductions. So instead they’re paying these bonuses to employees in a way that they don’t have to pay taxes on it,” McCaffrey said.
The official relationships between Trump’s children and the various entities of the family business are blurry. “We don’t take titles particularly seriously at the Trump Organization,” Ivanka said in a 2016 deposition.
But a person with knowledge of the company told The Daily Beast that “every new project had to have one of the kids attached to it.”
Incorporation documents don’t list any principals other than Donald Trump until he handed his business administration to his children after assuming the White House in 2017. But his children have long been closely involved with operations. And Ivanka’s financial disclosures reveal she’d held executive positions at dozens of Trump entities, including at Mar-a-Lago, which is listed in the indictment.
But some of the companies listed in the indictment also bear connections to Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. as well.
For instance, Trump CPS LLC reportedly cut Eric a sweetheart deal on condo purchases in April 2016. The indictment also names two golf courses, a corporate vertical that largely falls to Don Jr.
One of those two golf courses, Trump National in Los Angeles, happens to be under investigation by James’ office for possible tax fraud. Prosecutors also called out Trump Productions LLC, the ex-president’s media company which produced the Trump-hosted game show The Apprentice. Both Eric and Donald Trump Jr. served as advisers on that series.
Jampol noted that, while the charges are at the state level, the indictment also details federal crimes, “so we can’t rule out a federal investigation down the road.”
The blurred business lines, however, may pose hurdles for prosecutors, who still have until November to make their arguments to a grand jury.
“That’s the weakest link: Who at the organization can be held criminally responsible?” McCaffrey said. “That, I think, is gonna be the toughest thing. Some executives may try to take the ‘ostrich defense,’ say their heads were in the sand.”
In a deposition earlier this year, Ivanka Trump appeared to distance herself from Weisselberg. She told investigators she wasn’t familiar with her family company’s CFO, suggesting she was unaware of his responsibilities.
“He is the—I would have to see what his—I don’t know his exact title, but he’s an executive at the company,” she said.
Read more at The Daily Beast.
https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/trump-organization-indictment-may-spell-090727184.html
Afghan pilots assassinated by Taliban as US withdraws
Taliban spokesperson confirmed that it had started a program that will see Afghan Air Force pilots “targeted and eliminated because all of them do bombardment against their people."
Reuters | , Kabul
PUBLISHED ON JUL 09, 2021 04:57 PM IST
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news
Afghan Air Force Major Dastagir Zamaray had grown so fearful of Taliban assassinations of off-duty forces in Kabul that he decided to sell his home to move to a safer pocket of Afghanistan's sprawling capital.
Instead of being greeted by a prospective buyer at his realtor's office earlier this year, the 41-year-old pilot was confronted by a gunman who walked inside and, without a word, fatally shot the real estate agent in the mouth.
Zamaray reached for his sidearm but the gunman shot him in the head. The father of seven collapsed dead on his 14-year-old son, who had tagged along. The boy was spared, but barely speaks anymore, his family says.
Zamaray “only went there because he personally knew the realtor and thought it was safe," Samiullah Darman, his brother-in-law, told Reuters. "We didn’t know that he would never come back."
At least seven Afghan pilots, including Zamaray, have been assassinated off base in recent months, according to two senior Afghan government officials. This series of targeted killings, which haven't been previously reported, illustrate what US and Afghan officials believe is a deliberate Taliban effort to destroy one of Afghanistan's most valuable military assets: its corps of US- and NATO-trained military pilots.
In so doing, the Taliban -- who have no air force -- are looking to level the playing field as they press major ground offensives. The militants are quickly seizing territory once controlled by the US-backed government of President Ashraf Ghani, raising fears they could eventually try to topple Kabul.
Reuters confirmed the identities of two of the slain pilots through family members. It could not independently verify the names of the other five who were allegedly targeted.
In response to questions from Reuters, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid confirmed the group had killed Zamaray, and that it had started a program that will see Afghan Air Force pilots “targeted and eliminated because all of them do bombardment against their people."
A U.N. report documented 229 civilian deaths caused by the Taliban in Afghanistan in the first three months of 2021, and 41 civilian deaths caused by the Afghan Air Force over the same period.
Afghanistan's government has not publicly disclosed the number of pilots assassinated in targeted killings. The nation's Defense Ministry did not respond to requests for comment. The Pentagon said it was aware of the deaths of several Afghan pilots in killings claimed by the Taliban, but declined comment on US intelligence and investigations.
Afghan military pilots are particularly attractive assassination targets, current and former US and Afghan officials say. They can strike Taliban forces massing for major attacks, shuttle commandos to missions and provide life-saving air cover for Afghan ground troops. Pilots take years to train and are hard to replace, representing an outsized blow to the country's defenses with every loss.
Shoot-downs and accidents are ever-present risks. Yet these pilots often are most vulnerable in the streets of their own neighborhoods, where attackers can come from anywhere, said retired US Brigadier General David Hicks, who commanded the training effort for the Afghan Air Force from 2016 to 2017.
"Their lives were at much greater risk during that time (off base) than they were while they were flying combat missions," Hicks said.
Although Taliban assassinations of pilots have happened in years past, the recent killings take on greater significance as the Afghan Air Force is tested like never before.
Just last week, US forces left America’s main military bastion in Afghanistan, Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, as they complete their withdrawal from the country 20 years after ousting the Taliban following the Al Qaeda attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"Pilots are on top of the Taliban's hit list," the senior Afghan government official said.
That Afghan official and two others, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they're working to protect pilots and their families, moving some to on-base housing and relocating others to safer civilian neighborhoods.
A White House National Security Council spokesperson strongly condemned “all targeted assassinations in Afghanistan” and stressed US commitments to continue providing security assistance to the Afghan military.
The Afghan Air Force is heavily dependent on US training, equipment and maintenance as well as logistics to ensure a reliable pipeline of munitions and spare parts. The Pentagon has yet to fully detail how it will keep Afghan aviators flying after the US-led mission formally ends in coming weeks, as ordered by President Joe Biden.
The Pentagon told Reuters it would seek to provide Afghanistan with extra aircraft to ease the strain of combat losses and maintenance downtime.
David Petraeus, a former CIA director and former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, warned that failure of the United States to provide enough support for the Afghan military could be disastrous.
"We are potentially consigning Afghanistan and the Afghan people to a civil war," Petraeus said in an interview.
Washington is moving to evacuate interpreters who worked for the US military, but it’s unclear if the Biden administration would risk doing the same for Afghan forces, like pilots. Some officials believe offering an exit strategy for elite Afghan troops could accelerate a feared collapse following the US withdrawal.
US intelligence assessments have warned that the Afghan government could fall in as little as six months, two US officials told Reuters.
"No one wants to have the (Afghan forces) preemptively throw in the towel," another US official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Precious, Over-stretched
Two Afghan Air Force pilots were killed on June 7 while trying to evacuate troops wounded during a surge of fighting against the Taliban insurgency.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for shooting down their Russian-made, US-financed Mi-17 helicopter. Local media identified the deceased pilots as Milad Massoud and Abdul Alim Shahrayari. The Afghan Defense Ministry said in a statement that the aircraft crashed, but it did not say why, nor would it identify the pilots. An Afghan official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the chopper was shot down.
Both the crew and the aircraft were precious.
The Afghan fleet contained just 13 Mi-17 helicopters and 65 qualified aircrews of pilots and co-pilots to fly them, according to US military data from April 2021 and November 2020, respectively.
Those data show the entire Afghan Air Force comprises 339 qualified aircrews and 160 aircraft -- less than a quarter of the fleet size of US commercial carrier Southwest Airlines. The "usable" fleet is even smaller - around 140 aircraft - after accounting for aircraft undergoing maintenance, according to the same April data.
Built in America's image, the Afghan Air Force is equipped with UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and lumbering C-130H transport aircraft, neither of which Afghans know how to maintain, according to a Pentagon report released in April. Those aircraft are serviced by US-funded contractors, which also handle most maintenance for the rest of the fleet, including A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft, AC-208 Eliminator planes and MD-530 helicopters, according to that report.
A separate 2020 report by the Pentagon's Lead Inspector General warned that Afghanistan's fleet would stop being "combat effective" within a few months if the Afghan Air Force were to lose contractor support. The Pentagon has not said how many contractors will remain in Afghanistan.
Reuters contacted two large US defense contractors that support the Afghan Air Force: Leidos Holdings Inc and DynCorp International, now part of Amentum Services Inc. Spokespeople for those companies declined to say how many contractors, if any, were still in Afghanistan.
In comments to Reuters, the Pentagon acknowledged the withdrawal of contractors could impact routine maintenance, something it was working to address. Spokesman Major Rob Lodewick said it had already become common practice to send aircraft abroad for heavy maintenance.
Petraeus said that’s not only costly, but it’s "impractical" in a wartime setting to fly aircraft out of Afghanistan for repairs. Remote instruction and meetings via video-conference also have natural limitations.
Along with Afghanistan's Special Forces, the Afghan Air Force is a pillar of the nation's strategy for preventing a Taliban takeover of cities. In addition to providing air cover and performing bombing raids, pilots conduct medical evacuations, ferry supplies and transport troops for the country's over-stretched army.
Since Biden’s April withdrawal announcement, Taliban militants have more than doubled the number of districts under their control in Afghanistan to 203, which is nearly half the country’s 407 districts, according to the Long War Journal, an online publication associated with the conservative think-tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. Reuters could not independently verify the data.
Western security officials said insurgent forces have captured more than 100 districts, but the Taliban say they have control of more than 200 districts in 34 provinces comprising over half the Central Asian country.
The US military has stopped releasing its tally of Taliban-controlled districts and says that information is now classified. But on Thursday, a Pentagon spokesman acknowledged the Taliban had taken "dozens" of district centers.
Swift gains by the Taliban are putting more strain on Afghan Air Force crews and aircraft to repel the advances, four US officials said.
Even before the latest wave of Taliban offensives, the Afghan Air Force was flying missions at a faster pace than anticipated, piling up maintenance checks that took more planes out of circulation, according to a May report by the Pentagon's Inspector General.
General Austin Miller, the commander of US-led forces in Afghanistan, warned on June 29 that he was concerned about "overuse" of the Afghan Air Force.
"If you overuse the organizations, it's difficult for them to ... reconstitute," Miller told reporters.
In remarks from the White House on Thursday, Biden said aid to Afghanistan’s military would continue after the US military mission ends on Aug 31. But Biden was hardly optimistic about Afghanistan’s future, casting doubt on the two-decade-old project to preserve a unified, centralized state. Still, he said a Taliban victory was not inevitable.
"I trust the capacity of the Afghan military, which is better trained, better equipped and more competent” than the Taliban, he told reporters.
Stay and Fight?
It wasn't just Taliban death threats against him and his family that drove decorated Afghan helicopter pilot Major Naiem Asadi out of Afghanistan. Asadi said the Afghan Air Force had failed to do enough to protect pilots vulnerable to off-base assassinations.
"They spend a lot of money on (the training) of these pilots, but they can't spend any money on the pilots for their security," Asadi told Reuters in an interview, after arriving in New Jersey in June to start his bid for asylum.
Asadi complained that not all Afghan pilots got paid the same or even regularly. As a member of the ethnic Hazara minority, Asadi believed he was also passed up for promotion.
"They are not taking care of every pilot equally," he said.
The Afghan military did not respond to requests for comment on Asadi’s case. Asadi did not show Reuters documentation to support his discrimination claims.
Experts say the morale of Afghan forces could prove critical in preventing collapse, given the momentum of the Taliban and the perceived weakness of the Afghan central government in key parts of the country.
On Sunday, more than 1,000 Afghan security personnel fled across the border into Tajikistan following Taliban advances in northern Afghanistan. Almost 300 flew back to Afghanistan on Wednesday, and officials in Kabul continue to express confidence in the Afghan security forces.
A review by a US government watchdog found nearly half of all foreign military trainees who went Absent Without Leave (AWOL) while training in the United States since 2005 were from Afghanistan. The Pentagon eventually halted training of Afghan pilots inside the United States.
Niloofar Rahmani, the first female fixed-wing pilot in the Afghan Air Force, won asylum in the United States in 2018 after receiving death threats from the Taliban and others in Afghan society who condemned her for working alongside the US military.
Rahmani, who is now training in Florida to become a flight instructor, said the Afghan government didn't take those threats seriously enough and that even some of her fellow pilots didn't think women should fly. She said she wasn't paid for a year.
Still, the decision to leave Afghanistan wasn’t an easy one.
"It honestly broke my heart, I was depressed for two years just thinking about it," Rahmani said, explaining she felt like she had abandoned her family and what once seemed like a promising military career. She said she feared many pilots would drop out of the force "because of lack of support, because of the threat."
The Afghan military did not respond to a request for comment on Rahmani’s case.
An active-duty Afghan pilot, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity from Afghanistan, said he, too, was trying to figure out a way to flee the country in the face of deteriorating security.
Some are finding the US door shut. Mohd Hamayoun Zarin, a former A-29 pilot, expressed shock that the US Embassy in Kabul rejected his visa request in March.
As an Afghan Air Force veteran who spent years training in America, Zarin is convinced the Taliban will make good on their many threats to kill him and his family now that US troops are leaving.
It would be payback, he says.
"I wasn't dropping flowers on them. These were bombs," Zarin said in an interview, detailing his case publicly for the first time in the hopes that the United States might reconsider.
In its letter to Zarin, viewed by Reuters, the US Embassy in Kabul said he was ineligible for the same visas set aside for interpreters because he did not work directly for the United States, but rather for the Afghan government.
Zarin said that distinction makes little difference on the ground in Afghanistan, where he was known as an English-speaking pilot who spent years training in the United States.
The State Department declined comment on Zarin’s case, saying visa applications are confidential.
Trained Killers
Masood Atal, a Black Hawk helicopter pilot, was driving on his day off on Dec. 30 to buy fruit for his mother when two motorcycles flanked his gray Toyota Corolla on a Kandahar city highway, one on each side of the car.
Gunmen on the back of both bikes opened fire on Atal, shooting him 11 times, once in the face, six times in his right arm and hand, the rest in his chest, his family said.
Atal had confided to his family that he had received Taliban death threats, the latest in an expletive-laced phone call just two days before he was killed.
"We're killing you," they told him, recounted Bashir Ahmad, one of Atal's brothers.
Atal had asked for bodyguards and a bullet-proof car but the Afghan military turned him down, Ahmad said, accusing it of being "very weak on these things."
An Afghan military spokesman, Sadeq Esa, confirmed Atal had been killed by the Taliban but did not provide further comment about his case.
The Taliban confirmed it killed Atal and said it would do the same to other pilots.
“Targeting those who bombard civilians, who drop blind bombs on civilian houses, is an obligation for us and we will do this,” Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, told Reuters.
For Atal's parents, it was their fifth child killed in the many decades of fighting in Afghanistan. In 1984, during the Soviet occupation, a rocket fired by an anti-Soviet mujahideen landed in front of their children's school in Kandahar, killing another son and three daughters, the family said.
Such crossfire has killed untold numbers of Afghan civilians. But there was nothing indiscriminate about Atal's killing, his family said. The Taliban "are absolutely focusing on the pilots first ... to make the Afghan government vulnerable enough so they can be beaten," said another brother, Waheed.
Catching the killers of Afghan pilots has proven difficult.
A few weeks after the January shooting of Zamaray, the airman shot dead in his realtor's office, Kabul police told the family they had made an arrest. They asked Zamaray's 14-year-old son to identify the suspect.
Glimpsing the detainee at the police station, the teen informed police they had the wrong man. Police tried to convince the boy that the suspect might now look different because he had a broken nose, the family said.
"The police were pushing (Zamaray's) son to identify and implicate the wrong person just to hide their weakness and show an achievement," Darman, Zamaray's brother-in-law, said.
Afghan authorities did not respond to a request for comment on the allegations.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news
No problem answering that question - I receive no compensation from any source for anything I post on message boards.
It used to be a hobby, strange as it seems, to expose scams, along with many of the other like-minded people who did so on SI, RB and IH... I gave that up some time ago and I do not miss it at all. The personal attacks and nastiness that used to be part of it all were 'water off a duck's back' to me and sometimes people paid attention and learned how to avoid being scammed in future.
Now I post on IH FAKE on topics that interest me, and may be of interest other people, and one other board on SI - "A Hard Look At Donald Trump", and occasionally on "Plastics to Oil - Pyrolysis and Secret Catalysts... " using the same Scion alias I use here.
The Red/Blue Divide in COVID-19 Vaccination Rates is Growing
Jennifer Kates Follow @jenkatesdc on Twitter , Jennifer Tolbert , and Kendal Orgera Follow @_KendalOrgera on Twitter
Jul 08, 2021
https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/the-red-blue-divide-in-covid-19-vaccination-rates-is-growing/
One of the main factors driving differences in COVID-19 vaccination rates across the country is partisanship. Our surveys consistently find that Democrats are much more likely to report having been vaccinated than Republicans, and Republicans are much more likely to say that they definitely do not want to get vaccinated. In May, just as vaccine supply was starting to outstrip demand, we examined average vaccination rates by county and found that rates were lower in counties that voted for Trump in the 2020 Presidential election compared to those that voted for Biden. Now, two months later, we find that not only does this remain the case, the gap has grown.
We obtained data on the share of the population fully vaccinated by county from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) COVID-19 Integrated County View and data on the 2020 Presidential election results by county from here (for more detailed methods, see: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/vaccination-is-local-covid-19-vaccination-rates-vary-by-county-and-key-characteristics/). To create a longer time series, we also looked at vaccination rates in April 2021.
While the share of the total population that is fully vaccinated has increased for both county groups, it has increased faster in counties that voted for Biden, resulting in a widening gap. Three months ago, as of April 22, the average vaccination rate in counties that voted for Trump was 20.6% compared to 22.8% in Biden counties, yielding a relatively small gap of 2.2 percentage points. By May 11, the gap had increased to 6.5% and by July 6, 11.7%, with the average vaccination rate in Trump counties at 35% compared to 46.7% in Biden counties. See Figures 1 and 2.
Figure 1: Vaccination rates in counties that voted for Biden and counties that voted for Trump, April – July 2021
Figure 2: The gap in vaccination rates between counties that voted for Biden and counties that voted for Trump, April – July 2021
Although there has been an overall significant slow-down in COVID-19 vaccination rates in the U.S., these findings show a widening divide of communities at risk for COVID-19 along partisan lines. A key component of any effort to boost vaccination rates among Republicans will be identifying the right messengers. According to our Vaccine Monitor, which tracks the public’s attitudes and experiences with COVID-19 vaccinations, Republicans are most likely to trust their doctors and employers to provide reliable information on COVID-19 vaccines, while government sources are less trusted. Going forward, efforts that focus on these messengers, including President Biden’s recent announcement to augment vaccination distribution through doctor’s offices, may help, but there is a hardcore group of vaccine resisters who are disproportionately Republican and will be difficult to move.
https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/the-red-blue-divide-in-covid-19-vaccination-rates-is-growing/
1 big thing: How Russia invaded Facebook
"Oh f---, how did we miss this?" Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asked, looking around at the somber faces of his top executives, the N.Y. Times' Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang write in their book, "An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination," out Tuesday.
In an excerpt provided first to Axios, the authors write that the executives met Dec. 9, 2016, for a briefing on what Facebook's security team knew about Russian meddling on the platform during the election won by Donald Trump.
The security team, it turns out, had first spotted Russian activity on the platform in March 2016. But Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg were just being told about it nine months later.
The eight-page handout for the meeting — written by Alex Stamos, then Facebook's chief security officer — "acknowledged that Facebook was sitting on a trove of information proving that a foreign government had tried to meddle in the U.S. election."
Frenkel and Kang, in a chapter called "Company Over Country," write that "no one else spoke as Zuckerberg and Sandberg drilled their chief security officer":
Why had they been kept in the dark? How aggressive were the Russians? And why, asked a visibly agitated Sandberg, had she not known that Stamos had put together a special team to look at Russian election interference? Did they need to share what Stamos had found with lawmakers immediately, and did the company have a legal obligation beyond that?
What happened: The security team "had uncovered information that no one, including the U.S. government, had previously known," the authors write.
"Stamos felt that he had been trying to sound the alarm on Russia for months."
Stamos said: "It was well within my remit to investigate foreign activity within the platform. And we had appropriately briefed the people in our reporting chain ... It became clear after that that it wasn’t enough."
At the meeting, "Stamos gave a somber assessment of where they stood, admitting that no one at the company knew the full extent of the Russian election interference," we learn from "An Ugly Truth."
"Zuckerberg demanded that the executives get him answers, so they promised to devote their top engineering talent and resources to investigate what Russia had done on the platform."
Facebook spokesperson Dani Lever said in a previous statement to Axios about the book:
"There’s no silver bullet to fighting misinformation and disinformation, which is why we take a comprehensive approach which includes removing fake accounts and coordinated networks, connecting people to reliable information, and running an historic, independent fact-checking program."
Go deeper: Read a N.Y. Times adaptation (subscription).
Share this story.
https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-am?id=1&name=AM/PM
Pandemic gun violence surge was not linked to rise in gun sales, study finds
Research suggests looking at role of job loss, economic change, closure of schools and community organizations and civil unrest
Lois Beckett @loisbeckett
Fri 9 Jul 2021 06.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/09/pandemic-us-gun-violence-surge-firearm-sales
Gun homicides surged across the United States during the coronavirus pandemic, in the same year that Americans bought a record-breaking number of guns.
But some of America’s leading gun violence researchers have concluded that what might seem like an obvious cause-and-effect – a surge in gun buying leads to a surge in gun violence – is not supported by the data.
Through July of last year, there was no clear association between the increase in firearm purchases and the increase in most interpersonal gun violence at the state level, according to a new study published in Injury Epidemiology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40621-021-00339-5
The findings suggest that “we need to be looking at other factors, like job loss, economic change, the closure of schools and community organizations and nonprofits, and civil unrest,” in order to understand last year’s increase in gun violence, Julia Schleimer, the lead author of the new study, said.
There did appear to be some association between the increase in gun-purchasing and an increase in domestic violence gun injuries in April and May, but that correlation might also be explained by other factors, including increased substance abuse or the decreased access to domestic violence support services during the early months of lockdown, Schleimer said.
The results of the new study are an unexpected addition to the fierce political battle over how to explain last year’s estimated 25% increase in homicides, which experts say they expect will be the worst single-year increase in killings since the 1960s. While official government data is not yet available, experts are projecting that the US saw an additional 4,000 to 5.000 total homicides nationwide in 2020, and the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive recorded nearly 4,000 additional gun homicides last year compared with 2019.
Even though the homicide rate across big cities remains close to half of what it was in the 1990s, some politicians have used the single-year jump in killings to paint Democrats and the Biden administration as soft on crime, using an old political playbook of stoking anxiety over crime and violence in order to win elections.
Joe Biden has responded by focusing on firearms access and calling for new gun control laws, as well as supporting increased funding for police and community violence intervention programs.
The findings of the new study from the state-funded Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, do not fit tidily into either of these partisan political narratives. While the new study raises doubts about a correlation between last year’s spike in gun purchases and the increases in shootings, it doesn’t address the underlying risk of easy access to guns in the US, Schleimer said.
While official government crime data is not yet available for 2020, roughly three-quarters of US homicides annually are committed with guns, and experts estimate nonfatal shootings injure 100,000 people a year, often leaving survivors with serious, life-altering injuries.
There is a large body of research demonstrating the correlation between gun access and increased risk of gun injury, Schleimer said, an association that is particularly clear when it comes to the risk of gun suicide. The increase in shootings during 2020 may have been driven by Americans who already owned guns before the pandemic, not by the people who bought guns for the first time last year – but that does not mean that gun access is irrelevant, she said.
At the same time, the lack of any clear correlation between what the researchers estimated as 4.3m additional firearm purchases nationally from March through July 2020, and a 27% increase in firearm injuries over that time, suggests that other factors besides gun access and gun control laws deserve more attention, and more research, Schleimer said.
“There are a lot of strategies that can address some of the more social determinants of violence,” Schleimer said, including supporting violence interrupters and other community-based violence intervention programs, and focusing on economic policies that might help reduce gun violence, which is deeply correlated with poverty and concentrated disadvantage. “There’s some good evidence on youth summer job programs and young people’s risk for violence.”
It made sense that politicians and other public figures would point to the increase in gun buying in 2020 as a potential reason shootings had increased last year, Schleimer said.
But, she said, “Our findings, from this current study, in this particular context, are not supporting that.”
The new study has several limitations, including the complexity of factors that might have influenced gun violence during 2020, and the lack of official data on both gun sales and gun injuries. The researchers estimated gun sales using federal background check data, and relied on shooting incident data collected from media reports by the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive.
Daniel Webster, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy, said the study followed “rigorous statistical methods,” and that it raised interesting questions about whether the increase in gun violence might be more closely connected to some Americans’ willingness to carry their previously-purchased guns during the pandemic, rather than a spike in first-time gun purchases.
It was possible that in some states, many of the additional gun sales in 2020 went to people who had already owned multiple firearms – meaning that the surge in sales did not necessarily contribute to an increase in the overall prevalence of gun ownership, Webster said in an email.
“Data from Chicago and some other cities suggest that we have seen a sharp increase in illegal gun carrying,” he wrote. “The role that guns are playing in the increased levels of homicides may have more to do with increases in illegal gun carrying than with the number of incidents in which people buy guns legally, especially in the short-term.”
In general, Webster wrote, the relationship between gun ownership and the increased likelihood of a shooting depended a lot on who was acquiring the gun. “In places and among individuals who are particularly low risk, more guns may have little impact on rates of lethal violence, but in places and among individuals of high risk, gun ownership can greatly increase risks of lethal violence,” he wrote.
Schleimer also cautioned that it’s possible that there might be some connection between gun purchasing and gun violence in 2020 that was masked by other factors the researchers were not able to measure or control for.
“Last year was such a unique year in many ways, and the context was continually evolving, and there were a lot of factors changing all at once, both locally and at the state level and nationally in the context of the pandemic and social and civil unrest,” Schleimer said. “That really complicated what we were able to do analytically.”
To examine the possible link between gun sales and shootings, the UC Davis researchers looked at trends in gun purchasing, and gun injuries, across 48 states, and then examined whether there was a correlation between the number of additional guns purchased and the number of additional gun injuries during the spring and summer. They controlled for a range of state-level factors that might influence the number of gun injuries, including stay-at-home orders, coronavirus cases and deaths, unemployment, measures of racial tension and civil unrest, and seasonal variations in rates of gun injury.
While an early analysis from the same researchers, looking only at March through May, had found a correlation between increased gun purchases and gun injuries, their final analysis did not find any clear pattern between how many additional guns were purchased in a state through July 2020, and how much of an increase the state saw in non-domestic violence firearms injuries. The study did not analyze gun suicides or suicide attempts.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/09/pandemic-us-gun-violence-surge-firearm-sales
Glen @gleng1 ·Jul 8Replying to @tribelaw
THREAD
How low can a former law professor sink? To call a bogus lawsuit based on a fake version of the First Amendment an important case, much less “the most important” of the century? Has he no shame? https://t.co/BJlQh3Mnkt
— Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) July 8, 2021
The double standard of Kamala Harris being in charge
Opinion by Karen Tumulty
Columnist
July 8, 2021|Updated today at 7:55 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/08/double-standard-kamala-harris-being-charge/
When discussing qualities that people demand of their leaders, “easy to work for” rarely comes up — if the candidate is a man.
The catchphrase “You’re fired!” helped propel Donald Trump, star of “The Apprentice," into the ranks of mega-celebrities. Repeatedly invoked in his 2016 campaign for the presidency, those two words came to represent decisiveness, toughness and a low tolerance for those who do not perform.
When Rahm Emanuel ran for Chicago mayor in 2011, his well-known propensities for infighting, rage and swearing were seen as evidence he was fit to follow in the footsteps of the legendarily volatile Richard J. Daley.
As senator and then president, Lyndon B. Johnson was known to throw things — including drinks that had not been mixed to his specifications — at his terrified assistants.
But when a woman is in charge, or wants to be, a different and contradictory set of standards comes into play, something political scientists describe as “role incongruity.” Women are expected to conform to gender norms as warm nurturers, even as they break the mold.
We saw that during the 2020 presidential campaign, when Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) was hit with a spate of stories that described her as a difficult and sometimes abusive boss. While no one should excuse mistreatment of employees, Klobuchar was the only presidential contender who received that degree of scrutiny, or who had the internal workings of her Senate office raised as a gauge of her fitness to sit in the oval one.
In 2017, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions got flustered when then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) hit him with a line of rapid-fire questions during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. That kind of aggressiveness would hardly have been noteworthy in a male senator, but an obviously surprised and offended Sessions told Harris she made him “nervous.”
Now, of course, Harris is vice president, and under a spotlight as the first of her gender to hold the office, as well as having the pole position to run for the Democratic nomination to succeed President Biden.
A June 30 Politico story — quickly picked up in other outlets — told of “dysfunction” roiling Harris’s vice presidential office. The publication, relying on anonymous sources, described Harris’s operation as having “low morale, porous lines of communication and diminished trust among aides and senior officials.”
It is worth noting that it has been only 24 weeks since one of the most chaotic presidential transitions in modern history.
Even if the handoff of power had gone smoothly, Harris would hardly be the first high government official to make some early stumbles or require an adjustment period. Add to that the fact that she and her new staff are being handed some of the thorniest issues that confront the Biden administration, including fixing the chaos at the border, voting rights and police reform.
Much of the anonymous carping about Harris’s operation has centered on the vice president’s chief of staff, Tina Flournoy — who, like Harris, is a woman of color. One beef against Flournoy: She tightly controls access to the vice president. Well, that is pretty much the primary requirement of an effective chief of staff.
Among those reported to be most incensed are political donors, though it is hard to imagine they would have such expectations of access to Biden. “Either she can be out there doing the job she was elected to do, or she can sit around having tea with you. Which would you prefer?” asks veteran fundraiser Kimberly Peeler-Allen, co-founder of Higher Heights for America, a national organization aimed at building the political power of Black women.
Meanwhile, just as the profile of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) is being raised as a key moderate vote in the Senate — and a potential roadblock to Biden’s agenda — there come reports, again anonymous, of a “demoralizing” work environment in her office.
According to a list of supposed grievances detailed by Business Insider: Sinema’s interns feel underpaid, overworked and stressed out from dealing with hostile incoming phone calls to the office. Such has been the lament of interns since … forever.
It was hard to figure out what to make of the fluctuating staff turnover statistics cited, which used data compiled by the congressional-staffing database LegiStorm.
Sinema ranks 29th out of 100 senators for the most turnover this year, which puts her well in the mid-range, but was 94th out of 100 in 2020, which meant she had one of the best records in the chamber.
Calling out double standards is important, but there is only one thing that is likely to get rid of them: Seeing more women in charge.
Opinion by Karen Tumulty
Karen Tumulty is a Washington Post columnist covering national politics. She joined The Post in 2010 from Time magazine and has also worked at the Los Angeles Times. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/08/double-standard-kamala-harris-being-charge/