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Bill Browder @Billbrowder·10m Explosive story about the role that British enablers play in assisting dictators going after their enemies in the U.K. If the allegations are even half true, @HoganLovells should be ashamed of themselves and shunned by anyone with a moral compass
18.06.21 STATE SCRUTINY THE ENABLERS
The power of money: how autocrats use London to strike foes worldwide
"A Moscow prison. A London courtroom. One is part of a Russian legal system widely considered corrupt and subordinate to the Kremlin. The other is a symbol of an English legal system respected around the world. Yet after Hardman returned to London, an English judge would accept into the case the evidence obtained from the Moscow prison.
The episode is a vivid illustration of how the brutal politics of authoritarian countries like Russia and Kazakhstan have spilled into England’s legal system, with lawyers and private investigators in London raking in huge fees and engaging in questionable tactics in the service of autocratic foreign governments."
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2021-06-18/the-power-of-money-how-autocrats-use-london-to-strike-foes-worldwide
1:06 PM · Jun 18, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
THREAD
Explosive story about the role that British enablers play in assisting dictators going after their enemies in the U.K. If the allegations are even half true, @HoganLovells should be ashamed of themselves and shunned by anyone with a moral compass https://t.co/ezvHbxSeKa
— Sir William Browder KCMG (@Billbrowder) June 18, 2021
The sycophantic inner circle egging on Trump – and fueling his big lie
Despite audit after audit, the CEO of MyPillow, a state senator and a rightwing TV host remain convinced of election fraud
Adam Gabbatt @adamgabbatt
Fri 18 Jun 2021 03.15 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/18/trump-election-lie-mike-lindell-mypillow
On 7 November 2020, after several days of vote-counting, Donald Trump lost the US presidential election. More than 60 unsuccessful lawsuits and one insurrection later, Trump has still lost the election, but the former president refuses to accept defeat.
Egged on by a group of sycophants and fantasists, including a small-time Pennsylvania politician, a host on a far-right news network, and the CEO of a pillow company, Trump now plans to hold rallies at the end of June where he is likely to continue his fraudulent claims of a stolen election.
Despite the election having been repeatedly investigated and declared “the most secure in American history” by a group of experts, the former president is said to be convinced the election result will be overturned.
As are those in his close circle fighting a series of quixotic battles on his behalf.
Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and a Trump confidant who claims to have evidence that shows voting machines were hacked by China, told the Guardian Trump would be returned to office by August or – at the latest – September.
“With me they just keep saying: ‘It’s a conspiracy, Mike Lindell – he’s crazy, blah blah blah,’ all this stuff,” Lindell said. “But I think it gives the whole country hope because they know me and they know I wouldn’t be out there if I wasn’t 100%.”
Lindell, who is being sued for $1.3bn by the voting machine manufacturer Dominion over his repeatedly stated conspiracy theory that the company distorted the results of the election, might not be giving the whole country hope, but Trump and the 53% of Republicans who believe he won the election are certainly receiving a boost.
Trump’s aspirations are also being bolstered by Doug Mastriano, a failed Republican candidate for Congress in 2018 who now represents one of the 50 state senate districts in Pennsylvania, and Christina Bobb, a host at One America News Network, a rightwing channel that has faithfully propagated claims of election meddling, despite no evidence of any widespread fraud.
A lack of evidence has apparently not prevented Trump from believing the hype. The Washington Post reported this month that Trump is enthralled by a politically charged vote recount in Arizona, while according to the New York Times the 45th president, egged on by the likes of Lindell, does indeed believe he will be back in the White House this summer.
“His main focus is on Maricopa county and all the audits that are actually going on in the country here,” said Lindell, whose friendship with Trump grew over the last four years and blossomed when the pillow connoisseur became one of the loudest voices crying voter fraud.
“I think that gives him the most hope because everyone can see that,” Lindell said. Republicans have pushed for audits in several key states, despite previous audits having found no evidence of wrongdoing in any state in the country.
While Trump is concentrating on his audits, Lindell has focused his energies on a mysterious batch of data he says he was given – he won’t reveal who handed it to him – on 9 January.
Lindell claims that the data shows that Dominion and Smartmatic machines were hacked into by China, which changed votes from Trump to Biden. The results, he claims, are conclusive.
“If you were at a crime scene, and you had a DNA of blood and you had a movie of who did it, this is kind of what you have here, only better,” Lindell said.
The US government’s cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency disagrees. In a statement addressing “election security rumor vs reality”, the agency said voting system safeguards prevent exactly the thing Lindell is attempting to prove.
Last November, top cybersecurity experts from inside and outside the government issued a joint statement saying the election was “the most secure in American history”. They added: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
None of that has deterred Lindell, who said he has spent more than $12m of his own money on his bid to overturn the election. “I’ve had private investigators, I’ve had lawyers, I’ve put money into my own social media platform, I just … every waking moment is on my efforts to get this out there,” he said.
As Lindell barrages his way across the post-election conspiracy theory landscape, the other main attempt to overturn the election is happening at the local level.
Republicans’ main hopes seem to rest on Arizona, where the Republican-controlled state senate is performing its own audit of the election result in Maricopa county, despite multiple audits having already affirmed the election results.
The firm hired to conduct the audit, Cyber Ninjas, has little experience in elections, its CEO has promoted conspiracy theories that the election was fraudulent, and the audit has been funded, at least in part, by Trump-aligned figures, suggesting it may not be an entirely neutral effort. But it has excited many on the right.
Bobb, the OANN host, has been a repeated visitor to the audit. “Why Christina Bobb’s OAN ‘coverage’ of the Arizona audit is deceptive - and dangerous,” read one headline in the Arizona Republic newspaper this week. Bobb has discussed the effort with Trump and his team, the Washington Post reported. While nominally acting as a reporter on the audit, Bobb has also been fundraising for the venture.
Bobb interviewed Mastriano as the state senator visited the Maricopa county in early June and declared the goings on there as “the first forensic audit in the world”.
The pair share more than just a passion for spurious election fraud claims. Like Bobb, Mastriano is said to have been whispering in Trump’s ear, and he has called for a Maricopa-style audit in Pennsylvania. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the far-right member of Congress, has backed a similar audit in her state of Georgia, where multiple recounts have already confirmed Joe Biden’s win. There is also a push for an audit in Michigan.
There is no direct way for the supreme court to overturn the election – “in the same way sharks can’t grow legs on command and stroll on to land”, as Business Insider put it – but people like Lindell, Mastriano and Bobb will keep pushing. And in any case, shilling for Trump does have its benefits.
Mastriano, unknown until recently, has seen a once scarcely imaginable rise in his fame and is expected to run for Pennsylvania governor next year. Trump has promised to campaign on his behalf, Mastriano told a local radio station, while Rudy Giuliani headlined a Mastriano event in May. Bobb has seen her profile inexorably increase and become a star in rightwing circles.
Lindell, hunkered down with his secret data and his cybersecurity experts, seems unlikely to see any benefit, however.
He was being mentioned as a candidate for Minnesota governor before his immersion in the election fraud conspiracy, which has cost him both credibility and the ability to sell his pillows at Bed Bath and Beyond, Kohl’s and other big-name stores.
Nevertheless, Lindell will keep going on his lonely march. His next step, he said, would be to hold a “symposium” in July, where cybersecurity experts and journalists can examine his data. He hasn’t chosen a state yet, or a date, or sent out any invites, but he has high hopes.
Once people had seen his information, Lindell said, he would petition the supreme court and ask it to overturn the presidential election and reinstate Trump.
“Just because it hasn’t happened before doesn’t mean that, when a crime of this magnitude has been committed, you don’t look at it and you don’t take care of it,” Lindell said.
“I think they’re gonna move very fast. It could be August, it could be off by a month or so.”
He added: “It’ll be this year. I don’t see what other choice they have.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/18/trump-election-lie-mike-lindell-mypillow
As Gaetz investigation ramps up, feds mount sweeping probe into Central Florida political scene: Sources
The sprawling probe has revved up its focus on alleged corruption and fraud.
ByWill Steakin andKatherine Faulders
18 June 2021, 12:00
• 9 min read
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/gaetz-investigation-ramps-feds-mount-sweeping-probe-central/story?id=78321551
Since federal prosecutors obtained the cooperation of GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz's once close-ally in May, sources tell ABC News the ongoing investigation, which includes sex trafficking allegations involving Gaetz, has engulfed the tight-knit Central Florida political scene as prosecutors continue their investigation of the Florida congressman.
Former Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg, who reached a plea deal last month, has been assisting federal agents in the sprawling probe that has recently revved up its focus on alleged corruption and fraud stemming from Greenberg's time in office and beyond, multiple sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
The former tax collector pleaded guilty in May to a host of crimes including charges of stalking, identity theft, wire fraud and conspiracy to bribe a public official, as well as a sex trafficking charge. Greenberg is prepared to hand over evidence and testimony that could implicate Gaetz and others, sources told ABC News.
Sources told ABC News that prosecutors believe a decision about whether or not to bring charges against Gaetz could come as early as July.
Sources said the probe into the congressman has ramped up in recent weeks. Investigators have started interviewing more women who were allegedly introduced to Gaetz through Greenberg, who last month pleaded guilty to sex trafficking a 17-year-old girl -- who later went on to work in pornography -- and introducing her to other "adult men." Since May, a new round of target letters and subpoenas in the wide-ranging investigation have been sent out, ABC News has learned.
Another avenue investigators have been focusing on recently, according to sources, are contracts that Greenberg handed out through the tax office totaling more than $1.5 million, which an independent audit late last year described as "unnecessary" and "considered to be a waste of taxpayer dollars," according to documents in the forensic audit of the tax office obtained by ABC News through a public records request.
Sources told ABC News that investigators have reached out to Keith Ingersoll, whose firm KI Consulting had a $48,000 contract with the tax office that ran between January 2017 and September 2020. The audit found that there was "no evidence of work product" by Ingersoll's group despite the multi-year contract and staff at the tax office being "unaware what this group did."
Ingersoll's attorney did not respond to multiple requests for comment from ABC News.
In May, Politico reported that investigators were seeking information from close associates of Greenberg, including Gaetz and long-time friend Joe Ellicott. A subpoena received by one associate allegedly stated that the grand jury is investigating alleged crimes "involving commercial sex acts with adult and minor women as well as obstruction of justice." It also requested any communications, documents, recordings and payments the individual had with Ellicott, Gaetz and Greenberg from 2016 until now, according to Politico.
MORE: House Ethics Committee opens investigation into Rep. Matt Gaetz
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/house-ethics-committee-opens-investigation-rep-matt-gaetz/story?id=76981572
Ellicott, who was also on the tax office payroll as an assistant deputy tax collector, has a long history with Greenberg; he was a groomsman at the former tax collector's wedding and the pair co-hosted a local sports-themed radio show before Greenberg ran for office.
Ellicott could emerge as a key witness in the ongoing sex traffic investigation, and appears to have information that may be damning to others beyond Greenberg, sources say. In a private text exchange over the encrypted messaging app Signal, Ellicott allegedly told Greenberg last August that a mutual friend was worried she could be implicated in the investigation into the sex ring involving a minor.
"She is scared because she knew [the minor] was underage the whole time, had sex with her, and they both went [to] see other guys they had met together," according to private messages obtained by ABC News. The exchange was first reported by The Daily Beast.
In separate private Snapchat messages with the same mutual friend, obtained by ABC News, Ellicott allegedly urged the friend to encourage the young woman who was no longer a minor at the time to avoid speaking with law enforcement as federal authorities were pursuing her for questioning.
"She needs to delay them, hold them off and just not answer them," Ellicott allegedly wrote over the messaging app before the text was automatically deleted, according to photos taken with a separate phone and later viewed by ABC News.
Ellicott later wrote that the minor needed to find a lawyer and that he would be heading over to speak with her that day.
"I'm heading over there now... The lady isn't doing her any favors -- she drove all the way to cause trouble for her," Ellicott allegedly wrote, referring to the officer looking to speak with the former underage girl.
Ellicott has not returned numerous calls or text messages from ABC News seeking comment. Greenberg's lawyer Fritz Scheller declined to comment. The United States Attorney's Office in Middle District of Florida declined to comment.
While prosecutors have Greenberg's cooperation in the probe, the former tax collector's credibility could be an issue if the investigation results in further indictments. According to his plea agreement, Greenberg admitted that he paid a 17-year-old girl for sex and "introduced the minor to other adult men, who engaged in commercial sex acts."
When asked for comment, a spokesperson for Gaetz criticized the investigation as a "partisan smear job." Gaetz, who has not been charged with any crimes, has vehemently denied any wrongdoing and has repeatedly denied ever paying for sex or having sex with a minor. He has defiantly launched a rally tour around the country and has at times joked about the allegations.
The investigation targeting Gaetz was launched last year when Donald Trump was still president, sources told ABC News. Then-Attorney General Bill Barr was briefed on the investigation's progress several times, the sources said.
Greenberg pleaded guilty in May to six of the 33 federal charges he was facing, including sex trafficking of a minor. While the plea deal states that Greenberg will be assisting prosecutors moving forward, the government also stated that it reserves the right to prosecute him on the other charges if Greenberg violates any terms of the cooperation deal.
Following Greenberg's plea hearing in May, his lawyer, Fritz Schiller, offered a teasing response when asked if the plea deal could mean trouble for other officials.
"Does my client have information that could hurt an elected official?" Schiller said. "I guess this is must-see television. You'll just have to wait and see."
Moments earlier on that day, a plane carrying a banner that read "Tick Tock Matt Gaetz" flew over the Orlando federal courthouse.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/gaetz-investigation-ramps-feds-mount-sweeping-probe-central/story?id=78321551
‘I Made Juneteenth Very Famous’: The Inside Story of Trump’s Post-George Floyd Month
By MICHAEL C. BENDER
06/18/2021 07:00 AM EDT
Michael C. Bender covers the White House for The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost, which will be published on August 10 and from which this article is adapted.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/06/18/mike-bender-book-excerpt-trump-495071
For Father’s Day in 2020, what Donald Trump mostly wanted was to avoid his son-in-law.
It was Jared Kushner who had talked the president into hiring Brad Parscale to run a campaign that was now, just months before the election, in freefall. And when most Americans rejected Trump’s unreasonably truculent response to the civil unrest that was sweeping the country, the president also blamed Kushner.
The frustration and anguish that had accrued among Black Americans after decades of debasing systemic racism had been emphatically—finally—cracked open by the death of George Floyd, who’d been murdered by police a few weeks earlier. As protesters poured into the streets of the nation’s capital and major municipalities, Trump privately told advisers that he wished he’d been quicker to support police and more aggressive in his pushback against protesters.
Trump had staked nearly his entire campaign in 2016 around a law-and-order image, and now groaned that the criminal justice reform that Kushner had persuaded him to support made him look weak and—even worse—hadn’t earned him any goodwill among Black voters.
“I’ve done all this stuff for the Blacks—it’s always Jared telling me to do this,” Trump said to one confidante on Father’s Day. “And they all f------ hate me, and none of them are going to vote for me.”
The weekend after Father’s Day, Trump canceled a trip to Bedminster at the last minute—after Kushner had already left for the New Jersey golf club—and instead scheduled a round of political meetings at the White House without him.
A month after the murder of Floyd, Trump was dumping on his son-in-law, and he was also abandoning the chance to improve his relationship with Black leaders and Black voters during a particularly tumultuous moment in U.S. race relations and the presidential campaign. The story of this month, from the murder of Floyd to Trump’s assertion that his outreach to Black voters wasn’t working, is one of missed opportunities and bungled messaging, even in the eyes of some of Trump’s closest advisers, who described their firsthand accounts with me during the past year. Many of the sources spoke to me on the condition of deep background, an agreement that meant I could share their stories without direct attribution.
Trump had long struggled with addressing the nation’s racial issues, and his senior staff hadn’t included a single Black staffer since he’d fired Omarosa Manigault Newman—a former contestant on his reality television show—at the end of 2017. In August 2018, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway had been asked on NBC’s Meet the Press to name the top Black official in the Trump White House and could only come up with his first name: Ja’Ron.
But Ja’Ron Smith was two pay grades below the top ranks. After Conway’s interview, Smith asked for a promotion to formalize his role as the West Wing’s senior-most Black official and close the $50,000 salary gap. Kushner agreed but then put him off for the next two years.
Still, Smith remained in the White House, where he continued to work on Kushner’s criminal justice issues and played a crucial role in outreach to Black community leaders. In June 2020, Smith was writing a proposal for Trump to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. But the outcry over Trump’s rally on the day that commemorated the end of slavery convinced Smith to shelve the plan.
Trump hadn’t thought to ask his seniormost Black official about holding a rally on Juneteenth.
***
Trump’s first test at addressing the country’s racial tensions came in the summer of 2017. On a Saturday in August, 32-year-old Heather Heyer was killed, and 19 others injured, when a 22-old neo-Nazi drove his souped-up 2010 Dodge Challenger at about 30 miles per hour into a crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia. Heyer, who was white, and the others were protesting a white supremacist rally organized to oppose the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, a Virginian who commanded the Confederate States Army during the Civil War. Trump had been golfing at his Bedminster club that morning. It had been about two hours since Heyer’s death, and Trump said he wanted to “put out a comment as to what’s going on in Charlottesville.”
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides—on many sides,” Trump said.
The White House tried in vain to focus cable networks and newspaper reporters on the first words of his statement instead of the final phrase—“on many sides”—that he’d ad-libbed and then repeated. But the obvious question they couldn’t answer was how the president could put any blame on the peaceful counter-protesters. His remarks seemed to justify the white supremacist violence, and Trump’s silence over the next 24 hours unnerved even those around him.
Back at Trump Tower in New York two days later, Trump had a news conference scheduled to discuss the nation’s infrastructure. Responding to questions about Charlottesville, he again blamed the counterprotesters.
“You had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides,” Trump said.
The next day, Stephen Schwarzman, a longtime friend of Trump’s and chief executive of Blackstone Group, called the president and told him he had disbanded the White House Strategic and Policy Forum, a coalition of businesses chaired by Schwarzman that Trump had convened in February 2017 to advise him on economic issues. There weren’t enough executives left who would stand by Trump after his repeated failures to adequately address Charlottesville, Schwarzman said. Trump hung up and beat his friend to the punch by quickly tweeting that he was shutting down the panel.
Gary Cohn, the president’s top economic adviser—and a registered Democrat—was even more despondent. Raised Jewish on the East Side of Cleveland and a longtime New York resident, he stood next to Trump for the infrastructure news conference and grew increasingly alarmed and uncomfortable. Later, in a private meeting inside the Oval Office, Cohn unloaded on the president.
Cohn told Trump that his lack of clarity had been harmful to the country and that he’d put an incredible amount of pressure on people working in the White House. He told Trump that he might have to quit. No one backed Cohn up. Others in the room, including Pence, remained quiet.
Cohn returned to his office after the meeting broke up. Following a few minutes behind, Pence climbed the flight of stairs and appeared at the threshold of Cohn’s door.
“I’m proud of you,” Pence told him, safely out of earshot of the president.
An even bigger test for Trump came on May 26, 2020.
Ironically, in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Trump’s team had started picking up positive signals from some Black leaders that they interpreted as potential softening on the incumbent president. The reduction in sentences for crack cocaine offenses, which had disproportionately and unfairly targeted Black offenders, reduced prison time by an average of six years for more than 2,000 prisoners. Of those, 91 percent were Black. Trump’s tax-cut bill included specific incentives for investments in poverty-stricken areas, known as opportunity zones. And those incentives were starting to work, according to a study from the Urban Institute. The administration had also made some inroads with historically Black colleges and universities when it canceled repayment of more than $300 million in federal relief loans and made permanent more than $250 million in annual funding.
Al Sharpton, the MSNBC host and civil rights activist, had been secretly calling him, which left the president with the impression that their staffs should work together. But the follow-up calls from Kushner’s team would go unanswered. Jesse Jackson, the Baptist minister and civil rights activist and one-time presidential candidate, had phoned a few times, too.
And more than 600 Black leaders joined a call as White House aides strategized over a push to codify the opportunity zone revitalization council that Trump had created by executive order.
But none of Kushner’s efforts to repair Trump’s image with the Black community would matter when the video of George Floyd’s murder began spreading online.
The morning after Memorial Day, senior White House staff gathered inside the West Wing for a prescheduled meeting about coronavirus. The death toll was approaching 100,000 in the United States, and the administration was scrambling to address a shortage of remdesivir, the antiviral used to treat Covid.
“We’re getting crushed on Covid,” said Alyssa Farah, the communications director.
Kushner, who seemed distracted and more aloof than usual in the meeting, interrupted her.
“I’m just going to stop you,” he said. “There is going to be one story that dominates absolutely everything for the foreseeable future. I’m already hearing from African American leaders about the death of George Floyd in Minnesota.”
Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, brushed it off.
“Nobody is going to care about that,” Meadows told him, according to officials in the room. Meadows disputed this version of events.
It took another day for Trump to watch the devastating video of Floyd’s murder aboard Air Force One, where he was returning to Washington from Florida. Trump sat in the president’s suite near the front of the plane. As Trump pressed “play” on the video, he was surrounded by Kushner, social media director and deputy White House chief of staff Dan Scavino, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien and his media team. Trump contorted his face as he watched. He looked repulsed, then turned away. He handed the phone back to his aides without finishing.
“This is f------ terrible,” he exclaimed.
Trump said he wanted to speak immediately with Attorney General Bill Barr.
Trump was still shaken by the video the next afternoon when Barr arrived in the Oval Office on Thursday to brief the president about Floyd’s death, now three days later. Trump had tweeted the night before that he planned to expedite the probe from the Justice Department. The only effect of the tweet, however, was to politicize the issue and infuriate Barr, who hated the suggestion that his interest in the case was political or the idea that anybody was his boss. It was the opening fissure in the relationship between the prickly and stubborn septuagenarians.
“I know these f------ cops,” Trump said, recalling stories he’d heard growing up in Queens about savage police tactics. “They can get out of control sometimes. They can be rough.”
Trump’s assessment struck some in the room as surprisingly critical of police, and the president showed a level of empathy for Floyd behind closed doors that he would never fully reveal in public. Had he tried, it might have helped dial down the tension. But Trump didn’t see it as part of his job to show empathy, and he worried that such a display would signal weakness to his base.
Trump’s compassion quickly evaporated that night as he watched demonstrators torch a Minneapolis police station, and the protests spread to New York City; Denver; Phoenix; Columbus, Ohio; and Memphis, Tennessee.
“These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd,” he wrote on Twitter. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”
Later, Jackson said during one of his calls with Trump that the president said he was considering attending Floyd's funeral. Jackson dissuaded him from that idea, telling the president that he had barely spoken to the family after Floyd died. Trump had reached out to the Floyd family four days after his death in a call that relatives later criticized as brief and one-sided. Jackson told Trump that it would have been disrespectful to then turn up to the memorial service.
Trump agreed—and it was the last time he and Jackson spoke for the rest of the year.
***
As Trump stewed amid negative coverage of the worsening pandemic, the deepening recession and now the racial justice protests, it was clear to campaign aides that they needed to get their candidate back on the road again, and soon.
In early June, Trump gathered a dozen of his top White House staffers and campaign aides—plus Mike Lindell, the MyPillow company founder and a vocal Trump supporter—to discuss the campaign’s television advertising strategy and a return to the campaign trail. Trump admired the success Lindell had selling pillows with infomercials, and Brad Parscale, his campaign manager, cornered Lindell before the meeting and urged him to attest to the brilliance of the advertising campaign.
Parscale’s prep work paid off. Trump turned to Lindell as soon as campaign staffers finished their presentation on the advertising strategy.
“Mike, are they doing a good job?” Trump asked.
“Yes, they’re doing great!” Lindell said. “I’ve talked to them before, and they’re talking to my team.”
The meeting then turned to a discussion about rallies, and Parscale presented 11 potential locations in six different states: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Nearly all of the sites were outdoors.
But Florida was off the table. Parscale suggested a drive-in-style rally in Central Florida, but Trump said Governor Ron DeSantis didn’t want a big crowd in his state during the pandemic. Parscale urged Trump to call DeSantis and tell him it was safe, but Trump refused.
No one liked the options in Arizona—the weather was too hot for an outdoor rally, and a spike in Covid cases precluded indoor venues—and Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were all governed by Democrats. That left Tulsa, Oklahoma, which had landed on Parscale’s list after he asked Pence earlier that week about which state, governed by a Trump-friendly Republican, had the fewest Covid restrictions in the nation. The Mabee Center—the 11,300-seat arena Parscale proposed that day—had been the location of a Trump rally during the 2016 campaign. Trump was sold. (Parscale moved the venue to the 19,000-seat Bank of America Center after ticket requests shot through the roof, a result of both a prank from TikTok teens and a campaign decision to blast the announcement out to supporters across the country.)
Parscale recommended holding the Tulsa rally on June 19. No one on Parscale’s team flagged that day—or that combination of time and place—as potentially problematic. Had Parscale bothered to ask Katrina Pierson, the highest-ranking Black staffer on the campaign and a close friend of Parscale’s, she would have told him that June 19 was Juneteenth, a significant holiday for Black Americans that commemorated the end of slavery. She also would have said to him that Tulsa, as most Black Americans are well aware, had been home to one of the bloodiest outbreaks of racial violence in the nation’s history.
When staffers inside the Republican National Committee heard about the plans, they immediately pushed back.
“Don’t do this,” Ronna McDaniel, the RNC chairwoman, told Parscale. “The media is not going to give us the benefit of the doubt, especially now.”
There still was time to change the date or reconsider plans entirely. The campaign hadn’t yet signed contracts with vendors or the arena or even publicly announced the event. But Parscale dug in. Parscale’s only previous campaign had been Trump’s 2016 bid. Still, what the marketing and advertising veteran lacked in political experience, he filled in with overconfidence in what he viewed as his unlimited ability to win hearts and change minds.
On June 10, Trump had a single item on his public schedule: a 12:30 p.m. intelligence briefing. But, as was often the case with the Trump White House, that changed suddenly without any significant notice.
At 3:30 p.m., the White House summoned whichever reporters hadn’t wandered too far from their briefing room desks and quickly ushered them into the Cabinet Room, where Trump sat with Kushner and, as Trump described them, “friends of mine and members of the African American community.” That included Ben Carson, Trump’s housing secretary; Darrell Scott and Kareem Lanier, the founders of the Urban Revitalization Coalition; and Republican gadfly Raynard Jackson, who had sued the party over the trademark for “Black Republican Trailblazer Awards Luncheon,” which he believed that he, not the GOP, owned.
Trump said the meeting had been called to address law enforcement, education and healthcare issues. But for the next half-hour, Trump didn’t articulate any particular policy that would address any of those issues. The one thing Trump did talk about most extensively that afternoon: his return to rallies.
“We’re going to start our rallies back up now,” Trump informed the press. “The first one, we believe, will be probably—we’re just starting to call up—will be in Oklahoma.”
As reporters were ushered out of the room, one journalist asked Trump when he planned to be in Tulsa.
“It will be Friday,” Trump said. “Friday night. Next week.”
Juneteenth.
Democrats went on the warpath. Trump, they said, couldn’t be more insensitive to the world erupting all around him. Trump’s response was also impaired by his stunning disregard for history, particularly compared to most other modern presidents. Senior officials described his understanding of slavery, Jim Crow or the Black experience in general post-Civil War as vague to nonexistent. Now, the rally on Juneteenth threatened to exacerbate the racial fissures further.
The backlash shocked Trump. He started quizzing everyone around him.
“Do you know what it is?” Trump would ask.
Two days after announcing his rally, Trump turned to a Secret Service agent, who was Black, and asked him about Juneteenth.
“Yes,” the agent told Trump. “I know what it is. And it’s very offensive to me that you’re having this rally on Juneteenth.”
At 11:23 p.m. that night, Trump posted on Twitter that he wanted to change the date.
***
The following week, on the afternoon of June 17, my phone vibrated with a call from the White House. It was a few days before Trump’s Tulsa rally, and the president wanted to see me.
In our interview, one year ago this week, Trump tried to put a spin on the controversy. He told me that he had made Juneteenth a day to remember.
“Nobody had heard of it,” Trump told me.
He was surprised to find out that his administration had put out statements in each of his first three years in office commemorating Juneteenth.
“Oh really?” he said. “We put out a statement? The Trump White House put out a statement?”
Each statement, put out in his name, included a description of the holiday.
But such details were irrelevant to him. Instead, he insisted, “I did something good.”
“I made Juneteenth very famous,” he said.
Trump would arrive in Tulsa to a half-filled arena. Parscale had hightailed it out of the backstage area when he saw Trump and the White House entourage approaching—no one had told the president that the BOK Center wasn’t anywhere close to capacity.
Before rallies, White House aides usually inflated crowd sizes for Trump once they were told a capacity crowd was inside the building. On the way to Tulsa, no one knew how to break the disappointing news to Trump. It wasn’t until he was backstage and turned on the television that he realized the arena was two-thirds empty.
When Trump finally took the stage that night, he urged his latest audience to forget the past several months. From the rally stage in Tulsa, Trump sought a fresh start for his reelection bid.
“So we begin, Oklahoma,” the president would tell them. “We begin. We begin our campaign.”
But the truth was the campaign had begun long ago. What was actually beginning now, for Trump, was the end.
Adapted from ‘Frankly We Did Win This Election’: The Inside Story of How Donald Trump Lost by Michael C. Bender.
FILED UNDER: DONALD TRUMP, DONALD TRUMP 2020, 1600 PENN
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/06/18/mike-bender-book-excerpt-trump-495071
emptywheel @emptywheel CNN reported that Sean McHugh, the Jan 6 defendant who accused cops of being pedophiles, himself was prosecuted for unlawful sex with a minor.
edition.cnn.com/2021/06/04/politics/capitol-rioter-rape-charge/index.html
Turns out that was not a one-off crime.
Alleged US Capitol rioter who heckled police for 'protecting pedophiles' served jail time for statutory rape of 14-year-old girl
By Marshall Cohen and Hannah Rabinowitz
Updated 2317 GMT (0717 HKT) June 4, 2021
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/04/politics/capitol-rioter-rape-charge/index.html
11:38 AM · Jun 18, 2021·TweetDeck
THREAD
CNN reported that Sean McHugh, the Jan 6 defendant who accused cops of being pedophiles, himself was prosecuted for unlawful sex with a minor.https://t.co/JYc1H23nDV
— emptywheel (check, mate) (@emptywheel) June 18, 2021
Turns out that was not a one-off crime.
Tomthunkit™ @TomthunkitsMind UH-OH A federal judge in Florida just formally accepted the plea deal for Joel Greenberg, US Rep. Matt Gaetz's wingman. 02
10:49 AM · Jun 18, 2021·The Social Jukebox
THREAD
UH-OH
— Tomthunkit™ (@TomthunkitsMind) June 18, 2021
A federal judge in Florida just formally accepted the plea deal for Joel Greenberg, US Rep. Matt Gaetz's wingman. pic.twitter.com/noJBiMwjTT 02
Want Cleaner, Healthier Salmon? Raise Them on Land
Sustainable fish farmers say rearing salmon far away from their wild cousins solves the problems of waste, parasites, and disease.
By Danielle Bochove
17 June 2021, 11:00 BST
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-17/want-cleaner-healthier-salmon-raise-them-on-land?sref=Yg3sQEZ2
In a small town near the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, 200,000 Atlantic salmon—lean, firm, their persimmon-colored flesh endorsed by a famed Canadian chef for quality and taste—are being carefully tended for next year’s harvest. Some 2,000 miles south in a suburb of Miami, 2.5 million fish—10,000 metric tons—are being raised in saltwater pens for the same purpose. Nova Scotia’s Sustainable Blue and Florida’s Atlantic Sapphire ASA differ widely in scale but share a common ambition. Both are on the verge of doing something long considered almost impossible: turning a profit raising a premium Atlantic salmon that’s never touched the sea.
Expensive, technically difficult, and plagued with its own environmental challenges, salmon farming on land has so far been a niche industry producing a relatively expensive product. But its proponents say it offers the best shot over the long term at making a core food source if not fully sustainable, at least much more so than traditional marine-based farming.
Human per capita fish consumption has more than doubled over the past six decades, to 20.3 kilograms (44.8 pounds) in 2017, propelled by changing dietary preferences and population growth, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, even as the planet’s supply of wild fish is falling. About 87% of the 179 million metric tons (197 million tons) of fish produced through wild capture and farming in 2018 ended up on our plates, and that share is growing, according to the organization. Aquaculture, or seafood farming, now supplies the majority of the fish we eat, and salmonids—an illustrious family whose members include trout and char—account for almost a fifth of that market, but at a steep environmental cost.
It’s one thing to farm sustainable bivalve mollusks, which consume plankton through their gills while filtering their habitat water. It’s quite another to manage hundreds of thousands of carnivorous salmon caged in open-net pens suspended in the ocean, the typical salmon aquaculture operation. The worst problems created by such farms are analogous to those of piggeries and battery chicken cages: high rates of death and disease, threats to wild native species, algae blooms, and feces, so much feces. “You have under the cage, one meter—three feet or more—composed of fecal matter and rotting food, and that is the most disgusting thing you can imagine,” says Daniel Pauly, professor of fisheries at the University of British Columbia. “And sometimes that stuff, in a storm, gets stirred up and kills all the fish.”
Much of the world’s farmed salmon is flown to customers to keep it fresh, resulting in hefty transport emissions. And it doesn’t even put a dent in global food insecurity. That’s because the feed required to ensure farmed salmon contains the same heart-healing omega-3 fatty acids as their wild cousins is made with smaller oily fish such as anchovies and sardines, which people also eat. Land-based farms are studying if they can feed the salmon insects, instead.
A chameleon that changes from speckled or silvery blue and brown to crimson and orange with green heads or stripes, a wild salmon enjoys a rather epic life cycle. After hatching in fresh water, the juvenile fish make their way to the ocean, where they reach maturity, before battling their way back upstream to spawn at their birthplace, heroic journeys of hundreds or even thousands of miles, marked by acrobatic leaps along the way. Land-based fish farms try to mimic that process in fresh and saltwater tanks while minimizing interaction with local ecosystems to avoid the worst contagions caused by open-net-pen farms.
The complexity of keeping large numbers of salmon healthy in recirculated water has, until now, limited the land-based sector’s ability to grow. Sustainable Blue’s technology, developed over 20 years, discharges no water into the environment, keeps salmon in salt water longer for taste, and converts solid waste to biofuel. The smallest miscalculation—letting carbon dioxide levels build up too much, over-stressing the filtration system, introducing bacteria into the water that changes the flavor profile, or even a minor power hiccup—can be disastrous.
For Sustainable Blue and other land-based salmon farms, the biggest sustainability challenge is ensuring the energy used to filter and recirculate huge amounts of water is renewable, or clean. With Nova Scotia beginning to draw renewable hydroelectric power from neighboring Labrador, management is optimistic the facility’s carbon footprint can be significantly reduced. It’s producing a salmon that poses no threat to wild fish and ecosystems, requires no growth hormones or antibiotics, and is free of viruses and sea lice, says Kirk Havercroft, chief executive officer.
Sustainable Blue’s salmon fillets sell for C$18 to C$20 ($14.80 to $16.50) per pound, compared with about C$13 a pound for ocean-farmed Atlantic salmon. That gap is expected to narrow as the operation scales up production to 1,000 tons next year, from previous harvests of 100 to 150 tons, Havercroft says.
The company expects to cross into profitability in 2022, plans to expand to 5,000 tons a year, and is in active talks to potentially license its technology to other producers, he says.
There are fewer than 100 land-based salmon projects in the works globally, some attracting significant interest from private equity and investment banks. Backers say the potential for growth is enormous, with marine-based salmon farms under mounting pressure to clean up or close down. The Canadian government is phasing out open-net-pen farms in British Columbia, despite industry pushback. Pauly, the fisheries professor, says the land-based sector is a sustainable, specialized option—especially if insect feed is used—but is skeptical it can be done at scale.
A major ecological benefit of land-based salmon farming is that it removes the fish from natural marine habitats, eliminating the risk that they pass on a host of viruses and parasites. Recently published research by Gideon Mordecai, a viral ecologist at the University of British Columbia, shows that open-net-pen Atlantic salmon are continually infecting British Columbia’s wild Chinook salmon with Piscine orthoreovirus, associated with kidney and liver damage in wild fish. Because the virus can survive weeks in the water, it can spread with tidal movements as well as with escaped Atlantic salmon, infecting a range of fish species including herring, Mordecai says.
When Donald Wesley, a hereditary chief of the Gitwilgyoots tribe, began his fishing career 45 years ago, the icy waters around Port Simpson, B.C., teemed with wild sockeye salmon. “These big rivers that we had were the most bountiful rivers in all the world in my time, and now they’re gone to the point of extinction,” he says. “Even the herring is gone. And the herring is the fish that keeps the whole ecosystem alive.” About 15 years ago, a major open-net-pen salmon producer tried to start a farm nearby, but the community sent its executives packing, Wesley says. He’s skeptical about land-based farming, too, doubting large conglomerates will ever spend the money when the alternative is so much cheaper. For him, the only solution is to restore the wild population so it can be fished responsibly.
Atlantic Sapphire says it has the financing to do large-scale sustainable salmon farming on land. And its Florida project may be the industry’s best test. “As long as we don’t have a negative environmental footprint, then we are free to grow as much as we can,” says Chief Financial Officer Karl Oystein Oyehaug. The company has facilities in Denmark and the U.S. that are already the largest of their kind. The bigger Florida site is expected to produce 10,000 tons of Atlantic salmon next year, pushing the company to its first full-year profit, and by 2031 it’s aiming for 220,000 tons—far more than most open-net farms.
Atlantic Sapphire benefits from the state’s geology, drawing contaminant-free salt water from an ancient aquifer. Less than 1% of the project’s water is discharged as nontoxic wastewater into a boulder zone 3,000 feet down, the same way Miami gets rid of human wastewater. Over thousands of years, the water is filtered through the rock and eventually flows back to the ocean completely clean, Oystein Oyehaug says. “We’re producing salmon in tropical Florida, a cold-water species, with absolutely zero impact on the ocean,” he says.
Processed on site and shipped to customers by road, the fish can be on a Floridian’s plate within 24 hours, selling for a 50% premium to farmed ocean salmon, at about $15 per pound. Atlantic Sapphire is working on using 100% renewable energy, including solar, and looking to remove fish from its feed by 2025.
Some critics question all the hoops being jumped through in the name of serving sustainable pink fish. “So carnivorous salmon should be domesticated and fed a plant-based diet in service of omnivorous humans?” says Jennifer Jacquet, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at New York University. Mordecai says he recently discovered a company that makes artificial smoked salmon using carrots. “I actually tried it when I was out in a restaurant, and it was pretty good.”
BOTTOM LINE - The world needs more fish, but conventional salmon aquaculture is harmful. Raising them on land may soon be a viable option.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-17/want-cleaner-healthier-salmon-raise-them-on-land?sref=Yg3sQEZ2
Marshall Cohen @MarshallCohen I think Rep. Meijer (R-MI) is now officially the 1st House Republican to condemn the ridiculous false-flag conspiracy that the FBI did 1/6. This baseless lie went viral this week in right-wing media and among some of Meijer's GOP colleagues. fact-check -->
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/17/politics/tucker-carlson-capitol-insurrection-conspiracy/index.html
Rep. Peter Meijer @RepMeijer · 10h
Not peaceful.
Not “let in by police.”
Not Antifa.
Not FBI. (Can’t believe I have to say that.)
January 6th was not whatever ridiculous conspiracy or white-washing explanation liars are peddling. It was what it was: a violent attempt to stop the constitutional transfer of power. twitter.com/marshallcohen/…
11:10 PM · Jun 17, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
I think Rep. Meijer (R-MI) is now officially the 1st House Republican to condemn the ridiculous false-flag conspiracy that the FBI did 1/6. This baseless lie went viral this week in right-wing media and among some of Meijer's GOP colleagues. fact-check --> https://t.co/2SqxGtrZYW https://t.co/plO9DBEF7E
— Marshall Cohen (@MarshallCohen) June 17, 2021
How to Hold Trump Accountable
The extent of the former president’s corruption may be too great for Americans to fathom.
By Ronald Brownstein
JUNE 17, 2021
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/06/trump-corruption-consequences/619225/
A torrent of new revelations is filling in the picture of how Donald Trump used, and abused, his authority as president. But the disclosures may serve only to underscore how little remains known about all the ways in which Trump barreled through traditional limits on the exercise of presidential power—and highlight the urgency of developing a more comprehensive accounting before the 2024 election, when he may seek to regain those powers.
The steady flow of discoveries over the past few weeks has been damning. Emails show how both Trump and his White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows pressured the Justice Department to support the former president’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in 2020. A previously unheard tape captures how Rudolph Giuliani, as Trump’s attorney, explicitly pressured Ukraine to manufacture an investigation against Joe Biden—the issue that prompted the former president’s first impeachment. Even more ominous has been the disclosure that the Justice Department under Trump subpoenaed communications records of journalists, Democratic members and staffers in the House of Representatives, and even Trump’s own White House counsel, all without their knowledge.
The revelation of that sweeping surveillance, in particular, has triggered a uniform reaction among many who have most closely tracked Trump’s ethical and legal record: If a program that consequential and potentially egregious is surfacing only after he left office, there is likely much more that remains undiscovered.
“When the news broke about the congressional revelations, I was actually on television shortly thereafter … and I told the host, ‘This is just the tip of the iceberg; there will be more,’” Norm Eisen, who served as a special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment, told me recently. “Certainly, someone who would target the news organizations and target Congress would do much more.”
John Dean, a pivotal figure in shattering the Watergate cover-up as Richard Nixon’s White House counsel, agreed. “He is such a harsh taskmaster and is so vicious about leakers and disloyalty that I think his inner circle is terrified of him and remains that way, and for that reason we know very little,” Dean told me this week. “Is there more? You bet.”
David A. Graham: Trump’s DOJ was more dangerous than we knew
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/trumps-doj-was-more-dangerous-we-knew/619178/
Trump’s behavior remains the subject of multiple investigations in both chambers of Congress, as well as by the Manhattan district attorney and the New York State attorney general’s office (which is examining financial manipulation at his company), and by the district attorney’s office in Fulton County, Georgia, which is probing his pressure on state officials there to overturn the 2020 election results. Federal investigators are examining whether Giuliani violated lobbying laws in his dealings with Ukrainian officials.
The House Judiciary Committee announced this week that it would hold hearings on the administration’s acquisition, during a leak investigation, of communications records of journalists and members of Congress. (The Justice Department’s inspector general is also investigating.) And after Senate Republicans blocked a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection, House Democrats appear likely to launch their own inquiry into the attack.
But it’s an open question whether these disparate investigations, proceeding on multiple tracks and operating under divergent rules, will provide a comprehensive picture of all the ways in which Trump used, and potentially misused, his authority during his four years in office.
Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a left-leaning nonprofit group that studies ethical abuses, says that a more systematic approach is needed to understand the breadth of Trump’s impact on the federal government. “As best as we can tell, this was a co-opting of the entire federal government for the political and personal advancement of one person and those around him,” he told me.
To Bookbinder, the common thread in all of the scandals—from Trump’s pressuring of Ukraine to the new revelations about his DOJ obtaining communications data—is a consistent effort to enlist every element of federal power for his personal and political benefit (a dynamic I’ve examined before). Trump, Bookbinder noted, did much of that in full public view. He pardoned Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, political allies who refused to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Trump companies also famously billed the government for costs associated with stays at properties he owned.
The evidence already available, Bookbinder said, shows that Trump’s determination to use federal power to benefit him and his allies was felt in every corner of government. That demands a more systematic investigation, he argued, of how the full range of government agencies made decisions that helped political allies, well-connected lobbyists, or businesses associated with Trump himself.
Dean took a similar view. “The Nixon presidency is unique in that you had, first of all, the Senate Watergate committee, then the House impeachment inquiry; you had a Watergate special prosecutor and his taping system—that’s a remarkable record of a presidency in finding out what they did was wrong,” he told me. By comparison, “there’s not a fraction of that kind of knowledge” on Trump, he believes.
It’s not easy, though, to identify an investigative approach that could effectively fill in that picture.
One option, Bookbinder told me, would be for the Biden administration to create some kind of independent, blue-ribbon commission to examine abuses at each federal agency—or to assign each agency’s inspector general with responsibility for documenting conflicts of interest or other problems. But he and other experts note that the administration is highly unlikely to pursue such a course, because Biden wants to be seen as looking forward, rather than retrying the behavior of his predecessor. If anything, Biden’s Justice Department has frustrated some congressional Democrats and liberal activists by arguing, on institutional grounds, against releasing Trump’s tax returns and former Attorney General Bill Barr’s memo justifying the decision not to indict the former president for obstruction of justice in the Russia probe.
Still, even some stern Trump critics support the Biden administration’s caution. Eisen, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me that the need for “a full and fair accounting” must be balanced against “the long-standing norm of not using the Department of Justice as a tool for perceived retaliation against a vanquished presidential candidate.” For at least the next few months, Eisen said, the best course is to see what “emerges organically” from the assorted state, IG, and congressional investigations already under way. “Let’s give it another few months to unfold,” he said. “Then it will be time for a gut check when we are about a year in [to the Biden presidency]: Do we feel that the truth is naturally emerging, or do there need to be additional efforts to accelerate [those disclosures]?”
For those who want a more coordinated approach, Congress might provide another option. But winning approval for a far-reaching congressional investigation seems impossible now that Senate Republicans have filibustered even an independent investigation of the January 6 attack on the Capitol; if they won’t authorize an investigation of an attack in which they were the targets, they’re not likely to green-light one that ranges more broadly over Trump’s record.
A third model sometimes discussed is a “truth commission” or other “commission of inquiry” like the ones that more than 40 countries have established in recent decades. But the model applies imperfectly to the Trump situation. Usually created in countries emerging from authoritarian governments, these commissions have “typically been focused on gross violations of human rights, killings, disappearances, torture, and the like,” notes Neil Kritz, a senior scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace, which maintains a comprehensive database of such efforts. (The most famous examples of such “truth” commissions have included South Africa, Argentina, Chile, and Peru.) Only rarely, Kritz adds, have countries also examined corruption and the misuse of government resources in prior regimes.
But while the structure and focus of such commissions don’t exactly apply to the Trump example, their underlying motivation may be relevant. “They are all based on an assumption that for society to be able to heal, it needs to deal with its demons, it needs to confront its past, and to simply sweep it under the rug will result in long-term, ongoing problems,” Kritz told me. “In a best-case scenario, a truth commission forces society to take a look in the mirror.”
That closely parallels the argument from those who want a more aggressive examination of Trump’s behavior. Republicans have dismissed calls for new investigations of Trump’s actions as unnecessarily relitigating the past; Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for instance, used that argument to oppose not only a January 6 commission, but even the calls for Barr to testify about the surveillance revelations. But Bookbinder, Eisen, and others argue that far from looking back, a more comprehensive accounting of Trump’s behavior is required to diminish the odds that the abuses will recur, whether Trump runs again or not. “Ultimately, it’s not about relitigating the past,” Bookbinder said. “If you are going to protect your democracy in the future from being abused and ultimately being chipped away at, you have to understand the abuses that have happened before, you have to make that public, and you have to take concrete steps to protect against the same kind of abuses in the future. But you can’t do that if you don’t know what they were.”
If an official “truth commission” is off the table, another option might be an informal citizens’ commission of prominent figures to catalog the record, notes Susan Stokes, a political-science professor and the director of the Chicago Center on Democracy at the University of Chicago. Although such a commission would not have investigative power, it could pull together the continuing flow of revelations into one revealing document, she says. “There’s a lot we don’t know yet, and we are learning more every day,” she told me. “But there is a lot we do know. A broad-ranging report, written by people who are private individuals and widely admired and weighty and bipartisan … to say, ‘Here is what happened,’ that is something that may attract a fair amount of interest.”
In the meantime, the most likely venue for a comprehensive debate over Trump’s use, and abuse, of executive power might come through sweeping legislation, called the Protecting Our Democracy Act, that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (one of the members whose records the Justice Department targeted) introduced in the previous Congress. The bill, which he’s expected to reintroduce shortly, looks to plug a series of holes that Trump exploited (or expanded) in ethics laws. Through 12 titles, it seeks to address abuses of presidential pardon power; bar payments from foreign governments to a president or his business interests; strengthen Congress’s ability to enforce subpoenas against the executive branch; record a president’s contacts with the Justice Department; protect the independence of departmental inspectors general; and extend the statute of limitations for postpresidential prosecution of misdeeds while in office, among other things.
Although Trump “no longer sits in the White House, we cannot ignore or simply move past those abuses without addressing the vulnerabilities in the system that he exploited,” Schiff said in an emailed statement yesterday. “And that means enacting many of the guardrails we thought were sacrosanct into law. The failure to do so would leave the justice system once again prey to an unscrupulous executive.”
The legislation is a panoramic attempt to respond to the many ways Trump shredded constraints on the exercise of presidential authority. But, by definition, it can respond only to the actions that are known. The big lesson of the DOJ-surveillance revelations is that more questionable Trump behaviors we don’t know about almost certainly exist—that, as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once put it, there are “known unknowns” about how Trump utilized power. Creating a more complete record of those abuses would be the first step toward preventing their recurrence.
Ronald Brownstein is a senior editor at The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/06/trump-corruption-consequences/619225/
Brad Heath @bradheath A federal judge wants every attorney whose name was on court filings seeking to overturn Michigan's presidential election results in the "Kraken" suit there to show up for a sanctions hearing on July 6.
10:37 PM · Jun 17, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD
A federal judge wants every attorney whose name was on court filings seeking to overturn Michigan's presidential election results in the "Kraken" suit there to show up for a sanctions hearing on July 6. pic.twitter.com/816zUMHZ4l
— Brad Heath (@bradheath) June 17, 2021
Top general ‘shocked’ by AP report on AWOL guns, mulls fix
By KRISTIN M. HALL, JAMES LAPORTA and JUSTIN PRITCHARD
today
https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-e2ba30a8314d0642cbe8387fb9f34cae
Shocked by an Associated Press investigation into the loss and theft of military guns, the Pentagon’s top general signaled Thursday that he will consider a “systematic fix” to how the armed services keep account of their firearms.
The AP’s investigation reported how some of the missing guns have been stolen and later used in violent street crimes, while many others have vanished without a clue from the military’s enormous supply chains.
In all, AP identified at least 1,900 guns that the four armed services recorded as lost or stolen during the 2010s. Most came from the Army. Because some of the service branches provided incomplete data -- or none at all -- that total is a certain undercount.
“I was frankly shocked by the numbers that were in there,” Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Appropriations Committee at a hearing Thursday.
In a statement, Milley’s spokesman said the chairman would explore overhauling how the services track and secure weapons. Milley “would like to consider a systematic fix in the future where the accountability of weapons and the ability to track and query these numbers is simplified and accurate,” said Col. Dave Butler.
Later Thursday, an Army spokesman said the military branch with the most guns would also fill gaps in how it accounts for lost and stolen weapons.
“The Army staff met today to develop a way forward to fix this problem and we will provide more information as this effort evolves,” said Col. Cathy Wilkinson.
Four senators have publicly expressed concerns since AP published Tuesday.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., was the latest to question military officials during a Capitol Hill appearance. Citing a case in which automatic assault rifles were stolen from an Army base and sold to a California street gang, Feinstein asked Milley at Thursday’s hearing what the military is doing to ensure “there are no problems like this and that weapons are well secured.”
Milley responded that he had asked the leaders of each armed service to do a deep dive on their numbers. He said the initial information they have given him suggests the number of missing weapons is “significantly less” than what AP reported. The AP derived its figures from records provided by the service branches, including criminal investigations, lost property forms and data from small arms registries, as well as internal memos AP obtained.
“I need to square the balance here. I owe you a firm answer,” Milley told Feinstein.
His spokesman, Butler, elaborated: “Although we can’t yet verify the numbers reported by AP, the chairman believes this is another example of the free press shining a light on the important subjects we need to get right.”
Top officials with the Army, Marines and Secretary of Defense’s office have said missing weapons are not a widespread problem and noted that the number is a tiny fraction of the military’s stockpile.
Before publication of the AP’s investigation, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said in an interview that the armed services can account for 99.999% of their several million firearms. “Though the numbers are small, one is too many,” Kirby said.
Lawmakers’ focus so far had been a new reporting requirement, not systematic reform.
The Pentagon used to share annual updates about stolen weapons with Congress, but the requirement to do so ended years ago, apparently in fiscal year 1994. In more recent years, the Office of the Secretary of Defense has decided when to advise lawmakers of “significant” losses or thefts.
No such notifications have been made since at least 2017, the Pentagon said. Among the several hundred missing firearms that AP identified during subsequent years was a stolen Army pistol that authorities linked to shootings in New York. Other cases included weapons parts that an Army insider brought to the Texas-Mexico border to sell.
On Thursday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said he planned to write a “mandatory reporting requirement” into the National Defense Authorization Act that Congress is drawing up this summer. In a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Blumenthal also asked that the Department of Defense’s Office of the Inspector General conduct “a thorough review” of policies and security procedures.
Describing themselves as very concerned by AP’s findings, Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., have said they would be looking into questions raised by the reporting.
The AP’s investigation, which began in 2011, is the first public accounting of its kind in decades, in part because neither the Department of Defense nor the armed services are required to tell the public about AWOL weapons.
The Army, the largest of the military services and one with more than 3 million firearms, and Air Force could not readily provide data to the AP on how many weapons were lost or stolen from 2010 through 2019.
___
This story has been corrected to attribute a quote to Col. Cathy Wilkinson.
___
Hall reported from Nashville, Tennessee; LaPorta reported from Boca Raton, Florida; Pritchard reported from Los Angeles. Also contributing was Robert Burns in Washington.
___
Contact Hall at https://twitter.com/kmhall; contact LaPorta at https://twitter.com/jimlaporta; contact Pritchard at https://twitter.com/JPritchardAP.
___
Email AP’s Global Investigations Team at investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/. See other work at https://www.apnews.com/hub/ap-investigations.
https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-e2ba30a8314d0642cbe8387fb9f34cae
GOP needs new health care target; ‘Obamacare’ survives again
By ALAN FRAM
an hour ago
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-joe-biden-coronavirus-pandemic-business-health-aa90cdf5b897bda86e8d66bf85cfc6da
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court’s latest rejection of a Republican effort to dismantle “Obamacare” signals anew that the GOP must look beyond repealing the law if it wants to hone the nation’s health care problems into a winning political issue.
Thursday’s 7-2 ruling was the third time the court has rebuffed major GOP challenges to former President Barack Obama’s prized health care overhaul. Stingingly for Republicans, the decision emerged from a bench dominated 6-3 by conservative-leaning justices, including three appointed by President Donald Trump.
Those high court setbacks have been atop dozens of failed Republican repeal attempts in Congress. Most spectacularly, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., flashed a thumbs-down that doomed Trump’s drive to erase the law in 2017.
Along with the public’s gradual but decisive acceptance of the statute, the court rulings and legislative defeats underscore that the law, passed in 2010 despite overwhelming GOP opposition, is probably safe. And it spotlights a remarkable progression of the measure from a political liability that cost Democrats House control just months after enactment to a widely accepted bedrock of the medical system, delivering care to what the government says is more than 30 million people.
“The Affordable Care Act remains the law of the land,” President Joe Biden said, using the statute’s more formal name, after the court ruled that Texas and other GOP-led states had no right to bring their lawsuit to federal court.
“It’s not as sacred or popular as Medicare or Medicaid, but it’s here to stay,” said Drew Altman, president of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. “And it’s moved from an ideological whipping boy to a set of popular benefits that the public values.”
Highlighting the GOP’s shifting health care focus, in interviews and written statements Thursday, more than a dozen Republican lawmakers called for controlling medical costs and other changes, but none suggested another run at repeal. Congressional Republicans hadn’t even filed a legal brief supporting the latest Supreme Court challenge.
“Just practically speaking, you need 60 votes in a Republican Senate, a Republican president, right? And we’ve tried that and were unable to accomplish it,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a leading voice on health care in the GOP.
Polling shows the risks in trying to demolish Obama’s law. A Kaiser poll showed Americans about evenly divided on the law in December 2016, just after Trump was elected on a pledge to kill it. By February 2020, 54% had a favorable view while 39% disapproved.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and other top Republicans issued a statement illustrating one line of attack the party is preparing — trying to handcuff all Democrats to “Medicare for All,” a costly plan for government-provided health care backed by progressives that goes beyond what Biden and many in the party have proposed.
Congress should “not double down on a failed health care law or, worse, move towards a one-size-fits-all, socialist system that takes away choice entirely,” the Republicans said.
The GOP should focus on health issues people care about, like personalized care and promoting medical innovation, not repealing the health care law, said David Winston, a pollster and political adviser to congressional GOP leaders.
“Republicans need to lay out a clear direction of where the health care system should go,” Winston said. “Don’t look backward, look forward.”
Most people have gained coverage from either Obama’s expansion of the government-funded Medicaid program for lower-income people or from private health plans, for which federal subsidies help offset costs for many.
The law’s most popular provisions also include its protections for people with preexisting medical conditions from higher insurance rates, allowing people up to age 26 to remain covered under their parents’ plans and requiring insurers to cover services like pregnancy and mental health.
Key requirements like that are “locked in concrete,” said Joseph Antos, a health policy analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. The political opening for Republicans would be if Democrats push hard for things like lowering the eligibility age for Medicare to 60 because for many conservative-leaning voters, he said, “that’s a sign of government pushing too far” into private marketplace decisions.
Yet serious problems remain.
Nearly 29 million Americans remained uninsured in 2019, and millions more likely lost coverage at least temporarily when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, according to Kaiser. In addition, medical costs continue rising and even many covered by the law find their premiums and deductibles difficult to afford.
In response, Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package enacted in March expanded federal subsidies for health insurance premiums for those buying coverage. His infrastructure and jobs proposal being negotiated in Congress includes $200 billion toward making that permanent, instead of expiring in two years.
But his plan includes none of his more controversial campaign trail proposals to expand health care access, like creating a federally funded public health care option or letting Medicare directly negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. While those proposals are popular with Democratic voters, they face tough odds in a closely divided Congress.
Still, Republicans gearing up for 2022 elections that will decide congressional control must decide where their next focus will be.
One GOP strategist involved in House races, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal thinking, said the party should focus on issues like the economy and border security that register as higher voter concerns. A Gallup poll showed that in May, 21% of the public ranked the economy as the country’s top problem, with health care registering at just 3%.
Other Republicans say the Supreme Court’s rejection of the latest repeal attempt will clear the political field for them to refocus their health care attacks on Democrats.
“Now it’s Medicare for All that will be a top health care issue playing a role in campaigns,” said Chris Hartline, spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Senate GOP’s campaign arm.
___
Associated Press writers Alexandra Jaffe in Washington and Tom Murphy in Indianapolis, Ind., contributed to this report.
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-joe-biden-coronavirus-pandemic-business-health-aa90cdf5b897bda86e8d66bf85cfc6da
To stop the ransomware pandemic, start with the basics
That will help stop other sorts of cyber-mischief, too
Leaders Jun 19th 2021 edition
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/06/19/to-stop-the-ransomware-pandemic-start-with-the-basics
TWENTY YEARS ago, it might have been the plot of a trashy airport thriller. These days, it is routine. On May 7th cyber-criminals shut down the pipeline supplying almost half the oil to America’s east coast for five days. To get it flowing again, they demanded a $4.3m ransom from Colonial Pipeline Company, the owner. Days later, a similar “ransomware” assault crippled most hospitals in Ireland.
Such attacks are evidence of an epoch of intensifying cyber-insecurity that will impinge on everyone, from tech firms to schools and armies. One threat is catastrophe: think of an air-traffic-control system or a nuclear-power plant failing. But another is harder to spot, as cybercrime impedes the digitisation of many industries, hampering a revolution that promises to raise living standards around the world.
The first attempt at ransomware was made in 1989, with a virus spread via floppy disks. Cybercrime is getting worse as more devices are connected to networks and as geopolitics becomes less stable. The West is at odds with Russia and China and several autocracies give sanctuary to cyber-bandits.
Trillions of dollars are at stake. Most people have a vague sense of narrowly avoided fiascos: from the Sony Pictures attack that roiled Hollywood in 2014, to Equifax in 2017, when the details of 147m people were stolen. The big hacks are a familiar but confusing blur: remember SoBig, or SolarWinds, or WannaCry?
A forthcoming study from London Business School (LBS) captures the trends by examining comments made to investors by 12,000 listed firms in 85 countries over two decades. Cyber-risk has more than quadrupled since 2002 and tripled since 2013. The pattern of activity has become more global and has affected a broader range of industries. Workers logging in from home during the pandemic have almost certainly added to the risks. The number of affected firms is at a record high.
Faced with this picture, it is natural to worry most about spectacular crises caused by cyber-attacks. All countries have vulnerable physical nodes such as oil pipelines, power plants and ports whose failure could bring much economic activity to a standstill. The financial industry is a growing focus of cybercrime: these days bank robbers prefer laptops to balaclavas. Regulators have begun to worry about the possibility of an attack causing a bank to collapse.
But just as costly is the threat to new tech as confidence in it ebbs. Computers are being built into cars, houses and factories, creating an industrial “internet of things” (IOT). Insights gleaned from oceans of data promise to revolutionise health care. In theory, all that will boost productivity and save lives for years to come. But the more the digital world is plagued by insecurity, the more people will shy away from it and the more potential gains will be lost. Imagine hearing about ransomware in someone’s connected car: “pay us $5,000, or the doors stay locked.”
Dealing with cyber-insecurity is hard because it blurs the boundaries between state and private actors and between geopolitics and crime. The victims of cyber-attacks include firms and public bodies. The perpetrators include states conducting espionage and testing their ability to inflict damage in war, but also criminal gangs in Russia, Iran and China whose presence is tolerated because they are an irritant to the West.
A cloud of secrecy and shame surrounding cyber-attacks amplifies the difficulties. Firms cover them up. The normal incentives for them and their counterparties to mitigate risks do not work well. Many firms neglect the basics, such as two-step authentication. Colonial had not taken even simple precautions. The cyber-security industry has plenty of sharks who bamboozle clients. Much of what is sold is little better than “medieval magic amulets”, in the words of one cyber-official.
All this means that financial markets struggle to price cyber-risk and the penalty paid by badly protected firms is too small. The LBS study, for example, concludes that cyber-risk is contagious and is starting to be factored into share prices. But the data are so opaque that the effect is unlikely to reflect the real risk.
Fixing the private sector’s incentives is the first step. Officials in America, Britain and France want to ban insurance coverage of ransom payments, on the ground that it encourages further attacks. Better to require companies to publicly disclose attacks and their potential cost. In America, for example, the requirements are vague and involve large time lags.
With sharper and more uniform disclosure, investors, insurers and suppliers could better identify firms that are underinvesting in security. Faced with higher insurance premiums, a flagging stock price and the risk of litigation, managers might raise their game. Manufacturers would have more reason to set and abide by product standards for connected gizmos that help stem the tide of insecure IoT devices.
Governments should police the boundary between the orthodox financial system and the shadowy world of digital finance. Ransoms are often paid in cryptocurrencies. It must be made harder to recycle money from these into ordinary bank accounts without proof that the money has a legitimate source. Likewise with cryptocurrency exchanges, which should face the same obligations as established financial institutions.
Cyber-insecurity is a matter of geopolitics, too. In conventional warfare and cross-border crime, norms of behaviour exist that help contain risks. In the cyber-domain novelty and confusion reign. Does a cyber-attack from criminals tolerated by a foreign adversary warrant retaliation? When does a virtual intrusion require a real-world response?
A starting-point is for liberal societies to work together to contain attacks. At the recent summits of the G7 and NATO, Western countries promised to do so. But confronting states such as China and Russia is crucial, too. Obviously, they will not stop spying on the Western countries that do their own snooping. But a third summit, between Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin, began a difficult dialogue on cybercrime. Ideally the world would work on an accord that makes it harder for the broadbandits to threaten the health of an increasingly digital global economy. ¦
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/06/19/to-stop-the-ransomware-pandemic-start-with-the-basics
The govt was unamused that Richard Barnett went on Russian TV to claim that bringing a stun gun into Pelosi's office was a First Amendment protected activity.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20949973-210617-govt-opposition-classic-car
6:13 PM · Jun 17, 2021·TweetDeck
THREAD
The govt was unamused that Richard Barnett went on Russian TV to claim that bringing a stun gun into Pelosi's office was a First Amendment protected activity.https://t.co/F6cAmYhJtE pic.twitter.com/53ezdYZw5L
— emptywheel (check, mate) (@emptywheel) June 17, 2021
Reports detail tense moments with Georgia election monitors
By KATE BRUMBACK
an hour ago
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-joe-biden-elections-health-coronavirus-pandemic-b608499cb7253a39745af88ee8b4d739
ATLANTA (AP) — As a pair of election workers sat at a table counting ballots during an audit of Georgia’s presidential election in November, no fewer than eight Republican monitors swarmed around them, hurling accusations of voter fraud and taking photos in violation of the rules.
This was one of several tense situations involving party monitors that independent election monitor Carter Jones documented in reports produced during the several months he spent observing election operations in Fulton County to ensure that officials in the state’s most populous county were complying with a consent agreement.
“The party audit monitors seemed to feel as though they were detectives or sheriffs and that they were going to personally ‘crack the case’ and uncover a stolen election,” Jones wrote in a report submitted to the State Election Board on Nov. 20. “This is a gross misunderstanding of their role as monitors and certainly made the audit process more contentious — not to mention more difficult for the auditors attempting to count amidst the commotion of a full-scale argument.”
While transparency is imperative throughout the election process and monitors are necessary, political parties must do a better job of vetting and training their monitors and explaining exactly what their role is, Jones wrote. He also suggested that repeat offenders be prohibited from serving as monitors in the future.
No one from the Fulton County Republican and Democratic parties immediately responded Thursday to emails seeking comment.
Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta, experienced many problems during its primary last June, including hourslong lines and absentee ballots that were requested but never received. The State Election Board entered into a consent order with the county to make changes for the general election. That included the appointment of Jones, who has previous experience working on elections in other parts of the world, as an independent monitor from October through January.
An executive summary of his findings was released earlier this year and Jones briefed the State Election Board in February. But detailed notes and reports produced by Jones during the process and obtained this week by The Associated Press provide more details about what he saw.
Then-President Donald Trump focused his attention on Georgia after losing the traditional Republican stronghold to Democrat Joe Biden by about 12,000 votes in November. Trump and his allies focused particular attention on Fulton County, making repeated unfounded claims of widespread voter fraud. Election workers in the county were subjected to intense harassment, sometimes stemming from misunderstandings by observers about what they were seeing as ballots were counted, recounted by hand for an audit and recounted again by machine at Trump’s request.
On Nov. 14, when Jones walked over to the table where the group of GOP monitors was hovering over workers processing a batch of early voting ballots from the city of College Park, one monitor told him she’d taken a photo of the stack of ballots — all for Democrat Joe Biden, none for Trump — as evidence of voter fraud.
“You took photos?” Jones asked.
“Yes, for evidence. I’m concerned with the truth. As a journalist you should be too,” the woman replied, misunderstanding his role. When he told her photos weren’t allowed, she seemed to get angry and accused him of being complicit in a cover-up of voter fraud, Jones wrote.
About an hour and a half later, Jones observed the same party monitor yelling at a Fulton County attorney who had been called over to allow an elderly pair of audit workers to take a break. They had been working for hours to process a batch of 3,500 ballots and had skipped lunch so as not to violate the rules against taking breaks in the middle of a batch. But one of them was diabetic and was starting to shake from low blood sugar.
The party monitor was demanding strict adherence to the “no breaks” policy. After arguing with county elections director Rick Barron and another county official, the monitor pulled Jones into the conversation. Jones said he tried to stay neutral, but asked her to be reasonable with the application of the policy. He also let her know she could file a formal complaint with the secretary of state.
“The monitor then again accused me of colluding to cover up voter fraud and made a vague personal threat to both me and Barron,” Jones wrote in his report, adding that he included the anecdote “in an attempt to encapsulate the tense mood in the room.”
Complaints about overzealous party monitors were common during the audit, Jones wrote. Among the other issues he documented were monitors trying to speak with auditors, wandering among ballot bags and taking photos of the labels on them, trying to instruct auditors how to do their jobs, and gathering around tables when there was only supposed to be one monitor from each party for every 10 tables. The party monitors “were also performing their duties very eagerly and were frequently informing staff if they saw an issue,” Jones noted, adding that often their complaints were valid.
Earlier in the month, as the ballots were initially being counted during the week of the election, party monitors sometimes misunderstood what was happening, complained about their level of access, went around barriers to talk to election workers, shot photos and video, and exhibited “astoundingly poor mask hygiene,” Jones wrote, referring to the county’s policy that election workers wear face coverings to prevent transmission of the coronavirus.
At one point on Election Day, Jones noticed the party monitors watching him closely. He introduced himself and asked one if he’d seen anything out of the ordinary.
“We weren’t informed of your role here so it’s not our place to tell you anything,” the monitor responded and then called Jones a traitor.
During a runoff election in January, a monitor secretly recorded a 45-minute conversation with a county election official and quoted their conversation extensively in a complaint filed with the secretary of state’s office.
Multiple party monitors in January told Jones they had been recording the license plates of staffers’ cars as “evidence,” which Jones said seemed like “a massive invasion of the privacy of the election workers.”
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-joe-biden-elections-health-coronavirus-pandemic-b608499cb7253a39745af88ee8b4d739
Putin praises summit result, calls Biden a tough negotiator
By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV
50 minutes ago
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-europe-summits-d86605a1c60be7c9ca856028030b961b
The two leaders concluded three hours of talks Wednesday at an opulent villa facing Lake Geneva by exchanging expressions of mutual respect but firmly restating their starkly different views on cyberattacks, the conflict in Ukraine, political dissent and other issues. At the same time, they announced an agreement to return each other’s ambassadors and mapped more talks on arms control and cybersecurity.
Putin, who hailed Biden as a highly experienced and constructive interlocutor at a news conference in Geneva, offered more praise of the U.S. leader on Thursday in a video call with graduates of a government management school.
Biden kept him on his guard with his savvy negotiating skills, Putin said.
“He perfectly knows the matter,” Putin said. “He is fully concentrated and knows what he wants to achieve. And he does it very shrewdly.”
He dismissed what he described as media attempts to cast Biden as physically frail, noting that the 78-year-old U.S. president was in great shape even though the meeting wrapped up a European tour for him that included the G-7 and NATO summits.
“He was on a long trip, he flew in from across the ocean, involving jetlag,” the 68-year-old Putin said, adding that he knows how tiring travel can be.
“The atmosphere was quite friendly,” he added. “I think we managed to understand each other, we managed to understand each other’s positions on key issue, they differ on many things and we noted the differences. At the same time, we established areas and points where we can possibly bring our positions closer in the future.”
Putin particularly emphasized the importance of an agreement to conduct dialogue on cybersecurity between experts, saying it would help reduce tensions.
Biden said he and Putin agreed to have their experts work out an understanding about what types of critical infrastructure would be off-limits to cyberattacks. The agreement follows a flood of ransomware attacks against U.S. businesses and government agencies that U.S. officials said originated from Russia.
Putin, who has strongly denied any Russian state role in the cyberattacks, argued Thursday that “instead of finger-pointing and bickering, we should better combine efforts to fight cybercrime.”
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the summit as positive and productive, saying it allowed the leaders “to directly put forward their positions and try to understand where interaction is possible and where there can be no interaction due to categorical disagreements.”
Peskov particularly noted the joint statement from the presidents that said the two countries will conduct a dialogue on strategic stability issues and reaffirmed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” — a principle declared by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at their Geneva summit in 1985.
Restating the principle was a “significant achievement” amid current tensions between Moscow and Washington, said Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who attended the talks.
The strategic stability dialogue would cover a wide range of issues related to nuclear and other weapons and is key to reducing the risk of conflict between the two superpowers.
The talks follow a decision this year to extend the New START, the last remaining U.S.-Russian arms control pact and would be aimed at working out a follow-up agreement after it expires in 2026.
The negotiations will be complex and strenuous. The U.S. is worried about new destabilizing weapons developed by Russia, such as the atomic-powered, nuclear-armed Poseidon underwater drone, while Russia wants to include U.S. missile defense and potential space-based weapons in an agreement.
“It’s a difficult task to conjugate the approaches and formulas,” Ryabkov said. “But we are ready to try to solve it.”
Konstantin Kosachev, a deputy speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, hoped that talks between experts would help reduce the bad blood.
“The more often experts will meet, the less room the politicians will have for speculation and manipulation,” he told The Associated Press.
The decision to return the ambassadors, who left their posts amid the tensions, was also widely billed by Russian officials and experts as an important move to stabilize ties.
Russia recalled its ambassador, Anatoly Antonov, for consultations in March after Biden described Putin as a killer in an interview. John Sullivan, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, flew home in April after public suggestions from Russian officials that he should leave to mirror Antonov’s departure.
U.S.-Russian ties have plummeted to all-time lows after Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, accusations of Russian interference in elections and cyberattacks, and Western criticism of the Kremlin’s crackdown on the opposition.
Biden criticized the imprisonment of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and other moves by the Kremlin to stifle dissent and independent media. Putin shot back, keeping to his practice of never mentioning his chief political foe by name, saying Navalny knew he was breaking the law and was duly punished. He added that government critics designated as “foreign agents” were pursuing malign Western interests.
In comments posted to his Instagram account, Navalny denounced Putin’s comments as lies.
“He just doesn’t say a word of truth,” Navalny said. “Clearly, he just physically can’t stop lying.”
Navalny was arrested in January upon returning from Germany, where he spent five months recovering from a nerve agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin — an accusation that Russian officials reject. In February, Navalny was given a 2 1/2-year prison term for violating the terms of a suspended sentence from a 2014 embezzlement conviction that he dismissed as politically motivated.
Navalny’s supporters held a protest in Geneva ahead of Putin’s visit and dotted the city with billboards blasting the Kremlin for refusing to investigate his poisoning.
On Ukraine, Russia reaffirmed its view that the country’s bid for NATO membership represents a red line, while the U.S. has restated that the alliance’s doors remain open for its membership.
Some in Ukraine voiced hope the summit could help ease tensions that spiked this year when Russia bolstered its forces near Ukraine.
“Reducing the conflict potential in U.S.-Russian relations could help lower tensions on our border with Russia,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta Center think tank.
But independent Kyiv-based political expert Vadim Karasev warned of a danger that the lack of resolution of the conflict with Russia-backed separatists in Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland known as the Donbas would make it frozen, and the country would steadily drift to the fringes of international politics.
“The results of the Putin-Biden meeting will cool Kyiv’s aspirations,” Karasev said. “Ukraine won’t be able to quickly join NATO, and the conflict in Donbas will become a chronic one. The Ukrainian issue will lose its acuteness, leaving Kyiv on the periphery of the global agenda.”
Experts say that sharp differences rule out any quick progress on the divisive issues.
“Confrontation will continue, but there is a hope now that instead of being uncontrollable it could become more orderly,” said Valery Garbuzov, the head of the U.S. and Canada Institute, the government-funded think-tank.
—-
Associated Press journalist Kostya Manenkov in Moscow and Yuras Karmanau in Kyiv, Ukraine, contributed.
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-europe-summits-d86605a1c60be7c9ca856028030b961b
Threats to US election workers take heavy and harrowing toll
Election officials were the target of rage after Trump’s baseless claims – and a new report details how many workers feel unsafe
Sam Levine in New York
Thu 17 Jun 2021 10.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/17/us-election-threats-trump-baseless-claims
Happy Thursday,
In the United States, a quiet army of people work in towns, cities, and states across the country to make sure that elections hum along smoothly. They’re responsible for all the mechanics that ensure Americans can exercise their right to vote – like keeping track of complex data files, making sure that mail-in ballots get printed and go out on time, ensuring that polling places have enough workers, and making sure that every valid vote gets counted.
For a long time, these officials – elected in some places, appointed in others – have been largely invisible. That invisibility evaporated last year.
When Donald Trump began raising baseless claims about things like ballots being smuggled in and votes being flipped, these election officials became the target of his supporters’ rage. From state election officials to lower-level workers, they started receiving death threats, were followed in their cars, and even had people break into family-members’ homes, according to a harrowing Reuters report. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, even had to move out of his home because of vicious threats.
About a third of election officials surveyed this spring said they felt unsafe because of their job, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Brennan Center for Justice. And about a fifth of the 223 officials described threats to their lives as a concern related to their work.
Nearly 80% of the officials surveyed said social media conspiracy theories and misinformation made it harder for them to do their jobs. And more than half said the platforms had made their jobs more dangerous.
US attorney general Merrick Garland condemned attacks against election workers in a speech last week, and pledged law enforcement would investigate when federal laws were violated.
“We have not been blind to the dramatic increase in menacing and violent threats against all manner of state and local election workers, ranging from the highest administrators to volunteer poll workers,” he said. “Such threats undermine our electoral process and violate a myriad of federal laws.”
The Brennan Center report offers a range of suggestions for reform that can better protect election officials, including establishing a DoJ taskforce focused on threats against election workers, passing laws that give workers more privacy protections, and implementing measures that insulate officials from political pressure.
But the attacks have already taken their toll – many election officials retired or left their jobs after a bruising 2020 election. That’s alarming to many voting rights groups because it could lead to a loss in institutional knowledge as well as a drop in the polling place workers and other staff needed to ensure elections run smoothly.
A swell of candidates who embraced the baseless idea that the election was stolen are also running for key election administration positions. If elected, those officials would be able to wield enormous power over implementation of election rules, including ballot counting.
“A new, more dangerous front has opened in the voting wars, and it’s going to be much harder to counteract than the now-familiar fight over voting rules. At stake is something I never expected to worry about in the United States: the integrity of the vote count,” Richard Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in an op-ed earlier this month. “The danger of manipulated election results looms.”
Also worth watching…
The New York Times had an extraordinary story detailing how GOP-backed voting restrictions moving through state legislatures would curtail ballot access for people with disabilities.
Senator Joe Manchin released a list of provisions he would support in a sweeping voting reform bill in congress. That’s a welcome sign to many advocates, who feared Manchin’s recalcitrance would kill any hope of voting reform. Manchin still does, however, support the filibuster, which would block Democrats from advancing any measure.
Democrats in the Texas House of Representatives, heralded for halting a sweeping voting restrictions bill in their state, met with both Senate Democrats and Kamala Harris this week to urge them to pass sweeping voting reforms in Washington.
Attorney General Garland gave a speech last Friday on increasing voting rights enforcement by the department. Garland announced that the department’s voting section was doubling the number of attorneys there in the next 30 days. While that was a welcome announcement, observers are still waiting to see what kinds of voting challenges and cases the DoJ chooses to bring.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/17/us-election-threats-trump-baseless-claims
Affordable Care Act survives third Supreme Court challenge, as case from Trump administration and GOP-led states is rejected
By Robert Barnes
June 17, 2021 at 3:17 p.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/affordable-care-act-survives-third-supreme-court-challenge-as-case-from-trump-administration-and-gop-led-states-is-rejected/2021/06/17/1d800dce-cf6f-11eb-8cd2-4e95230cfac2_story.html
The Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act, saying Republican-led states do not have the legal standing to try to upend the law.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote the court’s 7 to 2 decision that preserves the law that provides millions of Americans with health coverage.
Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M Gorsuch dissented.
The decision meant the attempt to derail President Barack Obama’s landmark domestic achievement met the fate of past legal challenges, in 2012 and 2015.
The key issue this time was whether a 2017 decision by Congress to remove the penalty for not buying health insurance — the so-called individual mandate — meant that the law was unconstitutional and should be wiped from the books.
That would end popular provisions such as keeping young adults on their parents’ insurance policies, and ensuring coverage for those with preexisting medical conditions.
But the court said the states did not have the legal standing to bring the challenge.
President Biden, in contrast to former president Donald Trump, has said he plans to build on the program to offer more Americans health care coverage.
The red-state challenge came to the Supreme Court at an inopportune time — endangering the health-care coverage of more than 20 million Americans during the country’s gravest health crisis in a century.
Even congressional Republicans who have targeted Obamacare in the past distanced themselves from the suit brought by the Republican state attorneys general and joined by the previous administration.
The case posed three questions: Do the challengers have legal standing to bring the challenge? Did changes made by Congress in 2017 render unconstitutional the ACA’s requirement for individuals to buy insurance? And if so, can the rest of the law be separated out, or must it fall in its entirety?
“We do not reach these questions of the Act’s validity, however, for Texas and the other plaintiffs in this suit lack the standing necessary to raise them,” Breyer wrote.
The cases are California v. Texas and Texas v. California.
1156 Comments
By Robert Barnes
Robert Barnes has been a Washington Post reporter and editor since 1987. He joined The Post to cover Maryland politics, and he has served in various editing positions, including metropolitan editor and national political editor. He has covered the Supreme Court since November 2006. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/affordable-care-act-survives-third-supreme-court-challenge-as-case-from-trump-administration-and-gop-led-states-is-rejected/2021/06/17/1d800dce-cf6f-11eb-8cd2-4e95230cfac2_story.html
Anthony S. Fauci, chief medical adviser to the administration, and David Kessler, chief science officer for the covid-19 response, began brainstorming the idea late last year. With remarkably effective vaccines rolling out, their initial focus was on drugs that could make the next pandemic less devastating. But as virus variants emerged and it became clear that even a historic vaccination campaign wasn’t likely to eradicate the coronavirus, they accelerated the deadline.
“The focus was to reinvigorate the nation’s antiviral program over the next three to five years. What’s become more clear, as the pandemic has come into focus, is we have to do it this fall,” Kessler said. “We need this set of tools to close out this pandemic. … The hard thing is to recognize with all the success, there’s still several hundred deaths a day.”
The $3.2 billion represents a multiyear investment to jump-start basic science research to develop new drugs and test whether existing drugs show promise. The funding will support clinical research and manufacturing. The focus initially is on this coronavirus but will expand into collaborative drug discovery programs focused on viruses that have the potential to spark a pandemic.
At the same time, the government has started placing preorders for antiviral drugs for this pandemic — before they have been shown to work. It’s a strategy similar to the one used to encourage vaccine development.
“The aim of the program is to catalyze the development of new medicines to combat covid-19, but also to provide a structure, a durable structure, to prepare from a therapeutic standpoint against any of the pandemic threats,” Fauci said.
The quest for a pill to fight viruses gets a $3.2 billion boost
Antiviral drugs could help bring this pandemic to a close — and prepare for the next one
By Carolyn Y. Johnson
June 17, 2021 at 3:30 p.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/06/17/drugs-for-covid/?itid
Before this pandemic is over, scientists are preparing to fight the next one.
Borrowing from the model used to create drugs that transformed HIV from a death sentence into a manageable disease, the Biden administration announced Thursday a $3.2 billion plan to stock the medicine cabinet with drugs that would be ready to treat future viral threats — whether a hemorrhagic fever, influenza or another coronavirus.
Anthony S. Fauci, chief medical adviser to the administration, and David Kessler, chief science officer for the covid-19 response, began brainstorming the idea late last year. With remarkably effective vaccines rolling out, their initial focus was on drugs that could make the next pandemic less devastating. But as virus variants emerged and it became clear that even a historic vaccination campaign wasn’t likely to eradicate the coronavirus, they accelerated the deadline.
“The focus was to reinvigorate the nation’s antiviral program over the next three to five years. What’s become more clear, as the pandemic has come into focus, is we have to do it this fall,” Kessler said. “We need this set of tools to close out this pandemic. … The hard thing is to recognize with all the success, there’s still several hundred deaths a day.”
The $3.2 billion represents a multiyear investment to jump-start basic science research to develop new drugs and test whether existing drugs show promise. The funding will support clinical research and manufacturing. The focus initially is on this coronavirus but will expand into collaborative drug discovery programs focused on viruses that have the potential to spark a pandemic.
At the same time, the government has started placing preorders for antiviral drugs for this pandemic — before they have been shown to work. It’s a strategy similar to the one used to encourage vaccine development.
“The aim of the program is to catalyze the development of new medicines to combat covid-19, but also to provide a structure, a durable structure, to prepare from a therapeutic standpoint against any of the pandemic threats,” Fauci said.
Short memories, vanishing viruses
For months, scientists who work on therapies for viruses have debated whether the pandemic will be a wake-up call, an event that triggers sustained investment in an area increasingly neglected as drug companies seek more lucrative targets. Many have been skeptical much will change, aside from perhaps a temporary surge of drug development against coronaviruses.
“Investors are totally uninterested in antivirals. Even if you can demonstrate you can make a couple billion dollars, nobody cares,” said Ann Kwong, a virologist who played a leading role in developing an antiviral approved against hepatitis C at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, along with an influenza treatment. “What they really want is a chronic treatment. Nobody ever gets cured of high cholesterol.”
Scientists express hope tinged with doubt that the pandemic will trigger permanent change, including coronavirus researchers who learned firsthand how short attention spans can be. After severe acute respiratory syndrome emerged in 2003 and Middle East respiratory syndrome in 2012, scientists who study the viruses thought it was only a matter of time before another one threatened — but sometimes had trouble convincing funders of the urgency.
“The lack of antivirals on the shelf has been a really sad part of watching SARS-2 emerge,” said Matthew Frieman, a coronavirus expert at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Frieman conducted experiments to sift through existing drugs to see whether any could be repurposed against Middle East respiratory syndrome.
“We had been working on developing this — antivirals for future pandemics. It was problematic to get funded,” Frieman said.
Even if money exists, the development path wasn’t always clear when targeting viruses that disappeared — or have yet to appear.
Norbert Bischofberger, one of the inventors of Tamiflu, an oral antiviral pill for influenza, said coronaviruses were on his radar in recent years when he worked at Gilead Sciences.
“We thought about corona, we knew about corona — we just found it almost impossible to do clinical studies. Let’s say you have a drug, and you want to do a clinical study to show it’s safe and effective. Safe, that’s the easy part,” said Bischofberger, who is now president of Kronos Bio, a company focused on cancer. But to show it works outside of lab experiments? “You need for corona to be around.”
Several scientists who have worked on developing antivirals said that appetite for the drug class had decreased, in part because there wasn’t a clear commercial model. The hope is the new government effort, if it succeeds in a way similar to the investment into HIV, could remove much of the uncertainty from the process.
Closing out the pandemic
So far, the quest for antivirals against covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, has been a list, mostly, of failures.
The anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, the HIV drugs lopinavir and ritonavir, and the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin all showed hints of promise and have been touted at various stages of the pandemic as antivirals. None are recommended for use, although trials continue.
Even remdesivir — the only authorized covid-19 antiviral, which is delivered by IV — has been the subject of ongoing debate, with conflicting evidence on how well it works.
Beyond investing to produce drugs against future threats, the U.S. government is making bets on drugs that might, finally, help knock back covid-19. As it did with vaccines, the government has begun placing advanced purchase orders for antiviral drugs even before they are shown to work.
Last week, the administration committed $1.2 billion to buy 1.7 million doses of molnupiravir, an antiviral developed by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, if it is authorized. The drug integrates itself into the virus’s genetic code and interferes with the ability of the coronavirus to multiply, leading to “error catastrophe.”
Daria Hazuda, Merck’s vice president of infectious-disease discovery and chief science officer, said data from the late-stage clinical trial of the drug should be available in the last half of the year.
Even with the success in vaccines, Hazuda said she sees a role for an oral antiviral pill in helping thwart the coronavirus: Some countries have low vaccination rates, and vaccines don’t work for everyone. In the United States, several drugs known as monoclonal antibodies are authorized, but they are clunky to implement, typically requiring a lengthy IV infusion early in people’s illness when they still don’t feel very sick.
In addition, variants have already posed a risk to some monoclonals. In May, government health officials paused shipments of a monoclonal antibody cocktail made by Eli Lilly to eight states because it does not work against virus variants spreading in those states. This week, Rhode Island was added to the list.
Antivirals, on the other hand, could offer a way to target multiple variants, or even an entire family of viruses.
“As we’re seeing, the virus can evolve, and with variants cropping up, how well the vaccines will work against variants in the future is, I think, still an open question,” Hazuda said. Antivirals could be variant-proof and even work broadly against multiple coronaviruses.
A tough scientific target
Developing antiviral drugs, particularly for acute viral infections, comes with challenges, researchers said. The window of opportunity to intervene is short — possibly when people barely realize they are sick.
Bischofberger said one of the most powerful uses of Tamiflu was as a preventive measure — when flu hits a region or a nursing home, people could be given a prophylactic daily pill.
Identifying people early in their course of illness may not prove as hard with covid-19, because of awareness of testing. Still, Hazuda said that unlike flu, the precise trajectory of the disease and how it varies among people is still not well understood, and that poses another challenge.
Because viruses use the infected person’s cellular machinery to replicate, another approach involves developing antiviral therapies that aim at the host, not the virus. That could be a way to design a broad-acting drug against many viruses, but it adds a new wrinkle: the possibility of side effects.
In the end, the business proposition may be the fundamental problem with developing antivirals for acute diseases that often resolve on their own, said Kara Carter, president of the International Society for Antiviral Research and senior vice president of discovery biology at Dewpoint Therapeutics.
A chronic infection may have the same commercial potential as a drug for diabetes or rheumatoid arthritis. But an acute viral infection presents both a scientific challenge and a commercial one.
“You’re probably going to dose those patients for anywhere from five to 10 days, but you require the same amount of expense to develop and discover those drugs,” Carter said.
She and others pointed to the progress of the past year, with drugs in clinical development from Merck, Pfizer, Atea Pharmaceuticals and other companies. Carter cited a widely accepted formula for corralling a pathogen: at least one vaccine plus two antivirals that use different mechanisms to stop a virus.
“There’s going to be money to support it as long as the pain points are still there and being experienced and in people’s memory,” Carter said. “I hope I’m wrong, but as soon as this starts being less of a global health concern, it’s going to be, ‘We dealt with that, it’s done.’”
By Carolyn Y. Johnson
Carolyn Johnson is a science reporter. She previously covered the business of health and the affordability of health care to consumers. Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/06/17/drugs-for-covid/?itid
EXCLUSIVE In secret recording, Florida Republican threatens to send Russian-Ukrainian ‘hit squad’ after rival
“I really don't want to have to end anybody's life for the good of the people of the United States of America. ... But if it needs to be done, it needs to be done," William Braddock says in the clip.
By MARC CAPUTO
06/17/2021 04:30 AM EDT Updated: 06/17/2021 11:09 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/17/secret-recording-florida-republican-threat-hit-squad-494976
MIAMI — A little-known GOP candidate in one of Florida’s most competitive congressional seats was secretly recorded threatening to send “a Russian and Ukrainian hit squad” to a fellow Republican opponent to make her “disappear.”
During a 30-minute call with a conservative activist that was recorded before he became a candidate, William Braddock repeatedly warned the activist to not support GOP candidate Anna Paulina Luna in the Republican primary for a Tampa Bay-area congressional seat because he had access to assassins. The seat is being vacated by Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.), who is running for governor.
“I really don't want to have to end anybody's life for the good of the people of the United States of America,” Braddock said at one point in the conversation last week, according to the recording exclusively obtained by POLITICO. “That will break my heart. But if it needs to be done, it needs to be done. Luna is a f---ing speed bump in the road. She's a dead squirrel you run over every day when you leave the neighborhood.”
Reached by text message, Braddock refused to say whether he made any threats about Luna to the person who recorded him, Erin Olszewski.
Asked repeatedly via text if he mentioned Russian-Ukrainian hit squads, Braddock wouldn’t give a yes or no answer, saying he had not heard the recording and that it’s “allegedly me … there is no proof of that.” He also suggested the recording “may even be altered and edited.”
“This is a dirty political tactic that has caused a lot of people a lot of stress and is completely unnecessary,” he said.
Olszewski denied editing or altering the recording. She said she made it because she was concerned about Braddock’s “unhinged” dislike of Luna that he had previously expressed. After she made the recording just after midnight last Wednesday, she promptly turned it over to St. Petersburg, Fla., police and gave a heads-up to her friend Luna, who filed a petition for an injunction against Braddock. Luna and Olszewski each received a temporary restraining order against him last week. Braddock filed to run Monday.
In the recording, Braddock early in the call brought up the alleged assassins. He also made rambling statements about getting financial help from fellow Freemasons or by somehow importing millions of dollars from Malta and Gibraltar.
“I have access to a hit squad, too, Ukrainians and Russians,” he said about three minutes into the call, adding “don't get caught out in public supporting Luna. … Luna’s gonna go down and I hope it's by herself.”
Braddock went on to explain that he didn’t think Luna could win in the general election. Luna, an Air Force veteran and former model who went on to become a conservative activist, won a crowded GOP primary in the state’s 13th Congressional District last year but lost the general election to Crist.
It's unclear exactly why Braddock has such dislike toward Luna. The two do not appear to have any previous connection to one another, and Braddock is a lower-tier candidate in an increasingly crowded race for Crist’s seat. Already, two state lawmakers and a former Obama administration official have entered the race, with others expected to jump in.
The threats, claims of assassins and political backstabbing put an only-in-Florida stamp on what was already shaping up to be a wild midterm of congressional races. Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz in the Panhandle is still batting back accusations in an ongoing federal sex trafficking probe.
Democratic Rep. Val Demings is leaving her Orlando seat to run for Senate, causing a mad scramble to replace her. And the state is getting an additional congressional seat that is certain to lead to another crush of candidates after redistricting before next year’s elections.
Olszewski, who initiated and recorded the call just after midnight on June 9, said she phoned Braddock at his insistence because he kept trying to get her to appear on a health care panel for an event he was organizing.
Olszewski, a nurse by training, became a conservative figure last year after penning a book called “Undercover Epicenter Nurse: How Fraud, Negligence, and Greed Led to Unnecessary Deaths at Elmhurst Hospital,” which some in the health care industry have called disinformation.
After having a few conversations with Braddock, however, Olszewski said she became concerned that he wanted to use her to advance his candidacy and that he left her “threatening” messages about Luna that sounded “unhinged.”
With such a closely divided Congress currently in Democratic control, Braddock said on the recorded call that the “pivotal” St. Petersburg-based district will take on outsized importance in 2022 to keep America from devolving into a “communist-socialist s---hole.” When Olszewski asked him why he had Russians at the ready, Braddock indicated they were to stop Luna.
New York’s mayoral race remains a tossup after final Democratic debate
“My polling people are going to charge me $20,000 to do a poll right before the primary. And if the poll says Luna’s gonna win, she’s gonna be gone. She's gonna disappear,” Braddock said in the recorded call, pledging Olszewski to secrecy. “For the good of our country, we have to sacrifice the few. … For the better or the good of the majority of the people, we've got to sacrifice the few.”
Later in the call, Olszewski asked what would happen if “Luna is gonna win” and Braddock assured her that wouldn’t happen.
“She’s gonna be gone. Period. That's the end of the discussion. Luna is not an issue,” he said.
Olszewski pushed him, asking “how do we make her go, though? I just don’t understand that.”
“I call up my Russian and Ukrainian hit squad, and within 24 hours, they're sending me pictures of her disappearing,” he replied. “No, I'm not joking. Like, this is beyond my control this point.”
Asked if the killers were snipers, Braddock described them as, “Russian mafia. Close-battle combat, TEC-9s, MAC-10s, silencers kind of thing. No snipers. Up close and personal. So they know that the target has gone.”
Olszewski said that threats like the ones Braddock made “you can’t take lightly. Normal people don’t say these things.”
Olszewski called Braddock on one smartphone and recorded video of the call with another, occasionally displaying his name and number on the video to show it was him on the call. POLITICO also obtained a separate recording, a voicemail message, Braddock left with a consultant in which his phone number was identical and voice seemed to match the information Olszewski shot in her video.
In Florida, it’s a third-degree felony to record another person without their knowledge. But Olszewski said that St. Petersburg police told her she had nothing to worry about in recording the conversation and turning it over to authorities. A spokesperson for the St. Petersburg police declined to comment on the recording or whether it was legally recorded.
Braddock, though, indicated he was ready to sue Olszewski.
“The folks in possession of whatever recording they think they have of myself or someone else (which may even be altered and edited) will be facing civil damages suit(s) when the paperwork is file [sic] with the county and felony charges after I file with the local police department,” Braddock said in his text message to POLITICO. “I strongly advise not to get involved because the civil suits will continue to be filed until people stop sharing them because whomever is on the recording did not consent to be recorded in my humble opinion.”
In her filing for an injunction, Luna also mentioned how Braddock claimed in the call with Olszewski that two other potential Republican candidates in the race, Amanda Makki and Matt Tito, had formed an alliance with him to stop Luna. Braddock briefly posted the petition for the injunction on his Facebook page Friday but then took them down.
Both Makki and Tito denied the claims of an alliance with Braddock and each of them criticized Luna for mentioning their names in the injunction she filed against Braddock.
“The fact she dragged me through the mud, after not seeing or talking to me after 11 months, it really calls into question her judgment,” said Makki, who ran unsuccessfully in the GOP primary against Luna in 2020, despite earning the endorsement of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
Tito, also, was displeased with the fact that he was named in the injunction.
“This is a total political hit job. I wasn’t served. I’m not in legal trouble,” he said. “Luna doesn’t want me to get in the Republican race because she knows I’ll beat her. I’m a better candidate. She’s trying to wipe me out of the race, trying to embarrass me, intimidate me, smear my name so she has a wider path to the nomination.”
In the call, Braddock mentioned that he offered Tito a job on his campaign to keep him on the sidelines, but Tito said he had no intention to work for Braddock.
James Blair, a spokesperson for Luna, said she wouldn’t comment on the ongoing investigation. But he suggested Makki had “sour grapes” for losing the primary last year to Luna. And he faulted Tito because he “immediately blamed the woman” by accusing Luna of a political hit job.
“The content of the protective order filed is based upon Mr. Braddock’s own threats, actions, and statements,” Blair said. “I understand that Mr. Braddock is the one who stated he is working with Mr. Tito and Ms. Makki, so perhaps they should take it up with him instead of attacking the person he said he was going to kill if that’s what it took to keep her from winning.”
In her petition for the restraining order, Luna made it clear that she took Braddock’s threats seriously.
“I do not feel safe and am currently in fear for my life,” Luna wrote, according to a copy of it.
Olszewski, too, said Braddock sounded dangerous. At one point, Braddock even said he was scared himself.
“Don’t be on the f---ing wrong side of supporting Luna because if you're near her when the time comes, I just don't want that to happen to you because you've got kids,” Braddock said on the call. “So don't be associated with Luna under any circumstances. Please. And do not repeat this anybody because both of us will be in jeopardy if you do. I'm not just blowing smoke here. I'm f---ing being dead ass serious and it scares the s--- out of me, too.”
FILED UNDER: CHARLIE CRIST, TAMPA, LEGAL
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/17/secret-recording-florida-republican-threat-hit-squad-494976
Peter Thiel's army: Big Tech "disruptor" sets out to shake up the GOP
Thiel just made the biggest donation of his life and largest ever to a super PAC backing a single Senate candidate
By IGOR DERYSH
PUBLISHED JUNE 17, 2021 6:00AM (EDT)
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/17/peter-thiels-army-big-tech-disruptor-sets-out-to-shake-up-the-gop/
Republican megadonors who ponied up huge sums of cash to fund former President Donald Trump's presidential runs and election-related legal battles are now investing in candidates who could mainstream Trumpism beyond the GOP base, namely Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Trump acolyte with his sights set on 2024.
Others big Trump donors are looking to invest in outsider candidates with no political experience -- or even their own campaigns. Few have made a bigger splash than Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, who has already doled out $10 million donations to super PACs backing J.D. Vance, the author of "Hillbilly Elegy" turned venture capitalist who is eyeing a Senate run in Ohio, and Blake Masters, a fellow Silicon Valley protege expected to launch his own Senate bid in Arizona. The donations are the largest individual contributions ever made by Thiel and the most ever to outside groups supporting single Senate candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Thiel, a Facebook board member, was one of few Silicon Valley titans to publicly support Trump in 2016, buying face time with $1.5 million in donations to pro-Trump groups, making him one of the biggest Trump donors of the cycle. Thiel also served on Trump's transition team, though he later reportedly soured on his presidency and did not contribute to his 2020 run. However he recently brought Vance, who once said he had "no love" for Trump, to meet the former president at Mar-a-Lago, Politico reported last month.
Thiel has long supported Republican causes, backing Libertarian-leaning candidates like Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Mike Lee, R-Utah. His massive investment in Vance and Masters is a sign not just of their personal relationships but their embrace of the anti-globalization rhetoric that attracted him to Trump in the first place, according to the Politico report.
Vance, who is also backed by far-right Trump megadonors Bob and Rebekah Mercer, became a hot commodity in the political world as some in Washington pointed to his best-selling memoir about life in Appalachia as insight to reaching working-class white voters Democrats struggled to win over in 2016. But as a would-be candidate, Vance, a Yale Law School grad and longtime tech investor, has resorted to Trump's culture warrior playbook while rebranding himself online.
Vance has railed on Twitter against "critical race theory," outdoor masking, the "fake news" media, echoed Fox News Tucker Carlson's "great replacement" conspiracy theory rhetoric, and has even adopted Trump's penchant for inexplicable capitalization.
And, like Trump, his statements are often tinged in glaring hypocrisy as he wages a newfound war on "establishment" Republicans. Earlier this year, he criticized Republican "apologies for our oligarchy," writing they should come with a disclaimer saying "Big Tech pays my salary" even though he has earned a fortune from his career in Big Tech.
The Thiel and Mercer money "obviously helps," a veteran Ohio Republican consultant told Salon. "But once you get the money you have to have the right message, particularly if you're going to… kind of skirt the Trump lane and try to be that traditional conservative with a populist bent that isn't an asshole. That's a fickle thing."
Masters, a fellow tech venture capitalist who met Thiel while attending Stanford Law School, co-wrote the book "Zero to One" with Thiel and heads the venture fund Thiel Capital and the Thiel Foundation, which backs tech nonprofits. Like Vance, Masters has railed against Big Tech censorship, teacher unions, the "media elite," and President Joe Biden's decision to cancel border wall construction. While he doesn't share Vance's penchant for provocative original statements, his Twitter feed is filled with retweets complaining about "wokeness" and "critical race theory."
But Masters enters a crowded field that includes Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who is trying to appeal to the Trump base after facing criticism for not doing enough to support the state's dubious election "audit," Arizona Republican strategist Paul Bentz told Salon, and businessman Jim Lamon, who is expected to self-fund his campaign and is even buying TV time in New York and New Jersey in an apparent bid to "get Trump's attention."
"It will be challenging - even with $10 million - to carve out a niche of GOP support," Bentz said of Masters. "The two major issues for Republican primary voters are immigration and election fraud. It will be difficult for the candidates to set themselves apart on either issue."
Thiel is also looking to grow his influence in the Republican Party by wading into next year's House primaries and is expected to back Joe Kent, an "America First" Republican challenging Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of the few House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump.
"Thiel helped shape Silicon Valley into its current disruptive, monopolistic incarnation, he helped elect Trump, and he's shaping up to be a major player in 2022 and beyond," Max Chafkin, the author of the upcoming book "The Contrarian" about Thiel's pursuit of power, said on Twitter. "The political donations we already know about--$10 million to JD Vance, $10 million to Blake Masters--already put him in the ballpark of Koch, Mercer, Soros, etc. There are signs that this is just the beginning," he added.
It remains to be seen whether Thiel's cash will pay off.
Earlier this year, he donated to Brian Harrison, a former Trump administration official who ran in a special House election in Texas to "keep the Trump movement alive." Harrison finished fourth in the race with just 10.8% of the vote, failing to qualify for the runoff. Last year, he donated $2 million to back Kris Kobach, a staunch Trump ally and immigration hardliner, in his failed Kansas Senate primary bid to establishment-backed Republican Roger Marshall. Vance, who has launched an exploratory committee and is expected to formally announce his bid next month, is currently polling between 4% and 6%.
Thiel has also met privately with DeSantis, who is up for re-election next year and is already attending fundraisers across the country ahead of a potential 2024 presidential bid, according to Politico.
While Trump has soured on former allies like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, blaming them for not doing enough to overturn his electoral loss in their states, the former president has continued to embrace DeSantis, even floating him as a possible running mate if he runs in 2024. Of course, DeSantis appears to have even higher hopes for 2024 and is quickly carving out a large berth in the Trump lane of the 2024 GOP primary, signing bills and executive orders to make voting harder, ban "critical race theory" in schools, ban vaccine passports, ban social media "deplatforming," ban transgender athletes from playing on public school teams that do not match their biological gender, require school prayer, and impose tougher criminal penalties on protesters.
Having hit just about all of the big Republican culture war issues, DeSantis has attracted a who's who of former Trump donors, raking in more than $11 million for his reelection from October to April, according to Politico, more than 25 times as much as Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Nikki Fried, the state's agriculture commissioner.
Along with interest from Thiel, DeSantis has received six-figure contributions from top Trump donors like Bernie Marcus, the Home Depot founder who gave Trump $7 million in 2016, venture capitalist David Blumberg, and developer Steven Witkoff, according to Politico. Much of the money has come from out-of-state. Chicago hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, who has been among the biggest Trump and GOP donors in the country, has also contributed $5 million. Other Trump donors like former United Nations ambassador Kelly Craft, mine owner Andrew Sabin, conservative activist Doug Deason, and Don Tapia, a businessman Trump tapped to serve as his ambassador to Jamaica, are also planning big fundraisers for the governor.
Republican donors have described DeSantis as a "nicer version of Trump" and numerous benefactors that did not give much money to Republicans before 2016 appear to be coalescing behind DeSantis as well.
Julie Jenkins Fancelli, an heiress to the Publix fortune, spent little on politics before contributing more than $2 million to Trump and Republican causes since 2016. After Trump's election loss, she contributed $300,000 to the January 6 rally that preceded the Capitol riot and is now backing DeSantis.
Ike Perlmutter, the reclusive chairman of Marvel Entertainment and Trump's Mar-a-Lago buddy who served as an informal adviser on veterans affairs, and his wife Laura donated less than $7,000 to political causes before 2016 but have since dropped more than $31 million to back Trump and GOP causes, according to ProPublica. The couple has since contributed at least $1.5 million to back DeSantis.
Republican strategist John Feehery told Salon that donors have gravitated toward DeSantis because he is a "better version of Trump."
"He takes on the left with relish. He doesn't back down from a fight. He believes in America and the free market," Feehery said. "But he is fundamentally better in two key ways. He was much better on Covid than Trump, who never could get a handle on the health bureaucracy. And unlike Trump, he knows what he's doing."
Mac Stipanovich, a longtime Florida Republican strategist, noted that DeSantis' response largely tracked Trump's before he began to muscle local governments on Covid restrictions.
"Florida has not suffered markedly worse than some other large states but on the other hand it hasn't done a lot better than many other states. We're kind of like everybody else," he said in an interview with Salon. "But because DeSantis is turning out to be a pretty able propagandist, he is turning the lack of disaster into triumph."
DeSantis has also benefited from the attention to his closely-watched re-election, allowing big donors to act as sort of early-stage investors by "establishing a relationship" with the governor "without actually committing" to his potential 2024 run, Stipanovich said.
"These folks are percentage players," he added. "DeSantis is the shiny new thing. So they will gravitate toward you. That does not mean they will remain there."
As 2024 moves closer, he will likely have to compete for big donations with other Trump backers like Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who never contributed to political campaigns before dropping over $2.7 million to back Trump and GOP causes since 2016, is planning to host a fundraiser for the Texas senator.
Former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are also expected to compete for the 2024 nomination if Trump does not run.
Trump also appears to have inspired a growing number of major Republican donors to launch their own campaigns rather than invest in other candidates.
Lynda Blanchard, who served as Trump's ambassador to Slovenia after donating $1 million to pro-Trump super PACs, has already contributed $5 million to her own campaign for a Senate seat in Alabama. But Blanchard has apparently angered Trump by implying that he was backing her, prompting the former president to throw his support behind Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., who has been linked to the organizer of the January 6 "Stop the Steal" rally that preceded the Capitol riot. Blanchard's implication prompted former Trump campaign manager to warn Republicans against faking Trump's endorsements, telling Politico that most candidates claiming to have Trump's support are "full of shit."
Lewandowski and former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway have signed on to help Trump megadonor Charles Herbster in his Nebraska gubernatorial campaign. Herbster owns numerous agricultural businesses across the country and helped the Trump campaign's fundraising operations after befriending the former president at Mar-a-Lago.
Craft, the former UN ambassador who along with her husband donated over $1 million to pro-Trump groups, is considering a 2023 run against Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, according to Politico. MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, who has spent months pushing lies about the election, has also expressed interest in challenging Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz but raised baseless concern that the voting machines would "steal" the election.
And Vance is not the only big-money candidate in Ohio. Jane Timken, the former Ohio GOP chief who along with her husband donated nearly a quarter-million to Trump's 2020 campaign and loaned $1 million to her own campaign, and Mike Gibbons, who co-chaired Trump's fundraising in Ohio, are both vying to run in the Trump lane as well.
"YUCK," an Ohio Republican consultant told Salon describing the Senate race, which he said he chose to avoid this cycle after working for numerous top Republicans in the state because "I have to look at myself in the mirror in the morning."
Trump is a "bit of a model, if you have the resources," he said, adding that even with deep pockets it may be difficult to outspend donors like Thiel and the Mercers. At the same time, candidates who perhaps hoped to rely on Timken's and Gibbons' donations will have to look elsewhere.
"This is probably a $30 to $50 million campaign," he said. "That's a hell of a lot of money. So that's why when you have $10 million coming to J.D. and then whatever the Mercer family is raising, that's significant. That puts you in the upper echelon resource wise."
While megadonors and PACs have long provided the bulk of the money raised by many Republican candidates, the rise of WinRed has allowed other Trump allies who have scared off major donors to raise staggering sums of money. Republicans have tried for years to launch a service to rival the success of ActBlue on the left but it was only when Trump put his people in charge that the party cut off other vendors.
"WinRed succeeding is one of the many ways that the infrastructure of the Republican Party now belongs and continues to belong to Trump," Dave Karpf, a George Washington University professor who studies online political fundraising and organizing, said in an interview with Salon.
While corporate PACs and some major donors pulled back after the Capitol riot, small-dollar donations from grassroots donors on WinRed skyrocketed for lawmakers like Hawley and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., two of the most prominent backers of Trump's "Big Lie," as well as committees that raise money for House Republicans, most of whom voted to block the certification of the election results.
"The way you make a ton of money as a Republican candidate is that you say things that get you on Breitbart and Fox News," Karpf said. "Marjorie Taylor Greene is raising a ton of money [because] she is saying and doing doing things that make her insanely popular on these big conservative platforms that talk her up."
But while some big donors pulled back after the Capitol riot, many are already returning and there is little difference between what attracts megadonors and grassroots supporters, Karpf argued.
The small-dollar donations and big money contributions "go hand in hand with saying and doing very Trumpy things that get you seen and heard in conservative media," he said. "There's basically no daylight between their interests and so it's just another spigot for them bringing more money into politics."
Both big and small donors are expected to throw money behind a growing group of QAnon followers running for Congress in the wake of the Trump era. At least 33 candidates who have expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory are currently running for federal office, according to a Media Matters analysis.
"We are going to have more QAnon believers in Congress after 2022 than we have now," Karpf said. "And that is part and parcel of the stealing of American democracy. Big money in politics certainly doesn't help… [but] now big money is one of the ensemble cast members ruining politics. There's all these other forces also making America entirely uncomfortable."
IGOR DERYSH
Igor Derysh is a staff writer at Salon. His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and Baltimore Sun.
Tips/Email: iderysh@salon.com Twitter: @IgorDerysh
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/17/peter-thiels-army-big-tech-disruptor-sets-out-to-shake-up-the-gop/
"Stop the Steal" means "Start the Coup": Experts on Trump's Jan. 6 coup plot and the power of denial
January 6 was Trump's coup attempt, and it was serious. So why are Americans reluctant to say so?
By CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
PUBLISHED JUNE 17, 2021 9:01AM (EDT)
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/17/stop-the-steal-means-start-the-coup-experts-on-trumps-jan-6-coup-plot-and-the-power-of-denial/
In the most basic sense, a coup is an illegal takeover of government power by an individual or faction.
A coup can be attempted by members of the existing government and political system or those outside of it. A coup can also involve both groups working together towards the same goal of overthrowing the government.
The connotative meaning, symbolism, and emotional valence of the word "coup" is something much broader: for Americans a "coup" is something that happens in other countries — "over there," not in the world's "greatest democracy." More generally, a "coup" summons up ideas and feelings of social disorder and chaos, a broken democracy or other form of government, and a country to be looked down upon as some type of failed state in the so-called Third World.
On January 6, then-President Donald Trump, his Republican co-conspirators in Congress, allies in other parts of the United States government, and followers attempted a coup to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and Joe Biden's victory.
The last few days have seen more revelations about the Trump regime's lawlessness and just how perilously close Trump and his allies came to succeeding in their attempt to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election. The American people and the world now know that Donald Trump's agents were pressuring the Department of Justice to intervene by "proving" that Biden won the election because of widespread "voter fraud."
Documents obtained by the House Oversight and Reform Committee include a draft memo that was to be submitted by the Department of Justice to the Supreme Court which argued that the 2020 Election results should be nullified.
Moreover, other questions still remain about the events of January 6, such as how the Trump regime was able to so easily demobilize the United States military and why dozens of repeated warnings about a violent attack by Trump's followers on the Capitol were ignored.
Instead of speaking plainly and directly about the Trump regime's coup, many in the mainstream news media, and among America's political class more generally, have avoided using such language. When the coup was imminent, they dismissed it as something "impossible" and "ridiculous" and "fearmongering" by people afflicted with "Trump derangement syndrome."
When the coup and attack on the Capitol finally occurred, many of those same voices called it an "insurrection" or a "mob action" by Trump supporters who "didn't really have a plan." This too is incorrect: Trump's attack force included highly motivated and trained elements who acted in a precise fashion with the goal of capturing Mike Pence, whom they threatened to kill, along with other Republicans deemed to be "traitors" and Democrats. Trump's attack force was also attempting to start a civil war, and at the very least to disrupt the certification of Biden's victory with the goal of creating the conditions for Trump to declare a national state of emergency.
As the horrors of January 6 became even more clear, the chattering class and America's political elites then tried to dismiss the coup as "frightening" but not a "real threat" to the country's democracy. Too many other public voices have also defaulted to the weak and absurd claim that Trump's coup "failed" and "could not have succeeded any way" because of "institutions" — which in their collective mind somehow minimizes the existential peril facing the country's democracy.
And even with these new revelations about Trump and his regime's high crimes, members of the country's political class are still desperately trying to avoid using the word "coup" in a sustained and serious way because to do so would then necessitate questions about investigations, public hearings, trials — along with the threat of punishment — for Donald Trump and his regime.
The Democrats very much want to "move on" from January 6 because they see it as a distraction from their policy agenda. The Republicans are complicit and do not want to implicate themselves by having proper investigations – and are still using the Big Lie to attack American democracy and freedom in what is an on-going coup. The American people are divided on basic questions of reality, which means that there is no agreed upon narrative about January 6 and the Trump regime's attempt to overthrow the country's multiracial democracy and the rule of law. In total, America is being besieged by organized forgetting about the Trump's regime's coup attempt on January 6, and the horrors of the Age of Trump, more generally.
In an effort to better understand why so many Americans are afraid to use the word "coup" to describe the events of January 6 and beyond, I asked several experts from a range of backgrounds for their insights on this social and political dynamic of evasion and denial.
David Rothkopf, political commentator, author of "Traitor: A History of American Betrayal from Benedict Arnold to Donald Trump," and cohost of the podcast "Deep State Radio":
At first glance it seems that we were so shocked by the coup attempt that we froze. But with each passing day, as evidence that it was not only a coup attempt but a vast conspiracy involving multiple crimes at the federal state level, the question grows more urgent. Why are we so inert? Why the inaction? For the GOP, it is easy. They are afraid of complicity and suffering the grim political fate they so richly deserve. But why don't Democrats act? Are they afraid of appearing too "partisan?" Afraid of alienating the few Republicans who might support their legislative agendas? Afraid of a public backlash or giving more bandwidth to Trump and the Trumpists? Whatever the excuse, it is lame. The reality is inaction will just make the past into prelude, yesterday's coup into tomorrow's autocracy.
Norm Ornstein is an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a columnist and contributing editor for The Atlantic, and author of "One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported."
The evidence keeps piling up, and is now crystal clear. Donald Trump, Mark Meadows and their allies were dead serious about overturning the election and installing a coup-driven presidency. Trump's conversation on January with Kevin McCarthy makes it clear that if this took many deaths of members of Congress and even Mike Pence, that was a price he would pay. There is undoubtedly more to come, including with top officials at DOD. We came much closer to a genuine violent coup than we knew.
Andrea Chalupa, journalist and author of "Orwell and The Refugees: The Untold Story of Animal Farm." She is also the cohost of the podcast "Gaslit Nation":
I think a number of factors have normalized the coup for many people in the U.S., including many elites, especially in the media. For one thing, political violence has already been normalized through mass shootings and the gun violence epidemic, which are propped up by the Republican Party and the NRA. Another factor is that most white people in America — and the media and elites are mostly made up of white people — haven't had to deal with the realities of authoritarianism, so to them, they're still expecting an exit ramp and some return to normalcy.
Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University, and author of "How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them" and "How Propaganda Works":
Time and again in recent years, too many have avoided and even derided terminology that is perfectly adequate to describe our times; "authoritarianism," "autocracy," "anti-democratic," "racist" and "fascist" — all of these are accurate to describe the formation that is building in the modern Republican Party. Democratic party politicians have shied away from the accurate terminology because they wish to signal civility and bipartisanship, at a time when voters they wish to woo have clearly indicated a preference for strength. Others have simply failed to recognize and update on the authoritarian threat, mocking those who take the Trumpist faction seriously. As evidence emerges that the country narrowly avoided a coup, and the mechanisms that would have enabled that coup are now being legalized in bills passed across the country, the willful denial of the anti-democratic threat posed by the GOP must increasingly be seen as a form of complicity.
Jared Yates Sexton, political commentator and author of "American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People" and "The People Are Going To Rise Like The Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage." He is the co-host of the "Muckrake Political Podcast":
The denial by media, politicians and Americans at large of what January 6 meant and what it represented — namely an attempted coup and overthrow of a presidential election — is driven by an unwillingness to reckon with just how perilous of a moment we're living in but also how our history is riddled with antidemocratic actions. This isn't the first time our system has been imperiled. It is a canary in the coal mine moment that tells us we are dangerously close to a troubling and dangerous conclusion to representative government.
Dr. Justin Frank is a former clinical professor of psychiatry at the George Washington University Medical Center. He is the author of "Bush on the Couch" and "Obama on the Couch." His most recent book is "Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President":
The country is faced with intensified efforts to force a coup to take over the government. "Stop the Steal" means "Start the Coup." One fundamental psychological challenge facing all presidents is to help citizens contain their anxiety and fear — both of which risk replacing thought with action.
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon. His essays can also be found at Chaunceydevega.com. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Chauncey DeVega Show. Chauncey can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/17/stop-the-steal-means-start-the-coup-experts-on-trumps-jan-6-coup-plot-and-the-power-of-denial/
Asia Pacific - Hundreds of vaccinated Indonesian health workers get COVID-19, dozens in hospital
Kate Lamb, Agustinus Beo Da Costa, Stanley Widianto
June 17, 2021 9:54 AM BST Last Updated 4 hours ago
3 minute read
JAKARTA, June 17 (Reuters) - More than 350 doctors and medical workers have caught COVID-19 in Indonesia despite being vaccinated with Sinovac and dozens have been hospitalised, officials said, as concerns grow about the efficacy of some vaccines against more infectious variants.
Most of the workers were asymptomatic and self-isolating at home, said Badai Ismoyo, head of the health office in the district of Kudus in central Java, but dozens were in hospital with high fevers and declining oxygen saturation levels.
Kudus, which has about 5,000 healthcare workers, is battling an outbreak believed to be driven by the more transmissible Delta variant which has pushed up its bed occupancy rates above 90%.
Designated as a priority group, healthcare workers were among the first to be vaccinated when inoculations began in January.
Almost all have received the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Chinese biopharmaceutical company Sinovac, the Indonesian Medical Association (IDI) says.
While the number of Indonesian healthcare workers dying from COVID-19 has dropped sharply from 158 in January to 13 in May, according to data initiative group LaporCOVID-19, public health experts say the Java hospitalisations are cause for concern.
“The data shows they have the Delta variant (in Kudus) so it is no surprise that the breakthrough infection is higher than before, because, as we know, the majority of healthcare workers in Indonesia got Sinovac, and we still don’t know yet how effective it is in the real world against the Delta variant,” said Dicky Budiman, an epidemiologist at Australia’s Griffith University.
Spokespersons from Sinovac and Indonesia’s ministry of health were not immediately available for comment on the efficacy of the Chinese firm’s CoronaVac against newer variants of the virus.
The World Health Organization (WHO) approved emergency use of Sinovac’s vaccine this month, saying results showed it prevented symptomatic disease in 51% of recipients and prevented severe COVID-19 and hospital stays in all of those studied.
As Indonesia grappled with one of Asia’s worst outbreaks, registering more than 1.9 million infections and 53,000 deaths, its doctors and nurses suffered a heavy toll of 946 deaths.
Many are now experiencing pandemic fatigue and taking a less vigilant approach to health protocols after being vaccinated, said Lenny Ekawati, from LaporCOVID-19.
“That phenomenon happens quite often these days, not only within the community, but also healthcare workers,” she said. “They think because they are vaccinated that they are safe.”
But as more cases of the highly transmissible Delta variant are identified in the world’s fourth most populous nation, the data is starting to tell a different story.
Across Indonesia, at least five doctors and one nurse have died from COVID-19 despite being vaccinated, according to the data initiative group, although one had only received a first shot.
In Kudus, one senior doctor has died, said IDI, although it is understood he had a co-morbidity.
In Jakarta, the capital, radiologist Dr Prijo Sidipratomo told Reuters he knew of at least half a dozen doctors who had been hospitalized with COVID-19 in the past month, despite being vaccinated, with one now being treated in an ICU.
“It is alarming for us because we cannot rely on vaccinations only,” he said, urging people to take precautions.
Weeks after the Muslim Eid Al-Fitr holidays, Indonesia has experienced a surge in cases, with the positivity rate exceeding 23% on Wednesday and daily cases nearing 10,000, its highest since late February.
In its latest report, the WHO urged Indonesia to tighten its lockdown as increased transmission due to variants of concern and a surge in bed occupancy rates demanded urgent action.
(Reporting by Kate Lamb in Sydney and Agustinus Beo Da Costa and Stanley Widianto in Jakarta; Editing by Michael Perry and Clarence Fernandez)
...
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/hundreds-indonesian-doctors-contract-covid-19-despite-vaccination-dozens-2021-06-17/
GOP lawmaker refuses to shake hand of officer who protected Capitol on Jan. 6
Fadel Allassan
35 mins ago - Politics & Policy
https://www.axios.com/capitol-riot-police-officer-andrew-clyde-d11bc95e-52d9-4ecd-8667-5312290a63db.html
Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) on Wednesday refused to shake hands with D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, who suffered a heart attack and traumatic brain injury after he was assaulted while protecting the Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot, per the Washington Post.
Why it matters: Clyde is among the 21 Republicans who voted against awarding a Congressional Gold Medal to officers who defended the Capitol during the riot.
Driving the news: Fanone returned to the Capitol Wednesday looking to share his story with those members, and told the Post that he recognized Clyde in an elevator
Fanone said the Republican congressman refused to shake his hand even after he introduced himself as an officer who "fought to defend the Capitol on Jan. 6," and described being beaten until he was unconscious.
"His response was nothing,” Fanone said. “He turned away from me, pulled out his cellphone and started thumbing through the apps.”
The big picture: The Georgia Republican has tried to downplay the events of that day by likening the mob at the Capitol to tourists.
"There was no insurrection. To call it an insurrection is a bold-faced lie," Clyde said in May.
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Adam Kinzinger @AdamKinzinger ·16h
I just called Officer Fanone and confirmed this story. This is really incredible. Also relayed an interaction he had with another members Chief of Staff that was really incredibly bad and disrespectful.
Rep. Eric Swalwell
@RepSwalwell
· 16h
#BREAKING Officer Fanone just ran into @Rep_Clyde at Capitol (he’s the “Jan 6 was a typical tour” guy). Fanone introduced himself as “someone who fought to defend the Capitol” and put out his hand. Clyde refused to shake it. To honor Trump, @housegop will dishonor the police.
THREAD
I just called Officer Fanone and confirmed this story. This is really incredible. Also relayed an interaction he had with another members Chief of Staff that was really incredibly bad and disrespectful. https://t.co/fERYjK6dWg
— Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱 (@AdamKinzinger) June 16, 2021
Rape and ripping out fingernails: the extraordinary violence used by county lines gangs to exploit children
Hospital staff confronted with shocking injuries inflicted by the drug gangs on young people
By Charles Hymas,
HOME AFFAIRS EDITOR
17 June 2021 • 5:00am
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/17/rape-ripping-fingernails-extraordinary-violence-used-county/
County lines gangs are using increasing levels of violence to exploit boys and girls, including removing their fingernails, frontline medical staff report.
Hospital staff have told researchers that they were now treating victims of county lines violence who had suffered multiple injuries, where before they may only have been admitted with one or two.
These included fingernails being pulled out, hair being ripped off their heads and multiple stab wounds, according to the report by Nottingham University’s Rights Lab based on interviews with frontline workers.
“Whereas before Covid-19 you may have seen one or two injuries on a young person, now they will be repeatedly stabbed. So we're talking five, six times is kind of an average amount of stab wounds,” said one youth worker based in hospital accident and emergency departments.
There was also evidence of gangs using sexual violence to exert control. Youth workers described the use of “gift girls” where victims are sexually exploited and passed around the wider gang network as a reward.
Another hospital youth worker reported a rise in the number of young men aged 21 or under attending A&E who had been raped by members of county lines gangs.
The researchers said the increasing violence was linked to a rise in the number of young people linked to the gangs who were self-harming or had attempted suicide.
One frontline worker told the researchers of one youth heavily involved in county lines who was in hospital for trying to drink a litre of bleach after he refused to join the other members in a gang rape.
“When he refused to get involved they beat him up and now they were after him because he wouldn't get involved in that gang rape,” said the worker.
Young women were particularly vulnerable to online grooming, where they were coerced into taking and sharing explicit images of themselves.
The researchers said it was unclear whether this was linked to sexual or criminal exploitation, but they attributed rising cases of self-harm in young women to the phenomenon.
FAQ | County lines
The term is increasingly in the spotlight, here is what you need to know about it:
What is meant by county lines?
Drug-dealing operations in major cities seek new markets outside their urban hubs for their drugs, primarily crack cocaine and heroin.
They expand their networks into smaller towns, which requires a supply of new recruits to transport the drugs. These are often controlled via a branded mobile phone line.
Who falls victim to these operations?
Children and vulnerable adults are manipulated and coerced into ferrying and stashing the haul.
They can be homeless, missing people, addicts, living in care, trapped in poverty, or suffering from mental illness or learning difficulties.
Even the elderly and the physically infirm have been targeted and officers have observed a gang member attending drug rehabs to seek out potential runners.
How do dealers target the exploited?
Initially they can be lured in with money, gifts and the prospect of status. But this may quickly turn to the use of violence, sexual and physical.
How prevalent are county lines?
National Crime Agency research shows police have knowledge of at least 720 county lines in England and Wales, but it is feared the true number is far higher.
Some 65 per cent of forces reported county lines being linked to child exploitation, while 74 per cent noted vulnerable people being targeted.
How many people have been prosecuted in relation to this?
In October 2018, a drug-dealer was jailed for trafficking children – including a 14-year-old girl – to use in a heroin and crack-selling ring.
Zakaria Mohammed, a 21-year-old resident of Birmingham, is believed to be the first dealer to be convicted for breaching the Modern Slavery Act by trafficking juveniles.
How many children are at risk?
Children without criminal records – known in the trade as “clean skins” – are preferred because they are less likely to be known to detectives.
Charity The Children’s Society says 4,000 teenagers in London alone are exploited through county lines.
The Children’s Commissioner estimates at least 46,000 children in England are caught up in gangs.
----
One youth worker said “pop-up brothels” were being operated by the gangs, a trend that they had not seen before the Covid-19 pandemic. The victims, he said, were usually young British girls.
Dr Ben Brewster, Nottingham University Research Fellow said the findings were “extremely concerning.”
“Taken together with the fact that professionals’ ability to identify signs of exploitation and safeguard vulnerable young people are being hindered by Covid-19 restrictions, it is a very alarming picture,” he said.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/17/rape-ripping-fingernails-extraordinary-violence-used-county/
New York grand jury stores up trouble for Trump Organization executives
Glimpses of the deliberations behind closed doors suggest a case is being built against Trump’s CFO, Allen Weisselberg, which could be bad news for his boss
Victoria Bekiempis
Thu 17 Jun 2021 03.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/17/trump-organization-allen-weisselberg-new-york-grand-jury
Following a deluge of bombshell news about Donald Trump-related criminal investigations in New York, including the Manhattan district attorney’s convening of a special grand jury, more details have emerged that might suggest intensifying legal woes for one of the former president’s business lieutenants.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the Manhattan district attorney’s office has apparently “entered the final stages of a criminal tax investigation” of Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer.
The report that prosecutors might be nearing the final stages of their criminal tax inquiry into Weisselberg comes in the wake of reports that Jeff McConney – a senior vice-president and controller for the Trump Organization – has testified before the Manhattan special grand jury.
McConney, “one of the most senior officials” in this company, is also the first Trump Organization staffer called to testify – and is one of “a number of witnesses” who have been before the panel, ABC reported.
McConney’s role as the Trump Organization’s money man could have dramatic implications for an investigation into possible financial crimes at the sprawling business empire. The special grand jury convened by the Manhattan district attorney’s office is expected to decide whether to indict Trump, other executives at his company or the business itself if presented with criminal charges by prosecutors.
The investigation is broad and relates to Trump’s business affairs predating his presidency. The inquiry is examining whether the value of some property in his company’s real estate portfolio was presented in a way that defrauded insurance companies and banks. The investigation is also trying to determine whether sketchy property valuations might have led to unlawful tax breaks, according to the Washington Post.
With Weisselberg, the Manhattan district attorney’s office is reportedly probing whether he received any “fringe benefits” from the company on top of his salary, and if said benefits were taxed adequately.
Although Trump and Weisselberg were usually the “only two people in the room”, when prepping tax paperwork and other financial documents, McConney brought them the “original documents and tranches of raw data”, the Daily Beast reported. So, McConney might have financial information that could potentially be used against Weisselberg or Trump.
Weisselberg’s attorney said “no comment” when asked about the inquiry and Times report.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office declined to comment.
Longtime defense attorneys told the Guardian that such revelations about grand jury witness testimony might give clues about prosecutors’ strategy and thoughts about potential wrongdoing. When prosecutors start calling witnesses before grand juries, it typically means the investigation has hit the stage where prosecutors feel they have a criminal case against someone.
Daniel R Alonso, a partner at Buckley LLP’s New York office whose past work includes serving as chief assistant district attorney with the Manhattan district attorney, said: “You’ve got to start with the proposition that it’s pretty clear they’re targeting Allen Weisselberg, the CFO. If that’s correct, which it seems to be, it’s an obvious move to get the testimony of the controller on record.
“It appears from the reporting that he’s getting immunity,” Alonso said of McConney. “They either don’t think that he has criminal exposure or if he does, they’re more interested in getting people higher up on the food chain if they can.”
And because a controller has daily interaction with a CFO, “there are undoubtedly lots and lots of questions that the [district attorney] has asked him, or will ask him, or lots and lots of documents that they can show him that will make it difficult for him to feign a lack of memory,” Alonso also said.
McConney did not respond to an email request for comment.
Rebecca Roiphe, a former prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney’s office who now works as a professor at New York Law School, explained that in New York state courts, a witness called before the grand jury can’t be prosecuted for what they testify about.
“You really don’t want to use the grand jury, at least in terms of calling witnesses, at an early stage of your investigation because you don’t want to have to accidentally give somebody immunity,” Roiphe said.
So, if prosecutors are calling witnesses before a grand jury, they have a strong sense of who they want to prosecute – they are not just calling people in a way that could jeopardize a case.
“They must have a sense that they have a criminal case against somebody, because of the grand jury practice of New York,” Roiphe said.
“It seems that it’s a more advanced investigation. It’s not just the detectives and prosecutors thinking in theory about an investigation – they’re actively interviewing witnesses and putting a possible indictment together,” said Jeffrey Lichtman, a longtime criminal defense attorney.
“They don’t just call these people out of the blue.”
There appears to be no shortage of high-profile figures willing to discuss Trump, his businesses, or his cronies.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, has met with prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. They have reportedly asked Cohen questions about Trump’s business activities. Cohen pleaded guilty to tax evasion, campaign finance violations and lying to Congress.
Jennifer Weisselberg, Allen Weisselberg’s former daughter-in-law, has provided investigators with extensive tax records and other financial documents. A representative for Jennifer Weisselberg said: “She is still being considered as a potential witness and she’s been in conversation with the district attorney about her information and her potential [grand jury] testimony if necessary.”
The adult film star Stormy Daniels – who claimed to have had sex with Trump about 12 or so years ago, and received $130,000 in hush money during the 2016 presidential race not to discuss the alleged affair – said she would readily testify before a grand jury.
“I would love nothing more than my day in court and to give a deposition and to provide whatever evidence that they need from me,” Daniels reportedly said.
Trump has claimed he did not have a sexual liaison with Daniels.
Trump’s attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/17/trump-organization-allen-weisselberg-new-york-grand-jury
Internet outages briefly disrupt access to websites, apps
By The Associated Press
44 minutes ago
https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-b372a6796f95a3f51fbbb2bc8f6b40bf
A wave of brief internet outages hit the websites and apps of dozens of financial institutions, airlines and other companies across the globe Thursday.
The Hong Kong Stock Exchange said in a post on Twitter Thursday afternoon Hong Kong time that its site was facing technical issues and that it was investigating. It said in another post 17 minutes later that its websites were back to normal.
Internet monitoring websites including ThousandEyes, Downdetector.com and fing.com showed dozens of disruptions, including to U.S.-based airlines.
Many of the outages were reported by people in Australia trying to do banking, book flights and access postal services.
Australia Post, the country’s postal service, said on Twitter that an “external outage” had impacted a number of its services, and that while most services had come back online, they are continuing to monitor and investigate.
Many services were up and running after an hour or so but the affected companies said they were working overtime to prevent further problems.
Banking services were severely disrupted, with Westpac, the Commonwealth, ANZ and St George all down, along with the website of the Reserve Bank of Australia.
Services have mostly been restored.
Virgin Australia said flights were largely operating as scheduled after it restored access to its website and guest contact center.
“Virgin Australia was one of many organizations to experience an outage with the Akamai content delivery system today,” it said. “We are working with them to ensure that necessary measures are taken to prevent these outages from reoccurring.”
Akamai counts some of the world’s biggest companies and banks as customers.
Calls to Akamai, which is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but has global services, went unanswered.
The disruptions came just days after many of the world’s top websites went offline briefly due to a problem with software at Fastly, another major web services company. The company blamed the problem on a software bug that was triggered when a customer changed a setting.
Brief internet service outages are not uncommon and are only rarely the result of hacking or other mischief. But the outages have underscored how vital a small number of behind-the-scenes companies have become to running the internet.
https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-b372a6796f95a3f51fbbb2bc8f6b40bf
Republicans Are on the Brink of Embracing the Capitol Rioters
The party once freely condemned the would-be insurrectionists who attempted to waylay democracy. You’d hardly know it now.
Matt Ford
The New Republic
June 16, 2021
https://newrepublic.com/article/162749/ron-johnson-capitol-riot-gop-false-history
When a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol on January 6 to prevent Congress from finalizing President Joe Biden’s victory, many Republicans were willing to say that it was Bad. Mitch McConnell denounced it as a “failed insurrection” that had been “provoked by the president.” GOP members of Congress who’d planned to object to the certification of the Electoral College votes backed down, having come face-to-face with the consequences of their actions. Some of them even called for the president’s resignation.
Their stance has shifted over the past few months. Instead of the free and open denunciation of the Capitol riot, a growing number of Republican officials are softening their position from “It was Bad” to, at worst, “It was Not Good” or “It was … less than ideal.” Foremost among them is Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who freely admitted to Fox News over the weekend that he wanted to rewrite history to the rioters’ benefit. “I think it’s extremely important to create an accurate historical record of exactly what happened so the false narrative that thousands of armed insurrectionists doesn’t last,” he said.
The rioters assaulted dozens of Capitol Police officers, ransacked congressional offices, vandalized artworks, chanted, “Hang Mike Pence,” and built a makeshift gallows nearby. Johnson said he didn’t “condone” them for breaching the Capitol but nevertheless claimed that they “weren’t rioting.” He noted that many of the protesters were “staying within the roped lines in the Rotunda” and seemed to be “in a jovial mood.” Johnson denied that the attack on Congress amounted to an insurrection.
Johnson isn’t alone. Georgia Representative Andrew Clyde described the rioters’ behavior inside the Capitol as akin to a “normal tourist visit.” Jody Hice, another Georgia representative, argued that it was Trump supporters “who lost their lives that day,” imparting a sense of victimhood upon the rioters. South Carolina Representative Ralph Norman suggested last month without evidence that the Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol may have been left-wing agitators—a theory also floated by Johnson but abandoned after he decided to start defending the rioters outright. On Tuesday, 21 Republicans in the House voted against awarding a medal of valor to the police officers who protected the Capitol; Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said she voted against the measure on the grounds that the bill referred to the events of January 6 as an “insurrection.”
Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies continue to investigate the riots and make arrests; numerous trial proceedings against those who illegally breached the Capitol that day are wending their way through the courts. What would these Republicans suggest be done with the rioters, if they had the ability to decide? Pardon them and commute their sentences? This is a hypothetical concern for now, but it represents a larger fear: If Republican lawmakers can move from open condemnation of January 6 to a mixed indifference toward it in less than six months, there’s ample reason to believe that sometime between now and 2024, they’ll have revised their position to a tacit or open support of something similar.
These lawmakers’ perceptions are a reflection of the conservative mainstream. A Reuters/Ipsos poll in April found that 55 percent of Republican voters said yes when asked by pollsters if left-wing agitators were responsible for January 6. This isn’t actually true, and there’s little reason to think that Republican voters generally believe this. A Quinnipiac survey last month, for example, found that 74 percent of Republicans wanted to move on from the attack and focus less on what happened. If Republicans sincerely believed leftists were responsible for January 6, why would they want less scrutiny of the day’s events?
Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who recently called immigration “the most radical possible attack on the core premise of democracy,” often downplays this actual attack on American democracy. He has disputed that January 6 amounted to an insurrection and insinuated that some of the rioters were political prisoners. On the three-month anniversary of January 6, Carlson gave an extremely favorable spin on the rioters as he sarcastically mocked coverage of the attack.
You saw what happened. It was carried live on television, every gruesome moment. A mob of older people from unfashionable zip codes somehow made it all the way to Washington, D.C., probably by bus. They wandered freely through the Capitol, like it was their building or something. They didn’t have guns, but a lot of them had extremely dangerous ideas. They talked about the Constitution, and something called their rights.
Some of them made openly seditious claims. They insisted, for example, that the last election wasn’t entirely fair. The whole thing was terrifying, and then, as you’ve been told so very often, they committed unspeakable acts of violence.
The result is a strange mishmash of claims and beliefs among the right: that the tragedy of January 6 may have been the work of left-wing provocateurs and that it shouldn’t be investigated further by Congress, that the ongoing criminal investigations mean a bipartisan commission is unnecessary and that those criminal investigations reflect a purported anti-Trump zeal by the Biden Justice Department, that what happened on January 6 should be condemned and that those responsible for it shouldn’t be held accountable.
This obfuscation isn’t new, especially in the Trump era. When someone mailed pipe bombs to prominent Democrats and major news outlets ahead of the 2018 midterms, right-wing media figures immediately argued that it was a liberal hoax or false flag operation of some kind. Federal agents later arrested an avid Trump supporter in Florida for the attempted attacks. As I noted at the time, there’s a deeper history of this aggressive denialism in American politics: When the first Ku Klux Klan emerged in the 1870s, many of its sympathizers denied the abundant evidence of its existence and cast Southern whites as the true victims of Reconstruction.
What makes this shift in conservative views on January 6 so troubling is that the underlying grievance that drove January 6 remains intact. More than six in 10 Republicans still wrongly believe that the election was stolen from Trump, a belief he is more than willing to inflame during his postpresidential retreat to Florida. Arizona Republicans’ pseudo-audit of the 2020 results over the last few months, and the widespread interest it evoked among other GOP state lawmakers, shows that the party itself hasn’t moved on, either. Even congressional Republicans are drifting toward Trump on the Big Lie: The House GOP ousted Liz Cheney from her number three leadership slot for not lying about the election last month, installing Trump devotee Elise Stefanik in her place.
It’s worth noting that Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election before January 6 mainly failed because a sufficient number of elected officials in key positions refused to go along with them. Democrats held key governorships and secretary of state positions in many of the states Biden won. But GOP state officials in Arizona and Georgia also resisted pressure to interfere with the official count or declare it fraudulent. Republican lawmakers in Michigan and Pennsylvania ultimately declined a Hail Mary bid to change the electoral votes through legislative action. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority rejected out of hand a stupendously anti-constitutional lawsuit by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to overturn Biden’s victory in six states.
Trump, for his part, will continue to insist that the 2020 election was stolen. He will likely spend the next few years doing what he can to punish Republicans like Georgia’s Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger for not helping him undermine the outcome. If he runs again in 2024, he will almost certainly be the party’s nominee. If the past is prologue, he will once again try to delegitimize the election in advance and fight the outcome if he loses again.
This time out, however, he would enjoy even deeper support among the GOP for these thuggish and authoritarian tactics—and possibly even an open embrace of the type of violence that nearly made January 6 a greater tragedy than it already was. The GOP’s shift from vilifying the riots to revising their history suggests that it might now be susceptible to a deeper and more incurable illiberalism. If so, the only question that remains is whether the GOP will succumb to this disease alone or take the rest of the Republic down with it.
Matt Ford @fordm
Matt Ford is a staff writer at The New Republic.
https://newrepublic.com/article/162749/ron-johnson-capitol-riot-gop-false-history
Amazon blames social media for struggle with fake reviews
Firm says sites are slow to act when warned that fake reviews are being solicited on their platforms
Alex Hern UK technology editor
@alexhern
Wed 16 Jun 2021 07.24 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/16/amazon-blames-social-media-for-struggle-with-fake-reviews
Amazon has blamed social media companies for its failure to remove fake reviews from its website, arguing that “bad actors” turn to social networks to buy and sell fake product reviews outside the reach of its own technology.
The company says it removed more than 200m suspected fake reviews before they were seen by customers in 2020 alone, but nonetheless has faced continued criticism for the enormous scale of fake and misleading reviews that make it on to its store.
This year a Which? investigation found companies claiming to be able to guarantee “Amazon’s Choice” status on products – an algorithmically assigned badge of quality that can push products to the top of search results – within two weeks, and others claiming to have armies of reviewers numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
Amazon says the blame for those organisations should lie with social media companies, who it says are slow to act when warned that fake reviews are being solicited on their platforms.
“In the first three months of 2020, we reported more than 300 groups to social media companies, who then took a median time of 45 days to shut down those groups from using their service to perpetrate abuse,” an unsigned Amazon blogpost said. “In the first three months of 2021 we reported more than 1,000 such groups, with social media services taking a median time of five days to take them down.
“While we appreciate that some social media companies have become much faster at responding, to address this problem at scale it is imperative for social media companies to invest adequately in proactive controls to detect and enforce fake reviews ahead of our reporting the issue to them.”
While Amazon did not name any specific social network, Facebook has been repeatedly criticised for failing to clamp down on such activity. In January 2020, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority secured an agreement from Facebook to “better identify, investigate and remove groups and other pages where fake and misleading reviews were being traded, and prevent them from reappearing”. However, a follow-up investigation in 2021 forced the CMA to intervene a second time.
“After we intervened again, the company made significant changes, but it is disappointing it has taken them over a year to fix these issues,” said Andrea Coscelli, the chief executive of the regulator, in April.
A Facebook spokesperson said at the time: “Fraudulent and deceptive activity is not allowed on our platforms, including offering or trading fake reviews. Our safety and security teams are continually working to help prevent these practices.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/16/amazon-blames-social-media-for-struggle-with-fake-reviews
U.S.-Russia Presidential Joint Statement on Strategic Stability
JUNE 16, 2021
•
STATEMENTS AND RELEASES
We, President of the United States of America Joseph R. Biden and President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, note the United States and Russia have demonstrated that, even in periods of tension, they are able to make progress on our shared goals of ensuring predictability in the strategic sphere, reducing the risk of armed conflicts and the threat of nuclear war.
The recent extension of the New START Treaty exemplifies our commitment to nuclear arms control. Today, we reaffirm the principle that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
Consistent with these goals, the United States and Russia will embark together on an integrated bilateral Strategic Stability Dialogue in the near future that will be deliberate and robust. Through this Dialogue, we seek to lay the groundwork for future arms control and risk reduction measures.
###
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/06/16/u-s-russia-presidential-joint-statement-on-strategic-stability/
Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, Forceful on Jan. 6, Privately Are in Turmoil
The far-right groups face a cash squeeze, internal discord, social-media cutoff and isolation from the financial system
By Rebecca Ballhaus, Khadeeja Safdar and Shalini Ramachandran
June 16, 2021 12:09 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/proud-boys-and-oath-keepers-forceful-on-jan-6-privately-are-in-turmoil-11623859785?st=hner6s6ygpn07hc&reflink=desktopwebshare_twitter
The far-right group the Oath Keepers is splintering after board members accused the founder of spending its money on hair dye, steaks and guns. The leader of the Proud Boys, choked off from the financial system, is printing “Black Lives Matter” T-shirts to make money.
The finances of the two most visible groups with members involved in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol are sputtering. Leaders are low on cash, struggling with defections and arguing with members over the future.
The Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys have seen more than three dozen of their members or affiliates arrested in connection with Jan. 6. Prosecutors are investigating the money trail that led the groups to Washington that day and examining the roles played by the Proud Boys’ leader, Enrique Tarrio, and the founder of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, neither of whom entered the Capitol building.
In late April, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents surrounded Mr. Rhodes in unmarked vehicles in Lubbock, Texas, seized his iPhone and served him a search warrant, said the Oath Keepers’ general counsel, Kellye SoRelle. The warrant sought evidence about any “planning, preparation or travel” to breach the Capitol on Jan. 6, including any “tactical training” or weapons procurement. His phone has since been returned.
Members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers appeared well-organized at the Capitol, some coordinating with walkie-talkies and wearing military-style outfits. Behind the facade of power is a yearslong cash crunch exacerbated by internal discord and isolation from financial firms and social media. Fallout from Jan. 6 made it all worse.
“We’re bleeding,” Mr. Tarrio said in an interview in April, referring to an e-commerce business he uses to support himself and other Proud Boys members. “We’ve been bleeding money since January, like hemorrhaging money.”
The ideas driving the groups are far from dead. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been raised on fringe crowdfunding sites for the legal defense of those who participated in the Jan. 6 riot. Many members who have left the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers haven’t abandoned their causes. Some have formed new groups or joined other far-right organizations.
A report by U.S. intelligence agencies in March said that more violence is likely due to conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election, the Covid-19 pandemic and the Jan. 6 riot. It also said individuals or small cells are more likely to undertake violent acts than are organized extremist groups.
Within the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, an escalation of crackdown efforts and the departure of former President Donald Trump from office has spurred a new level of disarray, according to interviews with more than two dozen former or current members and an examination of financial records and internal emails.
In interviews, a half-dozen current or former Oath Keepers board directors and other members accused their founder, Mr. Rhodes, of misusing dues and donations for personal expenses. Four board members quit last year after confronting Mr. Rhodes about his spending, and at least six state chapters have split or distanced themselves from the national organization.
Membership has dropped 80% from its peak, to roughly 7,500, according to former board members. The organization had less than $10,000 in its bank account as of April, Mr. Rhodes said in an interview that month, speaking from the road in his 14-year-old SUV. RallyPay, a credit-card processor the Oath Keepers used in fundraising, shut them off after Jan 6.
The Proud Boys aren’t faring much better. Records show that a website through which Mr. Tarrio and other members sell Proud Boys T-shirts and other items, called 1776.shop, is on pace to generate tens of thousands dollars less revenue than last year. For months, Mr. Tarrio said, he couldn’t fulfill customer orders for lack of a way to process payments made with credit and debit cards.
Live streaming service DLive, which the Proud Boys used to raise money, banned Mr. Tarrio and other members after Jan. 6. Members and local chapters have turned to cryptocurrency, local credit unions, alternative payment brokers and encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram to replace a mainstream financial system that has largely cut them off.
On a spring afternoon, piles of unsold T-shirts sat on the floors of Mr. Tarrio’s headquarters in Miami, where he coordinates Proud Boys activities and runs the e-commerce operation. He said he had laid off some workers, office rent is harder to come by and legal fees loom. At a gun show in May, he said, he sat at a booth for hours and made barely enough in sales to cover the cost of the table.
Just a few years back, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were adding thousands of members and raising money and selling merchandise with little interference.
Founded during the 2016 election campaign, the Proud Boys describe themselves as a men’s organization for “Western chauvinists.” The group hasn’t outlined a singular set of beliefs, but some of its members have expressed a range of far-right views. Online videos of their clashes with leftwing protesters in Portland, Ore., and other cities increased the public’s familiarity with the Proud Boys, as did Mr. Trump’s callout to them at a 2020 debate.
The Oath Keepers, created by Mr. Rhodes in 2009, attracted many members with military or law-enforcement backgrounds as the group gained attention from its involvement in Western ranchers’ and miners’ confrontations with federal agencies over land use. The group’s credo is that members’ loyalty is to the U.S. Constitution, not any local or federal leader. Mr. Rhodes said in 2013 that he wanted to see a “restoration of the militia in this country.”
Financial trouble for the groups began brewing in 2017 after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., which turned deadly when a white nationalist drove a car into counterprotesters, killing a woman. The violence spurred action against extremism by tech and financial companies.
PayPal cut off the Oath Keepers, Mr. Rhodes said, even though his group didn’t attend the rally. He started asking members to pay their dues by mail. PayPal declined to comment.
Mr. Tarrio of the Proud Boys found his businesses, including a merchandising site, booted by their credit and debit card processor. Later, PayPal also banned him, as did another payment processor, Stripe. Mr. Tarrio sought out new processors, including ones used by gun makers and porn sites, but said more than a dozen processors eventually banned him, and his bank shut his business account.
After being shut off by one processor for what it called “hate propaganda” on a T-shirt that referred to a Democratic politician as a Communist and an idiot, Mr. Tarrio said, he had an idea: to launch a secretive e-commerce site to sell liberal merchandise with slogans such as Black Lives Matter and Impeach 45, referring to Mr. Trump.
He wouldn’t disclose the site’s name. The Journal observed Mr. Tarrio’s assistant printing two Black Lives Matter T-shirts but couldn’t independently verify the website’s existence.
Twitter and Facebook, which owns Instagram, said they banned accounts associated with the Proud Boys in 2018. Ever since, Mr. Tarrio said, he has been playing a game of cat and mouse with social media and card processors, using various aliases, corporate entities, email addresses and Google voice numbers to trick platforms into letting him back on, often temporarily.
Both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers turned to Alex Jones and his Infowars outlet, among dwindling ways to reach a sympathetic audience.
When Gavin McInnes, founder of the Proud Boys, wanted to raise money for the defense of nine members arrested for a 2018 brawl with antifascist activists in Manhattan, he sought out Mr. Jones and appeared on an Infowars show. He said about 22,000 donors gave a quarter-million dollars, and Infowars brought in a significant chunk of it.
People who led the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers have appeared on Mr. Jones’s show about five dozen times in two years, and Mr. Jones often urged his fan base to donate to their causes, a review of Infowars transcripts compiled by transcription and analysis service FiscalNote Factba.se shows. Infowars didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Mr. McInnes said he distanced himself from the Proud Boys shortly after the 2018 brawl in order to help arrested members’ cases, but remains supportive of the group. Members elected a new leader, Mr. Tarrio, to manage the group’s reputation and fight calls by other activists to shut them down.
While the Oath Keepers pull in dues and donations from members and supporters, the Proud Boys have a more decentralized approach in which local chapters control their own finances.
Some members said they grew concerned that Mr. Tarrio and other leaders were using the group’s name to gain exposure for themselves and affiliated businesses. ”They say they are in it for one thing, but it’s actually just to make money,” said Russell Schultz, a former Proud Boys member, who said he and others left because they worried that the group was moving in a centralized direction. Mr. Schultz said he continued to play an active role in Patriot Prayer, another far-right group to which he belonged, after leaving the Proud Boys.
Mr. Tarrio said he used to make much more money as a security contractor before joining the group and disagrees with Mr. Schultz about the circumstances of his departure.
Mr. Tarrio said he lets other Proud Boys sell on the 1776.shop and collects only a small commission from their sales. “We’ve been arguing with each other since inception,” he said. “We’ve never stopped.”
Mr. Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, meanwhile, was coming under fire for his spending of the organization’s funds, collected largely from veterans and former law-enforcement officers.
He spent Oath Keepers money on a deposit on a house in Montana, on haircuts and liquor, on storable food reserves and on personal riot gear, according to some current and former members and some of Mr. Rhodes’s family members. They also said he had a habit of buying expensive military equipment and leaving it in caches in people’s homes around the country for future “operations.”
Bank records reviewed by the Journal show thousands of dollars of Oath Keepers funds spent on goods and services near the town in Montana where Mr. Rhodes lived until recently, including at an auto-repair shop ($12,424), pet store ($83.50), dentist ($504), bar ($886), gun store (($9,974) and a lingerie and adult-goods shop called Alley Katz Nighties N Naughties ($229). The group also spent money on phone games ($275) and at an online perfume shop Fragrancenet.com ($256).
“He used that thing as a piggy bank,” said Ed Wilson, an Army veteran who managed information technology for the Oath Keepers in 2015 and said he alerted the board about spending. Mr. Wilson said he quit when he saw nothing was changing.
Ms. SoRelle didn’t dispute the expenditures in Montana or those listed in bank records but said they don’t represent the totality of the group’s community-service efforts.
Mr. Rhodes called the allegations of misusing funds “petty, stupid and salacious” and said the accusers were “disgruntled people that have a bone to pick.”
Former Oath Keepers secretary Billy Simmons said that in early 2020, he noticed Mr. Rhodes had maxed out his Oath Keepers card three days in a row at a sporting-goods store. When Mr. Rhodes refused to explain, Mr. Simmons said, he called the card company. It turned out Mr. Rhodes had bought an AR-10 military-style rifle costing about $1,000 for his own use, paying over three days because of a $350 daily spending limit on the card, former board members said.
The board had set that limit, said a former director, Scott Dunn, after Mr. Rhodes put around $800 on the card at Walmart to buy groceries for three that included more than a dozen T-bone and rib-eye steaks, plus kettlebells for exercising.
Mr. Dunn was traveling with Mr. Rhodes and another Oath Keeper at the time to attend a gun-rights rally in Virginia. He said Mr. Rhodes suggested the two go on Tinder dates on the Oath Keepers’ dime. Mr. Dunn said he declined. When they left Virginia, he added, Mr. Rhodes left the kettlebells behind.
Ms. SoRelle, the Oath Keepers’ lawyer, said that Mr. Rhodes bought the groceries for members to eat in Virginia and that he was trying to cheer up Mr. Dunn, who had recently split with his wife.
Much of Mr. Rhodes’s spending stemmed from his leadership role entailing nearly constant travel, the lawyer said. She, Mr. Rhodes and his family members said he at times didn’t take paychecks during downturns for the group. Ms. SoRelle described his gun purchases partly as “advertising.”
Ms. SoRelle said Mr. Rhodes’s critics cherry-pick spending details while ignoring others, including tens of thousands of dollars she said the Oath Keepers spent on natural-disaster relief after events such as Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
At one point, according to former board member Rick Moon, directors confronted Mr. Rhodes about buying gasoline and a “train car load” of rice and beans for himself with the organization’s money. His response, according to Mr. Moon: “I created this organization, it’s mine, and I’ll do what I want to do with this.”
The national organization is registered as a nonprofit in Nevada. An accountant told board members in 2019 that the group hadn’t filed a tax return in years, according to Mr. Simmons.
Ms. SoRelle said that was in part because Mr. Rhodes was going through a divorce. “This is common in divorces, where people get screwed up on taxes and financial stuff,” she said.
Several board members said supporters at times gave Mr. Rhodes donations for the Oath Keepers that he spent without reporting them. Mr. Dunn said a $10,000 donation last year from Gary Heavin, founder of the Curves fitness chain, was never officially reported to the board.
Mr. Heavin said he made the donation to the Oath Keepers to support constitutional rights and didn’t know what the group did with it.
Ms. SoRelle said Mr. Heavin’s contribution wasn’t properly recorded but was ultimately used for Oath Keepers’ needs and not Mr. Rhodes’s personal use.
Mr. Simmons, the group’s former secretary, said Mr. Rhodes’s spending “shot membership and morale to hell.” It also led some state chapters, including in Pennsylvania and Virginia, to quit the national organization and spurred a loss of dues, according to former board members and state leaders.
Mr. Rhodes’s AR-10 rifle purchase in early 2020 was the last straw for some members. “I can’t keep doing this,” Mr. Simmons told Mr. Rhodes, in a call with other board members. Mr. Simmons, Mr. Dunn and three other officers quit the Oath Keepers.
Despite the turmoil, the 2020 presidential election presented an opportunity for both groups, as did the ensuing effort to overturn its outcome.
The Oath Keepers, banned by Twitter and Facebook in 2020, increasingly turned to Infowars. The group pulled in tens of thousands of dollars and drew about a thousand new members as the prospect of Joe Biden coming to power spurred supporters to action, Mr. Rhodes and Ms. SoRelle said.
After Mr. Trump lost, the groups came together for the “Stop the Steal” movement, including in a nine-city caravan of rallies led by Mr. Jones, whose Infowars publicized the tour and promoted the false accusation that Democrats had stolen the election. Sales boomed at Mr. Tarrio’s 1776.shop.
In the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, the day Congress would officially count the electoral votes, Mr. Rhodes made increasingly urgent appeals for donations to cover travel and lodging costs of members who would go to Washington. He urged Mr. Trump to deploy troops and a civilian militia. The national organization paid for a block of hotel rooms in Virginia, Ms. SoRelle said, and reimbursed the Wyoming and Utah chapters $7,500 for their travel costs. Some other state chapters paid their own way.
Ms. SoRelle said that there was no plan to invade the Capitol and that the group’s mission for the day was to provide free security for speakers and Trump supporters. “Stewart did not go to D.C. to overthrow the Capitol,” she said.
The Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, individually and as groups, have raised at least $364,000 and $212,000, respectively, on crowdfunding sites for travel, gear and any legal fees related to Jan. 6, according to the Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies, a nonpartisan research group.
On Jan. 6, a post from Mr. Tarrio’s 1776.shop on the social media app Parler advertised a T-shirt with the slogan “WAR.” The post said, “Deep penetration into the Peoples’ Capitol...They asked for it.” Mr. Tarrio said the account is managed by an employee but he takes responsibility for the post.
When the FBI began arresting Proud Boys after the storming of the Capitol, Mr. Tarrio said, he scrambled to line up lawyers and raise defense money. The effort sputtered when Stripe stopped processing some donations to the Proud Boys and other groups made via GiveSendGo, a Christian crowdfunding platform.
Stripe and GiveSendGo declined to comment.
Proud Boys chapters in at least three states distanced themselves from the national group after a Reuters article in January revealed that Mr. Tarrio was once an FBI informant. Asked by the Journal, Mr. Tarrio said that those chapters never recognized his leadership to begin with and that he resolved some of his differences with them at a national meeting last weekend. He was an informant, he said, but it was a long time ago.
He said he struggled to find a replacement card processor when one shut him down in January, putting his e-commerce shop out of commission for months. Mr. Tarrio said he lined up a new processor a few weeks ago but doesn’t expect it to last long.
The Oath Keepers faced their own squeeze. Their servers, managed by Liquid Web, went dark. A notice on their website urged supporters to send checks payable to the Oath Keepers to a Granbury, Texas, UPS Store mailbox in Mr. Rhodes’s name or to donate via GiveSendGo.
Mr. Rhodes appealed for donations on right-wing outlets The Gateway Pundit and Infowars, where he also said members didn’t storm the Capitol on his orders and they did so contrary to the group’s plan for the day to provide security. Ms. SoRelle said Mr. Rhodes, who was outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, wasn’t conspiring with or helping members who chose to go in.
Mr. Tarrio wasn’t in Washington Jan. 6 after having been forbidden to enter the city because of an earlier arrest. Mr. Tarrio said he and the Proud Boys didn’t conspire to rush the Capitol. “I can’t even get them to walk in a straight line,” he said.
Mr. Rhodes, who hasn’t been charged, has hired a criminal defense lawyer. He sought advice from Infowars’ Mr. Jones on credit-card processors and is looking into using one Mr. Jones recommended, according to Ms. SoRelle.
At Mr. Tarrio’s office in Miami, where black riot gear is displayed on a stand in a corner, Mr. Tarrio often sits at his computer scrolling Twitter for updates on the FBI’s investigation of him and his group, stepping outside for cigarette breaks.
Sales at 1776.shop are way down. Records show orders of $64,789 in the first three months of this year, and Mr. Tarrio said he couldn’t complete most of the transactions because of card-processor issues. For all of 2020 the shop logged $373,625 in orders, though Mr. Tarrio said that figure included some fake purchases by bots and uncompleted transactions due to card-processor interruptions.
Mr. Tarrio said he plans to launch a video platform and his own credit-card processor to serve people like him and other cutoff groups, in an effort to give him and the Proud Boys an uninterrupted flow of income. In the meantime, he said, he is taking classes on how to invest in nonfungible tokens and bitcoin, and he has turned to speaking engagements to increase his exposure.
In early May, he was the keynote speaker at a dinner by the Boca Raton Regional Republican Club, with tickets at $45 a pop. At the event, he said, he sold T-shirts with the slogan “Enrique Tarrio Did Nothing Wrong.” He said he sold about $700 worth of them.
—Alexandra Berzon and Lisa Schwartz contributed to this article.
Write to Rebecca Ballhaus at Rebecca.Ballhaus@wsj.com, Khadeeja Safdar at khadeeja.safdar@wsj.com and Shalini Ramachandran at shalini.ramachandran@wsj.com
https://www.wsj.com/articles/proud-boys-and-oath-keepers-forceful-on-jan-6-privately-are-in-turmoil-11623859785?st=hner6s6ygpn07hc&reflink=desktopwebshare_twitter
Putin says Biden is an ‘experienced statesman’ and ‘very different from Trump’ after summit – live
Putin says he and Biden agreed ambassadors should return to posts
Summit concludes after about three hours of talks between leaders
First session was small meeting with Blinken and Lavrov present
Second session included more of the two leaders’ senior aides
Putin holds a news conference after summit with Biden – watch live
Joan E Greve (now) and Martin Belam (earlier)
Wed 16 Jun 2021 12.45 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/us-politics-live-with-joan-e-greve
Republicans move to block inquiry into Trump DoJ’s secret data seizure
Democrats are pushing for investigations into Trump’s justice department for data seizures from Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff
Hugo Lowell
The Guardian
Wed 16 Jun 2021 03.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/16/senate-republicans-trump-justice-department-democrats-data
Top Republicans are moving to block a Senate inquiry into the Trump justice department’s secret seizure of data from Democrats to hunt down leaks of classified information, fearing a close investigation could damage the former president.
Trump, who is facing a mounting crisis of legal problems and political criticism, still wields huge power among Republicans, and has hinted recently at a return run for the White House.
In fiery remarks, the Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, criticized the rapidly expanding congressional inquiries as unnecessary and accused Democrats of embarking on “politically motivated investigations”.
“I am confident that the existing inquiry will uncover the truth,” said McConnell. “There is no need for a partisan circus here in Congress.”
The forceful pushback from McConnell shows his alarm about the latest aggressive move by Democrats to engage in retrospective oversight that could expose Trump for misusing the vast power of the federal government to pursue his political enemies.
It also means Republicans are certain to lock arms to block subpoenas against Trump justice department officials, including former attorneys general Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions. Democrats need at least one Republican member for subpoenas because of the even split between Democrats and Republicans on the panel.
Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate judiciary committee, suggested he would offer no such support. “Investigations into members of Congress and staff are nothing new, especially for classified leaks,” he said.
The Republican criticism came as Democrats have stepped up investigations into the justice department for secretly seizing in 2018 data belonging to two Democrats on the House intelligence committee – and some of Trump’s fiercest critics.
In the Senate, the judiciary committee chair, Dick Durbin, demanded in a letter that the attorney general, Merrick Garland, deliver a briefing and respond to a raft of questions into the seizures by 28 June. And the House judiciary committee chair, Jerry Nadler, said his panel would launch an investigation into the “coordinated effort by the Trump administration to target President Trump’s political opposition” as he weighed hauling in Barr and Sessions.
The parallel investigations showed Democrats’ determination to seize the momentum, even as Republicans started rallying in opposition – for largely the same reasons that governed their motivation to sink a 9/11-style commission to examine the Capitol attack.
Democrats also said that they would press ahead with their investigations concurrently with the justice department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, whose office last week opened a separate inquiry.
“I do think there has to be a congressional role to supplement whatever DoJ doesn’t turn over,” the congressman Eric Swalwell, one of the two House Democrats who had his records seized, told the Guardian.
But in only requesting Garland’s appearance before the Senate judiciary committee – and not Barr or Sessions – Democrats revealed the power Senate Republicans wield to obstruct measures they fear could anger Trump and his base ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
The political roadblocks being laid down by Senate Republicans mean the most meaningful congressional investigation into the Trump justice department targeting Democrats is likely to come from the House judiciary committee.
On account of Democrats’ majority in the House, Nadler does not suffer from the same problems besetting his colleagues in the Senate, and retains the ability to subpoena Barr and Sessions without Republican support.
The judiciary committee did not outline concrete steps for their investigation. But Nadler intends to keep the threat of subpoenas hanging over the Trump attorneys general as he ratchets up pressure over the coming weeks, said a source familiar with the matter.
The twin investigations by House and Senate Democrats follow the referral from the deputy attorney general, Lisa Mascaro, to the inspector general to launch a review, according to a senior justice department official.
The inspector general probe came after the New York Times reported that the Trump administration used grand jury subpoenas to force Apple and one other service provider to turn over data tied to Democrats on the House intelligence committee.
Although investigations into leaks of classified information are routine, the use of subpoenas to extract data on accounts belonging to serving members of Congress is near-unprecedented outside corruption investigations.
Justice department investigators gained access to, among others, the records of Adam Schiff, then the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee and now its chairman; Swalwell; and the family members of lawmakers and aides.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/16/senate-republicans-trump-justice-department-democrats-data
Tariffs axed immediately on Australian beef and lamb, triggering fears that farmers will be sent ‘to the wall’
Small print – revealed by Canberra, but suppressed in London – reveals pledge to protect farmers for 15 years has been dropped
Rob Merrick
Deputy Political Editor
4 hours ago
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/australia-trade-deal-tariffs-farmers-b1866496.html
Tariffs will be scrapped immediately on imported beef and lamb from Australia, triggering accusations that the trade deal struck by Boris Johnson will send UK farmers “to the wall”.
The small print of the first major post-Brexit agreement – revealed by Canberra, as the UK government tried to keep it under wraps – revealed a pledge to protect farmers for 15 years has been dropped.
Instead, Australian farmers will effectively be handed tariff-free access from day one, up to a “cap” on sales that is 60 times the current level of imported beef.
The detail was revealed as experts warned the overall economic boost from the deal would be “close to zero” – and the government admitted the average household would be just £1.20 a year better off.
The National Farmers Union demanded ministers come clean on exactly what has been agreed, “to ensure our high standards of production are not undermined by the terms of this deal”.
And Emily Thornberry, Labour’s shadow trade secretary, said: “No other country in the world would accept such a terrible deal for its farming industry, and neither should we.
“With this deal, and the precedent it sets for New Zealand, America, Canada and Brazil, the government will send thousands of farmers to the wall, undermine our standards of animal welfare and environmental protection, and threaten the conservation of our countryside.”
MPs are demanding the power to scrutinise the deal immediately, but ministers – as The Independent revealed – plan to deny full access until the autumn, when critics fear it will be too late.
Neil Parish, the Conservative chair of the Commons environment committee, said that “would make a mockery of the commitments made”, when a watchdog was promised last year.
The prime minister, shaking hands in Downing Street with Scott Morrison, his Australian counterpart, insisted it was “a good deal that will benefit British farmers and British consumers as well”.
It contained “the strongest possible provisions for animal welfare”, the prime minister argued, telling journalists: “We had to negotiate very hard.”
However, when the deal was mooted last month, it was anticipated that tariffs and quotas would not be fully removed on meat imports for 15 years – to calm the protests of worried farming groups.
But the full details, released by Australia but suppressed in London, showed that:
* Tariffs on beef will only kick in, from day one, when imports rise above 35,000 tonnes – more than 60 times the level of sales to the UK in 2020.
* Tariffs will only be levied on imports of lamb above 25,000 tonnes – around three times last year’s sales.
Currently, Australian beef exporters pay a 12 per cent tariff, with variable surcharges of between £1.40 and £2.50 a kilo, and face an annual quota of 3,761 tonnes.
Labour also argued the UK would leap immediately from the 27th to the 6th most popular destination for Australian beef, if the full quota was taken up, and to third place for lamb.
Tariff-free beef imports will be allowed to reach 110,000 tonnes by the tenth year and sheep meat imports 75,000 tonnes.
“While Australia is getting everything it wanted and more, we are getting next to nothing in return, with a miniscule 0.025 per cent increase in UK growth the most optimistic projection,” Ms Thornberry added.
Trade experts backed that verdict on the economic benefits of the deal, John Ferguson, at the Economist Intelligence Unit, calling it “incredibly small”.
“This is simply due to the fact that Australia is a long way away from the UK and distance really matters to the amount that two countries trade with each other,” he said.
Dr Peter Holmes, of the UK Trade Policy Observatory at the University of Sussex, said: “The total direct net effect of the trade deal will be close to zero, so the key questions are what provisions it makes for standards and what precedents it sets.”
The UK government said the “agreement in principle”, to be published in the coming days, would:
* Eliminate tariffs on all UK goods going to Australia – although they are typically only around 5 per cent.
* Save British households £34m a year as tariff cuts make Australian imports cheaper – which works out as £1.20 per household.
* Make Britons under the age of 35, instead of under 30, eligible for working holiday visas – and free them from a compulsory rural work, in a second year in Australia.
* Scrap export tariffs for car manufacturing, Scotch whisky, confectionery, biscuits and ceramics.
Downing Street has been asked to confirm the tariff-free deal for beef and lamb imports and respond to the criticism that farmers have been let down.
Liz Truss, the trade secretary, admitted to a “zero-tariff quota that increases over time”, but argued there were safeguards to prevent “import surges”.
She also said MPs would eventually be able to oppose the deal, although there will be no specific vote, but there would be no detailed scrutiny until after it has been agreed in full, which is not expected to happen until the autumn
Angus MacNeil, chair of the Commons international trade committee, condemned the delay, saying: “The trade negotiation team must come to a public hearing of the committee.
“This is too important for a ‘pig in a poke’ deal – we don’t want the UK to agree to something that hasn’t been scrutinised.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/australia-trade-deal-tariffs-farmers-b1866496.html
Sweltering Texans urged to reduce cooking and cleaning to ease grid strain
Officials advise to avoid using large appliances such as ovens and washing machines, amid soaring summer temperatures
Katharine Gammon
Wed 16 Jun 2021 06.30 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/16/texas-power-grid-conservation-heat-wave
As temperatures rise to unseasonably warm levels across Texas this week, its citizens are being asked to use less energy on basics like cooking and washing clothes to ease strain on the state’s power grid that is struggling to generate enough electricity to cope with the high temperatures.
The move triggers memories for many Texans of the cold snap in the winter that incapacitated much of the state’s power infrastructure and raises fears that Texas – and other US states – are not prepared to deal with the extreme weather events that come with the global climate crisis.
The authority running the Texas power grid has asked Texans to set thermostats to 78F (25.5C) or higher, turn off lights and pool pumps and avoid using large appliances such as ovens, washing machines and dryers.
This is the second time that the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (Ercot) has issued such a call for conservation since the winter storms in February left more than 4.8m homes and businesses without electricity for days. The crisis was blamed for more than 100 deaths and $130bn in costs.
In addition to plant outages, demand is high this week as cities across Texas expect temperatures in the 90s. The state broke its June electricity demand record on Monday.
Summer hasn’t even officially begun, and the early calls for conservation raise questions over what will happen in the coming months and years as the global temperature continues to rise.
“We’re heading into a future climate that is likely to have more extreme droughts and more powerful hurricanes, which put their own strain on the system,” said Dan Cohan, a civil engineering professor at Rice University. “This week we saw that the Texas power grid barely even prepared for weather that is hot for June, but nowhere near how hot it can get in July and August.”
Cohan says that Ercot has not been transparent about which coal and gas plants are down and helping cause the strain on the grid, and why – it could be for maintenance, or repairs from February’s knockout blows, or preparing for potential summer demand.
“Ercot has really been leaving us in the dark as to which coal and gas power plants are down, and why,” he said. “They offered a belated acknowledgment that there are more than twice as many power plants down as they expected but no real clarity on why it’s happening. A lot of us are left guessing.”
The grid is only prepared to handle one crisis at a time, but often tissues overlap – for example, when it’s very hot, often winds don’t blow as they typically would, or a spike in demand while power plants are offline.
“We need to be prepared for it, not just because of random chance, but because these challenges can be correlated,” said Cohan. “Often when we have extreme weather events they can stretch both supply and demand at the same time.”
Solar generation is growing fast in Texas, and that has saved the lights this week.
“We could be in the midst of a two-year growth spurt that is faster than any state has ever experienced in solar generation,” said Cohan. “We have over five times as much solar as we had a few years ago and that made the difference in having these afternoons when we’ve had calls for conservation. There likely would have been rolling blackouts if we didn’t have solar farms online.”
Still, much more needs to be done: the grid needs to be weatherized, transmission from windy and sunny areas needs to be extended to fast-growing cities, and Texas’s grid needs to be integrated into other states, he says.
In this year’s Texas legislative session, lawmakers passed a series of reforms aimed at safeguarding the state against blackouts. At a signing ceremony last week, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, said that “everything that needed to be done was done to fix the power grid in Texas”.
Kyri Baker, a building systems engineer at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies power grids, said there needed to be better systems of coaxing consumers to use less energy, something that’s known as demand response.
“It’s 2021 and we’re requesting demand response over Twitter,” she says. “We can’t just ask people to not use their oven, because there’s no guarantee that people will participate.”
Many people don’t know which devices in their homes suck up the most power; it’s typically not lights, but instead heating and cooling systems and water heaters. She says that paying people to install smart meters and smart thermostats would go a long way to allow utilities to enact granular power cuts, rather than cutting power to entire swaths of a city.
She adds that connecting Texas to other states seems like an easy solution, but it’s no panacea: when there are large-scale heatwaves that drive up demand, they hit other states too. “It’s more complicated than just putting up more power lines.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/16/texas-power-grid-conservation-heat-wave
We cannot let the vaccine roll out run out of steam
Indications that the early success is now being squandered are deeply worrying. The Government must be more transparent
TELEGRAPH VIEW
16 June 2021 • 6:00am
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/06/16/cannot-let-vaccine-roll-run-steam/
Speaking in the Commons on Monday night, Matt Hancock acknowledged that some areas were running out of the Pfizer vaccine. “The fact that the fridges ran out of Pfizer demonstrates we’re getting through this as fast as we can,” he said, in response to a question from the Birmingham MP Liam Byrne. “Supply is the rate limiting factor on vaccination.”
Certainly, the UK appears to have little problem with demand, but Mr Hancock’s somewhat optimistic spin on the matter risks bordering on complacency. The country has grown used to having a vaccination programme that has performed substantially better than that of its main competitors, especially the EU. The venture capitalist, Kate Bingham, used her commercial acumen to acquire jabs early and in large enough quantities to give the UK a head start. In the first few months, the NHS managed to deliver considerably more doses per capita than most other similarly-sized countries.
Yet just as the so-called race between the vaccine and the variants intensifies, there are indications that the programme is failing to keep up. We report today that some people have had their appointments cancelled, and there are suspicions that supply shortages could be down to more than just high demand, which should have been anticipated. The advice not to use AstraZeneca for younger age groups if alternative jabs are available, for example, means that greater pressure has been placed on Pfizer and Moderna. Unlike other countries, which have made better use of the private sector to aid distribution, the UK’s vaccination effort remains substantially a public sector affair.
It would be a pity if Ms Bingham’s early successes were to be squandered, particularly if it were to mean further delays in the release of lockdown. The challenge will not end even once adults have received their second jab. The Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty, said at the No10 press conference this week that children may need to be vaccinated in order that their education can continue without disruption. Booster doses for vulnerable adults are also likely to be required in the autumn and winter.
At the very least, the Government should end the secrecy with which it shrouds information about its vaccine supply. If there is a problem, the public is entitled to know what it is.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2021/06/16/cannot-let-vaccine-roll-run-steam/
Biden’s plan to keep China in check relies on Manila
US alliance with Philippines is key to containing Beijing in Pacific but pact is under threat
Kathrin Hille in Taipei 11 HOURS AGO
https://www.ft.com/content/f654a80d-9f15-4195-9350-951dfe192311
From Japan to Nato, the administration of US president Joe Biden is rallying allies against security challenges from China. But Washington’s most vital struggle right now is happening outside the limelight of summits: it is trying to keep the military alliance with the Philippines, its oldest in Asia, from being gutted.
The Visiting Forces Agreement, the framework governing the deployment of US soldiers in the south-east Asian country, has been running on borrowed time since Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippine president, terminated it in February last year. On Monday, he extended the suspension of that termination once more, but again for just another six months.
Letting the agreement expire “would mean the alliance is kneecapped”, said Gregory Poling, a south-east Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US think-tank. Without the VFA, the mere fact of sending a US soldier to the Philippines would require an exchange of diplomatic notes, procedures that would force drastic cuts to the exercises the two militaries conduct together — at present about 300 a year.
As Duterte has moved his country closer to China despite their festering dispute in the South China Sea, the alliance has languished. Contrary to the terms of their Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), signed in 2014, Duterte has blocked the US from deploying troops and weapons in two Philippine air bases near Scarborough Shoal and the Spratly Islands — South China Sea territories where China has pushed back against the Philippines.
“The EDCA was principally designed to deal with the Chinese threat in the South China Sea. And yet President Duterte has successfully clipped its wings,” said Richard Heydarian, a Manila-based political scientist. “This provides the Chinese maximum room for manoeuvre, as they have been doing within the Philippine waters over the past few years.”
Experts believe that if the alliance continues on that trajectory, it would render the US’s entire strategy for countering China’s military power in Asia-Pacific a mission impossible.
The reason is geography. The Philippines consists of more than 7,600 islands fencing off the South China Sea from the western Pacific — islands the US military needs access to if it wants to retain a credible presence in the region.
China has developed missiles that can hit naval ships on the move, as well as bases as far away as Guam, the US Pacific territory which hosts a large portion of the US military’s assets for use in Asia-Pacific.
To respond to those capabilities, Washington is changing its posture in the region. It seeks to reduce reliance on large, stationary and vulnerable assets such as air and naval bases and wants to spread out in smaller, more mobile units which could deploy to island territories temporarily and target the surrounding waters and airspace with ground-based missiles.
While such operations can be conducted on the territory of Japan, Guam and other islands in the western Pacific, the US struggles to do the same in south-east Asia.
“Without the Philippines, the closest you can be to the South China Sea would be Okinawa,” Poling says. “If you lose access to the Philippines, none of these concepts can be implemented.”
Analysts expect Singapore and Vietnam to expand naval co-operation with the US if its alliance with the Philippines is weakened further. But Singapore’s territory is tiny, and Vietnam is highly unlikely to allow US Marines access to its territory.
That means Manila remains crucial. “The maths for the US is brutal. China dominates the South China Sea in every domain,” said Poling. “The only way you can change that maths is long-range fires from territory nearby. Lose the Philippines and you lose the South China Sea.”
Washington’s only hope that will not happen lies in the fact that Duterte’s presidential term is coming to an end in May 2022.
By leaving the VFA hanging, the Philippine president is “kicking the can down the road,” said Lynn Kuok, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore. “With presidential elections coming up next year, we might then get someone considering the matter rationally in the Philippines’ national interest.”
https://www.ft.com/content/f654a80d-9f15-4195-9350-951dfe192311
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Michael Cohen recalls the time Trump offered up Don Jr. for prison before Ivanka
Sarah K. Burris
June 15, 2021
https://www.rawstory.com/michael-cohen-donald-trump-jr-ivanka/
In a wide-ranging interview with The Lincoln Project, former lawyer to Donald Trump, Michael Cohen responded to the recent news that Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg could be indicted as early as this summer.
Among the many things Cohen revealed, he cited an occasion in which some legal things seemed to be getting complicated and it was possible that Donald Trump Jr. or Ivanka Trump could be held accountable for it. It was something that Cohen said he included in his 2020 book Disloyal, but appeared to go largely unnoticed. Cohen recalled Trump saying that if it comes down to Don Jr. or Ivanka going to prison that it should be Don Jr. because "he can handle it." Cohen explained that he would shoot for keeping both children out of prison.
The comment came as Lincoln Project hosts Tara Setmayer and Rick Wilson were talking about a past appearance Cohen had on MSNBC in which he predicted that Trump would flip on Weisselberg as well as his children and even his wife if necessary.
Cohen went on to talk about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and the hosts asked him what he thought Trump was thinking or feeling as he watched the U.S. Capitol falling under siege by his supporters. Cohen predicted that Trump was elated and that for him, the attack was probably "better than sex."
He went on to describe the Trump cult as being akin to the Jim Jones cult that ended with the mass suicide of over 900 people. He confessed that without enduring what he had, he would still be embedded in the cult today.
At one point, Wilson asked if Trump knows that he's despised in New York, which Cohen said he likely does. It's one of the reasons that he thinks Trump moved to Florida along with Don. Jr. and Ivanka.
"The only one that I think is still left here is Eric, you know, nobody even knows where Melania and Barron are. I mean, for all you know, they're on Jeff Bezos' space shuttle now," he joked. "So, nobody even knows. And truth be told, nobody even cares. But he knows that he's despised and that's one of the reasons he walks around Mar-a-Lago, right? Which is sort of an insane asylum for incredibly wealthy sycophants who want to sit there and pet the fat ass of Donald Trump."
Among the other things Cohen explained, he noted that Vladimir Putin is someone that Trump sees as having and being all of the things that he wants to have and be. The difference is that Trump secretly knows that he'll never be able to be as powerful or as wealthy as Putin.
Trump "is just a wannabe," Cohen said. "He thinks he's a tough guy out there, walking the walk and talking the talk, but he waddles and he mumbles."
When asked about the alleged "pee tape," a conspiracy that the ex-president was in a Russian hotel room with prostitutes, Cohen said that he's convinced the tape doesn't exist because he would have been able to find it.
He then blasted Rudy Giuliani, predicting that Giuliani will soon learn that Trump isn't ever going to be there for him and even took down former White House counsel Don McGahn too.
See the full video below:
https://www.rawstory.com/michael-cohen-donald-trump-jr-ivanka/