New Poll: Arizona Voters Reject 2020 Election ‘Audit’

Emily Singer
May 28 | 2021
https://www.nationalmemo.com/arizona-audit-poll

Reprinted with permission from American Independent

A majority of likely voters in Arizona oppose the audit state Senate Republicans forced of some 2.1 million ballots cast in the state's 2020 presidential elections, according to a poll released Thursday by a GOP consulting firm in the state, a fact Republican analysts say could be problematic for the party in the coming midterm elections.

The poll found 55 percent of voters don't support the hand recount of some 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County, the state's largest. Democrats overwhelmingly oppose it, but so do 68 percent of unaffiliated voters.

What's more, 44.5 percent of likely voters say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who supported the audit, leading Chuck Coughlin, a Republican who is the president and CEO of the firm that conducted the poll, to say it proves the audit is a political liability for the GOP.

"While it is to be expected that they would receive significant opposition from Democrats, this audit makes them face headwinds among independent and unaffiliated voters as well," Coughlin said of the Republicans who forced the audit in the first place. "As we have said before, 'never run the last election, run the election you are in now.' This issue is an electoral cul-de-sac that spells trouble for Republicans in 2022."

The poll results come as bad news continues to plague the audit — which was forced by Republican state senators and is being run by a Donald Trump-supporting conspiracy theorist who was involved in a failed effort to overturn the election.

Election experts who witnessed the counting called the audit a mismanaged mess, condemning the conspiracy-fueled exercise as one meant simply to sow doubt in the election result rather than actually audit the vote.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs said the audit's shoddy security protocols compromised millions of dollars worth of election equipment, and she advised Maricopa County election officials that they should purchase new machines.

The Department of Justice said the entire audit may be in violation of federal election law, as ballots are not supposed to go to outside contractors this soon after an election.

In fact, even some GOP lawmakers in the state have come out to say the audit is an embarrassment that needs to stop, and that it makes Republicans look like "idiots."

Yet Republicans are pressing on in their quest to scrounge up evidence for Trump's voter fraud lies.

CNN interviewed state Senate President Karen Fann — whose lawsuit forced the audit in the first place — who stood by the audit despite the problems and continued to promote lies about dead people voting.

Two previous audits conducted in the state found no evidence of Fann's claims.

"There is no doubt that a mid-term 2022 turnout will lean more Republican, but the audit appears to mitigate advantages in this upcoming cycle that should otherwise be helpful to GOP candidates," Paul Bentz, another Republican consultant who works at the Arizona High Ground firm, said in a news release.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.

https://www.nationalmemo.com/arizona-audit-poll

30,000 'Virus Shut Out' Necklaces Seized; Packaging Promised to Create Clouds Preventing COVID

BY ZOE STROZEWSKI ON 5/28/21 AT 1:48 PM EDT
https://www.newsweek.com/30000-virus-shut-out-necklaces-seized-packaging-promised-create-clouds-preventing-covid-1595986

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers seized 30,000 "Virus Shut Out" necklaces from China that claimed to prevent coronavirus infection for wearers by producing anti-viral clouds, the CBP said Thursday.

Border agents found three undeclared pallets of the wearables inside a tractor trailer passing through the Nogales, Arizona, border station into Mexico on April 16, the CBP's statement said. The lanyard-like devices contained a blue parcel of chlorine dioxide, which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says can cause respiratory irritation, breathing difficulty and chronic bronchitis after prolonged exposure.

After an initial detainment and examination of the goods, agents seized the products for violation of federal pesticide laws.

The CBP was contacted by Newsweek for comment but was unavailable for a response before publication.

An appraisal by the CBP's Centers of Excellence and Expertise valued the necklaces at $479,700 domestically. Officers also seized more than $24,000 worth of merchandise and clothing with counterfeit trademarks.

The necklace packaging includes 16 cautionary statements, including warnings to not put the product "in your underwear." Warnings also said it can bleach clothes and cause corrosion and rust "on or near metal objects."

The "Virus Shut Out" packaging states the product was manufactured by the Yiwu Haoyi Biotechnology Co. Ltd., located in Yiwu in the Zhejiang province of eastern China. The website for a seemingly related Yiwu Howell Biotechnology Co. Ltd. says it specializes in the production of cockroach powder, mosquito killer liquid, mosquito killer mats, mouse powder and insect spray.

Yiwu Howell Biotechnology did not respond to requests from Newsweek for comment in time for publication.

The CBP included a warning in its media release on the potential dangers of goods like the "Virus Shut Out" necklaces.

"In addition to posing potential health and safety hazards, counterfeit goods are often of inferior quality," the release said. "Peeling labels, low-quality ink or printing errors on the packaging, and loosely packed items in the box can be signs that the product you purchased may not be legitimate."

The release also provided a series of precautionary measures that people can take to protect themselves against counterfeit products, such as reading reviews from other customers and buying directly from retailers and trademark holders. It also warned that if a product's price "seems too good to be true, it probably is."

https://www.newsweek.com/30000-virus-shut-out-necklaces-seized-packaging-promised-create-clouds-preventing-covid-1595986

Meet the little-known accountant who could be about to bring down Donald Trump

Allen Weisselberg has worked for the Trump family as far back as the early 1970s

By Josie Ensor,
US CORRESPONDENT, NEW YORK
28 May 2021 • 12:30pm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/28/meet-little-known-accountant-could-bring-donald-trump/

The list of Donald Trump associates who have attempted to bring down the former president is as long as it is varied: from his lawyer, to his closest advisor, his ex-wife and his alleged lover. But like many powerful figures before him, it may well be his accountant that would be his undergoing.

Allen Weisselberg, the little-known 73-year-old chief financial officer for the Trump Organisation, has worked for the Trump family as far back as the early 1970s under Donald’s father Fred. Some say he is closer to Mr Trump than he is to his own children. As one former employee put it, “he knows where the bodies are buried".

In recent weeks New York prosecutors investigating Mr Trump’s tax affairs have been turning the screws on Mr Weisselberg in the hope of flipping him to testify against his boss.

Cyrus Vance, the Manhattan District Attorney, is looking into everything from hush-money payments paid to women on Mr Trump's behalf, to property valuations and employee compensation.

Speculation is mounting that his office may be able to turn Mr Weisselberg, who has not been accused of any wrongdoing, as it pulls together a grand jury to decide whether to indict.

Mr Trump has repeatedly denied the allegations and dismissed the investigation as politically motivated. Mr Weisselberg has not commented on any of the legal issues.

"My gut tells me that this will rise or fall on one person: Alan Weisselberg,” said Elie Honig, a former New York federal and state prosecutor. “If prosecutors can flip Weisselberg - and this grand jury can charge anybody - he can tell them what Donald Trump knew and authorised."

Without an insider it can often be difficult to put all the pieces in a white-collar case together.

The Trump Organisation may be a sprawling business enterprise with over 350 employees, but at the top there are just three loyal lieutenants: Mr Trump’s sons, Donald Jnr and Eric, and Mr Weisselberg.

Having spent half a century managing the family’s accounts, Mr Weisselberg has played significant roles in businesses ranging from Miss Universe, to Trump Towers, to the president’s casinos.

The pressure was raised on Mr Weisselberg last week after his own tax returns were probed, with investigators hoping to gain leverage that could convince him to cooperate.

They have even subpoenaed financial records of the private school attended by his grandchildren, believing tuition payments were part of Mr Weisselberg’s compensation package at the Trump Organisation. Prosecutors say it could amount to tax evasion, which is a criminal offence.

The testimony of the unassuming accountant has brought about the downfall of many high-profile figures throughout history. It was Frank Wilson who helped put away notorious mob boss Al Capone in the 1930s. More recently, David Friehling’s evidence proved essential in prosecuting financier Bernie Madoff over his multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme.

To add to Mr Weisselberg's woes, former associates of Mr Trump's who have already turned supergrass are attempting to implicate the CFO in Mr Trump's underhand dealings.

Michael Cohen, Mr Trump's personal lawyer at the start of his presidency, has accused Mr Weisselberg of arranging for the Trump Organisation to pay him $35,000 (£22,000) a month, to reimburse him for hush money Mr Trump had asked him to pay adult film actress Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged affair.

Mr Weisselberg was subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury regarding the Cohen investigation but was granted limited witness immunity for his testimony and faced no charges of his own.

However, Mr Weisselberg’s federal immunity does not extend to state investigations.

The threat of criminal investigations into his taxes was a spectre that haunted Mr Trump throughout much of his presidency, providing an added impetus to secure a second term which would have shielded him from prosecution.

In his 20s, Mr Trump built his empire on publicity and gained fame, while Mr Weisselberg, who is one year younger than the former president, worked behind the scenes to help create the jumble of roughly 500 companies that make up the Trump empire into what it is today.

Mr Trump’s personal and professional lives were often blurred. The Trump Organisation’s boardroom provided the set for Mr Trump’s TV series The Apprentice. Mr Weisselberg himself appeared as a judge on the seventh episode of the second season.

The Weisselberg and Trump families too have become intertwined over the decades. Alan’s son Jack is an executive at Ladder Capital, which has acted as a lender to the Trump Organisation. Another son, Barry, has managed the Trump Organisation's Central Park ice rinks.

Jennifer Weisselberg, Mr Weisselberg’s former daughter-in-law, once said of him: "He has more feelings and adoration for Donald than for his wife. For Donald, it's a business. But for Allen, it's a love affair.”

The former ballet dancer, who has two children with Barry, has begun speaking out publicly on the investigation, predicting this week that her father-in-law may well cooperate to protect the family.

Ms Weisselberg has said several members received free use of Trump Organisation apartments and alleged that her ex-husband laundered money through the ice rink operations.

Barry Weisselberg did not reply to request for comment, nor did the Trump Organisation.

Ms Weisselberg, who claimed this week she had been evicted from her Manhattan apartment for cooperating with authorities, told NBC News that Allen Weisselberg discusses 'everything' with Mr Trump about the company’s financial workings. “And Donald trusts him to continue the legacy the way his father set things up,” she said.

"I contacted Allen numerous times last year to try and discuss this privately, with dignity, gracefully, within the family," she said. "He wasn't interested."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/28/meet-little-known-accountant-could-bring-donald-trump/

Marshall Cohen @MarshallCohen JUST IN: The Justice Department has charged at least 450 people in connection with the Capitol insurrection, according to CNN's latest tally. This is a major milestone reached on the same day that Senate Republicans appear likely to kill the bipartisan Jan. 6 commission.

3:54 PM · May 28, 2021·Twitter Web App

THREAD

JUST IN: The Justice Department has charged at least 450 people in connection with the Capitol insurrection, according to CNN's latest tally. This is a major milestone reached on the same day that Senate Republicans appear likely to kill the bipartisan Jan. 6 commission.

— Marshall Cohen (@MarshallCohen) May 28, 2021

Judge Approves Special Master, Denies Rudy Giuliani and Victoria Toensing’s Requests for Details of Government’s Probe

ADAM KLASFELD May 28th, 2021, 10:22 am
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/judge-approves-special-master-denies-rudy-giuliani-and-victoria-toensings-requests-for-details-of-governments-probe/

Granting federal prosecutors’ request for a special master, a federal judge rejected Rudy Giuliani and his fellow pro-Trump lawyer Victoria Toensing’s requests for the government to disclose more information about the basis for their search warrants.

“Giuliani and Toensing contend that their status as lawyers, including Giuliani’s status as a lawyer to the former President, makes these searches problematic,” U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote in a seven-page opinion on Friday. “To be sure, ‘a law office search should be executed with special care to avoid unnecessary intrusion on attorney-client communications.'”

“But lawyers are not immune from searches in criminal investigations. Rather, a law office search ‘is nevertheless proper if there is reasonable cause to believe that the specific items sought are located on the property to be searched,” the ruling continues. “The searches here were based on probable cause, and it is precisely to avoid ‘unnecessary intrusion on attorney-client communications’ that the Government is seeking appointment of a special master.”

Roughly a week after the raid on Giuliani’s home and office, federal prosecutors set the stage for the sort of attorney-client privilege fight that unfolded in the Southern District of New York some three years ago in the case of Trump’s ex-fixer Michael Cohen. The government asked the judge to appoint a special master to assess the thorny privilege issues involving a practicing attorney whose sometime client is a former president of the United States.

Giuliani demanded the law enforcement affidavits that supported the searches earlier this year and in late 2019, but prosecutors argued there was no reason not to proceed in the usual course, noting the big-name attorneys aren’t “above the law.”

In all respects, Judge Oetken found in favor of the government.

“Giuliani cites no precedent — and the Court is aware of no authority — for the proposition that the Fourth Amendment (or any other constitutional or statutory provision) gives a person who has not been charged a right to review a search warrant affidavit during an ongoing investigation,” Oetken wrote.

The judge added that demanding this information now was premature.

“If Giuliani is charged with a crime, of course, he will be entitled to production of the search warrant affidavits as part of discovery pursuant to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 16,” the judge noted.

Oetken also rejected the pair’s request for pre-indictment discovery on the fruits of the government’s search, and Toensing’s request for the return of her cell phone, which authorities seized in April.

The judge agreed with the government that a special master would enhance public confidence that Giuliani and Toensing’s attorney-client privileges are being respected.

“The Court agrees that the appointment of a special master is warranted here to ensure the perception of fairness,” the ruling states. “The special master will expeditiously conduct a filter review of the April 2021 warrant materials for potentially privileged documents, and that review can be informed by Giuliani’s and Toensing’s parallel review of the same materials. The Government’s investigative team will thereafter conduct a responsiveness review of the released materials.”

The parties must propose potential candidates for the special master by June 4.

Giuliani’s lawyer Robert Costello called the ruling unsurprising.

“We knew that a Special Master was inevitable, which is why we did not oppose it, so this ruling comes as no surprise to us,” Costello told Law&Crime in an email.

He did not answer questions about the rejection of his client’s requests—or his potential candidates for that special master’s review.

Toensing’s lawyer did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

Read the judge’s ruling below:
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20792610/special-master-order.pdf


https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/judge-approves-special-master-denies-rudy-giuliani-and-victoria-toensings-requests-for-details-of-governments-probe/

Trump appointee on West Point Board spreads conspiracy that Biden is replacing White people of European ancestry

By Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck, CNN
Updated 12:17 AM ET, Fri May 28, 2021
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/27/politics/kfile-macgregor2/index.html

(CNN)A Trump appointee serving on West Point's advisory board has repeatedly spread a conspiracy that the Biden administration is bringing in non-White immigrants as part of a "grand plan" to have them outnumber White Americans of European ancestry in the United States.

In another interview, he also attacked women serving in the military in combat roles.

The comments were made in April and May by retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, who was appointed to West Point's Board of Visitors in the waning months of the Trump administration, and uncovered in a CNN KFile review of his recent comments. Macgregor also served as a senior official in Trump's Department of Defense, where he was tasked with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan after being appointed in November 2020.

Macgregor was previously nominated to be the Trump administration's ambassador to Germany, but his nomination failed to receive a hearing following a CNN KFile report on controversial comments on minorities, Islam, and Germany's remembrance of the Holocaust. He graduated from West Point and served in the US Army for nearly 30 years as a decorated combat veteran before retiring as a colonel in 2004. He is a frequent radio and television commentator on national security affairs, most recently for Fox News and RT, and has published five books.

"I think they've got control of it," Macgregor said on New York local radio in late April, when asked about the situation on the US-Mexico border. "There's no question about it. But their idea of control is to bring in as many people as they possibly can, as quickly as possible, from anywhere in the world, frankly. But preferably from Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and some, some portions of Asia, but not many."

"The idea is that they have to bring in as many non-Europeans as possible in order to outnumber the numbers of Americans of European ancestry who live in the United States. That's what it's all about. And I don't think there's any point in questioning it. That is the policy. ... It is a deliberate policy to enact demographic change."

Macgregor sits on the military academy's Board of Visitors, which is comprised of members of Congress and presidential appointees. The board carries out inquiries into the military academy's "morale and discipline, curriculum, instruction, physical equipment, fiscal affairs, and academic methods." It meets several times a year and provides independent advice and recommendations to the President on the military academy. Appointments typically involve serving out a three-year term.

Susan Gough, a Pentagon spokesperson, told CNN that West Point had no say who serves on the board: "The Army has no input as to who is appointed to the USMA Board of Visitors. West Point's responsibility is to update the Board of Visitors, not administer or appoint it."

Macgregor did not respond to requests for comment.

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates condemned Macgregor's recent remarks, telling CNN, "These hateful and grotesque sentiments are antithetical to the values and character of our nation and armed forces--whose standards, excellence, and professionalism are without comparison."

"There is absolutely no place in public service for racism, for denigrating the contributions of women in the military, or for religious bigotry," said Bates.

A White House official told CNN that Macgregor's standing on West Point's Board of Visitors is currently being reviewed.

Macgregor also said "a lot of criminals" were among migrants and undocumented immigrants coming into the United States, adding they would be a "burden on our economy," who carried since eradicated diseases.

"We're also encouraging all these worst elements to come in and camp and effectively enjoy the fruits of citizenship without earning them and without ever having qualified for them," he said, "And I think some of you must have seen the thousands of pregnant women coming up from Latin America, so they can have their children here. And then the child immediately is declared an American citizen. And again, all of this is part of the grand plan. This is what Mr. Biden and his supporters want. They want another country. They don't want the United States."

In another interview in May, Macgregor blasted allowing women in combat.

"What we call diversity -- in the extreme. In other words, affirmative action programs for every conceivable category of humanity that the left wants to come up with, " said Macgregor. "Whether it's someone who is a gender neutral or homosexual or whatever else, the left loves to put us into categories and push this. And the people that went along with it and said, 'sure, let's put women into the combat forces. Let's have women everywhere.' Let's do whatever we want to do. We're going to create this brave new world where everyone is the same. There are no differences, nothing matters. So I think that's where we are."

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/27/politics/kfile-macgregor2/index.html

Russia Appears to Carry Out Hack Through System Used by U.S. Aid Agency

Microsoft reported that it had detected the intrusion and that the same hackers behind the earlier SolarWinds attack were responsible.



A screenshot, with some information redacted by the source, showing an apparent spearphishing email meant to resemble a legitimate email from the United States Agency for International Development.Credit...Microsoft

By David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth
May 28, 2021 Updated 1:04 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/us/politics/russia-hack-usaid.html

Hackers linked to Russia’s main intelligence agency surreptitiously seized an email system used by the State Department’s international aid agency to burrow into the computer networks of human rights groups and other organizations of the sort that have been critical of President Vladimir V. Putin, Microsoft Corporation disclosed on Thursday.

Discovery of the breach comes only three weeks before President Biden is scheduled to meet Mr. Putin in Geneva, and at a moment of increased tension between the two nations — in part because of a series of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks emanating from Russia.

The newly disclosed attack was also particularly bold: By breaching the systems of a supplier used by the federal government, the hackers sent out genuine-looking emails to more than 3,000 accounts across more than 150 organizations that regularly receive communications from the United States Agency for International Development. Those emails went out as recently as this week, and Microsoft said it believes the attacks are ongoing.

The email was implanted with code that would give the hackers unlimited access to the computer systems of the recipients, from “stealing data to infecting other computers on a network,” Tom Burt, a Microsoft vice president, wrote on Thursday night.

Last month, Mr. Biden announced a series of new sanctions on Russia and the expulsion of diplomats for a sophisticated hacking operation, called SolarWinds, that used novel methods to breach at least seven government agencies and hundreds of large American companies.

That attack went undetected by the U.S. government for nine months, until it was discovered by a cybersecurity firm. In April, Mr. Biden said he could have responded far more strongly, but “chose to be proportionate” because he did not want “to kick off a cycle of escalation and conflict with Russia.”

The Russian response nonetheless seems to have been escalation. The malicious activity was underway as recently as the past week. That suggests that the sanctions and whatever additional covert actions the White House carried out — part of a strategy of creating “seen and unseen” costs for Moscow — has not choked off the Russian government’s appetite for disruption.

A spokesperson for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security said late Thursday that the agency was “aware of the potential compromise” at the Agency for International Development and that it was “working with the F.B.I. and U.S.A.I.D. to better understand the extent of the compromise and assist potential victims.”

Microsoft identified the Russian group behind the attack as Nobelium, and said it was the same group responsible for the SolarWinds hack. Last month, the American government explicitly said that SolarWinds was the work of the S.V.R., one of the most successful spinoffs from the Soviet-era K.G.B.

The same agency was involved in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016, and before that, in attacks on the Pentagon, the White House email system and the State Department’s unclassified communications.

It has grown increasingly aggressive and creative, federal officials and experts say. The SolarWinds attack was never detected by the United States government, and was carried out through code implanted in network management software that the government and private companies use widely. When customers updated the SolarWinds software — much like updating an iPhone overnight — they were unknowingly letting in an invader.

Among the victims last year were the Departments of Homeland Security and Energy, as well as nuclear laboratories.

When Mr. Biden came to office, he ordered a study of the SolarWinds case, and officials have been working to prevent future “supply chain” attacks, in which adversaries infect software used by federal agencies. That is similar to what happened in this case, when Microsoft’s security team caught the hackers using a widely used email service, provided by a company called Constant Contact, to send malicious emails that appeared to come from genuine Agency for International Development addresses.

But the content was, at times, hardly subtle. In one email sent through Constant Contact’s service on Tuesday, the hackers highlighted a message claiming that “Donald Trump has published new emails on election fraud.” The email bore a link that, when clicked, drops malicious files onto the computers of the recipients.

Microsoft noted that the attack differed “significantly” from the SolarWinds hack, using new tools and tradecraft in an apparent effort to avoid detection. It said that the attack was still in progress and that the hackers were continuing to send spearphishing emails, with increasing speed and scope. That is why Microsoft took the unusual step of naming the agency whose email addresses were being used and of publishing samples of the fake email.

In essence, the Russians got into the Agency for International Development email system by routing around the agency and going directly after its software suppliers. Constant Contact manages mass emails and other communications on the aid agency’s behalf.

“Nobelium launched this week’s attacks by gaining access to the Constant Contact account of U.S.A.I.D.,” Mr. Burt of Microsoft wrote. Constant Contact could not be reached for comment.

Microsoft, like other major firms involved in cybersecurity, maintains a vast sensor network to look for malicious activity on the internet, and is frequently a target itself. It was deeply involved in revealing the SolarWinds attack.

In this case, Microsoft reported, the goal of the hackers was not to go after the State Department or the aid agency, but to use their connections to get inside groups that work in the field — and in many cases rank among Mr. Putin’s most potent critics.

“At least a quarter of the targeted organizations were involved in international development, humanitarian, and human rights work,” Mr. Burt wrote. While he did not name them, many such groups have revealed Russian action against dissidents, or protested the poisoning, conviction and jailing of Russia’s best-known opposition leader, Alexei A. Navalny.

The attack suggests Russia’s intelligence agencies are stepping up their campaign, perhaps to demonstrate that the country would not back down in the face of sanctions, the expulsion of diplomats and other pressure.

Mr. Biden raised the SolarWinds attack with Mr. Putin in a phone call last month, telling him that the sanctions and expulsions were a demonstration of how his administration would no longer tolerate an increased tempo of cyberoperations.

Mr. Putin has denied Russian involvement, and some Russian news outlets have argued that the United States launched the attack against itself.

At the time, the White House also placed a range of new sanctions on Russian individuals and assets, including new restrictions on purchasing Russia’s sovereign debt, which will make it more difficult for Russia to raise money and support its currency.

“This is the start of a new U.S. campaign against Russian malign behavior,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said at the time.

Tensions over Russia’s harboring of cybercriminals escalated significantly this month after a ransomware group held hostage the business networks at Colonial Pipeline. The attack forced the company to shut down a pipeline that brings nearly half the gas, diesel and jet fuel to the East Coast, prompting a surge in gas prices and panic buying at the pump.

Mr. Biden said two weeks ago that “we have been in direct communication with Moscow about the imperative for responsible countries to take decisive action against these ransomware networks.”


David E. Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent. In a 38-year reporting career for The Times, he has been on three teams that have won Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2017 for international reporting. His newest book is “The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage and Fear in the Cyber Age.” @SangerNYT • Facebook

Nicole Perlroth is a cybersecurity and digital espionage reporter. She is the bestselling author of the book, “This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends,” about the global cyber arms race. @nicoleperlroth
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/us/politics/russia-hack-usaid.html

Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, who is credited with leading a mob of rioters away from the Senate doors on Jan. 6, happened to be standing a few feet behind Murkowski as she spoke passionately about the need for an outside investigation.

Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, who was standing behind Murkowski, shows her his phone. “Look, you’re trending.”

Murkowski tells him she had no clue he was right there during the 10 minutes she spoke about the need for a commission.

She gave Goodman a hug.

Julie Tsirkin
@JulieNBCNews

THREAD

Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, who was standing behind Murkowski, shows her his phone. “Look, you’re trending.”

Murkowski tells him she had no clue he was right there during the 10 minutes she spoke about the need for a commission.

She gave Goodman a hug. https://t.co/OWS38VozFx

— Julie Tsirkin (@JulieNBCNews) May 28, 2021

Sen. Lisa Murkowski Says Mitch McConnell Is Blocking Jan. 6 Commission For Political Gain

“Is that really what this is about, one election cycle after another?" the Alaska Republican said.

By Igor Bobic, HuffPost US
28/05/2021 03:35 BST | Updated 39 minutes ago
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/january-6-commission-murkowski-mcconnell_n_60b046e4e4b0c5658f91cff4?ri18n=true

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) expressed frustration Thursday with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) over his decision to block a commission to look into the violent Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by hundreds of Donald Trump supporters.

In an extraordinary meeting with reporters on Capitol Hill before an expected vote on the Jan. 6 commission, Murkowski took direct aim at the Kentucky Republican over his stated rationale for opposing the investigatory panel: that he would rather focus his party’s energy on President Joe Biden’s misdeeds to gain fodder for the 2022 midterm elections rather than risk alienating former President Trump and his supporters.

“To be making a decision for the short-term political gain at the expense of understanding and acknowledging what was in front of us on Jan. 6, I think we need to look at that critically. Is that really what this is about, one election cycle after another?” Murkowski said.

She added: “Or are we going to acknowledge that as a country that is based on these principles of democracy that we hold so dear. And one of those is that we have free and fair elections... I kind of want that to endure beyond just one election cycle.”

Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman, who is credited with leading a mob of rioters away from the Senate doors on Jan. 6, happened to be standing a few feet behind Murkowski as she spoke passionately about the need for an outside investigation.

The Alaska senator, who faces reelection next year, has been one of the most outspoken Republicans about the Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump’s culpability in inciting the riot at the Capitol. She was one of only seven GOP senators who voted to convict Trump over the disturbing events during his second impeachment trial earlier this year. And she is one of only a handful of GOP votes expected to back an independent Jan. 6 commission.

Republicans broadly oppose establishing the commission, which would be equally divided among credible experts selected by both parties, with equal subpoena power, on the grounds that it would be a partisan expedition.

But Murkowski pushed back on those claims, as well as McConnell’s comments earlier in the day that there is “no new fact about that day we need the Democrats’ extraneous commission” to uncover.

“I need to know. I think it’s important for the country that there be an independent evaluation.... If you want to make this an independent commission, then, Leader, this is your opportunity. Pick the right people,” Murkowski said.

“I guess now we’ll never know,” she added of unresolved questions about the Jan. 6 attack. “Isn’t that part of the problem, that we’ll never know? It’ll never be resolved. It’ll always be hanging out there.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/january-6-commission-murkowski-mcconnell_n_60b046e4e4b0c5658f91cff4?ri18n=true

McConnell focuses ‘100 percent’ on blocking Biden — and zero percent on America

Opinion by Dana Milbank
Columnist
May 26, 2021 at 9:21 p.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/26/mcconnell-focuses-100-percent-blocking-biden-zero-percent-america/

It has long been obvious that Mitch McConnell puts party before country, but this week he actually admitted it.

The Senate minority leader told Republican colleagues that they should oppose the creation of a Jan. 6 commission, no matter how it is structured, because it “could hurt the party’s midterm election message,” as Politico’s Burgess Everett reported.

And so, as early as Thursday, McConnell will use the filibuster to thwart a bipartisan effort to prevent further attacks on the U.S. government by domestic terrorists — because he thinks it’s good politics for Republicans.

“That is extremely frustrating and disturbing,” Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), the Democrat working hardest to protect the minority’s filibuster rights, told reporters. “There’s a time when you rise above [politics], and I’m hoping that this would be the time that he would do that. I guess, from what I am hearing, he hasn’t.”

Manchin has every right to be disturbed. But he shouldn’t be surprised.

McConnell, asked this month about the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from GOP leadership, and whether he was concerned that many Republicans believe Donald Trump’s election lie, replied, twice: “One hundred percent of my focus is on stopping this new administration.” True to his word, McConnell has blocked everything — even if it means undercutting Republican negotiators.

In addition to denouncing the Jan. 6 commission bill, negotiated by the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, McConnell undercut Tim Scott (S.C.), the lone Black Republican in the Senate and McConnell’s designee to negotiate policing legislation. McConnell upended negotiations by announcing opposition to any bill that doesn’t preserve qualified immunity for police.

This week, McConnell disrupted progress on a broadly bipartisan bill designed to improve American technological competitiveness against China. Even though Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had followed “regular order” and allowed Republicans to amend the bill, McConnell threatened to filibuster the bill if Democrats didn’t slow the process further. On Monday, he demanded “a number of further votes on important amendments before there would be any attempt to shut off debate.”

Why? Because unrelenting obstruction is McConnell’s only way to placate the GOP base in the face of Trump’s attacks. The former president has called McConnell, among other things, a “dumb son of a bitch,” a “dour, sullen and unsmiling political hack,” “gutless and clueless,” “weak and pathetic,” a “stone-cold loser,” and a leader Republicans “should change.” The attacks must be rattling McConnell, for he has been unusually clumsy in his appeals to the Trumpian base.

He earned an extraordinary rebuke from the University of Louisville (the Kentuckian’s alma mater and home to the McConnell Center) when he declared that it was an “exotic notion” to believe that 1619 — the year in which slaves arrived in the American colonies — is among “the most important dates in American history.” Before that, McConnell threatened “serious consequences” for “woke” corporations that moved business from Georgia because of the state’s discriminatory new voting restrictions.

On the infrastructure bill, he and his Republican colleagues are using the same techniques they used to try to derail the covid-relief legislation earlier this year: suggesting that Biden is a marionette manipulated by his staff. It’s just another way of planting the notion that Biden is mentally unfit.

In February, McConnell suggested that Biden was prevented by his staff from negotiating. “Our members who were in the meeting felt that the president seemed more interested in that than his staff did,” McConnell said. Republicans referred to Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, as “Prime Minister Klain” and “the guy behind the curtain,” and they suggested that Biden had his wings clipped by economic adviser Brian Deese.

Now they’re suggesting that aides are manipulating Biden on infrastructure. Sen. John Thune (S.D.), the No. 2 GOP leader under McConnell, said Tuesday that the White House staff is “not as inclined to make a deal as the president is.”

And longtime McConnell adviser Josh Holmes claimed Tuesday that White House “staff treats Biden as though he’s an invalid who just wanders into a meeting and knows not what he speaks.”

Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) picked up the Biden-as-puppet theme Wednesday, suggesting Biden backed Republicans’ $1 trillion infrastructure proposal — until staff overruled him. “We went backwards very significantly when the staff came in with a much, much higher number than what I thought the president agreed to,” he said on CNBC.

The insulting implication that Biden is not in control, coming from his longtime Senate colleagues, would naturally anger Biden. So why try to undercut Biden in such a personal way? To poison the well as negotiators make a rare attempt at bipartisanship.

Maybe Manchin will be disturbed by this, too. He is still trying to negotiate on infrastructure, and to get 10 Republicans to support a Jan. 6 commission and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. More power to him. But sooner or later, he’ll have to conclude that there’s no negotiating when McConnell has a 100 percent focus on obstruction.


Opinion by Dana Milbank
Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics.
Twitter
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/26/mcconnell-focuses-100-percent-blocking-biden-zero-percent-america/

How William Barr served as Trump’s legal heat shield

Opinion by Randall D. Eliason
Contributing columnist
May 27, 2021 at 7:16 p.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/27/how-william-barr-served-trumps-legal-heat-shield/

It’s now clearer than ever: On the question of whether former president Donald Trump obstructed justice, the fix was in at William P. Barr’s Justice Department.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson recently ordered the Justice Department to release an internal memorandum from 2019 concerning the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. On Monday, the department announced it would appeal part of that decision but agreed to reveal a portion of the memo.

The new disclosures offer further evidence of the extent to which Barr sought to shield Trump from the implications of the Mueller report.

Mueller delivered his 400-plus page report to Barr on March 22, 2019. Just two days later, Barr sent a four-page letter to Congress purporting to summarize the "principal conclusions” of the report. Concerning whether Trump had obstructed justice, Barr noted that Mueller had declined to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment and claimed it therefore fell to him, as attorney general, to make that determination. He then announced his own conclusion: “the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”

When the redacted Mueller report was finally released three weeks later, it became apparent how misleading Barr’s announcement had been. Mueller had presented compelling evidence of obstruction of justice by the former president. He declined to take a final position on obstruction because of an internal Justice Department opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted. He certainly did not suggest that he thought Barr should make that call for him. But by that point, Barr’s “spin” on the report had taken a firm hold, with the president repeatedly using Barr’s conclusions to claim he had been fully exonerated.

The current litigation before Jackson concerns a memo to Barr from senior Justice Department officials. Titled “Review of the Special Counsel’s Report,” it is dated March 24, 2019, the same day as Barr’s letter to Congress. In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Trump’s Justice Department sought to withhold the memo, claiming it contained privileged legal analysis and advice to the attorney general.

The judge rejected this characterization, noting that the memo and Barr’s letter to Congress were all “being written by the very same people at the very same time.” She concluded that, within the senior echelons of the Justice Department, it was a given that Trump would not be prosecuted. The memo, she held, was not intended to advise Barr in making a decision but rather to assist in “public relations” and help prepare a “preemptive strike on the Mueller report.”

News reports indicate that at least part of the legal analysis in the portion of the memo still being withheld discusses whether a president may ever be charged with obstruction for acts taken as part of his official duties. Barr himself, before being appointed attorney general, famously wrote a 19-page memo to Justice officials laying out his arguments about why such obstruction of justice charges against a president would be an unconstitutional infringement of executive authority.

But Barr’s pronouncement to Congress that the evidence did not support obstruction failed to point out that his conclusions rested, at least in part, on his views about the special status of the president. And he did not acknowledge that Mueller himself thoroughly debunked those legal arguments in his report, demonstrating why obstruction of justice charges against a corrupt president were not only possible but also potentially essential to upholding the rule of law. Instead, Barr suggested that the evidence of obstruction was simply not there — not that Trump was shielded by virtue of his office from prosecution for conduct that would be obstruction of justice if done by anyone else.

Jackson is not alone in concluding that, when it came to the Mueller report, Barr and his Justice Department were engaged not in objective legal analysis but in public relations on Trump’s behalf. In an earlier case involving challenges to redactions to the report, Judge Reggie Walton noted his concern that Barr had tried to create a “one-sided narrative” about the report that was at odds with Mueller’s actual conclusions. Now Jackson has concluded that although the Trump DOJ tried to convince her Barr had truly weighed the obstruction charges, in truth Barr’s decision that Trump did not obstruct justice was a foregone conclusion.

Many have criticized President Biden’s Justice Department for deciding to appeal the order to release the memo. The decision puts Attorney General Merrick Garland in a tough spot. Certainly the Biden administration has no interest in sheltering misconduct by former Trump officials. But Garland also has to worry about setting legal precedents that might chill the flow of legitimate advice to the attorney general in future cases.

What we have already seen is damning enough, however. When Trump appointed Barr he got just what he bargained for: an attorney general who would act as a backstop against any obstruction of justice charges against the president he served.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/27/how-william-barr-served-trumps-legal-heat-shield/

GOP frets behind the scenes over potential Trump 2024 bid

Trump is indicating he plans to run again so long as he still has a good bill of health. But he may face skepticism from surprising conservative corners of the GOP.

By OLIVIA BEAVERS and BURGESS EVERETT
05/27/2021 04:30 AM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/27/trump-2024-gop-skepticism-491002

Republicans largely oppose forming a commission to examine the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, hoping to block out further Donald Trump-induced chaos while they try to retake Congress next year.

The former president is making clear he isn’t going anywhere.

Trump is confiding in allies that he intends to run again in 2024 with one contingency: that he still has a good bill of health, according to two sources close to the former president. That means Trump is going to hang over the Republican Party despite its attempts to rebrand during his exile and its blockade of a Trump-centric investigation into January’s insurrection.

And amid news that the Manhattan district attorney has convened a grand jury that could decide to indict Trump, other executives working for him or the business itself, Trump publicly signaled this week that he’s considering another run. But he may face skepticism from surprising corners of the GOP, as some Republicans who supported him consistently during his presidency have mixed opinions about the possibility of a Trump 2024 campaign, according to interviews with 20 Republicans in both the House and Senate.

“President Trump did a lot of good. But he squandered a lot of his legacy after what happened after Nov. 3. And I think that’s a shame,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who was the GOP whip for Trump’s first two years in office. “Running for president, you’re under a lot of scrutiny. And all I can say is there’s a lot to talk about.”

Even without a Twitter presence, the former president still dominates the Republican water cooler. He’s working to oust those who backed his impeachment, namely Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), as well as boost his preferred candidates in battleground Senate primaries.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the middleman between Trump and the Hill GOP these days, said that the ex-president’s plans to devise a still-nascent “America First” messaging drive will put Trump “in charge of the policy agenda.” And Trump’s future, his semi-regular golfing partner suggested, might hinge on how his party handles the next 18 months.

“It’s more likely than not that he does” run, Graham said. “How we do in 2022 will have a big effect on his viability. If we do well in 2022, it helps his cause. I want him to keep the option open.”

Trump allies warn him not to run in 2024
BY ANITA KUMAR
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/10/trump-2024-campaign-456692

Multiple Republicans, however, say Trump’s appeal can be replicated by someone without the baggage of two impeachments, a Capitol riot he stoked, groundless challenges to his election loss and a barrage of inflammatory statements. Those GOP lawmakers believe their party is more competitive than it was five years ago but that Trump himself may no longer be the best standard-bearer.

Of course, most of them would sooner retire than attach their names to that opinion. As one publicly Trump-praising Republican lawmaker put it: “I’d like to see a fresh face. I think we have a lot of them.”

“He’s one of the best presidents we’ve had in terms of policies. But having said that, if it were up to me, I would never have Trump on any ballot ever again because it’s such a distraction,” said another House GOP member, who also insisted on anonymity to speak candidly. “I would love for him to play a behind-the-scenes role and not be on the ballot.”

There’s no shortage of possibilities who could carry a Trumpian mantle to the nomination in 2024: In the Senate, there are Floridians Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, Texan Ted Cruz, Missouri’s Josh Hawley or South Carolina’s Tim Scott. GOP governors from Ron DeSantis in Florida to Kristi Noem in South Dakota are also on everyone’s radar. Then there’s former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley or even Trump’s embattled House acolyte, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida.

Of course, some conservatives argue that if 2024 candidates are going to just replicate his platform, why not go with the man himself? Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), one of Trump’s fiercest allies, said: “I’m for Trump, period. I don't care who else is running.”

“Why have a carbon copy?” said Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.). “Why would we not support the original?”

But some congressional Republicans fear a Trump comeback will freeze the GOP field and potentially deter other potential 2024 candidates from laying the proper groundwork to challenge President Joe Biden, if he fulfills his vow to run again. This means that most eager GOP hopefuls must wait to see what the former president decides, particularly those who have grown their national profiles in Trump’s political shadow.

Pompeo is expected to run in 2024 if Trump forgoes a run or 2028 if Trump jumps in, according to multiple GOP sources who say his intentions seem clear. He and others could be waiting years before Trump gives a definitive answer. But none of the former president's potential successors are publicly questioning his timeline.

GOP frets behind the scenes over potential Trump 2024 bid
Hawley said that if Trump runs, “I don’t think there’s anybody else who would be able to capture the party.” Cruz dined with Trump earlier this month and said that when Trump makes his decision, “everyone else will respond accordingly.”

“Folks in Washington, both politicians and the press, that are trying to silence or erase President Trump are not going to succeed. And he’ll make his own decision on his own time frame,” Cruz added.

While Republicans are divided on whether another Trump campaign is the solution to 2024, they're more aligned on stopping a months-long investigation from probing his actions on Jan. 6 and before the riot. Republicans foresee a disaster in the proposed commission: All the drama of answering questions about Trump with absolutely no upside. Of course, Democrats and some Republicans argue that an independent inquiry is just the right thing to do.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell privately told his Republican colleagues in a meeting this week that such a probe would hurt their messaging heading into the midterms. Both McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) are gearing up for fights to win back control of their respective chambers and want to focus on opposition to Biden's agenda — not Trump-fueled news cycles that still haunt Capitol Hill Republicans who survived his presidency.

“That’s one of the main objections that has been spoken of: That the Democrats would use this [commission] as a way to try and keep the Jan. 6 issue front and center as long as possible and affect the 2022 election,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who voted to convict Trump in two separate impeachment trials and who supports a commission.

He said as his colleagues consider Thursday’s vote, they are looking at their constituents and asking themselves: “How do I align with them and represent them? It’s very clear that within our party that President Trump is very much admired.”

In a Tuesday statement, Trump called the news of a grand jury probe into his business practices “an affront to the almost 75 million voters” who supported him in the last election cycle.

“Interesting that today a poll came out indicating I’m far in the lead for the Republican Presidential Primary and the General Election in 2024,” Trump wrote.

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), a longtime Trump backer, said that even if Trump's legal troubles intensified, that might not hurt him with Republicans: “Some people might consider him a folk hero.”

Of course, with all of his posturing toward another run, Trump may be feinting. Floating his name as a presidential contender keeps him relevant and in the news, while also making his allies eager as ever to kiss his ring in Mar-a-Lago.

The Republicans who are hoping their mercurial figurehead won't drag out his decision until the last second — and risk kneecapping other candidates — argue that what's best for Trump may not be best for the GOP as a whole.

“I would be among the voices trying to tell him to let us know as soon as he can,” said a third House Republican.


FILED UNDER: JOHN CORNYN, JIM JORDAN, KEVIN CRAMER, DONALD TRUMP,
POLITICO

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/27/trump-2024-gop-skepticism-491002

What frigging law school did he go to?

Trump University?

Judge finalizes $25 million Trump University settlement for students of 'sham university'

JOSH HAFNER , JOSH HAFNER | USA TODAY
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/04/10/trump-university-settlement-judge-finalized/502387002/

A federal judge finalized the $25 million settlement between President Trump and students of his now shuttered Trump University on Monday, with New York's attorney general claiming “victims of Donald Trump’s fraudulent university will finally receive the relief they deserve.”

The order from U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel — the same Indiana-born judge Trump called biased because of his "Mexican heritage" — comes a year after he first approved the settlement. It marks the end of two class-action lawsuits and a civil lawsuit from New York accusing Trump of "swindling thousands of Americans out of millions of dollars through Trump University," in the words of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/04/10/trump-university-settlement-judge-finalized/502387002/

Trump University settlement approved by U.S. judge

A U.S. judge officially approved a $25 million settlement to resolve a class action lawsuit that claimed fraud against Donald Trump and real estate seminars at the now-defunct Trump University.

USA TODAY

"This settlement marked a stunning reversal by President Trump, who for years refused to compensate the victims of his sham university," Schneiderman said in a statement.

Indeed, Trump claimed as a candidate that he "never" settled lawsuits, and would not do so in the case of Trump University. "That's why I won't settle," Trump told MSNBC in 2016. "Because it's an easy case to win in court ... How do you settle a case like that?"

But Trump entered settlement talks days after the 2016 election, agreeing to pay the millions under terms that let him admit no wrongdoing.

Trump University was not an actual university but a for-profit seminar series, and former students waged a years-long battle claiming the course misled them with claims of teaching real estate success. The program ended in 2010. Some elderly plaintiffs who paid $20,000-plus in tuition died waiting to receive their checks from the settlement.

Trump had involvement in 3,500-plus lawsuits at the time of his election, an unprecedented volume for a presidential nominee.

Follow Josh Hafner on Twitter: @joshhafner

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/04/10/trump-university-settlement-judge-finalized/502387002/

GOP’s Ron DeSantis turns his back on embattled Matt Gaetz — who helped put him in office

Travis Gettys
May 25, 2021
https://www.rawstory.com/matt-gaetz-ron-desantis/

The sex scandal swirling around Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) could soon put Gov. Ron DeSantis, who leaned heavily on the GOP lawmaker during his campaign, in a tough spot.

The pair met when both were serving in Congress, and the 39-year-old Gaetz used his father's connections as a longtime state senator to help the relatively inexperienced DeSantis navigate the Florida political landscape as he weighed a gubernatorial run, and he went on to play a major role in that campaign and the early days of the administration, reported Politico.

"Man, I can't tell you how much by the end of the election he was the campaign," said one former DeSantis adviser. "By the time we were in heavy general election mode, DeSantis was not doing anything without Gaetz being in on it."

The governor's communications did not respond to requests for comment, and DeSantis has not made any comments about the Gaetz investigation.

"I don't have anything to say about that," he has previously said about the case.

Gaetz urged the governor to appoint several associates now caught up in the federal sex trafficking investigation, and he brought friend Joel Greenberg, a former Seminole County tax collector who pleaded guilty this month in the case, for a visit to the campaign office in Orlando.

"I obviously knew who Matt was, but I was like, 'who the f*ck is this guy?'" said one former DeSantis aide who was at the meeting. "It was the first time I saw him [Joel]. They were in like shorts and sunglasses, and just came in trying to give us advice and tell us what to do. It was very bizarre for like an hour or so."

Gaetz continued to advise DeSantis after his November 2018 election win, and he helped the new governor pick his early staff and pushed to get appointments for friends now linked to the federal sex trafficking probe.

"When they started the transition, the governor let Gaetz appoint the transition team," said one early DeSantis administration adviser. "He picked the transition chairs… they were all picked by Gaetz, and he worked hard, and to some degree of success, putting all his people he wanted in the administration."

The lawmaker lobbied Orlando surgeon and GOP fundraiser Jason Pirozzolo, whose private plane was used in September 2018 for a Bahamas trip that included Gaetz and five woman, including one who was 17 at the time, to oversee the state Department of Health.

"Gaetz stood on his head to make Jason surgeon general," said one DeSantis transition official. "He got a meeting. The governor didn't appoint him, but no way he's even in the room without Matt."

Another plane used for that Bahamas trip belonged to former state Rep. Halsey Beshears, who Gaetz urged DeSantis to appoint to a post in his administration, and the governor ultimately tapped him to head the Department of Business and Professional Regulation.

"Gaetz wanted him to be [Department of Environmental Protection] secretary and had him interview with [the Department of Environmental Protection] secretary," said a former DeSantis transition adviser. "It didn't work out, so he needed to find a place to get him in."

The lawmaker eventually fell out of the governor's inner circle, which was pushed by DeSantis' former chief of staff Shane Strum.

"Here is a good way to look at it: As Shane's power grew, Matt's diminished," said one current DeSantis adviser. "I don't think it was a personality conflict, it was more of a power conflict."


https://www.rawstory.com/matt-gaetz-ron-desantis/

QAnon’s hallmark catchphrases evaporating from the mainstream internet

The conspiracy’s followers on alternative platforms have failed to out-post their counterparts on mainstream ones

@DFRLab
May 26 · 7 min read
DFRLab
@AtlanticCouncil’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
By Jared Holt and Max Rizzuto, DFRLab
https://medium.com/dfrlab/qanons-hallmark-catchphrases-evaporating-from-the-mainstream-internet-ce90b6dc2c55

Data retrieved and analyzed by the DFRLab shows that the language of the QAnon conspiracy theory movement as it has historically appeared online has all but evaporated from the mainstream internet. In its wake lies a kind of neo-QAnon: a cluster of loosely connected conspiracy theory-driven movements that advocate many of the same false claims without the hallmark linguistic stylings that defined QAnon communities during their years of growth.

The QAnon conspiracy theory alleges that one or more high-rank individuals within former President Donald Trump’s inner circle utilized anonymous online imageboards to share national security intelligence with Trump’s strongest supporters. Followers of the conspiracy theory believe that the anonymously sourced messages, attributed to an author calling themselves “Q,” contain puzzles that can be solved to reveal information about a secret plan to crush a global network of business, entertainment, media, and political leaders plotting to subvert the United States by arresting them for their supposed engagement in human trafficking, satanic rituals, and child sex abuse.

Though outlandish, the political movement surrounding the claims blossomed into a fringe, yet powerful force in American politics since its inception. It produced two elected Republicans in the U.S. Congress and has been tied to acts of violence, murder, and terrorism. Several individuals who displayed belief in the conspiracy theory were arrested for participating in the insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump and his associates courted QAnon while in the White House; the movement’s followers were repeatedly boosted on Trump’s Twitter feed and QAnon-related content found its way to Trump’s family members again and again. Trump repeatedly declined opportunities to denounce the conspiracy theory. In August, he told reporters in the White House briefing room that he “didn’t know much” about QAnon and its supporters “other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate.”

The theory and its followers received increased public attention and scrutiny in the last year corresponding with its groundswell within the broader Republican Party base. Data analyzed by the DFRLab shows that the taglines and phrases associated with the movement have plummeted in mainstream internet venues following major tech moderation and policy actions meant to counter the conspiracy theory. While alternative social media platforms like Parler and Gab have seen swells in QAnon language on their respective platforms, those peaks still pale in comparison to mainstream platforms’ slowest days.

Methodology
...
MUCH MORE
https://medium.com/dfrlab/qanons-hallmark-catchphrases-evaporating-from-the-mainstream-internet-ce90b6dc2c55

Trump Claims Immunity Against Jan. 6 Lawsuit Because His Efforts To Overturn Election Were Part Of His Presidential Duties

Alison Durkee Forbes Staff Business
May 25, 2021,12:26pm EDT|120,067 views
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2021/05/25/trump-claims-immunity-against-jan-6-lawsuit-because-his-efforts-to-overturn-election-were-part-of-his-presidential-duties/?sh=1dd5bab12a15

TOPLINE Former President Donald Trump argued in a court filing late Monday that he cannot be sued by Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) for his alleged role in inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol building because he was conducting official presidential business, in a continuation of past claims that the presidency rendered him “immune” from legal liability —which legal experts have partially rejected when it comes to criminal charges.

KEY FACTS
Swalwell is suing Trump and allies including Donald Trump Jr. and Rudy Giuliani over the Jan. 6 riot, alleging they violated the Ku Klux Klan Act through their claims of election fraud and attempts to block Congress from certifying the election results, particularly at a rally Trump spoke at that took place immediately before the Capitol was attacked.

In a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, lawyers representing the ex-president and his son argued that Trump has “absolute immunity” against legal action over conduct while he was president.

Legal experts broadly agree that presidents can be criminally charged after leaving office, including for something committed while they were president, though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Nixon vs. Fitzgerald that ex-presidents are immune from being sued in civil cases for damages—such as Swalwell’s suit—that arise from their official acts as president.

Based on that precedent, Trump’s attorneys allege that the then-president’s efforts to overturn the election results were part of his presidential duties, claiming immunity would only not apply if Trump were conducting “purely personal and purely unofficial actions.”

“It is well recognized that rousing and controversial speeches are a key function of the presidency,” Trump’s lawyers argued in defense of his Jan. 6 rally speech—in which he pushed false election fraud claims and argued for lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to block the election results—claiming the then-president was “advocating for … congressional action.”

The motion also argues that Trump’s false claims about the election were protected speech under the First Amendment, an argument that some legal experts have cast doubts on and suggested could potentially rise to the level of unprotected incitement of violence.

CRUCIAL QUOTE
“While holding that office, former President Trump was free to advocate for the appointment and certification of electors, just as he was entitled to advocate for the passage or defeat of a constitutional amendment, or the reconsideration of a congressional act over his veto even though the President does not directly participate in those congressional acts,” Trump’s lawyers argue.

KEY BACKGROUND
Trump repeatedly claimed he had immunity in responding to the lawsuits brought against him while he was president and he was never charged with a crime while in office. The Supreme Court did put a dent in Trump’s immunity theory in a 2020 ruling on a grand jury subpoena for his tax returns, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing, “No citizen, not even the President, is categorically above the common duty to produce evidence when called upon in a criminal proceeding.” Since departing the White House, Trump has become more open to legal jeopardy, and faces multiple investigations from prosecutors including the Fulton County District Attorney in Georgia, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance and New York Attorney General Letitia James. In addition to Swalwell’s suit, 11 other House lawmakers have also brought a separate lawsuit against Trump and Giuliani for their alleged role in the Jan. 6 attack.



Alison Durkee
I am a New York-based journalist covering breaking news at Forbes. I previously covered politics and news for Vanity Fair and Mic, and as a theater critic I serve as a member of the New York Outer Critics Circle. Follow me on Twitter @alisond64 or get in touch at adurkee@forbes.com.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2021/05/25/trump-claims-immunity-against-jan-6-lawsuit-because-his-efforts-to-overturn-election-were-part-of-his-presidential-duties/?sh=1dd5bab12a15

‘Domshell’: what the papers say about Dominic Cummings’ attack on Boris Johnson

The extraordinary performance by the former senior aide – and his unprecedented accusations against the PM – dominate the front pages

Helen Sullivan
@helenrsullivan
Thu 27 May 2021 03.49 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/27/domshell-what-the-papers-say-about-dominic-cummings-attack-on-boris-johnson



It was an extraordinary day in British politics. A rain of fire. A grenade. A “Domshell”.

Dominic Cummings’ seven-hour performance before Westminster MPs on Wednesday filled the UK front pages on Thursday, with his condemnation of Boris Johnson’s handling of the pandemic dominating headlines.

The Guardian leads with Cummings’ devastating accusation that “tens of thousands of people died who didn’t need to die” during the Covid outbreak in Britain, above a triptych of faces the ousted aide made during the hearing. The Guardian also carried analysis by political editor Heather Stewart calling the hearing self-serving but plausible.
...
MUCH MORE
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/27/domshell-what-the-papers-say-about-dominic-cummings-attack-on-boris-johnson

Scientists claim to have solved Covid vaccine blood-clot puzzle

German researchers say side effect caused by adenovirus vector and can be fixed

Anna Gross in London 27 MINUTES AGO
https://www.ft.com/content/f76eb802-ec05-4461-9956-b250115d0577

Scientists in Germany claim to have cracked the cause of the rare blood clots linked to the Oxford/AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccines and believe the jabs could be tweaked to stop the reaction happening altogether.

Rolf Marschalek, a professor at Goethe university in Frankfurt who has been leading research into the rare condition since March, said his research showed that the problem sat with the adenovirus vectors that both vaccines use to deliver the spike protein of the Sars-Cov-2 virus into the body.

The delivery mechanism means the vaccines send the spike protein into the cell nucleus rather than the cytosol fluid found inside the cell where the virus normally produces proteins, Marschalek and other scientists said in a preprint paper released on Wednesday.

Once inside the cell nucleus, certain parts of the spike protein splice, or split apart, creating mutant versions, which are unable to bind to the cell membrane where important immunisation takes place. The floating mutant proteins are instead secreted by cells into the body, triggering blood clots in roughly one in 100,000 people, according to Marschalek’s theory. 

In contrast, mRNA-based vaccines, such as the jabs developed by BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna, deliver the spike’s genetic material to the cell fluid and it never enters the nucleus.

“When these...virus genes are in the nucleus they can create some problems,” Marschalek told the Financial Times. 

The rare blood-clotting reaction that has disrupted the rollout of the AstraZeneca and J&J shots has been recorded in 309 of the 33m people who have received the AstraZeneca vaccine in the UK, causing 56 deaths. In Europe, at least 142 people have experienced the blood clots out of 16m recipients of the vaccine.

In response, use of the AstraZeneca jab has been restricted or suspended in more than a dozen countries. J&J began the rollout of its vaccine in Europe with a warning on its label in April after a brief delay because of the concerns.

But Marschalek believes there is a straight forward “way out” if the vaccine developers can modify the sequence of the spike protein to prevent it splitting apart. 

J&J had already contacted Marschalek’s lab to ask for guidance and was looking at ways to adapt its vaccine to prevent splicing, he said.

The spike protein in the J&J shot was already less prone to “splicing” than the spike protein in the AstraZeneca jab, making the reaction less common, according to Marschalek. In the US, eight of the 7.4m recipients of the J&J shot have reported the rare reaction.

“[J&J] is trying to optimise its vaccine now,” he said. “With the data we have in our hands we can tell the companies how to mutate these sequences, coding for the spike protein in a way that prevents unintended splice reactions.”

Marschalek said his lab had not yet discussed its findings with AstraZeneca. “[AstraZeneca] never contacted us so we never spoke to them, but if they do I can tell them what to do to make a better vaccine,” he said.

J&J said: “We are supporting continued research and analysis of this rare event as we work with medical experts and global health authorities. We look forward to reviewing and sharing data as it becomes available.”

AstraZeneca did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Some scientists have cautioned that Marschalek’s theory is one among many, and that further evidence is needed to substantiate his claims.

“There is evidence missing to show the causal chain from the splice?.?.?.?of the spike protein to the thrombosis events,” said Johannes Oldenburg, professor of transfusion medicine at the university of Bonn. “This is still a hypothesis that needs to be proven by experimental data.”

Marschalek said he had presented his lab’s findings to the German government’s Paul-Ehrlich Institute and to the country’s advisory body on vaccination and immunisation.

“They were surprised by our findings, because no one was thinking about the splice problem,” he said. 

https://www.ft.com/content/f76eb802-ec05-4461-9956-b250115d0577

Dominic Cummings: Seeing a former senior adviser excoriate his former administration was jaw-dropping

Regardless of how you feel about Mr Cummings, his seven hours of testimony was a remarkable foray into the pandemic response.

Sky News Beth Rigby
Political editor @BethRigby
Wednesday 26 May 2021 19:07, UK
https://news.sky.com/story/dominic-cummings-seeing-a-former-senior-adviser-excoriate-his-former-administration-was-jaw-dropping-12317692

Whether you admire or loathe Dominic Cummings, think he's credible or dishonorable, his testimony on Wednesday was remarkable.

For such a senior advisor to so openly and comprehensively try to demolish a sitting prime minister and his top team was jaw-dropping.

But put aside your feelings for the witness and his motives, what is undeniable is the impact of his testimony as he told the public they had been failed by this government. If you boil down the hours of evidence he offered, it comes down to this: "Tens of thousands of people who died didn't need to die."

There was no smoking gun in Mr Cummings' seven hours of evidence - although that may come later when he provides written evidence to back up some of his eye-popping claims to the committee. Instead the former right-hand man to Boris Johnson painted a picture of a deeply dysfunctional, chaotic government led by a prime minister ill-prepared to deal with a pandemic for which the public paid a deadly price.

He put on record what Number 10 and the prime minister have for months sought to stonewall as the government kicked the beginning of the public inquiry into the COVID pandemic into 2022.

The UK was woefully unprepared for the pandemic; failed to grasp the nettle in February and early March; came to the first lockdown too late; failed the public by releasing people into care homes without being tested; had a border policy that exacerbated difficulties in controlling the disease; was too late to lockdown in the autumn.

He also put on record that he did not think Mr Johnson was a fit and proper person to be prime minister and lead the country through this pandemic. Again the public may already have a low view of Mr Cummings after the Durham debacle, but for the person who was so closely aligned to Mr Johnson to not just publicly disavow him but also place the blame for thousands of deaths directly as this door was disturbing.

https://news.sky.com/story/dominic-cummings-seeing-a-former-senior-adviser-excoriate-his-former-administration-was-jaw-dropping-12317692

Dominic Cummings: Matt Hancock should have been sacked for lying and Boris Johnson thought COVID was a scare story, PM's former adviser claims

He says the government’s response to the COVID outbreak last year "fell disastrously short of standards required by the public".

Alix Culbertson
News reporter @alixculbertson
Wednesday 26 May 2021 16:22, UK
https://news.sky.com/story/dominic-cummings-says-government-failed-public-in-early-pandemic-days-and-apologises-for-deaths-12317232

Dominic Cummings has claimed that the health secretary should have been sacked for lying, and that Boris Johnson thought COVID was a "scare story" like swine flu in the early days of the pandemic.

In an explosive Commons hearing on coronavirus, the PM's former chief adviser has told MPs the government failed the public in the early months of 2020.

Explaining why Mr Johnson did not attend the COBRA meetings at the start of last year, he said: "The prime minister described it as the new swine flu, I certainly told him it wasn't.

"The view from No 10 was if the PM chairs COBRA and says it's just swine flu that would not help."

We're absolutely f****d': Dominic Cummings' key claims
https://news.sky.com/story/there-was-no-plan-cummingss-key-claims-on-early-pandemic-strategy-12317238

He added that the PM wanted to be injected with the coronavirus live on TV by chief medical officer Chris Whitty to show it was not harmful.

Lashing out at Matt Hancock, Mr Cummings claimed that he, the cabinet secretary and other senior officials called for the PM to fire the health secretary for "at least 15-20 things, including lying".

Mr Cummings said the PM "was close" to firing Mr Hancock in April 2020 "but wouldn't do it".

He added that Mr Hancock took too long to get test and trace set up and told the PM: "If we don't fire the secretary of state and we don't get testing into someone's hands, we are going to kill lots of people."

The PM's former chief aide also said:

• It is "crackers" that people like Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn were the only two options at the last general election

• Chancellor Rishi Sunak supported locking down (and never threatened to quit over the second lockdown), it was the PM who did not think the pandemic "was the big danger"

• "It is crazy I should have been in such a senior position, I'm not smart, I've not built great things in the world - neither is the PM" - and he said he and the PM let down brilliant junior colleagues

• Plan A was herd immunity by September after one peak but after it was modelled 260,000 would die, or more, that was changed

• There was no plan for financial help for people and the Chancellor and his team had to create the whole scheme in a few days

• There was no plan for shielding in the pandemic plan but some "brilliant" officials in the Department of Health hacked together a plan in two all-nighters

• "Groupthink" prevented ministers and officials from realising how severe the situation was going to get

• When the PM got COVID, Mr Cummings said: "In lots of ways, the whole core of government fundamentally fell apart."

•There were claims it would be "racist" to close the borders because it would be tantamount to "blaming China"

• On telling the PM he was going to resign in December 2020, Mr Cummings claimed the PM told him: "You're right, I am more frightened of you having the power to stop the chaos than I am of the chaos, chaos isn't that bad because chaos means that everyone has to look to me to see who's in charge."

• On Mr Hancock saying people would be tested before they returned to care homes and there was a shield around care homes, Mr Cummings said he lied and said: "Quite the opposite, complete nonsense - we sent people with COVID back to care homes"

• On whether or not to sack Mr Hancock, Mr Cummings said the PM was told: "Don't sack him now, he's the person you sack when the inquiry comes along."

• He would rate the government's response: "Some individual brilliant responses - overall system, total failure."

• He did not quit when he considered doing so in the summer because people urged him not to and: "Fundamentally I regarded [Johnson] unfit for the job and I was trying to create a structure around him to stop extremely bad decisions."

• He made the trip to Durham to get his family out of London following death threats and a gang outside his house where his wife and son, aged three, were threatening them

• He said it was logical at the time to go for a 30 mile drive to Barnard Castle to see if he could cope with driving 300 miles to Westminster, and had been writing his will in bed a few days before because he thought he was going to die.

"I wish I'd never heard of Barnard Castle and I'd never have gone, and I can only apologise," he added

• "Tens of thousands of people died who didn't need to die."

• Patrick Vallance was instrumental in getting the early vaccine contracts and "deserves absolutely enormous credit for his role in the vaccine taskforce"

• After March, the PM thought the UK should not have gone into lockdown and should have focused on the economy - "I thought that perspective was completely mad".

• Mr Cummings said: "Fundamentally the prime minister and I do not agree about COVID. I had very little influence on COVID stuff, I mean I tried, I made arguments, but as you can see on pretty much all the major arguments basically lost."

• He said he heard the PM say he would rather see "bodies pile high" than go into a third lockdown

• Asked if he is surprised about the chaos over the current travel traffic light system, he said: "No, it's deja vu all over again."

• His departure was inevitable in September, but Mr Cummings' girlfriend Carrie Symonds was something to do with it as she tried to change "a whole bunch of different appointments", was appointing her friends to jobs, was overturning the hiring process of one job, which was "unethical and clearly illegal". The PM's behaviour was "appalling", he said https://news.sky.com/story/cummings-says-resignation-linked-to-illegal-moves-by-carrie-symonds-to-appoint-friends-to-jobs-12317616

• Asked if he thinks the PM is a fit and proper person to get us through the pandemic, Mr Cummings said: "No."

At the start of the session, Mr Cummings said the government failed the public when they needed them most and apologised to the families of those who died in the early days of the pandemic.

Taking some of the blame himself, he said: "The truth is, senior minister, officials, advisers like me fell disastrously short of standards required by the public.

"When the public needed us the most, the government failed. I want to apologise to all those families who had people that died.

"I did think oh my god, is this what people have been warning about all this time?

"However, PHE, WHO, CDC, organisations across the western world were not ringing the alarm bells about it then.

"In retrospect, it's completely obvious that many institutions failed."

https://news.sky.com/story/dominic-cummings-says-government-failed-public-in-early-pandemic-days-and-apologises-for-deaths-12317232

New grand jury seated for next stage of Trump investigation

By MICHAEL R. SISAK
today
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-trump-investigations-business-government-and-politics-80592eae7ba9ca508a3161e085a0fec6?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=May26_Morning_Wire&utm_term=Morning%20Wire%20Subscribers

NEW YORK (AP) — New York prosecutors have convened a special grand jury to consider evidence in a criminal investigation into former President Donald Trump’s business dealings, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

The development signals that the Manhattan district attorney’s office was moving toward seeking charges as a result of its two-year investigation, which included a lengthy legal battle to obtain Trump’s tax records.

The person familiar with the matter was not authorized to speak publicly and did so on condition of anonymity. The news was first reported by The Washington Post.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is conducting a wide-ranging investigation into a variety of matters such as hush-money payments paid to women on Trump’s behalf, property valuations and employee compensation.

The Democratic prosecutor has been using an investigative grand jury through the course of his probe to issue subpoenas and obtain documents. That panel kept working while other grand juries and court activities were shut down because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The investigation includes scrutiny of Trump’s relationship with his lenders; a land donation he made to qualify for an income tax deduction; and tax write-offs his company claimed on millions of dollars in consulting fees it paid.

The new grand jury could eventually be asked to consider returning indictments. While working on that case, it also will be hearing other matters. The Post reported that the grand jury will meet three days a week for six months.

Trump contends the investigation is a “witch hunt.”

“This is purely political, and an affront to the almost 75 million voters who supported me in the Presidential Election, and it’s being driven by highly partisan Democrat prosecutors,” Trump said in a statement.

Vance’s office declined to comment.

The new grand jury is the latest sign of increasing momentum in the criminal investigation into the Republican ex-president and his company, the Trump Organization.

Attorney General Letitia James said last week that she assigned two lawyers to work with Vance’s office on the probe after her civil investigation into Trump evolved into a criminal matter.

James, a Democrat, said her office also is continuing its civil investigation into Trump. She did not say what prompted her office to expand its investigation into a criminal probe.

In recent months, Vance hired former mafia prosecutor Mark Pomerantz to help run the investigation and has been interviewing witnesses, including Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

Vance declined to run for reelection and will leave office at the end of the year, meaning the Trump case is likely to pass to his successor in some form. An election next month is all but certain to determine who that will be.

Trump said in a statement last week that he’s being “unfairly attacked and abused by a corrupt political system.” He contends the investigations are part of a Democratic plot to silence his voters and block him from running for president again.

In February, the U.S. Supreme Court buoyed Vance’s investigation by clearing the way for the prosecutor to enforce a subpoena on Trump’s accounting firm and obtain eight years of tax returns and related documents for the former president, the Trump Organization and other Trump entities.

The documents are protected by grand jury secrecy rules and are not expected to be made public.

Vance’s investigation has appeared to focus in recent weeks on Trump’s longtime finance chief, Allen Weisselberg. His former daughter-in-law, Jen Weisselberg, is cooperating with both inquiries.

She’s given investigators reams of tax records and other documents as they look into whether some Trump employees were given off-the-books compensation, such as apartments or school tuition.

Allen Weisselberg was subpoenaed in James’ civil investigation and testified twice last year. His lawyer declined to comment when asked Tuesday if he had been subpoenaed to testify before the new grand jury.

A message seeking comment was left with Jen Weisselberg’s lawyer.

___

Follow Michael Sisak on Twitter at twitter.com/mikesisak

https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-trump-investigations-business-government-and-politics-80592eae7ba9ca508a3161e085a0fec6?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=May26_Morning_Wire&utm_term=Morning%20Wire%20Subscribers

England’s NHS plans to share patient records with third parties

55m patients have until June 23 to opt out of having their health data scraped into a new database

Madhumita Murgia in London 3 HOURS AGO
https://www.ft.com/content/9fee812f-6975-49ce-915c-aeb25d3dd748

England’s NHS is preparing to scrape the medical histories of 55m patients, including sensitive information on mental and sexual health, criminal records and abuse, into a database it will share with third parties.

The data collection project, which is the first of its kind, has caused an uproar among privacy campaigners, who say it is “legally problematic”, especially as patients only have a few weeks to opt out of the plan.

NHS Digital, which runs the health service’s IT systems, confirmed the plan to pool together medical records from every patient in England who is registered with a GP clinic into a single lake that will be available to academic and commercial third parties for research and planning purposes.

Cori Crider, co-founder of Foxglove, a campaign group for digital rights, said: “We all want to see the NHS come out of the pandemic stronger” but noted that the NHS had been “completely silent” on who would have access to the data.

“Is it pharma companies? The health arm of Google Deepmind? If you ask patients whether they want details of their fertility treatment or abortion, or results of their colonoscopy shared with [those companies], they’re not going to want that,” she said.

Foxglove has issued a legal letter to the Department of Health and Social Care, questioning the lawfulness of the plans under current data protection laws, and threatening further legal action.

Rosa Curling, a solicitor at Foxglove, wrote in the letter that she had “serious concerns” about the legality of the move because no explicit consent had been given and “very few members of the public will be aware that the new processing is imminent, directly affecting their personal medical data”.

Patients have until June 23 to opt out by filling in a form and taking it to their GP before their historical records will become a permanent and irreversible part of the new data set. Patients who opt out after the deadline can stop future data from being funnelled into the new system.

The plan to create a new data set was announced by Matt Hancock, health secretary, in early April and publicised mainly on blogs on the NHS Digital website, and through flyers at GP surgeries, said NHS Digital, which added that the plans had been in the works for three years.

But Phil Booth, founder of advocacy group MedConfidential, said: “They’re trying to sneak it out, they are giving you six weeks nominally and if you do not act based on web pages on the NHS digital site and some YouTube videos and a few tweets, your entire GP history could have been scraped, never to be deleted.”

He added that the NHS had “opaque” commercial relationships, often through middlemen, and that it would be difficult to trace who ultimately sees the data. NHS Digital says on its website that it publishes a monthly register of who it has released data to, and whether the data is anonymised or not.

Data that directly identifies patients will be replaced with unique codes in the new data set, but the NHS will hold the keys to unlock the codes “in certain circumstances, and where there is a valid legal reason”, according to its website.

NHS Digital said the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK’s data regulator, had not objected to its plans, and that it was in the process of delivering a data protection impact assessment.

The plan comes following an attempt in 2013 to extract GP records into a central database, called the Care.data programme, which was abandoned in 2016 after complaints about confidentiality and commercial use.


https://www.ft.com/content/9fee812f-6975-49ce-915c-aeb25d3dd748

US got ex-Ukrainian officials' data in Giuliani probe

By Larry Neumeister?|?AP
May 26, 2021 at 1:04 a.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/lawyer-us-got-ex-ukranian-officials-data-in-giuliani-probe/2021/05/25/b9030d9c-bd94-11eb-922a-c40c9774bc48_story.html

NEW YORK — U.S. prosecutors in 2019 sought the electronic messages of two ex-Ukrainian government officials and a Ukrainian businessman as part of their probe of Rudy Giuliani’s dealings in that country, a lawyer accidentally revealed in a court filing Tuesday.

The filing said federal prosecutors in New York had informed defense lawyers that the seized communications included an email account believed to belong to the former prosecutor general of Ukraine, Yuriy Lutsenko.

It said prosecutors accessed Lutsenko’s account around the same time that investigators also got access to Giuliani’s Apple iCloud account.

Lutsenko was a key figure in Giuliani’s efforts to press Ukraine for an investigation into then-presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

The two have both said in interviews that they met to discuss both the possibility of Ukraine launching an investigation of Hunter Biden’s job with a Ukrainian gas company and Lutsenko’s desire to meet with the U.S. attorney general to discuss efforts to recover looted national assets.

Lutsenko also spoke with Giuliani about his clashes with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who the Trump administration later removed.

The filing said prosecutors had also seized an email account believed to belong to the former head of the Ukrainian Fiscal Service, Roman Nasirov, in December, 2019, and the iPhone and iPad of Ukrainian businessman Alexander Levin in February and March 2020.

The identities of the individuals were in a submission in Manhattan federal court filed by a lawyer representing Lev Parnas, an associate of Giuliani who was charged in 2019 with scheming to make illegal campaign contributions.

The names were redacted in the document but could be viewed when copied into a separate document. CNN was the first to report the faulty redactions and the details on what the document contained.

The document also said prosecutors had obtained “historical and prospective cell site information” related to Giuliani and Washington lawyer Victoria Toensing, a former federal prosecutor and close ally of Giuliani and former President Donald Trump. Her law firm has said she was informed that she is not a target of the investigation.

Prosecutors are examining Giuliani’s ties to Ukraine and whether he violated a federal law that governs lobbying on behalf of foreign countries or entities. No charges have been filed.

Giuliani has insisted that his activities in Ukraine were conducted on behalf of Trump, not any foreign entity or person.

Last week, prosecutors revealed they had seized 18 electronic devices during raids on Giuliani’s home and his law firm several weeks ago and a cell phone from Toensing. They also say they obtained email and Apple iCloud accounts of Giuliani and Toensing in 2019.

Prosecutors said investigators had successfully downloaded 11 devices belonging to Giuliani and returned them to him. They said they need to obtain passcodes or unlock seven other devices belonging to Giuliani or employees of his business.

Lawyers for Giuliani have challenged last month’s raids on the grounds that anything gathered from the 2019 search warrants was illegally obtained because investigators improperly intruded on private communications with the president during their secret inquiry.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/lawyer-us-got-ex-ukranian-officials-data-in-giuliani-probe/2021/05/25/b9030d9c-bd94-11eb-922a-c40c9774bc48_story.html

Prosecutor in Trump criminal probe convenes grand jury to hear evidence, weigh potential charges

By Shayna Jacobs and David A. Fahrenthold
May 26, 2021 at 1:52 a.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-investigation-grand-jury/2021/05/25/5f47911c-bcca-11eb-83e3-0ca705a96ba4_story.html

NEW YORK — Manhattan's district attorney has convened the grand jury that is expected to decide whether to indict former president Donald Trump, other executives at his company or the business itself, should prosecutors present the panel with criminal charges, according to two people familiar with the development.

The panel was convened recently and will sit three days a week for six months. It is likely to hear several matters — not just the Trump case ­— during its term, which is longer than a traditional New York state grand-jury assignment, these people said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. Generally, special grand juries such as this are convened to participate in long-term matters rather than to hear evidence of crimes charged routinely.

The move indicates that District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.’s investigation of the former president and his business has reached an advanced stage after more than two years. It suggests, too, that Vance thinks he has found evidence of a crime — if not by Trump, by someone potentially close to him or by his company.

Vance’s investigation is expansive, according to people familiar with the probe and public disclosures made during related litigation. His investigators are scrutinizing Trump’s business practices before he was president, including whether the value of specific properties in the Trump Organization’s real estate portfolio were manipulated in a way that defrauded banks and insurance companies, and if any tax benefits were obtained illegally through unscrupulous asset valuation.

The district attorney also is examining the compensation provided to top Trump Organization executives, people familiar with the matter have said.

In a statement issued Tuesday evening, Trump called the seating of the grand jury “a continuation of the greatest Witch Hunt in American history.”

“This is purely political, and an affront to the almost 75 million voters who supported me in the Presidential Election, and it’s being driven by highly partisan Democrat prosecutors,” Trump said. “Our Country is broken, our elections are rigged, corrupt, and stolen, our prosecutors are politicized, and I will just have to keep on fighting like I have been for the last five years!”

A spokesman for Vance (D) declined to comment.

Although grand juries with extended terms can hear cases out of order and to varying levels of completion, it is likely that Trump-related testimony in the secret proceeding has already begun, said one of the people familiar with the matter.

Adam S. Miller, who served as deputy bureau chief of the Major Economic Crimes Bureau in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office before entering private practice in 2011, said such a “special grand jury” is “certainly not an uncommon thing to do with a large, technical and complicated investigation.”

“It’s really for very complicated cases that have a lot of information for a grand jury to digest,” Miller said, noting that a special grand jury’s term can be extended with a judge’s approval.

It is unclear whether prosecutors working under Vance intend to go through the entirety of their grand-jury presentation at once or if the proceeding may be interrupted for the panel to review other cases between hearing from witnesses about the Trump Organization and its business dealings.

It is also unclear when or even whether the grand jury will be asked to consider returning any indictments. Prosecutors handling cases such as this one can choose to present charges for the grand jury to consider — or not. A prosecutor’s grand-jury strategy is often a closely kept secret and can be subject to change.

Rebecca Roiphe, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan who is now a professor at New York Law School, said that such investigations are always formally overseen by grand juries. In the early stages, prosecutors may use a grand jury’s power just to subpoena documents without offering charges for consideration.

Roiphe said the recent step of seating a long-term panel shows that Vance’s investigation has progressed to the point that prosecutors will visit the grand jury, present evidence and witnesses, and potentially ask that charges be considered. Prosecutors were unlikely to take that step without believing they had evidence to show there was probable cause to believe someone had committed a crime, she said.

“The prosecutors are convinced they have a case. That’s at least how I read it,” Roiphe added.

Trump is facing two investigations of his business practices in New York. Both appear to have begun with the same man: Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer and attack dog, who turned on Trump after pleading guilty to making hush-money payoffs on Trump’s behalf and lying to Congress.

Vance’s criminal investigation began in 2018, after Cohen pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the hush-money payoffs, made in the last days of the 2016 campaign to women who said they had affairs with Trump years earlier — allegations the former president denies. Vance’s investigation soon expanded, as the district attorney sought to examine millions of pages of Trump’s tax records.

Separately, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) began a civil investigation of the Trump Organization in 2019 prompted by Cohen’s testimony to Congress, where he said Trump had misled lenders and tax authorities with manipulated valuations of his assets. Asset values were inflated at times when the company was seeking favorable loan interest rates and were deflated to reduce tax liability, Cohen has alleged. He has been interviewed extensively by Vance’s team, which has added a decorated former federal prosecutor, Mark F. Pomerantz, to help with the Trump case.

In recent months, the two investigations have appeared to converge. Both sets of investigators have sought documents related to a Trump estate in suburban New York, according to court records and people familiar with the efforts, where the then-future president obtained a $21?million tax break by agreeing to give up development rights, and a tower in Chicago where Trump’s lenders forgave $100?million of debt.

Another sign of convergence: James’s office said last week that its long-running civil probe had also spawned a criminal investigation, now being run in coordination with Vance.

The state attorney general’s office did not explain what inspired the criminal inquiry, but veterans of the office said such shifts often are triggered by evidence that indicates a defendant intended to break the law.

Trump has attacked both investigations, pointing to comments by James during her 2018 election campaign in which she called him an “illegitimate president” and promised to investigate his family business. Trump has never been criminally charged. No former U.S. president has ever been charged with a crime.

The Washington Post previously reported that Vance’s office has been trying to pressure the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, into cooperating against his boss, a person familiar with the strategy confirmed. Weisselberg is said to know the ins and outs of every business transaction at the company over the course of his decades in employment there.

A lawyer for Weisselberg declined to comment when reached Tuesday.


Fahrenthold reported from Washington. Jonathan O’Connell in Washington contributed to this report.


By Shayna Jacobs
Shayna Jacobs is a federal courts and law enforcement reporter on the national security team at The Washington Post, where she covers the Southern and Eastern districts of New York. Twitter

By David Fahrenthold
David A. Fahrenthold is a reporter covering the Trump family and its business interests. He has been at The Washington Post since 2000, and previously covered Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the environment and the D.C. police. Twitter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-investigation-grand-jury/2021/05/25/5f47911c-bcca-11eb-83e3-0ca705a96ba4_story.html

Cummings lashes out at government denials on COVID 'herd immunity' hours before he faces MPs

Tom Rayner, digital politics editor 1 hour ago
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/cummings-lashes-out-at-government-denials-on-covid-herd-immunity-hours-before-he-faces-mps/ar-AAKn81B

Dominic Cummings says PM had no plan to protect vulnerable people from…
Actors you've probably never seen young

Dominic Cummings says the government's strategy in the initial phase of the pandemic was based on an "assumption" the spread of COVID-19 was inevitable and could not be contained by restrictions.

It comes on the eve of what is expected to be a dramatic and lengthy appearance in front of a joint inquiry by the health and science select committees into what lessons can be drawn from the handling of COVID-19.

Downing Street is braced for a slew of potentially damaging accusations to be made by the man who was once the prime minister’s most senior adviser, but has since become one of the most vocal critics of Boris Johnson, his government and its institutions.

In the 60th post in an on-going Twitter thread started last week, Mr Cummings included a screenshot from a document he described as the "official pandemic preparation plan" from the initial phase of the COVID outbreak in the UK.

He said it "spelled out explicitly" that the strategy in February and March last year was to avoid the risk of a second peak in the winter by achieving "herd immunity" via a single wave of infections by September 2020.

The document sets out that vaccines, which provide the only way to achieve herd immunity without infections, were unlikely to be available from manufacturers until later that autumn.

He highlights a passage from the document which says "the expectation must be that the virus will inevitably spread and that any local measures taken to disrupt or reduce the spread are likely to have very limited or partial success at a national level and cannot be relied on as a way to 'buy time'".

In his tweet, Mr Cummings said: "When crisis hit, this assumption governed thinking."

Boris Johnson's official spokesman has said "herd immunity from infection has never been government policy".

Government sources have suggested Mr Cummings is attempting to distance himself from decisions taken at a point when he wielded enormous influence at the heart of Downing Street.

It is expected that many of the 20 MPs who will be given the opportunity to question the former adviser during the session will challenge him on his recollection of events and the extent to which he takes any personal responsibility.

Mr Cummings, who a year ago gained public notoriety for his own lockdown-breaking trip to Barnard Castle, has repeatedly suggested in recent days that the government's failure to lockdown sooner cost thousands of lives.

He has claimed to have "the only copy of a crucial historical document" related to the early phase of the pandemic; described the government's border policy as "a joke" and argued greater transparency would have exposed government errors earlier.

A post at the weekend claimed it was not until the week starting 9 March that Health Secretary Matt Hancock and officials in the Cabinet Office "understood herd immunity effects", suggesting the strategy would lead to "100s of 1000s choking to death + no NHS for *anybody* for months + dead unburied + econ[omic] implosion; so we moved to Plan B".

In a previous select committee appearance, he described the Department of Health and Social Care as "a smoking ruin" in relation to its handling of PPE procurement during the first few months of the crisis.

In an indication he intends to continue to pile pressure on the health secretary, Mr Cummings posted further social media criticism of his department on Tuesday afternoon.

In it he said "one of the worst failings in Feb/March, less discussed than lockdown, was the almost total absence of a serious plan for shielding/social care. As in general, there was widespread delusion we HAD a great plan. It turned out to barely exist".

He went on: "the official plan was 'don't put a helpline number on the shielding letters because we haven't sorted out the helplines'".

Dominic Cummings was brought into Downing Street by Boris Johnson when he became leader of the Conservative Party in 2019.

The former campaign director for Vote Leave during the Brexit referendum in 2016 had previously served as a special adviser to Michael Gove during David Cameron’s premiership.

Mr Cummings was sacked on the orders of the former prime minister for briefing against the government. Mr Cameron is reported to have described Mr Cummings as a "career psychopath".

Throughout his time advising Mr Johnson he made no secret of his hostility towards the civil service and MPs who were opposed to Brexit.

He was ousted from Downing Street in November 2020 after months of feuding with allies of the prime minister's fiancee Carrie Symonds - famously walking out of the front door of Number 10 clutching a single cardboard box of his belongings.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/cummings-lashes-out-at-government-denials-on-covid-herd-immunity-hours-before-he-faces-mps/ar-AAKn81B

The graphic video of Ronald Greene’s death shows — again — the urgent need for police reform

Opinion by the Editorial Board
May 25, 2021 at 7:27 p.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-graphic-video-of-ronald-greenes-death-shows--again--the-urgent-need-for-police-reform/2021/05/25/139589d8-bcd2-11eb-b26e-53663e6be6ff_story.html

RELATIVES OF Ronald Greene said authorities initially told them he died on impact after he failed to pull over for a traffic violation, was chased by Louisiana state troopers and crashed his vehicle into a tree shortly after midnight on May 10, 2019. A one-page statement later issued by police said he was taken into custody after struggling with troopers, became unresponsive and died on the way to the hospital. We now know, thanks to body cam footage obtained by the Associated Press, that there is far more — horrifyingly more — to the story of how this 49-year-old Black man died. And once again, troubling questions are raised about the conduct, character and credibility of police that underscore the need for reform.

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry. I’m scared. Officer, I’m scared, I’m your brother, I’m scared,” Greene can be heard telling the White troopers as he is subjected to agonizing and brutalizing treatment. He was repeatedly jolted with a stun gun, wrestled to the ground, put in a chokehold, punched in the face and dragged by shackles on his ankles as he lay on the ground. He was left unattended, handcuffed and prone for several minutes — a practice that use-of-force experts deem as dangerous. According to the autopsy, he died due to “cocaine induced agitated delirium complicated by motor vehicle collision, physical struggle, inflicted head injury, and restraint.” But no manner of death was specified and, according to the AP, police withheld basic documents from the coroner. “Does not add up,” was the judgment of the emergency room doctor who questioned the initial account that Greene had died on impact as result of a car crash.

The shifting stories and secrecy smack of a coverup. State Police at one point argued the use of force was justified — “awful but lawful” — and did not open an administrative investigation until 474 days after Greene’s death. Troopers so far have faced limited repercussions: The officer who dragged Greene by his ankles was given a 50-hour suspension and returned to active duty. A federal investigation is now underway that could hold law enforcement accountable. The family has also filed a wrongful-death suit.

Greene’s death came a year before that of George Floyd and the release of the video footage coincided with the first anniversary of Floyd’s murder, a case that put an international spotlight on the police brutality that has long victimized Black people. It’s impossible to watch the graphic video of Greene pleading to police and not think of Floyd crying for help under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. How many other cases are there of Black people needlessly killed by police where no video exists that would undermine the official police accounts?

In the wake of Floyd’s death, there has been some modest police reforms on the state and local levels, but federal legislation has stalled in the Senate over disagreement about eliminating the qualified immunity that shields police officers. “I beat the ever-living f--- out of him,” one trooper said of Ronald Greene in chatter picked up on his body-camera mic.

The system is broken, and it is time to fix it so that the people who need protection get it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-graphic-video-of-ronald-greenes-death-shows--again--the-urgent-need-for-police-reform/2021/05/25/139589d8-bcd2-11eb-b26e-53663e6be6ff_story.html

There is a pending lawsuit and ongoing discussions about how and whether to compensate the families of the Tulsa Massacre victims. No compensation has ever been paid under court order or by legislation.

To this day, not one person has been prosecuted or punished for the devastation and ruin of the original Greenwood.


The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 killed hundreds of residents, burned more than 1,250 homes and erased years of Black success.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/24/us/tulsa-race-massacre.html

Capitol riot suspect drove to Ted Cruz’s house with truck of molotov cocktails to befriend him before 6 January

Man with stockpile of napalm tried to meet Ted Cruz before coming to capital before President Joe Biden certification vote

Clara Hill @clara_ish
5 hours ago
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/capitol-riot-ted-cruz-molotov-cocktail-b1853409.html

A federal judge ruled that an Alabama man must remain in police custody after it was revealed he intended to make contact with Senator Ted Cruz before the deadly Capitol riot.

Lonnie Coffman, 70, is currently being indicted on 17 counts following the attack on the Capitol on 6 January. He was arrested mere hours afterwards. The resident of Falkville pleaded not guilty on all counts.

However, despite this, “the record evidence strongly indicates that Mr Coffman ‘engaged in prior planning before arriving at the Capitol’ and ‘came to Washington, DC with the intention of causing mayhem and disrupting the democratic process,” the ruling read.

In light of all the evidence, and Mr Coffman being deemed a flight risk, he was not permitted to be freed until his later trial date.

“The court finds by a preponderance of the evidence, that no condition or combination of conditions will reasonably assure Mr Coffman’s appearance as required if he were to be released pending trial,” District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kennedy concluded.

As made clear by documents published on Monday, he had driven to Washington, DC once before on 11 December 2020, information confirmed via a GPS tracking device. On this trip, he went to Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s home in the capital. After knocking on the door and not managing to get in contact with Sen. Cruz, he called his office to try to arrange a meeting.

A member of Sen. Cruz’s staff told investigators that Mr Coffman appeared “unbalanced” and “not 100 per cent there” when they spoke. They did not perceive him to be a danger, but was “odd enough to record” and Mr Coffman seemed keen to “help with the election fraud he saw”.

Senator Cruz is a significant voice in the Republican movement named ‘Stop the Steal’, peddling the unverified claims that the 2020 Presidential election was awash with widespread voter fraud. Before the riot at the Capitol building, he was a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump’s various lawsuits battling the verdict, despite their lack of evidence. Currently, there are still recounts of mail-in ballots taking place in counties in Arizona and Georgia.

Other figures in this movement include Senator Josh Hawley, who came under fire for gesturing in support of the crowd opposing the certification of President Joe Biden and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has prior links to QAnon and has been removed from her sub-committee duties for her conduct as a member of Congress.

It is believed that Mr Coffman was living in his truck for a week in the Washington, DC area. Video captured the truck parked outside the National Republican Club, which is near the Democratic National Committee Headquarters, on 6 January.

Investigators discovered various firearms inside the truck; a 9mm handgun, a rifle, a crossbow, machetes, camouflage smoke devices, a stun gun and various refill ammunition.

Most notably, there were 11 jars with what authorities deemed to be homemade napalm. At his Alabama home, more of this substance was uncovered in a search by authorities on 26 January. This was alongside a variety of other firearms and literature related to the Southwest Desert Militia, a group dedicated to monitoring and stopping Mexican border crossings.

Also, they uncovered a list that suggested a plan with instructions such as “use White Pages to identify people” and descriptions of people such as “Billionaire leftist traitor” and “G.E,. Obama lapdog”.

Mr Coffman is a twice serving Vietnam war veteran, who reportedly had a history of erratic behaviour, leaving for days on end and “was very closed-mouth about what he did”. According to what was told to the authorities in an interview, he spoke about coping with mental difficulties and “became a hermit after he separated from his wife”.

Previous people involved with the insurrection have had their mental health taken into account by judges, such as Jake Angeli, better known as the ‘QAnon Shaman’, and Landon Copeland, who both were referred for mental health assessments before further court dates.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/capitol-riot-ted-cruz-molotov-cocktail-b1853409.html

China will likely ban all bitcoin mining soon

Country’s top financial regulator homes in on the source.

TIM DE CHANT - 5/24/2021, 5:12 PM
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/china-advances-its-war-on-bitcoin-cracks-down-on-mining/#htg=853327

Bitcoin took investors on another rollercoaster ride over the weekend after a top regulator in China announced a crackdown on mining, a new tack in the country’s ongoing fight against the cryptocurrency.

The government will “crack down on bitcoin mining and trading behavior and resolutely prevent the transfer of individual risks to the society,” said the statement, which was issued by the Financial Stability and Development Committee of the State Council, the country’s cabinet equivalent. The committee is chaired by Vice Premier Liu He, who acts as President Xi Jinping’s top representative on economic and financial matters.

“The wording of the statement did not leave much leeway for cryptocurrency mining,” Li Yi, chief research fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, told the South China Morning Post. “When all mining activities are banned in China, it will be a turning point for the fate of bitcoin, as a large chunk of its processing power is taken out of the picture.”

The Chinese government isn’t just worried about financial stability, either. A commentary piece in Xinhua News, the Communist Party’s official media outlet, elaborated on the government’s stance, voicing concerns about bitcoin’s role in money laundering, drug trafficking, and smuggling. It also mentioned bitcoin’s profligate energy use. Last week, China warned financial institutions not to participate in crypto-transactions or related servic

China isn’t the only country concerned about the role of bitcoin and other cryptocurrency in illegal activities. Late last week, the US Treasury Department announced that businesses must report cryptocurrency transactions greater than $10,000 to the Internal Revenue Service. “Cryptocurrency already poses a significant detection problem by facilitating illegal activity broadly including tax evasion,” the Treasury Department said. And earlier this month, news leaked that three US agencies, including the IRS, the Department of Justice, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, were investigating crypto-exchange Binance for potential criminal violations. A significant portion of illicit bitcoin makes its way through the Binance exchange, according to a 2020 report by Chainalysis.

China’s hardening stance toward bitcoin comes as the highest-valued cryptocurrency is under increasing scrutiny for its outsize carbon footprint. Fewer than two weeks ago, Elon Musk announced that Tesla would no longer be accepting bitcoin to buy one of its electric vehicles. When Tesla’s bitcoin purchase policy was announced, the bitcoin cost of a Model 3 produced about 400 metric tons of carbon dioxide, compared with just 8.85 metric tons to make and drive the car over its lifetime. When Musk canceled the policy—a decision apparently influenced by Ars’ coverage—the Model 3’s bitcoin carbon footprint had swelled to more than 500 metric tons. “We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions,” he wrote in a tweet.

The bitcoin network demands a staggering amount of energy. Today, it uses as much power as the Netherlands to maintain its normal operations. That load must be particularly obvious to the Chinese government, since a recent Nature Communications paper estimated that 75 percent of all bitcoin mining happens in China.

The combination of bitcoin’s high price and its tremendous energy demand has pushed miners to take extreme positions. Miners in China have flocked to provinces such as Inner Mongolia, where cheap coal power makes mining more profitable. The scale of these facilities reflects how much money investors have sunk into the projects. At least one mining facility in Inner Mongolia draws more than 50 MW. Similarly large operations are popping up in the US, too. In upstate New York, a private equity firm bought and revamped an abandoned power plant just to mine bitcoin. When its data centers are completed, mining will consume 79 percent of the power plant’s capacity, or 85 MW.

China’s warning to bitcoin miners is certain to push many operations out of the country. At least one bitcoin observer said that he anticipates miners pushed out of China will set up operations in Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan.


https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/china-advances-its-war-on-bitcoin-cracks-down-on-mining/#htg=853327

VMI is dragging its feet on unavoidable reforms to its toxic racial culture

Opinion by the Editorial Board
May 25, 2021 at 2:00 p.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/vmi-is-dragging-its-feet-on-unavoidable-reforms-to-its-toxic-racial-culture/2021/05/24/41a659f0-b8d7-11eb-96b9-e949d5397de9_story.html

THE VIRGINIA MILITARY INSTITUTE’S history of jarring racial incidents and toxic treatment of minorities has rightly made it the subject of an independent outside investigation, commissioned last fall by Gov. Ralph Northam (D), an alumnus. In the intervening months, VMI has made serious moves to overhaul its culture, leadership and symbols. At the same time, it has demonstrated — by foot-dragging, evasions and denialism — that further reforms are unavoidable and urgent.

As a public institution underwritten by taxpayers, VMI, the nation’s oldest state-supported military college, has an obligation to take seriously disturbing revelations in reporting by The Post, and in an interim report by the law firm conducting the state-ordered inquiry. There are some signs it is doing so.

In the past six months, it has replaced its long-serving superintendent — the college’s equivalent of president — with the first Black superintendent in its 182-year history, retired Army Maj. Gen. Cedric T. Wins, a VMI alumnus. It has moved to promote diversity and inclusion; removed from campus a variety of Confederate iconography, including a previously revered statue of Gen. Stonewall Jackson, who owned six enslaved people; de-emphasized the role of VMI cadets who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War Battle of New Market; added a course on the U.S. civil rights movement to the school’s core curriculum; and improved racial sensitivity training for cadets, faculty and staff.

Those steps are more than window-dressing; they represent the beginnings of a new era for a school whose hidebound traditions seemed barely cognizant of the 20th century, let alone the 21st.

Unfortunately, there is still a kicking-and-screaming aspect to VMI’s evolution, evident in the rear-guard resistance it has mounted as Barnes & Thornburg, the law firm investigating the school’s racial culture, prepares its final report. The report is expected in the coming days, and VMI seems intent on discrediting it sight unseen. That is unwise.

College officials publicly pledged their full cooperation in the report’s preparation. In the event, its cooperation has been less than complete, and tinged with attempts to meddle in the preparation of what was explicitly designed as an independent enterprise.

Initially, officials insisted that the school’s lawyers would attend the firm’s interviews with cadets and faculty, a move that would have impeded candor. After backing off that demand, the school has denounced the forthcoming report as a vehicle for hearsay. Meanwhile, several senior VMI administrators have either declined to discuss certain topics with the law firm’s investigators or refused to speak with them altogether, according to Barnes & Thornburg. Most recently, the college insisted that a final draft be submitted for its review and comment before publication — a demand that disregards the state’s mandate that the report be rigorously independent.

VMI has no business editing or negotiating the law firm’s findings, and it is foolish to mount a campaign against them before publication, which only deepens suspicions that the school is loath to make further reforms. A smarter approach would be to await the report quietly, weigh its conclusions judiciously and act on them swiftly.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/vmi-is-dragging-its-feet-on-unavoidable-reforms-to-its-toxic-racial-culture/2021/05/24/41a659f0-b8d7-11eb-96b9-e949d5397de9_story.html

House GOP leader McCarthy calls Greene’s comparison of coronavirus masking policies to the Holocaust ‘appalling’

By John Wagner
May 25, 2021 at 3:35 p.m. GMT+1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/mccarthy-greene-holocaust-tweet/2021/05/25/d77bbb50-bd5f-11eb-9c90-731aff7d9a0d_story.html

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Tuesday compared coronavirus masking policies to Nazi Germany, drawing condemnation from House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

In a morning tweet, Greene linked to a news story about a Knoxville, Tenn., grocery store at which fully vaccinated employees will have a vaccination logo displayed on their name badge and be allowed to go maskless.

“Vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s forced Jewish people to wear a gold star,” Greene wrote. “Vaccine passports & mask mandates create discrimination against unvaxxed people who trust their immune systems to a virus that is 99% survivable.”

Greene’s comments came in the wake of an uproar in recent days over her comparing the continuing coronavirus restrictions in the U.S. Capitol to what Jewish people suffered during the Holocaust.

In a statement, McCarthy said, “Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling. The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling.”

“Let me be clear: the House Republican Conference condemns this language.”

Greene has remained defiant, ignoring the earlier criticism from Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) who decried the comparison as “evil lunacy.” Her tweet Tuesday prompted a fresh round of condemnation, including from Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

“Please educate yourself so that you can realize how absolutely wrong and inappropriate it is to compare proof of vaccination with the 6million Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis,” Brooks said in a tweet directed at Greene. “You’re an embarrassment to yourself and the GOP.”

Republican leaders have been reluctant to take action against Greene.

In a recent appearance on Real America’s Voice network’s “The Water Cooler with David Brody,” a conservative show, Greene complained about the decision of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to keep a mask mandate on the House floor over concerns that many Republican lawmakers might not be vaccinated.

Cheney (R-Wyo.), who was recently ousted from Republican leadership for her criticism of former president Donald Trump’s falsehoods about the 2020 election, and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), another Trump critic, lambasted Greene.

In February, the House voted largely along party lines to remove Greene from her two committee assignments, a precedent-shattering move by Democrats to rebuke a Republican who has espoused extremist beliefs that she publicly renounced in part just hours before the vote.

As recently as last year, Greene had been an open adherent of the QAnon ideology, a sprawling and violent web of false claims that played a role in inspiring the Capitol attack. In addition, she had made comments on social media suggesting that some mass shootings were staged by supporters of gun control, that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by government forces and that a Jewish cabal had sparked a deadly wildfire with a space beam.

Earlier this month, Greene aggressively confronted Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez falsely accused her of supporting “terrorists,” leading the New York congresswoman’s office to call on leadership to ensure that Congress remains “a safe, civil place for all Members and staff.”


By John Wagner
John Wagner is a national reporter on The Post's new breaking political news team. He previously covered the Trump White House. During the 2016 presidential election, he focused on the Democratic campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley. He also chronicled Maryland government for more than a decade. Twitter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/mccarthy-greene-holocaust-tweet/2021/05/25/d77bbb50-bd5f-11eb-9c90-731aff7d9a0d_story.html

QAnon Crowd Convinced UFOs Are a Diversion From Voter Fraud

Will Sommer
Tue, 25 May 2021, 9:52 am·4-min read
https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/qanon-crowd-convinced-ufos-diversion-085213801.html

It’s never been a better time to believe in UFOs. Barack Obama talked last week about inexplicable footage of unidentified aerial phenomena, and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) wrote about his trip to Area 51 in a recent op-ed. In June, American intelligence agencies are set to release an unclassified report on what the government knows about UFOs.

For “ufologists,” long mocked as tinfoil hat-wearers obsessed with little green men, some measure of vindication may finally be at hand. But for many UFO enthusiasts on the right, this new round of UFO disclosures is nothing to cheer about. Instead, they’re claiming the new videos of possible UFO sightings are meant to distract people from Donald Trump’s baseless voter fraud allegations and conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic.

“There’s no doubt that this mainstream UFO disclosure push is offering a convenient distraction for the Deep State to turn our attention away from important issues like the Scamdemic and the election fraud getting exposed,” Jordan Sather, a UFO and QAnon conspiracy theorist, complained on social media network Telegram on May 19.

Sather, who has griped that interest in UFOs has just become a way for left-wing “social justice warriors” to “virtue signal,” typifies the response. At a moment when longtime UFO promoters are soaking in the mainstreaming of UFO discussion, many conspiracy theorists on the right instead see the sinister hand of a global cabal at play.

Conspiracy theory hub InfoWars often posts articles about UFOs. But more recently, InfoWars has started to see the prospect of extraterrestrial revelations as a deep state plot. In an April video, InfoWars staffer Greg Reese posited that the UFOs were being faked using technology from inventor Nikola Tesla and the Nazis, with the ultimate goal of faking an alien invasion to enslave humanity in “the most dire false flag imaginable.”

In QAnon-heavy language about a nefarious “cabal” and a “Great Awakening,” Reese claimed that the new UFO videos were meant to convince people, wrongly, that the aliens are real, before vaporizing much of humanity with energy weapons.

“We know the cabal has the will to do this, and it seems they have the means as well,” Reese said.

The claims that an evil cabal is behind the new wave of interest in UFOs reflects the growing overlap between the UFO “disclosure” community and other conspiracy theory movements, especially QAnon. Believing in UFOs means buying into what Syracuse University professor Michael Barkun, an expert on conspiracy theories, has dubbed “stigmatized knowledge”— embracing a universe of ideas that’s been dismissed by the mainstream. People who have already embraced one form of stigmatized knowledge often find it easy to sign on for another, according to Barkun—going from New Age healing crystals to UFOs, or from anti-vaccine activism to QAnon.

Ufologist Steven Greer, for example, has claimed that other UFO promoters were assassinated by intelligence agents to prevent them from telling the truth about UFOs. But with the prospect of some genuine disclosures in the offing, Greer has decided that whatever comes from the government now is in fact a trick meant to hide the genuine facts about UFOs.

“This is the ramping up of the false disclosure that we warned about,” Greer warned his fans in a YouTube video last week, claiming that the UFOs were wrongly being portrayed as a “national security threat.”

Sather and other QAnon conspiracy theorists who have promoted UFOs are challenged by the prospect of more widespread UFO interest, according to Travis View, the co-host of QAnon-tracking podcast “QAnon Anonymous.”

“QAnon promoters gain an audience by claiming that they have access to information that the mainstream media doesn’t,” View told The Daily Beast. “When major outlets report on their pet topic, such as UFOs, it’s actually damaging to their brand because their audience has been trained to distrust everything that comes from the mainstream media.”

The idea that UFO revelations are being used to distract people has also been embraced by white nationalists in the United States. One cartoon that’s become a popular meme on extremist Telegrams channels shows slack-jawed UFO believers excited to see aliens who urge Earthlings to unite behind a single world government. Behind the scenes, though, the cartoon reveals that the aliens are the creation of a projector operated by a man wearing a blue United Nations helmet.

The UFO-as-distraction theory has also gained more mainstream traction on the pro-Trump right. On May 19, Newsmax White House correspondent Emerald Robinson tweeted that the UFO footage was a diversion meant to draw attention away from, among other things, the controversial, Republican-led recount of presidential election ballots in Arizona’s Maricopa County.

“They want you talking about aliens because they don’t want you talking about Maricopa,” Robinson wrote. “They want you talking about UFO’s because they don’t want you talking about stagflation, the collapse of the dollar, the crisis on the border, and Biden’s mental health.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/qanon-crowd-convinced-ufos-diversion-085213801.html

Kevin McCarthy @GOPLeader · 22m Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling.

Let me be clear: the House Republican Conference condemns this language.

My full statement:

Leader McCarthy Condemns Comparisons to the Holocaust

MAY 25 2021

Washington, D.C. – House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (CA-23) released the following statement:

“Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling. The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling.

“At a time when the Jewish people face increased violence and threats, anti-Semitism is on the rise in the Democrat Party and is completely ignored by Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“Americans must stand together to defeat anti-Semitism and any attempt to diminish the history of the Holocaust.

“Let me be clear: the House Republican Conference condemns this language.”

https://republicanleader.house.gov/leader-mccarthy-condemns-comparisons-to-the-holocaust/

THREAD

Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling.

Let me be clear: the House Republican Conference condemns this language.

My full statement: https://t.co/KnliN3YbJ2

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) May 25, 2021

Maidenhead far-right sympathiser jailed for terrorism offences

Published57 minutes ago
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-berkshire-57242219

A collector of Nazi memorabilia has been jailed for possessing manuals on knife fighting and making explosives.

Police found a hoard of Nazi-era daggers, extreme literature and a framed Ku Klux Klan certificate in Nicholas Brock's bedroom in Berkshire.


Brock's bedroom contained a hoard of Nazi-era daggers

The 53-year-old was found guilty in March of three counts of possessing materials which could be of use in preparing terrorist acts.

He was jailed for four years at Kingston-upon-Thames Crown Court.

Brock's collection included a copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf manifesto and a video of a white supremacist attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, the court heard.

Prosecutors described the hoard as materials suitable for "an undergraduate degree" in the far-right.

The stash and a hard drive containing the terrorist manuals were found in 2018 at Brock's home in Maidenhead, which he shared with his mother.

'Toxic ideology'

Judge Peter Lodder QC told him: "It is clear from the wide range of other material found on your computer and your hard drive that you are a right-wing extremist.

"Your enthusiasm for this repulsive and toxic ideology is demonstrated by the graphic, racist, Islamophobic and white supremacist iconography which you have stored."

Edward Butler, defending, said there was no evidence his client intended to carry out an attack.

Brock, of Lancaster Road, previously told police he had an interest in military memorabilia which stemmed from his love of Action Man as a child.

Police said Brock was likely to have been self-radicalised through browsing online.

Det Ch Supt Kath Barnes, head of Counter Terrorism Policing South East, said: "The material Brock had in his possession is dangerous and concerning.

"He had books which would provide techniques on how to fight, assisting someone who was potentially preparing a terrorist act."

The defendant was ordered to serve another year on licence after his release from prison.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-berkshire-57242219

The fight to whitewash US history: ‘A drop of poison is all you need’

At least 15 states are trying to ban schools from teaching critical race theory and the 1619 Project. The reactionary movement stretches back to the 1920s and the KKK

by Julia Carrie Wong
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/25/critical-race-theory-us-history-1619-project

On 25 May 2020, a man died after a “medical incident during police interaction” in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The man was suspected of forgery and “believed to be in his 40s”. He “physically resisted officers” and, after being handcuffed, “appeared to be suffering medical distress”. He was taken to the hospital “where he died a short time later”.

It is not difficult to imagine a version of reality where this, the first police account of George Floyd’s brutal death beneath the knee of an implacable police officer, remained the official narrative of what took place in Minneapolis one year ago. That version of reality unfolds every day. Police lies are accepted and endorsed by the press; press accounts are accepted and believed by the public.

That something else happened – that it is now possible for a news organization to say without caveat or qualification that Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd – required herculean effort and extraordinary bravery on the part of millions of people.

The laborious project of establishing truth in the face of official lies is one that Americans embraced during the racial reckoning of the summer of 2020, whether it was individuals speaking out about their experiences of racism at work, or institutions acknowledging their own complicity in racial injustice. For a time, it seemed that America was finally ready to tell a more honest, nuanced story of itself, one that acknowledged the blood at the root.

But alongside this reassessment, another American tradition re-emerged: a reactionary movement bent on reasserting a whitewashed American myth. These reactionary forces have taken aim at efforts to tell an honest version of American history and speak openly about racism by proposing laws in statehouses across the country that would ban the teaching of “critical race theory”, the New York Times’s 1619 Project, and, euphemistically, “divisive concepts”.

The movement is characterized by a childish insistence that children should be taught a false version of the founding of the United States that better resembles a mythic virgin birth than the bloody, painful reality. It would shred the constitution’s first amendment in order to defend the honor of those who drafted its three-fifths clause.

“When you start re-examining the founding myth in light of evidence that’s been discovered in the last 20 years by historians, then that starts to make people doubt the founding myth,” said Christopher S Parker, a professor of political science at the University of Washington who studies reactionary movements. “There’s no room for racism in this myth. Anything that threatens to interrogate the myth is seen as a threat.”

Legislation seeking to limit how teachers talk about race has been considered by at least 15 states, according to an analysis by Education Week.

In Idaho, Governor Bill Little signed into law a measure banning public schools from teaching critical race theory, which it claimed will “exacerbate and inflame divisions on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or other criteria in ways contrary to the unity of the nation and the wellbeing of the state of Idaho and its citizens”. The state’s lieutenant governor, Janice McGeachin, also established a taskforce to “examine indoctrination in Idaho education and to protect our young people from the scourge of critical race theory, socialism, communism, and Marxism”.

In Tennessee, the legislature has approved a bill that would bar public schools from using instructional materials that promote certain concepts, including the idea that, “This state or the United States is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist.”

The Texas house of representatives has passed a flurry of legislation related to teaching history, including a bill that would ban any course that would “require an understanding of the 1619 Project” and a bill that would establish an “1836 Project” (a reference to the date of the founding of the republic of Texas) to “promote patriotic education”.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, in April came out in opposition to a small federal grant program (just $5.25m out of the department of education’s $73.5bn budget) supporting American history and civics education projects that, among other criteria, “incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives”.

“Families did not ask for this divisive nonsense,” McConnell wrote in a letter to the secretary of education, Miguel Cardona. “Voters did not vote for it. Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil.”

Unsurprisingly, McConnell left out a few pertinent adjectives.

“Whose children are we talking about?” asked LaGarrett King, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Education who has developed a new framework for teaching Black history. “Black parents talk to their kids about racism. Asian American parents talk to their parents about racism. Just say that you don’t want white kids to learn about racism.”

“If we understand the systemic nature of racism, then that will help us really understand our society, and hopefully improve it,” King added. “Laws like this – it’s simply that people do not want to improve society. History is about power, and these people want to continue in a system that they have enjoyed.”

While diversity training and the 1619 Project have been major targets, critical race theory has more recently become the watch word of the moral panic. Developed by Black legal scholars at Harvard in the 1980s, critical race theory is a mode of thinking that examines the ways in which racism was embedded into American law.

“Its effectiveness created a backlash,” said Keffrelyn D Brown, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education who argues that critical race theory does have a place in classrooms. Brown said that she believes students should learn about racism in school, but that teachers need tools and frameworks to make those discussions productive.

“If we are teaching this, we need to think about racism as just as robust a content area as if we were talking about discrete mathematics or the life cycle,” Brown said. “I find that critical race theory provides a really elegant and clear way for students to understand racism from an informed perspective.”

But in the hands of the American right, critical race theory has morphed into an existential threat. In early January, just five days after rightwing rioters had stormed the US capitol, the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing thinktank with close ties to the Trump administration, hosted a panel discussion about the threat of “the new intolerance” and its “grip on America”.

“Critical race theory is the complete rejection of the best ideas of the American founding. This is some dangerous, dangerous philosophical poisoning in the blood stream,” said Angela Sailor, a VP of the Heritage Foundation’s Feulner Institute and the moderator of the event.

“The rigid persistence with which believers apply this theory has made critical race theory a constant daily presence in the lives of hundreds of millions of people,” she added, in an assessment that will probably come as a surprise to hundreds of millions of people.

The Heritage Foundation has been one of the top campaigners against critical race theory, alongside the Manhattan Institute, another conservative thinktank known for promoting the “broken windows” theory of policing.

Bridging the two groups is Christopher Rufo, a documentary film-maker who has become the leading spokesperson against critical race theory on television and on Twitter. As a visiting fellow at Heritage, he produced a report arguing that critical race theory makes inequality worse, and in April the Manhattan Institute appointed him the director of a new “Initiative on Critical Race Theory”. (Rufo is also affiliated with another rightwing thinktank, the Discovery Institute, which is best known for its repeated attempts to smuggle Christian theology into US public schools under the guise of the pseudoscientific “intelligent design”.)

A host of new organizations has also sprung up to spread the fear of critical race theory far and wide. The Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (Fair) launched recently with an advisory board comprised of anti-“woke” media figures and academics. The group is so far encouraging opposition to the grant program McConnell opposed and has highlighted a legal challenge to a debt relief program for Black farmers as a “profile in courage”.

Those who take the Fair “pledge” can also join a message board where members discuss their activism against critical race theory in schools and access resources such as the guide, How to Talk to a Critical Theorist, which begins, “In many ways, Critical Theorists (or specifically Critical Race Theorists) are just like anyone.”

Parents Defending Education, another new organization, encourages parents to “expose” what’s happening in their schools and offers step-by-step instructions for parents to set up “Woke at X” Instagram accounts to document excessive “wokeness” at their children’s schools.

A new website, What Are They Learning, was set up by Daily Caller reporter Luke Rosiak to serve as a “woke-e-leaks” for parents to report incidents of teachers mentioning racism in school. “In deep-red, 78% white Indiana, state department of education tells teachers to Talk about Race in the Classroom, cites Ibram X Kendi,” reads one such report. (The actual document submitted is, in fact, titled Talking about Race in the Classroom and appears to be a copy of a webinar offering teachers advice on discussing last year’s Black Lives Matter protests with their students.)

Such initiatives and others – the Educational Liberty Alliance, Critical Race Training in Education, No Left Turn in Education – have received enthusiastic support from the rightwing media, with the New York Post, Daily Caller, Federalist, and Fox News serving up a steady stream of outrage fodder about the threat of critical race theory. Since 5 June, Fox News has mentioned “critical race theory” by name in 150 broadcasts, the Atlantic found.

For some of these groups, critical race theory is just one of many “liberal” ideas they don’t want their children to learn. No Left Turn in Education also complains about comprehensive sex education and includes a link on its website to an article suggesting that teaching children about the climate crisis is a form of indoctrination.

It’s not enough to be balanced; it’s not adequate to say that we balance out criticism of the past with praise of the past. The idea is that a drop of poison is all you need to ruin the well
- Adam Laats

For others, it seems possible that attacking critical race theory is just a smokescreen for a bog standard conservative agenda. (Toward the end of the Heritage Foundation’s January panel, the group’s director of its center for education policy told viewers that the “most important” way to fight critical race theory was to support “school choice”, a longstanding policy goal of the right.)

Whatever their motives, today’s reactionaries are picking up the mantle of generations of Americans who have fought to ensure that white children are taught a version of America’s past that is more hagiographic than historic. The echoes are so strong that Adam Laats, a Binghamton University professor who studies the history of education in the US, remarked, “It’s confusing which decade we’re in.”

In the 1920s and 1930s, reactionaries objected to textbooks that gave credence to the progressive historian Charles Beard’s argument that the founders’ motives were not strictly principled, but instead were influenced by economic self-interest, according to Seth Cotlar, a history professor at Willamette University.

In 1923, an Oregon state government controlled by members of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan enacted a law that banned the use of any textbook in schools that “speaks slightingly of the founders of the republic, or of the men who preserved the union, or which belittles or undervalues their work”. And in the 1930s, conservatives waged what Laats called a “frenzied campaign” against the textbooks of Harold Rugg, another progressive historian, that actually resulted in a book burning in Bradner, Ohio.

For those supporting the resurgent Klan, “To speak ill of a founder was akin to a kind of sacrilege,” said Cotlar.

Another battle over textbooks flared in the 1990s when Lynne Cheney launched a high-profile campaign against an effort to introduce new standards for teaching US history, which she found insufficiently “celebratory” and lacking “a tone of affirmation”. Harriet Tubman, the KKK, and McCarthyism all received too much attention, Cheney complained, and George Washington and Robert E Lee not enough.

The decades change; the fixation on maintaining a false idea of historic figures as pure founts of virtue remains. Today, the single contention in the 1619 Project that has drawn the most vociferous outrage is author Nikole Hannah-Jones’ assertion that “one of the primary reasons” colonists fought for independence was to preserve the institution of slavery. Hannah-Jones was denied tenure by the University of North Carolina’s board of trustees, which overruled the dean, faculty and university, reportedly due to political pressure from conservatives critics of the 1619 Project.

“Underlying this is the never solved dilemma about what history class is supposed to do,” said Laats. “For some people it’s supposed to be a pep talk before the game, a well of pure inspiration for young people, and I think that is why the danger seems so intense to conservatives.

“It’s not enough to be balanced; it’s not adequate to say that we balance out criticism of the past with praise of the past. The idea is that a drop of poison is all you need to ruin the well.”

Still, the fact that reactionaries are looking to legislate against certain ideas may be a sign of just how weak their own position is.

Laats suspects that the right is using “critical race theory” as a euphemism. “You can’t go to a school board and say you want to ban the idea that Black Lives Matter.”

“They’ve given up on arguing in favor of indoctrination and instead say that critical race theory is the actual indoctrination,” he said of the conservative movement. “They’ve given up on arguing in favor of racism to say that critical race theory is the real racism. This campaign against the teaching of critical race theory is scary, and it’s a sign of great strength, but it’s strength in favor of an idea that’s already lost.”

Or at least, so we hope.

Last week I called Pawel Machcewicz, a Polish historian who has been at the center of a battle in his own country between those who want to tell the truth about the past, and those who want to weaponize history for political purposes. Machcewicz was one of the historians who uncovered evidence of Polish complicity in Nazi war crimes, and as the founding director of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk, he attempted to provide an accurate account of Poland’s experience in the war. The far-right ruling party, Law and Justice, deemed the museum insufficiently patriotic and fired him. The next year, the government passed legislation to outlaw accusing Poland of complicity in Nazi war crimes.

“Democracy turned out to be very fragile,” Machcewicz said. “I knew history was important for Law and Justice, but it became a sort of obsession. I never thought that as a founding director of a museum of the second world war, I would become a public enemy.”

“You never know what price you have to pay for independent history,” he added. “I don’t think it will ever go as far in the US as Poland, but some years ago, I also felt quite secure in my country.”

Are you a teacher who has been affected by efforts to ban teaching about racism or certain aspects of US history in schools? Contact the author at julia.wong@theguardian.com.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/25/critical-race-theory-us-history-1619-project

Shepherd hailed for saving six runners in deadly China ultramarathon

Zhu Keming rescued runners during cross-country mountain race in which 21 other competitors died


Zhu Keming in the cave where he sheltered the runners. which he had previously stocked up with food and clothes for emergencies. Photograph: CNS/AFP/Getty Images

Agence France-Presse in Shanghai
Tue 25 May 2021 13.31 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/25/shepherd-hailed-for-saving-six-runners-in-deadly-china-ultramarathon

A shepherd has been hailed as a hero in China after it emerged that he saved six stricken runners during an ultramarathon in which 21 other competitors died.

Zhu Keming was trending on Weibo on Tuesday, three days after a 100km (60-mile) cross-country mountain race in the north-western province of Gansu turned deadly in freezing rain, high winds and hail.

The incident triggered outrage and mourning in China, as questions swirled over why organisers apparently ignored warnings about the incoming extreme weather.

Zhu was grazing his sheep on Saturday around lunchtime when the wind picked up, the rain came down and temperatures plunged, he told state media.

He sought refuge in a cave where he had stored clothes and food for emergencies but while inside spotted one of the race’s 172 competitors and checked to see what was wrong because he was standing still, apparently suffering cramps.

Zhu escorted the man back to the cave, massaged his freezing hands and feet, lit a fire and dried his clothes.

Four more distressed runners made it into the cave and told the shepherd others were marooned outside, some unconscious.

Zhu headed outside once more and, braving hail and freezing temperatures, reached a runner lying on the ground. He carried him towards the shelter and wrapped him in blankets, almost certainly saving his life.

“I want to say how grateful I am to the man who saved me,” the runner, Zhang Xiaotao, wrote on Weibo.

“Without him, I would have been left out there.”

Zhu has been feted in China for his selfless actions, but the shepherd told state media that he was “just an ordinary person who did a very ordinary thing”.

Zhu rescued three men and three women, but regrets that he was unable to do more to help others who reportedly succumbed to hypothermia.

“There were still some people that could not be saved,” he said. “There were two men who were lifeless and I couldn’t do anything for them. I’m sorry.”

The tragedy has thrown a renewed spotlight on the booming marathon and running industry in China, with authorities ordering organisers of events to improve safety.

According to the Paper in Shanghai, five cross-country, marathon or other running races have been cancelled at short notice.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/25/shepherd-hailed-for-saving-six-runners-in-deadly-china-ultramarathon

EU imposes new economic sanctions on Belarus over ‘hijacked’ flight

Joe Biden welcomes EU moves as father of opposition blogger Roman Protasevich says video confession appears forced

Daniel Boffey in Brussels and Andrew Roth in Moscow
Tue 25 May 2021 06.28 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/24/belarus-put-on-notice-of-sanctions-over-hijack-of-ryanair-flight

Belarus hit with sanctions as world leaders react to ‘hijacked’ flight – video report

Source: Reuters
Tue 25 May 2021 05.25 BSTLast modified on Tue 25 May 2021 08.26 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2021/may/25/belarus-hit-with-sanctions-as-world-leaders-react-to-hijacked-flight-video

Ted Cruz staffer told feds Lonnie Coffman seemed 'unbalanced" and "not 100% there" during his call to Cruz office (Senate offices receive so many phone calls, it's notable staffer recalls this call)

"wanting to help w/ election fraud"

Then there's the militia allegations ...




Scott MacFarlane
@MacFarlaneNews
Replying to
@MacFarlaneNews

Feds say they found paper in Coffman's wallet which links him to Camp Lonestar in Texas

Coffman was allegedly part of 2014 activity there "where he was armed with a crack barrel 12 gauge shotgun & a 9 mm pistol"

Feds say they then searched his home and found (more thread ...)



THREAD

Feds say they found paper in Coffman's wallet which links him to Camp Lonestar in Texas

Coffman was allegedly part of 2014 activity there "where he was armed with a crack barrel 12 gauge shotgun & a 9 mm pistol"

Feds say they then searched his home and found (more thread ...) pic.twitter.com/qmYzeVbhB8

— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) May 24, 2021

The oldest person jailed is Lonnie L. Coffman, 70, of Falkville, Ala., accused of parking a pickup truck with 11 Molotov-cocktails and five loaded weapons on Capitol Hill. He has pleaded not guilty to firearms charges.


Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews ALERT: Judge rules US Capitol riot defendant Lonnie Coffman MUST REMAIN in jail, pending trial

Coffman is the man accused of having 11 Molotov cocktails & weapons in pickup truck on Capitol Hill Jan 6

Judge's order includes series of other alarming accusations (THREAD)




11:25 PM · May 24, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD

ALERT: Judge rules US Capitol riot defendant Lonnie Coffman MUST REMAIN in jail, pending trial

Coffman is the man accused of having 11 Molotov cocktails & weapons in pickup truck on Capitol Hill Jan 6

Judge's order includes series of other alarming accusations (THREAD) pic.twitter.com/nVxqavSTCl

— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) May 24, 2021

The oldest person jailed is Lonnie L. Coffman, 70, of Falkville, Ala., accused of parking a pickup truck with 11 Molotov-cocktails and five loaded weapons on Capitol Hill. He has pleaded not guilty to firearms charges.


Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews ALERT: Judge rules US Capitol riot defendant Lonnie Coffman MUST REMAIN in jail, pending trial

Coffman is the man accused of having 11 Molotov cocktails & weapons in pickup truck on Capitol Hill Jan 6

Judge's order includes series of other alarming accusations (THREAD)




11:25 PM · May 24, 2021·Twitter Web App
THREAD

ALERT: Judge rules US Capitol riot defendant Lonnie Coffman MUST REMAIN in jail, pending trial

Coffman is the man accused of having 11 Molotov cocktails & weapons in pickup truck on Capitol Hill Jan 6

Judge's order includes series of other alarming accusations (THREAD) pic.twitter.com/nVxqavSTCl

— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) May 24, 2021