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Tag: 2020 presidential election

  • DOJ tells senators it is working to satisfy Trump and Biden document demands without harming special counsel probes | CNN Politics

    DOJ tells senators it is working to satisfy Trump and Biden document demands without harming special counsel probes | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Justice Department has told lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee that it is working to satisfy their demands for information about classified documents found at properties of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump without harming ongoing special counsel investigations into both matters, according to a new letter obtained by CNN.

    The DOJ letter, dated Saturday, responds to the committee’s August request for information about the documents recovered from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and follow-up inquiries by the panel about classified material found at the Penn Biden Center as well as Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home.

    “We are working with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to support the provision of information that will satisfy the Committee’s responsibilities without harming the ongoing Special Counsel investigations,” Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte wrote to Democratic Sen. Mark Warner and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, the Intelligence panel’s top lawmakers.

    “Although one of the Special Counsels was appointed only on January 12, prosecutors on both matters are actively working to enable sharing information with the Committee,” Uriarte said.

    The letter also notes that the DOJ “worked in good faith to schedule a briefing in September 2022,” but since that time, there have been “significant developments, including the appointment of two separate Special Counsels to handle the respective matters.”

    “The Department looks forward to continuing to engage with the Committee to meet its needs while protecting the Department’s interests,” the letter states.

    The DOJ’s response, which was also sent to the top lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee, comes with Warner and Rubio reiterating their call for department to share the classified documents obtained from the properties of Biden and Trump.

    In an interview Sunday with “Face the Nation” on CBS, Warner and Rubio objected to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s policy to withhold the documents until the special counsels handling each investigation give authorization. Warner said the DOJ policy “doesn’t hold water.”

    “Our job is to make sure there’s not an intelligence compromise, and while the Director of National Intelligence had been willing to brief us earlier, now that you’ve got the special counsel, the notion that we’re going to be left in limbo, and we can’t do our job, that just cannot stand,” the Virginia Democrat said.

    Rubio called into question the logic behind the Justice Department’s position to not share the documents with the committee, arguing that as members of the Senate Intelligence panel, it’s likely they already have the proper clearance to view the documents.

    “I don’t know how congressional oversight on the document, actually knowing what they are, in any way impedes an investigation,” the Florida Republican said. “These are probably materials we already have access to. We just don’t know which ones they are.”

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Fact check: Biden makes false and misleading claims in economic speech | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Biden makes false and misleading claims in economic speech | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden delivered a Thursday speech to hail economic progress during his administration and to attack congressional Republicans for their proposals on the economy and the social safety net.

    Some of Biden’s claims in the speech were false, misleading or lacking critical context, though others were correct. Here’s a breakdown of the 14 claims CNN fact-checked.

    Touting the bipartisan infrastructure law he signed in 2021, Biden said, “Last year, we funded 700,000 major construction projects – 700,000 all across America. From highways to airports to bridges to tunnels to broadband.”

    Facts First: Biden’s “700,000” figure is wildly inaccurate; it adds an extra two zeros to the correct figure Biden used in a speech last week and the White House has also used before: 7,000 projects. The White House acknowledged his misstatement later on Thursday by correcting the official transcript to say 7,000 rather than 700,000.

    Biden said, “Well, here’s the deal: I put a – we put a cap, and it’s now in effect – now in effect, as of January 1 – of $2,000 a year on prescription drug costs for seniors.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claims that this cap is now in effect and that it came into effect on January 1 are false. The $2,000 annual cap contained in the Inflation Reduction Act that Biden signed last year – on Medicare Part D enrollees’ out-of-pocket spending on covered prescription drugs – takes effect in 2025. The maximum may be higher than $2,000 in subsequent years, since it is tied to Medicare Part D’s per capita costs.

    Asked for comment, a White House official noted that other Inflation Reduction Act health care provisions that will save Americans money did indeed come into effect on January 1, 2023.

    – CNN’s Tami Luhby contributed to this item.

    Criticizing former President Donald Trump over his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, Biden said, “Back then, only 3.5 million people had been – even had their first vaccination, because the other guy and the other team didn’t think it mattered a whole lot.”

    Facts First: Biden is free to criticize Trump’s vaccine rollout, but his “only 3.5 million” figure is misleading at best. As of the day Trump left office in January 2021, about 19 million people had received a first shot of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to figures published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The “3.5 million” figure Biden cited is, in reality, the number of people at the time who had received two shots to complete their primary vaccination series.

    Someone could perhaps try to argue that completing a primary series is what Biden meant by “had their first vaccination” – but he used a different term, “fully vaccinated,” to refer to the roughly 230 million people in that very same group today. His contrasting language made it sound like there are 230 million people with at least two shots today versus 3.5 million people with just one shot when he took office. That isn’t true.

    Biden said Republicans want to cut taxes for billionaires, “who pay virtually only 3% of their income now – 3%, they pay.”

    Facts First: Biden’s “3%” claim is incorrect. For the second time in less than a week, Biden inaccurately described a 2021 finding from economists in his administration that the wealthiest 400 billionaire families paid an average of 8.2% of their income in federal individual income taxes between 2010 and 2018; after CNN inquired about Biden’s “3%” claim on Thursday, the White House published a corrected official transcript that uses “8%” instead. Also, it’s important to note that even that 8% number is contested, since it is an alternative calculation that includes unrealized capital gains that are not treated as taxable income under federal law.

    “Biden’s numbers are way too low,” said Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute think tank, though Gleckman also said we don’t know precisely what tax rates billionaires do pay. Gleckman wrote in an email: “In 2019, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabe Zucman estimated the top 400 households paid an average effective tax rate of about 23 percent in 2018. They got a lot of attention at the time because that rate was lower than the average rate of 24 percent for the bottom half of the income distribution. But it still was way more than 2 or 3, or even 8 percent.”

    Biden has cited the 8% statistic in various other speeches, but unlike the administration economists who came up with it, he tends not to explain that it doesn’t describe tax rates in a conventional way. And regardless, he said “3%” in this speech and “2%” in a speech last week.

    Biden cited a 2021 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy think tank that found that 55 of the country’s largest corporations had made $40 billion in profit in their previous fiscal year but not paid any federal corporate income taxes. Before touting the 15% alternative corporate minimum tax he signed into law in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, Biden said, “The days are over when corporations are paying zero in federal taxes.”

    Facts First: Biden exaggerated. The new minimum tax will reduce the number of companies that don’t pay any federal taxes, but it’s not true that the days of companies paying zero are “over.” That’s because the minimum tax, on the “book income” companies report to investors, only applies to companies with at least $1 billion in average annual income. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, only 14 of the companies on its 2021 list of 55 non-payers reported having US pre-tax income of at least $1 billion.

    In other words, there will clearly still be some large and profitable corporations paying no federal income tax even after the minimum tax takes effect this year. The exact number is not yet known.

    Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, told CNN in the fall that the new tax is “an important step forward from the status quo” and that it will raise substantial revenue, but he also said: “I wouldn’t want to assert that the minimum tax will end the phenomenon of zero-tax profitable corporations. A more accurate phrasing would be to say that the minimum tax will *help* ensure that *the most profitable* corporations pay at least some federal income tax.”

    There are lots of nuances to the tax; you can read more specifics here. Asked for comment on Thursday, a White House official told CNN: “The Inflation Reduction Act ensures the wealthiest corporations pay a 15% minimum tax, precisely the corporations the President focused on during the campaign and in office. The President’s full Made in America tax plan would ensure all corporations pay a 15% minimum tax, and the President has called on Congress to pass that plan.”

    Noting the big increase in the federal debt under Trump, Biden said that his administration has taken a “different path” and boasted: “As a result, the last two years – my administration – we cut the deficit by $1.7 trillion, the largest reduction in debt in American history.”

    Facts First: Biden’s boast leaves out important context. It is true that the federal deficit fell by a total of $1.7 trillion under Biden in the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years, including a record $1.4 trillion drop in 2022 – but it is highly questionable how much credit Biden deserves for this reduction. Biden did not mention that the primary reason the deficit fell so substantially was that it had skyrocketed to a record high under Trump in 2020 because of bipartisan emergency pandemic relief spending, then fell as expected as the spending expired as planned. Independent analysts say Biden’s own actions, including his laws and executive orders, have had the overall effect of adding to current and projected future deficits, not reducing those deficits.

    Dan White, senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics – an economics firm whose assessments Biden has repeatedly cited during his presidency – told CNN’s Matt Egan in October: “On net, the policies of the administration have increased the deficit, not reduced it.” The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, wrote in September that Biden’s actions will add more than $4.8 trillion to deficits from 2021 through 2031, or $2.5 trillion if you don’t count the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill of 2021.

    National Economic Council director Brian Deese wrote on the White House website last week that the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill “facilitated a strong economic recovery and enabled the responsible wind-down of emergency spending programs,” thereby reducing the deficit; David Kelly, chief global strategist at J.P. Morgan Funds, told Egan in October that the Biden administration does deserve credit for the recovery that has pushed the deficit downward. And Deese correctly noted that Biden’s signature legislation, last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, is expected to bring down deficits by more than $200 billion over the next decade.

    Still, the deficit-reducing impact of that one bill is expected to be swamped by the deficit-increasing impact of various additional bills and policies Biden has approved.

    Biden said, “Wages are up, and they’re growing faster than inflation. Over the past six months, inflation has gone down every month and, God willing, will continue to do that.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claim that wages are up and growing faster than inflation is true if you start the calculation seven months ago; “real” wages, which take inflation into account, started rising in mid-2022 as inflation slowed. (Biden is right that inflation has declined, on an annual basis, every month for the last six months.) However, real wages are lower today than they were both a full year ago and at the beginning of Biden’s presidency in January 2021. That’s because inflation was so high in 2021 and the beginning of 2022.

    There are various ways to measure real wages. Real average hourly earnings declined 1.7% between December 2021 and December 2022, while real average weekly earnings (which factors in the number of hours people worked) declined 3.1% over that period.

    Biden said he was disappointed that the first bill passed by the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives “added $114 billion to the deficit.”

    Facts First: Biden is correct about how the bill would affect the deficit if it became law. He accurately cited an estimate from the government’s nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

    The bill would eliminate more than $71 billion of the $80 billion in additional funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that Biden signed into law in the Inflation Reduction Act. The Congressional Budget Office found that taking away this funding – some of which the Biden administration said will go toward increased audits of high-income individuals and large corporations – would result in a loss of nearly $186 billion in government revenue between 2023 and 2032, for a net increase to the deficit of about $114 billion.

    The Republican bill has no chance of becoming law under Biden, who has vowed to veto it in the highly unlikely event it got through the Democratic-controlled Senate.

    Biden said that “MAGA Republicans” in the House “want to impose a 30 percent national sales tax on everything from food, clothing, school supplies, housing, cars – a whole deal.” He said they want to do that because “they want to eliminate the income tax system.”

    Facts First: This is a fair description of the Republicans’ “FairTax” bill. The bill would eliminate federal income taxes, plus the payroll tax, capital gains tax and estate tax, and replace it with a national sales tax. The bill describes a rate of 23% on the “gross payments” on a product or service, but when the tax rate is described in the way consumers are used to sales taxes being described, it’s actually right around 30%, as a pro-FairTax website acknowledges.

    It is not clear how much support the bill currently has among the House Republican caucus. Notably, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told CNN’s Manu Raju this week that he opposes the bill – though, while seeking right-wing votes for his bid for speaker in early January, he promised its supporters that it would be considered in committee. Biden wryly said in his speech, “The Republican speaker says he’s not so sure he’s for it.”

    Biden claimed the unemployment rate “is the lowest it’s been in 50 years.”

    Facts First: This is true. The unemployment rate was just below 3.5% in December, the lowest figure since 1969.

    The headline monthly rate, which is rounded to a single decimal place, was reported as 3.5% in December and also reported as 3.5% in three months of President Donald Trump’s tenure, in late 2019 and in early 2020. But if you look at more precise figures, December was indeed the lowest since 1969 – 3.47% – just below the figures for February 2020, January 2020 and September 2019.

    Biden said that the unemployment rates for Black and Hispanic Americans are “near record lows” and that the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is “the lowest ever recorded” and the “lowest ever in history.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claims are accurate, though it’s worth noting that the unemployment rate for people with disabilities has only been released by the government since 2008.

    The Black or African American unemployment rate was 5.7% in December, not far from the record low of 5.3% that was set in August 2019. (This data series goes back to 1972.) The rate was 9.2% in January 2021, the month Biden became president. The Hispanic or Latino unemployment rate was 4.1% in December, just above the record low of 4.0% that was set in September 2019. (This data series goes back to 1973.) The rate was 8.5% in January 2021.

    The unemployment rate for people with disabilities was 5.0% in December, the lowest since the beginning of the data series in 2008. The rate was 12.0% in January 2021.

    Biden said that fewer families are facing foreclosure than before the pandemic.

    Facts First: Biden is correct. According to a report published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, about 28,500 people had new foreclosure notations on their credit reports in the third quarter of 2022, the most recent quarter for which data is available; that was down from about 71,420 people with new foreclosure notations in the fourth quarter of 2019 and 74,860 people in the first quarter of 2020.

    Foreclosures plummeted in the second quarter of 2020 because of government moratoriums put in place because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Foreclosures spiked in 2022, relative to 2020-2021 levels, after the expiry of these moratoriums, but they remained very low by historical standards.

    Biden said, “More American families have health insurance today than any time in American history.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claim is accurate. An analysis provided to CNN by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which studies US health care, found that about 295 million US residents had health insurance in 2021, the highest on record – and Jennifer Tolbert, the foundation’s director for state health reform, told CNN this week that “I expect the number of people with insurance continued to increase in 2022.”

    Tolbert noted that the number of insured residents generally rises over time because of population growth, but she added that “it is not a given” that there will be an increase in the number of insured residents every year – the number declined slightly under Trump from 2018 to 2019, for example – and that “policy changes as well as economic factors also affect these numbers.”

    As CNN’s Tami Luhby has reported, sign-ups on the federal insurance exchange created by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, have spiked nearly 50% under Biden. Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan pandemic relief law and then the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act temporarily boosted federal premium subsidies for exchange enrollees, and the Biden administration has also taken various other steps to get people to sign up on the exchanges. In addition, enrollment in Medicaid health insurance has increased significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic, in part because of a bipartisan 2020 law that temporarily prevented people from being disenrolled from the program.

    The percentage of residents without health insurance fell to an all-time low of 8.0% in the first quarter of 2022, according to an analysis published last summer by the federal government’s Department of Health and Human Services. That meant there were 26.4 million people without health insurance, down from 48.3 million in 2010, the year Obamacare was signed into law.

    Biden said, “And over the last two years, more than 10 million people have applied to start a small business. That’s more than any two years in all of recorded American history.”

    Facts First: This is true. There were about 5.4 million business applications in 2021, the highest since 2005 (the first year for which the federal government released this data for a full year), and about 5.1 million business applications in 2022. Not every application turns into a real business, but the number of “high-propensity” business applications – those deemed to have a high likelihood of turning into a business with a payroll – also hit a record in 2021 and saw its second-highest total in 2022.

    Trump’s last full year in office, 2020, also set a then-record for total and high-propensity applications. There are various reasons for the pandemic-era boom in entrepreneurship, which began after millions of Americans lost their jobs in early 2020. Among them: some newly unemployed workers seized the moment to start their own enterprises; Americans had extra money from stimulus bills signed by Trump and Biden; interest rates were particularly low until a series of rate hikes that began in the spring of 2022.

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  • ‘Decisions are imminent’ on charges in Trump’s effort to overturn 2020 election in Georgia, Fulton County DA says | CNN Politics

    ‘Decisions are imminent’ on charges in Trump’s effort to overturn 2020 election in Georgia, Fulton County DA says | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis suggested Tuesday that the special grand jury investigating Donald Trump and his allies’ efforts to upend the 2020 election in Georgia has recommended multiple indictments and said that her decision on whether to bring charges is “imminent.”

    At a hearing in Atlanta on whether to publicly release the special grand jury report. Willis, a Democrat, said she opposes making it public at the moment, citing her ongoing deliberations on charges.

    “Decisions are imminent,” Willis told Judge Robert McBurney.

    “We want to make sure that everyone is treated fairly, and we think for future defendants to be treated fairly it’s not appropriate at this time to have this report released,” she said.

    The special grand jury, barred from issuing indictments, penned the highly anticipated final report as a culmination of its seven months of work, which included interviewing witnesses from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.

    The special grand jury heard from a total of 75 witnesses, Willis said Tuesday.

    Its final report is likely to include some summary of the panel’s investigative work, as well as any recommendations for indictments and the alleged conduct that led the panel to its conclusions.

    Fmr. US attorney explains what could happen next in Fulton Co. investigation

    Donald Wakeford, Fulton County’s chief senior assistant district attorney, also argued to the judge that it would be “dangerous” to release the report before any announcement related to possible charges is made.

    “We think immediately releasing before the district attorney has even had an opportunity to address publicly whether there will be charges or not – because there has not been a meaningful enough amount of time to assess it – is dangerous,” Wakeford said. “It’s dangerous to the people who may or may not be named in the report for various reasons. It’s also a disservice to the witnesses who came to the grand jury and spoke the truth to the grand jury.”

    Atlanta-area prosecutors are already poring over the report as they weigh whether to bring charges against Trump or his associates.

    McBurney, who oversaw the special grand jury’s roughly seven-month investigation, will decide whether the report should be released publicly and, if so, how much of it. While the panel of grand jurors recommended its report be made public, so far, the contents have been closely held.

    A media coalition, which includes CNN, is seeking for the full report to be made public.

    “We believe the report should be released now and in its entirety. And that approach is consistent with the way the American judicial system operates,” attorney Tom Clyde, representing the coalition, argued. “In other words, it is not unusual for a district attorney or a prosecuting authority to be generally uncomfortable with having to release information during the progress of the case. That occurs all the time.”

    At the close of the nearly two-hour hearing, McBurney emphasized the unique nature of the issue, saying, “I think the fact that we had to discuss this for 90 minutes shows that it is somewhat extraordinary.”

    “There’ll be no rash decisions” he said, adding later: “No one’s going to wake up with the court having disclosed the report on the front page of a newspaper.”

    McBurney will have to weigh the public’s interest in learning about efforts to interfere in the last presidential election against concerns that making the information public could hinder an ongoing investigation if the district attorney is pursuing indictments and that the release could disparage individuals who have not been charged with crimes, said Peter Skandalakis, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia.

    “What you don’t want is an opportunity for a grand jury to make some allegation of criminal conduct that later on either can’t be proven or is unsubstantiated and the person hasn’t had a chance to clear his or her name,” Skandalakis said.

    Attorneys for Trump did not participate in Tuesday’s hearing.

    “The grand jury compelled the testimony of dozens of other, often high-ranking, officials during the investigation, but never found it important to speak with the President,” Trump attorneys Drew Findling, Marissa Goldberg and Jennifer Little said in a statement. “Therefore, we can assume that the grand jury did their job and looked at the facts and the law, as we have, and concluded there were no violations of the law by President Trump.”

    The Georgia probe began soon after Trump phoned Raffensperger in January 2021, pressing the secretary of state to “find” the votes necessary for Trump to win the state. He lost the state to Joe Biden by nearly 12,000 votes.

    “Our vote is as important as anyone else,” Willis told CNN in a 2022 interview. “If someone takes that away or violates it in a way that is criminal, because I sit here in this jurisdiction it’s my responsibility.”

    Willis requested a special grand jury to investigate the case and the panel began its work in June 2022, calling a roster of witnesses that included Raffensperger, Giuilani, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.

    In this file photo, Fulton County Judge Robert C. McBurney instructs potential jurors during proceedings to seat a special purpose grand jury, May 2, 2022, in Atlanta.

    Over time, the investigation has expanded well beyond the Trump call to include false claims of election fraud to state lawmakers, the fake elector scheme, efforts by unauthorized individuals to access voting machines in one Georgia county and threats and harassment against election workers.

    Along the way, Willis has designated a number of people as targets of her probe, including 16 Republicans who served as pro-Trump electors in 2020 and Giuliani.

    But how much of that makes it into the final report was up to the special grand jurors.

    “It’s important for people to know that the prosecutor’s office does not write the presentment, traditionally,” said Robert James, who used a special grand jury to investigate local corruption when he was district attorney in Georgia’s DeKalb County. “It literally is the will of the people.”

    Now that Willis has the special grand jury’s report, it’s up to her to decide whether to go to a regular grand jury to pursue indictments. She’s not required to follow the exact recommendations laid out by the special grand jury, but its work product is likely to eventually become public and she could risk backlash if she runs too far afield of the panel’s suggestions.

    Willis has previously said she could pursue Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) charges in this case, which would allow prosecutors to bring charges against multiple defendants and make the case that Trump and his allies were part of a criminal enterprise.

    Whatever her approach, she’s likely to face pressure to move expeditiously with indictments or close her investigation.

    The level of pressure is “all encompassing,” said James, who predicted Willis would marshal her resources and get her case trial-ready before she seeks any indictments.

    “The spotlight is hot,” James said. “You can’t afford to lose a case like this, right?”

    Prior special grand jury reports have laid out a narrative of the panel’s investigation and concluded with recommendations.

    The 2013 special grand jury James worked with issued a roughly 80-page report, but it was only released publicly after a months-long court fight.

    The DeKalb County panel’s investigative summary referenced testimony and documents provided to the grand jury. Tacked on to the end of the report was a list of all the witnesses who appeared. The grand jurors ultimately referred one person for indictment – who fought the report’s public release – and nearly a dozen others for further investigation, laying out the infractions in each case that led them to their conclusions. They also recommended a variety of government reforms.

    A 2010 report from a special grand jury in Gwinnett County summarized its investigative activity surrounding local land acquisition deals and indicted one public official, though the indictment was later overturned when a court ruled that special grand juries could not issue indictments.

    For McBurney, there are only a few special grand jury examples to guide his decision-making on the report’s handling.

    “Like everyone else I’m sitting around eating popcorn waiting to see what he’s going to release and what he’s not going to release,” said Robert James, who used a special grand jury to investigate local corruption when he was district attorney in Georgia’s DeKalb County.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Fact check: McCarthy’s false, misleading and evidence-free claims since becoming House speaker | CNN Politics

    Fact check: McCarthy’s false, misleading and evidence-free claims since becoming House speaker | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Since winning a difficult battle to become speaker of the House of Representatives, Republican Kevin McCarthy has made public claims that are misleading, lacking any evidence or plain wrong.

    Here is a fact check of recent McCarthy comments about the debt ceiling, funding for the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s resort and residence in Florida, President Joe Biden’s stance on stoves and Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff.

    McCarthy’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

    McCarthy has cited the example of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, his Democratic predecessor as House speaker, while defending conservative Republicans’ insistence that any agreement to lift the federal debt ceiling must be paired with cuts to government spending – a trade-off McCarthy agreed to when he was trying to persuade conservatives to support his bid for speaker. Specifically, McCarthy has claimed that even Pelosi agreed to a spending cap as part of a deal to lift the debt ceiling under Trump.

    “When Nancy Pelosi was speaker, that’s what transpired. To get a debt ceiling, they also got a cap on spending for the next two years,” McCarthy told reporters at a press conference on January 12. When Fox host Maria Bartiromo told McCarthy in a January 15 interview that “they” would not agree to a spending cap, he responded, “Well Maria, I don’t believe that’s the case, because when Donald Trump was president and when Nancy Pelosi was speaker, that’s exactly what happened for them to get a debt ceiling lifted last time. They agreed to a spending cap.”

    Facts First: McCarthy’s claims are highly misleading. The deal Pelosi agreed to with the Trump administration in 2019 actually loosened spending caps that were already in place at the time because of a 2011 law. In other words, while congressional conservatives today want to use a debt ceiling deal to reduce government spending, the Pelosi deal allowed for billions in additional government spending above the pre-existing maximum. The two situations are nothing alike.

    Shai Akabas, director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank, said when asked about the accuracy of McCarthy’s claims: “I’m going to steer clear of characterizing the Speaker’s remarks, but as an objective matter, the deal reached in 2019 increased the spending caps set by the Budget Control Act of 2011.”

    The 2019 deal, which was criticized by many congressional conservatives, also ensured that Budget Control Act’s caps on discretionary spending – which were created as a result of a 2011 debt ceiling deal between a Democratic president and a Republican speaker of the House – would not be extended past 2021. Spending caps vanishing is the opposite of McCarthy’s suggestion that the deal “got” a spending cap.

    Pelosi spokesperson Aaron Bennett said in an email that McCarthy is “trying to rewrite history.” Bennett said, “As Republicans in Congress and in the Administration noted at the time, in 2019, Speaker Pelosi and Democrats were eager to reach bipartisan agreement to raise the debt limit and, as part of the agreement, avert damaging funding cuts for defense and domestic programs.”

    In various statements since becoming speaker, McCarthy has boasted of how the first bill passed by the new Republican majority in the House “repealed 87,000 IRS agents” or “repealed funding for 87,000 new IRS agents.”

    Facts First: McCarthy’s claims are false. House Republicans did pass a bill that seeks to eliminate about $71 billion of the approximately $80 billion in additional Internal Revenue Service funding that Biden signed into law in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act – but that funding is not going to hire 87,000 “agents.” In addition, Biden has already made clear he would veto this new Republican bill even if the bill somehow made it through the Democratic-controlled Senate, so no funding has actually been “repealed.” It would be accurate for McCarthy to say House Republicans “voted to repeal” the funding, but the boast that they actually “repealed” something is inaccurate.

    CNN’s Katie Lobosco explains in detail here why the claim about “87,000 new IRS agents” is an exaggeration. The claim, which has become a common Republican talking point, has been fact-checked by numerous media outlets over more than five months, including The Washington Post in response to McCarthy remarks earlier this January.

    Here’s a summary. While Inflation Reduction Act funding may well allow for the hiring of tens of thousands of IRS employees, far from all of these employees will be IRS agents conducting audits and investigations. Many other employees will be hired for the non-agent roles, from customer service to information technology, that make up the vast majority of the IRS workforce. And a significant number of the hires are expected to fill the vacant posts left by retirements and other attrition, not take newly created positions.

    The IRS has not yet released a detailed breakdown of how it plans to use the funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, so it’s impossible to say precisely how many new “agents” will be hired. But it is already clear that the total won’t approach 87,000.

    In his interview with Fox’s Bartiromo on January 15, McCarthy criticized federal law enforcement for executing a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and residence in Florida, which the FBI says resulted in the recovery of more than 100 government documents marked as classified and hundreds of other government documents. Echoing a claim Trump has made, McCarthy said of the documents: “They knew it was there. They could have come and taken it any time they wanted.”

    Facts First: It is clearly not true that the authorities could somehow have come to Mar-a-Lago at any time, without conducting a formal search, and taken all of the presidential records they were seeking from Trump. By the time of the search, the federal government – first the National Archives and Records Administration and then the Justice Department – had been asking Trump for more than a year to return government records. Even when the Justice Department went beyond asking in May and served Trump’s team with a subpoena for the return of all documents with classification markings, Trump’s team returned only some of these documents. In June, a Trump lawyer signed a document certifying on behalf of Trump’s office that all of the documents had been returned, though that was not true.

    When FBI agents and a Justice Department attorney visited Mar-a-Lago without a search warrant on that June day to accept documents the Trump team was returning in response to the subpoena, a Trump lawyer “explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes that remained in the storage room,” the department said in a court filing after the August search. In other words, according to the department, the government was not even allowed to poke around to see if there were government records still at Mar-a-Lago, let alone take those records.

    In the August court filing, the department pointedly called into question the extent to which the Trump team had cooperated: “That the FBI, in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the ‘diligent search’ that the former President’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter.”

    McCarthy wrote in a New York Post article published on January 12: “While President Joe Biden wants to control the kind of stove Americans can cook on, House Republicans are certainly cooking with gas.” He repeated the claim on Twitter the next morning.

    Facts First: There is no evidence for this claim; Biden has not expressed a desire to control the kind of stove Americans can cook on. McCarthy was baselessly attributing the comments of a single Biden appointee to Biden himself.

    It is true that a Biden appointee on the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, Richard Trumka Jr., told Bloomberg earlier this month that gas stoves pose a “hidden hazard,” as they emit air pollutants, and said, “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” But the day before McCarthy’s article was published by the New York Post, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a press briefing: “The president does not support banning gas stoves. And the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is independent, is not banning gas stoves.”

    To date, even the commission itself has not shown support for a ban on gas stoves or for any particular new regulations on gas stoves. Commission Chairman Alexander Hoehn-Saric said in a statement the day before McCarthy’s article was published: “I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so.” Rather, he said, the commission is researching gas emissions in stoves, “exploring new ways to address health risks,” and strengthening voluntary safety standards – and will this spring ask the public “to provide us with information about gas stove emissions and potential solutions for reducing any associated risks.”

    Trumka told CNN’s Matt Egan that while every option remains on the table, any ban would apply only to new gas stoves, not the gas stoves already in people’s homes. And he noted that the Inflation Reduction Act makes people eligible for a rebate of up to $840 to voluntarily switch to an electric stove.

    Defending his plan to bar Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff from sitting on the House Intelligence Committee, a committee Schiff chaired during the Democratic majority from early 2019 to the beginning of this year, McCarthy criticized Schiff on January 12 over his handling of the first impeachment of Trump. Among other things, McCarthy said: “Adam Schiff openly lied to the American public. He told you he had proof. He told you he didn’t know the whistleblower.”

    Facts First: There is no evidence for McCarthy’s insinuation that Schiff lied when he said he didn’t know the anonymous whistleblower who came forward in 2019 with allegations – which were subsequently corroborated – about how Trump had attempted to use the power of his office to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden, his looming rival in the 2020 election.

    Schiff said last week in a statement to CNN: “Kevin McCarthy continues to falsely assert I know the Ukraine whistleblower. Let me be clear – I have never met the whistleblower and the only thing I know about their identity is what I have read in press. McCarthy’s real objection is we proved the whistleblower’s claim to be true and impeached Donald Trump for withholding millions from Ukraine to extort its help with his campaign.” Schiff also made this comment to The Washington Post, which fact-checked the McCarthy claim last week, and has consistently said the same since late 2019.

    The New York Times reported in 2019 that, according to an unnamed official, a House Intelligence Committee aide who had been contacted by the whistleblower before the whistleblower filed a formal complaint did not inform Schiff of the person’s identity when conveying to Schiff “some” information about what the person had said. And Reuters reported in 2019 that a person familiar with the whistleblower’s contacts said the whistleblower hadn’t met or spoken with Schiff.

    McCarthy could have fairly repeated Republican criticism of a claim Schiff made in a 2019 television appearance about the committee’s communication with the whistleblower; Schiff said at the time “we have not spoken directly with the whistleblower” even though it soon emerged that the whistleblower had contacted the committee aide before filing the complaint. (A committee spokesperson said at the time that Schiff had been merely trying to say that the committee hadn’t heard actual testimony from the whistleblower, but that Schiff acknowledged his words “should have been more carefully phrased to make that distinction clear.”)

    Regardless, McCarthy didn’t argue here that Schiff had been misleading about the committee’s dealings with the whistleblower; he strongly suggested that Schiff lied in saying he didn’t know the whistleblower. That’s baseless. There has never been any indication that Schiff had a relationship with the whistleblower when he said he didn’t, nor that Schiff knew the whistleblower’s identity when he said he didn’t.

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  • Bob Bauer: The man behind Biden’s classified documents strategy | CNN Politics

    Bob Bauer: The man behind Biden’s classified documents strategy | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden was facing the prospect of an imminent federal investigation after the discovery of classified documents at his former Washington office in November – and it was up to Bob Bauer, his personal attorney, to break the news to the White House, two sources familiar with the matter said.

    Bauer is now the driving force behind a strategy that has focused on cooperating with investigators and trying to zero out Biden’s legal risk but that has also drawn criticism for worsening the president’s political and PR woes.

    He finds himself at the center of the legal maelstrom swirling below Biden’s presidency – and has managed a drip-drip-drip of bad news for the president in recent months, with four subsequent discoveries of additional documents since that first November 2 search. The latest came following a nearly 13-hour search the FBI carried out at the president’s Wilmington, Delaware, home on Friday with the permission of Biden’s attorneys.

    A veteran Democratic attorney and former White House counsel under President Barack Obama, Bauer has developed a knack for telling powerful people things they need – but don’t necessarily want – to hear, multiple former colleagues said. Part of it lies in his matter-of-fact delivery, they said. The rest comes down to what several described as an unflappable demeanor, even amid spiraling crises.

    “He’s fearless in terms of delivering news to a client,” said Valerie Jarrett, a top Obama adviser who worked alongside Bauer in the White House. “He never blinks. You don’t have to wonder whether or not he’s going to get weak-kneed.”

    And so, when Jarrett and two other senior advisers agreed they had to tell Obama news he “did not want to hear” on what she described as a “highly sensitive and personal matter,” they sought out Bauer.

    Bauer reprised his role as bearer of bad news on November 2. After a White House official transmitted Bauer’s initial heads-up to Biden, Bauer later gave the president a more fulsome briefing, laying out the beginnings of a strategy to navigate the fallout, which continues to guide the White House’s public and private posture and which has come under heated public scrutiny.

    That criticism has focused most acutely on the White House’s first statement earlier this month, which acknowledged the discovery of classified documents at the Penn Biden Center office in November, but omitted the discovery of a second batch of documents at Biden’s Wilmington home in late December.

    “I’m kind of surprised by it because Bob is usually pretty savvy about this stuff,” a former Obama White House official who worked with Bauer said of the critical omission.

    Like the decision not to disclose the initial discovery of classified documents for more than two months, people familiar with the matter said Biden’s team wanted to avoid public disclosures that could be viewed as getting ahead of and undermining DOJ’s investigation.

    For months, Bauer was part of the small circle of aides involved in weighing what to disclose and when. That included lawyers inside the White House, like White House special counsel Richard Sauber, and Anita Dunn, Biden’s top communications adviser and Bauer’s wife. Keeping the information closely held was intentional, even as it risked leaving key messaging advisers out of the loop, because the legal concerns were driving the decision-making process.

    The group aware of the matter remained exceedingly small – even as it expanded to include Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain and his senior adviser Mike Donilon – until it became inevitable that the president’s team would need to prepare for it to leak out in the media, people familiar with the details said.

    The aides understood that not revealing the discovery of a second batch of documents at Biden’s home in that initial statement would generate criticism, but they decided to adhere to Bauer’s legal strategy – wagering that losing some credibility with the press was less important than losing credibility with DOJ officials, according to a source familiar with the matter. Biden’s team also believed that making a more fulsome disclosure would not have lessened the public furor, the source said.

    Above all, Biden’s team is motivated by a desire to cooperate and draw DOJ’s investigation to a close. That mentality motivated Biden’s team to quickly agree to an FBI search of his Wilmington home, according to a source familiar with the matter, just nine days after Biden’s attorneys carried out their last search of the property.

    That source said Biden’s legal team viewed the FBI search as inevitable, particularly after the discovery of additional documents at the Wilmington home, and decided “the faster this happened, the better.”

    “This is a team that has consistently demonstrated they’re far more interested in the long game than whatever the issue of the day driving Twitter may be,” a second person familiar with the strategic planning said. “There’s an understanding that people outside may not get that, but this isn’t some kind of dramatic shift – it’s where they’ve always been even if it doesn’t satisfy the Beltway crowd.”

    There would be no divergence from the carefully constructed plans to highlight Biden’s agenda and no changes to his day-to-day schedule. Biden officials would publicly highlight the sharp differences between the Biden and Trump documents investigations, with those distinctions also driving their process behind the scenes.

    Weighing heavily on that thinking was a mid-November letter from DOJ’s National Security Division that directed Biden’s legal team not to review or move materials and asked for full cooperation, a source familiar with the matter said, which Biden’s legal team understood as issuing minimal public statements about the ongoing investigation.

    Bauer also wanted to avoid creating a precedent of proactively sharing new information about the case and taking the risk of providing an incomplete picture of an ongoing investigation, the source said – one that DOJ might be compelled to correct.

    In practice, the White House’s incomplete first public statement on the documents not only undercut the administration’s stated commitment to public transparency; it also caused a ripple effect at the Justice Department, where Attorney General Merrick Garland was preparing to name a special counsel.

    Garland had initially planned to leave out details of the investigation during that announcement, according to people briefed on the matter. But the White House’s omission of the Wilmington documents prompted DOJ officials to change course, the people said, and Garland instead laid out a timeline that revealed the second batch of documents had been found weeks earlier – and that the White House knew.

    The White House’s omission of that detail in the initial statement embodied the enduring tension between a legal and communications strategy, and while Bauer’s former colleagues said he was always mindful of both, his focus was on providing the best legal advice.

    “Bob is politically sophisticated – he understands all of that – but when he’s functioning in the role of lawyer, he behaves like one, which is to say he is conservative in securing, safeguarding the legal interests of his client,” said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Obama who worked with Bauer at the White House.

    Nearly a dozen former colleagues and friends who spoke with CNN unanimously described Bauer as a brilliant and savvy attorney who is cautious and rarely rattled. They invariably called him “collaborative,” “brilliant” and a true “lawyer’s lawyer” who demonstrated tremendous integrity in his professional life.

    “There is no lawyer in the country who is better equipped to handle a matter like this than Bob Bauer. Full stop,” said Kathy Ruemmler, a former White House counsel who served as Bauer’s principal deputy during the Obama administration.

    “The stakes don’t get any higher than this,” said Ben Ginsberg, a veteran Republican election lawyer and Bauer’s decades-long friendly rival. “But Bob spent 40 years on high-stakes matters and representing presidents, public officials and high-profile candidates. From (Biden’s) perspective, Bob is the right person for this.”

    Biden’s selection of Bauer to serve as his personal attorney was hardly a surprise to people inside the White House.

    Even before serving as general counsel on Biden’s 2020 campaign, where he navigated sexual assault accusations made against Biden by a former Senate staffer, Bauer had been a sounding board and adviser, including when Biden was weighing a run for president following the death of his son Beau in 2015. Bauer worked out an agreement with his law firm to act as an adviser to Biden as he deliberated whether he was ready to mount a bid for the Democratic nomination.

    Bauer took the lead on preparing Biden’s 2020 campaign for what they knew could be a messy Election Day – or even week. Then-President Donald Trump and his allies had made more than clear that if things didn’t go their way, they wouldn’t go down easy. Biden campaign officials – and the candidate himself – relied on what one person described as Bauer’s ability to see through the fogginess as they braced for the deluge of conspiracy theories and lies from their opponent.

    “Biden has always had total confidence in what Bob tells him,” one person familiar with the men’s relationship said. “You don’t hear him second-guessing him, which isn’t really true for the rest of the team.”

    Bauer has also become one of the few people to earn the deep trust of both Obama and Biden, whose innermost circles display little overlap. Bauer has served as personal attorney to both men and was among only a handful of aides who received a thank you in the acknowledgments of Biden’s 2017 memoir.

    Don Verrilli, the former solicitor general who served as Bauer’s deputy when he was White House counsel, witnessed up close Obama’s trust in Bauer. And during Zoom meetings between Biden and members of his vice presidential search committee, which Bauer headed, Verrilli saw a similar trust develop.

    “It was just evident how much respect (Biden) had for Bob and how much he trusted Bob,” Verrilli said.

    Dunn, the White House’s senior adviser for communications, is also among the few to crack both inner circles. Bauer and Dunn now find themselves paired in confronting the Biden documents case. People who have worked with the couple previously say they hold each other’s viewpoints in high regard, even if those don’t always align.

    “If you didn’t know they were married, you wouldn’t know they were married. They’re professionals,” said Ruemmler. “He gives his point of view, she gives her point of view. They don’t always agree.”

    Bauer’s strategy of maximum cooperation could be put to the test as special counsel Robert Hur takes over the case.

    US Attorney John Lausch’s initial review of the Biden’s documents matter was not a full-blown criminal investigation, and he did not use a grand jury. Even an interview with a key witness – Biden attorney Pat Moore, who first discovered the classified material at the Washington office – appears to have been an informal conversation that did not generate a 302 form that the government uses to memorialize interviews.

    Now Hur, who has yet to formally take up the role, is in the process of assembling his team, and legal experts expect he will use a grand jury.

    Biden’s legal team has stressed they plan to continue to cooperate with the investigation, but a source familiar with the matter said disagreements could eventually emerge with the Department of Justice about what future cooperation actually looks like.

    Bauer could, for example, confront the question of whether to make the president available to answer questions from investigators. The White House has not ruled out a presidential interview.

    “We’re not going to get ahead of that process with the special counsel and speculate on what they may or may not want or ask for,” said Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office.

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  • Kamala Harris mourns victims of Monterey Park shooting before speech to mark 50 years since Roe | CNN Politics

    Kamala Harris mourns victims of Monterey Park shooting before speech to mark 50 years since Roe | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Vice President Kamala Harris declared Sunday that “this violence must stop” in her first on-camera remarks about the mass shooting in Monterey Park, California, that has left at least 10 people dead.

    “I do want to address the tragedy of what happened in my home state,” Harris, a former California senator and state attorney general, told a crowd in Tallahassee, Florida, at the beginning of her speech to mark 50 years since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision.

    “A time of a cultural celebration … and yet another community has been torn apart by senseless gun violence,” the vice president said, noting that the shooting took place on the weekend of the Lunar New Year. The attack happened at a dance studio Saturday night near a Lunar New Year festival celebration in the city approximately seven miles from downtown Los Angeles.

    “So Doug and I join the president and Dr. Biden, and I know everyone here, in mourning for those who were killed, as we pray for those who are injured, and as we grieve for those many people whose lives are forever changed. All of us in this room and in our country understand this violence must stop,” Harris said. “And President Biden and I and our administration will continue to provide full support to the local authorities as we learn more.”

    President Joe Biden said in a Sunday morning tweet that he is monitoring the aftermath of the mass shooting “closely as it develops.”

    “Jill and I are praying for those killed and injured in last night’s deadly mass shooting in Monterey Park,” he said. “I’m monitoring this situation closely as it develops, and urge the community to follow guidance from local officials and law enforcement in the hours ahead.”

    The White House announced earlier Sunday that the president had been briefed by Homeland Security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall and had directed her to “make sure that the FBI is providing full support to local authorities,” while providing him regular updates.

    The Bidens remain at their vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and are expected to return to Washington, DC, on Monday.

    Harris’ high-profile speech in Tallahassee came on the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which the Supreme Court overturned in June, ending federal protections for abortion.

    The vice president sought to draw a direct throughline between abortion access and the freedoms enjoyed by Americans, arguing that limits or outright bans on reproductive health care threaten the rights of ordinary citizens.

    “There’s a collection of words that mean everything to us as Americans. The heartfelt words of our great national anthem, that America is the land of the free and the home of the brave. But let us ask, can we truly be free if a woman cannot make decisions about her own body?” Harris said as the crowd at The Moon nightclub responded with a loud “no.”

    The vice president’s office said there were 1,500 people in attendance.

    Harris’ office said earlier that the choice of Florida for the vice president’s speech Sunday spoke to the reality that the Sunshine State, which enacted a 15-week abortion ban last year, is now at the forefront of the abortion debate.

    Harris did not mention the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, by name in her remarks, but she appeared to speak directly to the potential 2024 presidential contender, as well as other Republican opponents of abortion rights.

    “Republicans in Congress are now calling for a nationwide abortion ban,” she said.”The right of every woman in every state in this country to make decisions about her own body is on the line. And I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: How dare they?”

    Harris in her speech announced a new presidential memorandum Biden will sign to protect access to medication abortion.

    “I’m pleased to announce that President Biden, I’m announcing it today, has issued a presidential memorandum on this issue. Members of our Cabinet and our administration are now directed as of the president’s order to identify barriers to access to prescription medication and to recommend actions to make sure that doctors can legally prescribe, that pharmacies can dispense and that women can secure safe and effective medication,” Harris said.

    As vice president, Harris has claimed the issue of reproductive rights as her own, becoming the administrations most visible advocate for abortion rights since news leaked last year that the Supreme Court was all but expected to overturn Roe v. Wade. Harris traveled the country to convene state legislators, activists, lawyers and educators to discuss the issue and set a national message for Democrats.

    The Biden administration has taken steps in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision last June to ensure access to abortion care. The president signed an executive order in August that he said would help women travel out of state to receive abortions; ensure health care providers comply with federal law so women aren’t delayed in getting care; and advance research and data collection “to evaluate the impact that this reproductive health crisis is having on maternal health and other health conditions and outcomes.”

    Harris, touting the White House’s strategy, called Sunday on Congress to pass federal protections for abortion.

    But any legislation to enshrine abortion rights into federal law is unlikely to get far in the Republican controlled-House, which passed a bill earlier this month that would require health care providers to try to preserve the life of an infant in the rare case that a baby is born alive during or after an attempted abortion. The bill is not expected to be taken up in the Democratic-controlled Senate, but passage in the House serves as a messaging opportunity for the new Republican majority.

    Still, Harris encouraged abortion rights advocates to stay positive.

    “To all the friends and leaders, I say let us not be tired or discouraged because we’re on the right side of history,” she said Sunday. “Here now, on this 50th anniversary, let us resolve to make history and secure this right.”

    This story and headline have been updated.

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  • No. 2 Senate Democrat agrees Biden has lost ‘high ground’ in criticism over classified documents | CNN Politics

    No. 2 Senate Democrat agrees Biden has lost ‘high ground’ in criticism over classified documents | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin agreed Sunday that Joe Biden has lost the “high ground” in the political back-and-forth over classified document storage following the discovery of additional material at the president’s home in Wilmington, Delaware. But he rejected any comparisons between Biden’s situation and that of former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents.

    “Of course. Let’s be honest about it,” the Illinois Democrat told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” when asked if the president had “lost the high ground on this notion of classified information being where it shouldn’t be.”

    “When that information is found, it diminishes the stature of any person who is in possession of it because it’s not supposed to happen,” Durbin said. “Whether it was the fault of a staffer or an attorney, it makes no difference. The elected official bears ultimate responsibility.”

    But Durbin said that Biden’s situation was “significantly different” from the discovery of classified information at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

    “Donald Trump defied those who knew the documents were in place and ultimately led to, involuntarily, a court order and a search of his Mar-a-Lago hotel resort to find out how many documents were there,” the senator said.

    “Contrast that with Joe Biden. Embarrassed by the situation, as he should have been, he invited the government agencies in to carefully look through all the boxes he had accumulated. It’s a much different approach,” Durbin added. “It is outrageous that either occurred. But the reaction by the former president and the current president could not be in sharper contrast.”

    FBI investigators on Friday found additional classified material while conducting a search of Biden’s Wilmington home.

    Bob Bauer, the president’s personal attorney, said in a statement that during the search, which took place over nearly 13 hours Friday, “DOJ took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President’s service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President. DOJ also took for further review personally handwritten notes from the vice-presidential years.”

    Those six items are in addition to materials previously found at Biden’s Wilmington residence and in his private office.

    The federal search of Biden’s home, while voluntary, marks an escalation of the probe into the president’s handling of classified documents and will inevitably draw comparisons to his predecessor – even if the FBI’s search of Trump’s residence was conducted under different circumstances.

    Durbin on Sunday also warned against “playing games” with the national debt and said that Biden should not negotiate with Republicans.

    The US hit the debt ceiling set by Congress on Thursday, forcing the Treasury Department to start taking “extraordinary measures” to keep the government paying its bills and escalating pressure on Capitol Hill to avoid a catastrophic default.

    The battle lines for the high-stakes fight have already been set. Hard-line Republicans, who have enormous sway in the House because of the party’s slim majority, have demanded that lifting the borrowing cap be tied to spending reductions.

    The White House, however, countered that it will not offer any concessions or negotiate on raising the debt ceiling. And with the solution to the debt ceiling drama squarely in lawmakers’ hands, fears are growing that the partisan brinksmanship could result in the nation defaulting on its debt for the first time ever – or coming dangerously close to doing so.

    “If we play games with this, if we delay this, if we have short-term extensions of the national debt, we run the very risk of the recession in this economy,” Durbin said.

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  • Who is Jeff Zients? | CNN Politics

    Who is Jeff Zients? | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden is expected to tap Jeff Zients, ​​who ran the administration’s Covid-19 response effort and served in high-ranking roles in the Obama administration, to succeed Ron Klain as the next White House chief of staff.

    Biden decided on Zients after an internal search when it became clear that Klain, who is expected to resign in the coming weeks, favored Zients as his successor, a factor that played a big role in the president’s decision. Klain had tapped Zients to lead a talent search for expected staff turnover following the midterm elections, but that didn’t ultimately materialize after Democrats performed better than expected.

    In replacing Klain with Zients, Biden is turning to a consultant with more business experience than political background as he enters the third year of his presidency.

    The decision to pick Zients surprised some internally given that there were differences in Biden’s and Zients’ management styles early on in the administration. But Biden was impressed with his job as the coronavirus response coordinator when Zients inherited what officials described as a “largely dysfunctional” effort by the Trump administration.

    Another factor in the search was how this stretch of Biden’s presidency will focus on implementing the legislation enacted in his first two years, and Zients is seen internally as a “master implementor,” one source said. His operational skills were on display as he handled the coronavirus response and helped with the bungled 2013 launch of HealthCare.gov during the Obama administration.

    Zients, 56, now has a closer relationship with Biden and with his senior advisers and multiple Cabinet members.

    While Zients is not viewed as a political operator, his deep experience inside two administrations and his reputation for technocratic skill would likely serve as assets at a time when both are viewed as critical for what Biden faces in the year ahead.

    Zients (rhymes with “science”) first joined the Biden administration in December 2020 when the then-president-elect appointed him as his White House coronavirus czar. He was tasked at the time with containing the coronavirus pandemic, mass distributing an approved vaccine and rebuilding a battered economy as Biden took office.

    When he left that position over a year later, Biden praised Zients as “a man of service and an expert manager” and touted the progress the US had made in vaccinating Americans and beating back the pandemic under Zients’ watch.

    “I will miss his counsel and I’m grateful for his service,” Biden said.

    Earlier in his career, at the beginning of the Obama administration in 2009, Zients was the country’s first chief performance officer and was tasked with making the government run smarter and less costly. Those duties fell under his other title as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. He would later go on to become acting director of that office.

    Zients also served as the director of the National Economic Council and assistant to the president for economic policy under Obama.

    He is credited with reviving the Obamacare enrollment website, Healthcare.gov, which had been plagued with issues and crashed shortly after its launch in 2013. The website, an online marketplace for medical insurance, was a critical centerpiece to Obama’s landmark health care law. Zients was the fix-it man and provided advice to the US Department of Health and Human Services as it worked to resolve the problems.

    Zients has deep ties to the private sector. Before serving in government, he served as the chairman, chief executive officer and chief operating officer of the Advisory Board Company and chairman of the Corporate Executive Board, both Washington-area consulting firms. By the time he was 35, he had already landed a spot on Fortune’s list of the richest Americans under 40, ranking 25th with an estimated worth of $149 million after the Advisory Board went public.

    He also founded Portfolio Logic, an investment firm focused on health care and business services.

    After leaving the Obama administration, he served as the CEO of the holding company Cranemere and served a two-year stint on Facebook’s board of directors. Zients was also an investor in the popular Washington DC deli Call Your Mother and often brought bagels to the office once a week to share with White House staff.

    Zients divested his shares in Facebook and Call Your Mother before gaining coronavirus czar status in the White House. He was worth at least $89.3 million when his financial disclosures were made public in March 2021, the wealthiest member of Biden’s Cabinet appointments.

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  • Jeff Zients to replace Ron Klain as White House chief of staff | CNN Politics

    Jeff Zients to replace Ron Klain as White House chief of staff | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Jeff Zients, who ran President Joe Biden’s Covid-19 response effort and served in high-ranking roles in the Obama administration, is expected to replace Ron Klain as the next White House chief of staff, according to three people briefed on the matter.

    Klain is expected to step down in the coming weeks.

    The move to replace Klain is particularly important for Biden, who has entered a critical moment in his presidency and his political future. As he continues to weigh whether to seek reelection in 2024, the early stages of a special counsel investigation into his handling of classified documents has rattled Democrats and emboldened congressional Republicans, who now hold the House majority and have pledged their own probes.

    Biden decided on Zients after an internal search when it became clear that Klain favored Zients as his successor, a factor that played a big role in the president’s decision. Klain had tapped Zients to lead a talent search for expected staff turnover following the midterm elections, but that didn’t ultimately materialize after Democrats performed better than expected. Klain is now the most significant departure and is being replaced by the person he picked to help bring in new team members.

    A source said Klain will continue to be involved and remain close to the West Wing. Biden’s core political and legislative team – which includes Steve Ricchetti, Anita Dunn, Mike Donilon, Jen O’Malley Dillon, Bruce Reed and Louisa Terrell – will continue to advise him. Zients’ new role is being compared to when Jack Lew was Obama’s chief of staff and others, like David Plouffe, focused more on his political portfolio.

    Additional political talent is expected to join for the likely re-election campaign, CNN is told.

    In replacing Klain with Zients, Biden is turning to a consultant with more business experience than political background as he enters the third year of his presidency.

    The decision to pick Zients surprised some internally given that there were differences in Biden’s and Zients’ management styles early on in the administration. But Biden was impressed with his job as the coronavirus response coordinator when Zients inherited what officials described as a “largely dysfunctional” effort by the Trump administration.

    Another factor in the search was how this stretch of Biden’s presidency will focus on implementing the legislation enacted in his first two years, and Zients is seen internally as a “master implementor,” one source said. His operational skills were on display as his handled the coronavirus response and helped with the bungled 2013 launch of HealthCare.gov during the Obama administration.

    Zients now has a closer relationship with Biden and with his senior advisers and multiple Cabinet members.

    While Zients is not viewed as a political operator, his deep experience inside two administrations and his reputation for technocratic skill would likely serve as assets at a time when both are viewed as critical for what Biden faces in the year ahead. Still, he will be tasked with replacing an official who was a central force inside the administration – and someone with a rapport developed over decades with Biden himself.

    Klain, who had long planned to depart the White House after Biden’s first two years, has targeted the weeks after the February 7 State of the Union address for the end of his tenure.

    A number of top officials had been viewed as top candidates to succeed Klain, including Cabinet members and close Biden advisers such as Ricchetti, counselor to the president, and Dunn, the senior adviser with a wide-ranging strategy and communications portfolio.

    But while Zients isn’t among the tight-knit circle of long-tenured Biden advisers, he’s been deeply intertwined with the team since the 2020 campaign, when he served as co-chairman of Biden’s transition outfit.

    After the election Biden tapped Zients to lead the administration’s Covid-19 response effort as he entered office with the country facing dueling public health and economic crises. While Zients left that role last spring, he was once again brought into White House operations a few months later when Klain asked him to lead the planning for the expected turnover inside the administration that historically follows a president’s first midterm elections.

    Zients was tasked with conducting a wide and diverse search for prospective candidates outside the administration to fill Cabinet, deputy Cabinet and senior administration roles, officials said, in an effort that would be closely coordinated with White House counterparts.

    But even as wide-scale turnover has remained minimal for an administration that has taken pride in its stability in the first two years, now, the official leading the planning effort may soon shift into one of, if not the, most critical role set to open.

    The White House chief of staff is a grueling and all-consuming post in any administration, and Klain’s deep involvement across nearly every key element of process, policy and politics touching the West Wing only served to elevate that reality.

    A long-time Washington hand with ties Democratic administrations – and Biden – that cross several decades, Klain is departing at a moment that officials inside the West Wing have spent the last several months viewing as a high point.

    Biden entered 2023 on the heel of midterm elections that resulted in an expanded Senate majority for his Democratic Party and the defiance of widespread expectations of massive GOP victories in the House.

    The sweeping and far-reaching cornerstones of Biden’s legislative agenda have largely been signed into law, the result of a series of major bipartisan wins paired with the successful navigation of intraparty disputes to secure critical Democratic priorities.

    Biden has made clear to advisers that the successful implementation of those laws – which is now starting to kick into high gear across the administration – is one of their most critical priorities for the year ahead.

    But Zients will also inherit a West Wing now faced with a new House Republican majority that is girding for partisan warfare – and wide-scale investigations into the administration and Biden’s family.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Why a historically small presidential primary field is possible in 2024 | CNN Politics

    Why a historically small presidential primary field is possible in 2024 | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The 2020 presidential primary race was already in full motion at this point four years ago, with candidates jumping in left and right. The Democratic primary field, as well as the combined Democratic and Republican fields, were well on their way to being the largest in the modern primary era.

    We’re in a considerably different place today heading into the 2024 cycle. The only major candidate to declare is former President Donald Trump, and, while other candidates are entertaining bids, the field will almost certainly end up being much smaller than it was in 2020.

    Indeed, the 2024 primary field could be the smallest on record in the modern era – with an incumbent president running for reelection on the Democratic side and historically dominant front-runners on the Republican side.

    How small are we talking? The last time there was a combined primary field with fewer than 20 major candidates was 2012. The last time there was one with 10 or fewer was 1992. The record in the modern primary era (i.e., since 1972) is nine, in 1984.

    We could be heading toward 1984 or 1992 territory.

    Now, predicting who will and will not run for president in the early stages is somewhat of a fool’s errand. Two factors, though, suggest that many will pass on running.

    The first is that Democrats already have an incumbent in President Joe Biden, who seems geared to run for another term. Incumbents rarely face major primary challengers. Those who even get one do so because they’re not beloved within at least part of their party.

    Think of Trump’s biggest GOP challenger in 2020: William Weld. The former Massachusetts governor, who won a sole delegate in the primary and was polled many times, was a moderate, well-educated New England Republican. Trump’s approval rating among moderate or liberal Republicans with at least a college degree was only about 50% around the time Weld announced his candidacy.

    The last presidential incumbent to lose a state primary – Jimmy Carter in 1980 – had an approval rating south of 70% among Democrats overall. The same low overall approval rating was true for Gerald Ford among Republicans before Ronald Reagan took him all the way to the Republican National Convention in 1976.

    Biden doesn’t have any of those particular weaknesses in polling. His approval rating among Democrats in our most recent CNN/SSRS poll, for example, was 84%. There wasn’t a single segment that I could find within the Democratic electorate for whom Biden’s numbers were anywhere near where Trump was among moderate, college-educated Republicans at this point in the 2020 cycle. Biden polled well among younger and more liberal Democrats, who have traditionally been some of his weakest supporters.

    If Biden does end up running for reelection, I’m not sure there’s a single Democrat whom most would define as a major candidate who would try to take him on.

    The second factor that presages a smaller-than-usual 2024 field is the fact that most prominent politicians generally don’t run for president if they don’t think they can win. By winning, I mean earning the nomination and then the presidency itself. Biden, no doubt, is vulnerable in a general election, given that his overall approval rating is well below 50%.

    The problem for a lot of Republicans is they may ultimately decide that winning the nomination is going to be very difficult if your name isn’t Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

    Both Trump and DeSantis are each regularly polling above 30% among GOP primary voters. Trump, himself, is usually in the 40s if not 50s. No one else is close to 10%, with former Vice President Mike Pence leading this second tier of candidates.

    Trump and DeSantis combined are polling well into the 70s among Republicans nationally.

    A look at polling from years past reveals that this is the first time this early in the cycle that two presidential candidates in a primary without an incumbent were each polling above 30%, on average, at the same time.

    The only contest that looks anything like the Republican one right now is the 1980 Democratic primary, which featured an incumbent president, Carter. Then-Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts was his most prominent challenger. Both were polling above 30% at this point in the primary.

    Only four major Democrats – using the widest definition of “major” – ended up running for president in 1980.

    The 2024 Republican field will probably be larger than four candidates, though it’s not clear how much larger.

    I can think of only two other primary fields where the two leading candidates were combining for more than 70% of the primary vote this early on. Both were on the Democratic side: 2000 and 2016.

    Just five major Democrats ran in 2016, given how much Hillary Clinton looked like a juggernaut. The primary ended up being relatively competitive (with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders doing surprisingly well), but the result was never really in doubt.

    A mere two top Democrats ran in 2000, when Al Gore, the sitting vice president, was polling above 50%. His challenger, former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, didn’t win a single state.

    We obviously don’t know how many Republicans or Democrats will end up running in 2024. Right now, by my count, about 10 candidates, including Biden, are getting regularly polled.

    Given the history, that strikes me as a fairly decent (if not a little bit high) place to start. Whether this 2024 field ends up being truly historic will ultimately depend on whether Biden, DeSantis and Trump can keep up their strong polling.

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  • Jay Inslee Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    Jay Inslee Fast Facts | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Here is a look at the life of Jay Inslee, governor of Washington and former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.

    Birth date: February 9, 1951

    Birth place: Seattle, Washington

    Birth name: Jay Robert Inslee

    Father: Frank Inslee, biology teacher, coach and athletic director

    Mother: Adele (Brown) Inslee, store clerk

    Marriage: Trudi (Tindall) Inslee (August 27, 1972-present)

    Children: Jack, Connor and Joe

    Education: Stanford University, 1969-1970; University of Washington, B.A., 1973, economics; Willamette University College of Law, J.D., 1976, graduated magna cum laude

    Religion: Protestant

    Inslee is dedicated to addressing climate change and other environmental issues.

    While in the US House of Representatives, he served on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and on the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

    He was the first governor to enter the 2020 presidential race.

    At Seattle’s Ingraham High School, Inslee was the starting quarterback.

    Worked his way through college doing odd jobs.

    Has praised the “Green New Deal,” saying it is “raising people’s ambitions” and “making what might seem impossible within the realm of the possible,” but has not outright said he would support the entire package. Nor has he endorsed Medicare-for-all.

    Established Washington’s Marijuana Justice Initiative. It allows for gubernatorial pardons for those previously convicted of a single misdemeanor marijuana crime “between January 1, 1998, and December 5, 2012, when I-502 legalized marijuana possession.”

    After law school, works as an attorney with Peters, Schmalz, Leadon & Fowler (later Peters, Fowler and Inslee), and serves as a city prosecutor for over a decade.

    November 1988 – Wins an open seat in the Washington House of Representatives for the 14th District against Lynn Carmichael (R) with 51.64% of the vote. Is reelected in 1990 with 61.82% of the vote.

    1989-1993 – Washington House of Representatives.

    November 1992 – Wins US House of Representatives seat for Washington’s 4th District against Richard “Doc” Hastings (R) with 50.84% of the vote.

    January 3, 1993-January 3, 1995 – US House of Representatives.

    November 1994 – Loses his reelection bid to the US House of Representatives to Hastings with 46.6% of the vote.

    1995-1996 – Attorney at Gordon, Thomas, Honeywell, Malanca, Peterson & Daheim L.L.P.

    September 1996 – Unsuccessful gubernatorial bid, only coming in third with 10% of the vote in the primary.

    1997-1998 – Region 10 Director for the US Department of Health and Human Services under US President Bill Clinton, serving Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington.

    November 1998 – Wins US House of Representatives seat for Washington’s 1st District, after four years out of office, against incumbent Rick White (R) with 49.77% of the vote.

    January 3, 1999-March 20, 2012 – US House of Representatives. Reelected six times.

    2007 – His book, “Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy,” written with Bracken Hendricks, is published.

    March 10, 2012 – Announces he will resign from the US House of Representatives in order to focus on his run for governor of the state.

    November 2012 – Wins the election for governor of Washington, defeating Rob McKenna (R) with 51.54% of the vote. Is reelected in 2016 with 54.39% of the vote.

    January 16, 2013-present – Governor of Washington.

    February 11, 2014 – Announces that he is suspending executions while he is in office, meaning he will issue reprieves when any capital cases come to his desk for action.

    2015-2016, 2017-2018 – Education and Workforce Committee Chair, National Governors Association (NGA).

    2016-2017, 2018-2019 – Education and Workforce Committee Vice Chair, NGA.

    2016 – Endorses Hillary Clinton for president of the United States.

    2017-present – Co-chair of the US Climate Alliance, a group he co-founded with California Governor Jerry Brown and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. The Alliance pledges to uphold the Paris Climate Accord following the United States’ withdrawal from the agreement.

    2017-2018 – Chairman of the Democratic Governors Association.

    July 5, 2017 – Inslee signs Washington’s paid family and medical leave act into law. It is considered one of the most generous such laws in the nation.

    November 6, 2018 – Loses a bid to enact a statewide carbon emissions tax, for the second time in two years.

    March 1, 2019 – Releases a video announcing his presidential candidacy.

    March 14, 2019 – Signs a bump stock buy-back program into law a week before a nationwide ban takes effect. The devices, which replace the standard stock and grip of a semi-automatic firearm, make it easier to fire rounds from such a weapon by harnessing the gun’s recoil to “bump” the trigger faster.

    August 21, 2019 – Suspends his 2020 presidential campaign.

    August 22, 2019 – Announces that he is running for a third term as governor.

    November 3, 2020 – Wins reelection to a third term as governor.

    June 30, 2022 – Inslee issues a directive that bars state police from cooperating with out-of-state investigatory requests related to abortion in his efforts to make the state a “sanctuary” for those seeking abortion services. The decision comes after the US Supreme Court ruled to strike down Roe v Wade, the 1973 legal precedent which guaranteed people’s federal constitutional right to abortion. The historic ruling essentially leaves abortion laws in states’ hands.

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  • Why Black voters are more important in Georgia than in any other state | CNN Politics

    Why Black voters are more important in Georgia than in any other state | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden is heading back to Georgia. On the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, he’s visiting Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the civil rights pioneer once preached. The trip makes a lot of sense, not just to pay tribute to King, but also because King helped lead the drive for equal voting rights for Black Americans.

    The Peach State is in many ways the place where the political importance of Black voters is clearest. They are one of the biggest reasons Georgia has swung from a red state to a purple one.

    The current list of swing states in American politics mostly features places where Black voters don’t play an outsize role – states such as Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin. Even in swing states where Black voters make up at least 10% of the voting public (e.g., Michigan and Pennsylvania), the Black portion of the electorate in the 2020 election was comparable to what it was nationwide (12%).

    Georgia is the big exception. According to US Census data, 33% of 2020 presidential election voters in the state were Black. That ranked second nationally behind deep-red Mississippi. Georgia’s own records show that a slightly smaller 29% of 2020 voters whose race was known were Black (or 27% when we include voters for whom race was unknown). That’s still the highest percentage in any swing state by far.

    Not only that, but the Black portion of the electorate is growing in Georgia as their percentage of the population has risen. State records show that Black adults made up 23% of voters in the 2000 election – which indicates a 6-point increase in the Black portion of the presidential electorate (whose race was known) from 2000 to 2020. There was an uptick of 1 point nationally over the same time span.

    To put into perspective how important this shift has been to Democratic fortunes, consider this math of the 2020 election results. Black voters in Georgia favored Biden by 77 points, according to the exit polls. Non-Black voters as a group (led by White voters) backed then-President Donald Trump by about 30 points. If Black voters had made up the same 23% of presidential election voters they did in 2000, Trump would have won the state by 6 points.

    Instead, Biden won Georgia by less than a point and became the first Democrat to carry the state in a presidential election since Bill Clinton in 1992.

    (Keep in mind, other datasets suggest that Biden won Georgia’s Black voters by an even larger margin, so this math may, in fact, underestimate how important Black voters were to Biden’s win.)

    There are other factors as to why Biden won Georgia when Democrats before him had failed. The state’s Asian and Hispanic populations are also way up from where they were 20 years ago. At the same time, White voters with a college degree in Georgia have shifted well to the left, matching recent national trends.

    All that said, Black voters are a huge reason why only a handful of states have swung more Democratic in presidential elections since 2004 than Georgia, which has moved 17 points more Democratic. None of the seven states with bigger Democratic swings had elections that were anywhere as close as Georgia’s was in 2020.

    Of course, it’s not just in presidential elections where the voting power of Black Georgians is felt.

    Both of Georgia’s US senators are Democrats, including the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church himself, Raphael Warnock. Without Warnock and Sen. Jon Ossoff, Democrats would be in the Senate minority instead of holding 51 out of 100 seats.

    Neither Warnock nor Ossoff would be in the Senate without Black voters. I’m not only talking about the fact that Black Georgians overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Ossoff and Warnock in twin Senate runoffs in 2021 or about the rise in the percentage of Black voters in the state since the beginning of the century.

    I’m talking about factors unique to the 2021 runoffs. Historically, Black turnout had dropped in general election runoffs in Georgia. That was not the case in 2021, when both Ossoff and Warnock scored narrow wins.

    Black voter turnout (relative to voters as a whole) was actually up in the 2021 runoffs compared with the November 2020 general election. Moreover, those who turned out were more Democratic-leaning than Black voters who had voted in the general election.

    Many of these same Black voters backed Warnock in huge numbers again in his victorious bid for a full six-year term in December’s Senate runoff.

    With the 2024 election around the corner, Georgia’s electoral fate depends on Black voter turnout and whether Democrats continue to win them in large numbers more than any other state. Expect Biden to be back in the Peach State rallying Black voters, if he runs for a second term.

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  • Why there are more Republican women in Congress than ever before | CNN Politics

    Why there are more Republican women in Congress than ever before | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Lori Chavez-DeRemer sat in the gallery of the House nearly two decades ago with her mom and her twin daughters – tourists peering down at lawmakers on the floor of the chamber.

    “I’d really love to be here someday,” the Oregon Republican recalled telling her mother, who encouraged her to think about a run. She’d recently been elected to her city council, but she had her doubts. “I said, ‘Everybody on the floor there probably has a law degree. I’m a stay-at-home mom.’”

    But Chavez-DeRemer flipped a Democratic seat in November, helping Republicans win a narrow House majority. She is now among a record 42 Republican women in Congress and one of the first two Latino members of Congress from Oregon.

    The trail she has blazed is emblematic of the progress that the Republican Party has made in electing women over the past decade – hard-fought milestones reached only after outside groups began playing a larger role in primaries.

    Still, GOP women are far from reaching parity with Democrats. Thirty-three of them will serve in the House alone this term, compared with 91 Democratic women. Though many women (and men who care about electing them) applaud a recent shift in attitude among GOP leadership and a segment of the donor class – for whom identity politics has often been anathema – long-term hurdles remain.

    Some leaders, including House GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik and Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel, want to see the party do more.

    That push is not just about statistics. It’s imperative as the party tries to appeal to a broader spectrum of voters, including the many suburban women who abandoned the GOP after Donald Trump was elected in 2016.

    “Suburban women and independent women are going to continue to be the X factor in whether we win,” said Annie Dickerson, the founder and chair of Winning for Women, an outside group that helps elect female Republicans.

    When Erin Houchin first ran for the Indiana state Senate in 2014, she urged a few party leaders to support female candidates in primaries – especially in deep-red seats where the primary is the only competitive election.

    “The answer I got was, ‘Well, we don’t get involved in primaries. You should go see if other women will help you,’” Houchin recalled.

    After winning her race, she ran for Congress in 2016 – the only woman in a five-person primary for a safe Republican seat. The party officially stayed out; the National Republican Congressional Committee’s policy is to never take sides in primaries.

    Houchin had support from Republican women, including early backing from Value in Electing Women, or VIEW, PAC, which encouraged female members of Congress to write checks for her.

    Those checks, however, were no match for what Houchin was up against: an opponent who benefited from a big-spending super PAC that likely could have outspent her even if she had more institutional party support. Trey Hollingsworth won that primary and the general election and went on to represent the 9th District for three terms before retiring last year.

    Houchin was once again the only woman in the primary to succeed Hollingsworth out of a field of nine, but this time, she emerged the winner. She easily won the general election for a district that Trump would have carried by 27 points in 2020.

    “There were many more groups this time around that did engage,” Houchin said, praising VIEW PAC, Winning for Women and Stefanik’s leadership PAC, known as Elevate PAC or E-PAC. “That made a difference.”

    Republicans have long viewed supporting diverse candidates differently from Democrats, who were earlier to embrace building coalitions among specific demographics.

    “Some of the Republican men didn’t necessarily think that it ought to be a priority,” GOP strategist Parker Poling, the executive director of the NRCC for the 2020 cycle, said of the party’s prior attitude toward boosting female candidates.

    “I had to sell it very differently in the beginning, back in 2017,” Dickerson recalled. “And it was real work persuading donors that it wasn’t identity politics. It was really about identifying excellence.”

    Stefanik raised the alarm with House GOP leaders after the 2018 election, when, as the first female recruitment chair of the NRCC, she had enlisted more than 100 women to run. Just one of them won.

    Democrats flipped the House that year, buoyed in large part by the success of female candidates, but the number of GOP women in the chamber declined by nearly half. Even if Republican leaders didn’t immediately recognize the problem – then-NRCC Chairman Tom Emmer called Stefanik’s desire to get involved in primaries a “mistake” – they quickly came around in their public support for her mission.

    “I am very proud that our efforts have been pretty much embraced across the board,” Stefanik said last month when asked if leadership now understands the importance of supporting women.

    That commitment to changing those dynamics showed in 2020 – which some have called the “Year of the Republican Woman” – when a record-breaking number of nonincumbent House GOP female candidates won, helping flip several pivotal Democratic seats.

    “There’s an understanding now that Republican women candidates can be very successful in the general election and in many cases are stronger candidates than men,” said Cam Savage, a veteran Republican consultant who worked for Houchin. “It’s been true for a while; it just hasn’t been recognized.”

    McDaniel accepts a shirt from Rep. Michelle Steel at the congresswoman's campaign office in Buena Park, California, in September 2022.

    McDaniel also noted that the tenor of conversations with donors has changed.

    “Our investors – when I started, some of them would say to me candidly, ‘You have young kids. How can you be a mom and do this?’” she said. “I don’t have those conversations anymore. It’s more: ‘What other women candidates can we invest in?’ ‘Where can we support women in our party?’”

    After impressive gains in 2020, Republican women made more nominal progress in 2022. Just one GOP woman, Virginia’s Jen Kiggans, unseated a Democratic incumbent in a swing seat, while several others flipped open seats in Oregon, Florida and Texas.

    There’s excitement, however, about conservative women’s success in red districts and how that could help deepen and extend the longevity of the bench of female Republicans in Congress.

    “You can’t just focus on electing women Republicans in swing seats. That’s why we had, you know, such a historic loss in 2018, as most of our women members were in those swing seats,” Stefanik said.

    Of the seven nonincumbent Republican women elected last year, five represent districts Trump would have carried in 2020.

    “That allows those members to gain seniority over time and also to make investments in other candidates,” added Stefanik.

    In other words, electing women in safe seats means they’re more likely to stay there – although not always. Liz Cheney lost her deep-red Wyoming seat in a primary to another woman backed by Stefanik.

    And those very primaries in deeply conservative districts have sometimes been harder for women to win, even if – based on their policy positions and voting records – they are the most conservative candidates.

    Houchin, for example, said it was important for her to be very clear about where she stood on the issues because “it’s been easier to paint female candidates as more moderate or more liberal. That’s certainly not my profile.”

    Helping women get through primaries in safe red seats could become more difficult after a deal reached between two outside groups as part of the Republican negotiations over the House speaker’s election. Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC backed by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, agreed to stay out of open-seat primaries in exchange for the anti-tax Club for Growth’s support for his speakership bid.

    Chavez-DeRemer — one of those Republican women to flip an open seat last year — now calls her self-doubts during that visit to the Capitol silly.

    Chavez-DeRemer is seen in Happy Valley in the Portland suburbs in September 2022.

    “Little did I know that, really, my whole life, I was probably preparing for this,” she said. “I needed to just be me.”

    The former mayor of Happy Valley, in suburban Portland, won a five-way primary in Oregon’s 5th District and went on to win the general election over a Democratic woman, who had defeated the incumbent in her primary.

    Her story speaks to the message pushed by potential White House aspirant Nikki Haley, who has channeled her energies into elevating female Republican candidates through her Stand for America PAC.

    “What we need to do is to tell women, ‘We need you. We need you at the table. We need you making the decisions. We need your experience. We need your ability to talk about families and budgets and crime, and all of those things,” the former South Carolina governor and onetime US ambassador to the United Nations said in a brief interview on the campaign trail in Nevada last year.

    Haley speaks at a campaign event for De La Cruz and Rep. Mayra Flores in McAllen, Texas, in October 2022.

    “Success begets success,” Poling added of female candidates’ track record. “When people see that this helped us win more seats, then they’re more likely to put the time and effort into recruiting and helping female candidates.”

    Party operatives credit strong recruitment – both in 2022 under NRCC recruitment chair Carol Miller of West Virginia and in 2020, under then-Rep. Susan Brooks of Indiana.

    “That begins with the acknowledgment that the way you recruit women is different from men,” Savage said. “You don’t have to recruit men. They line up to tell you they’re the best fit.”

    But one of the major lessons from 2018 is the recognition that getting women to run isn’t enough: Helping them through the process is also critical.

    “I don’t look at women as a monolith – they come with different backgrounds and experience – but sometimes fundraising can be a challenge, or life balance,” said McDaniel, who was elected RNC chair in 2017.

    One part of addressing that is female candidates supporting each other. Monica De La Cruz was one of three Republican women running for South Texas swing districts along the southern border last year.

    “We had a support group of women who understood exactly what you were going through at that moment, so it was a very special time,” said De La Cruz, the only one of the three to win.

    And increasingly, there’s recognition that a female perspective can be a strength in the eyes of voters.

    “I had no political background. I’m a small-business owner, single mom of two teenage children. And people could relate to that,” said De La Cruz, who has been tapped to serve on the RNC’s advisory panel to examine how the party can continue broadening its appeal to women and more diverse voters.

    De La Cruz takes a selfie with supporters in McAllen, Texas, in October 2022.

    “They saw me at the Friday night football games, and the Saturday morning volleyball games,” she said. “They saw me in parent-teacher conferences at the school. My community saw themselves in me.”

    The GOP still has a lot of catching up to do. Even with leadership PACs and outside groups committed to boosting women in Republican primaries, the party lacks the firepower of a group like EMILY’s List, which has been helping elect Democratic women who support abortion rights since the mid-1980s.

    Some of the outside groups backing GOP women have diverged in primaries, either not engaging in the same races or even backing different women in the same primaries.

    To expand institutional support, McDaniel pointed to the example of programs such as League of Our Own, a campaign program she worked with in her home state of Michigan that has focused on training female candidates.

    “We talked about things like, ‘How do you raise money? How do you pick a campaign manager?’” McDaniel said. “You’d see these women who were graduates, going on to be state reps or state senators. It’s really, really impactful to see how even just that little bit of campaign school and that little bit of help can go a long way in bringing women into the conversation.”

    Chavez-DeRemer said the party must “keep reaching out” and “make sure that all women are running at a local level.”

    Stefanik echoed that sentiment, pointing to a robust state and local pipeline as a lynchpin to deepening the bench of Republican women in Congress in the years ahead.

    “It’s a long-term strategy,” she said.

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  • Two words no president wants to hear | CNN Politics

    Two words no president wants to hear | CNN Politics

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    A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    There’s something ringing in Joe Biden’s ears that no president ever, ever wants to hear: special counsel.

    These are the independent lawyers appointed, usually by attorneys general, to look, without conflict of interest, into actions involving the president or his administration. While you might have forgotten their names, you’re familiar with their work.

    Watergate. Iran-Contra. Whitewater. The Russia investigation. Teapot Dome.

    Other investigations include inquiries into the George W. Bush administration’s leak of the identity of an undercover CIA agent whose husband questioned intelligence about Iraq, the government’s ultimately deadly siege of the Branch Davidian compound and Jimmy Carter’s peanut business.

    Note that I’m including special counsels, special prosecutors, independent counsels and independent prosecutors here. A law that authorized independent prosecutors or independent counsels, who had more autonomy from the Department of Justice, lapsed in 1999 after high profile and expensive inquiries during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations into the Iran-Contra affair and during the Clinton administration into Whitewater. In the years since, the Department of Justice has adopted regulations to enable to the attorney general to call up a special counsel when needed.

    Since Carter, only Barack Obama has emerged from the White House without having a special counsel or special prosecutor look at his administration. See lists of these investigations compiled by the A-Mark Foundation and The Washington Post.

    Now, there are two special counsels at the same time. One, Jack Smith, is looking into the multiple investigations involving former President Donald Trump, ranging from his effort to overturn the 2020 election to his handling of classified data and stonewalling that led the FBI to search Mar-a-Lago last summer.

    The other, appointed this week, is Robert Hur, who will assess what should happen as a result of classified documents being found both in a Washington, DC, office used by Biden following his vice presidency, and locked up in the garage at his Wilmington, Delaware, home, where he also keeps his Corvette.

    Both Biden and Trump’s teams have denied wrongdoing.

    All of Hur’s previous appointments to official positions have come during Republican administrations, including his appointment to be US attorney in Maryland by former President Donald Trump. He served as law clerk for federal judges appointed by former President Ronald Reagan, including the late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. He once held a top position as an assistant to current FBI Director Christopher Wray, also a Trump appointee, but one who has been criticized by Trump. As US attorney in Maryland, he oversaw a corruption case where Baltimore’s former Democratic mayor was sentenced to prison for three years following a children’s book scandal.

    Smith, who is coordinating Trump investigations, worked at the Justice Department during the Obama administration. While at the public integrity unit of the Justice Department, Smith was involved in the decision to prosecute former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican who was convicted of corruption, although the Supreme Court later vacated the conviction. He was also involved in the failed prosecution of former Sen. John Edwards, a Democrat.

    The two special prosecutors can expect very different treatment by the subjects of their investigations.

    Biden’s White House has promised to cooperate with Hur; Trump has already written off Smith.

    “The Special ‘Prosecutor’ assigned to the ‘get Trump case,’ Jack Smith(?), is a Trump Hating THUG whose wife is a serial and open Trump Hater, whose friends & other family members are even worse,” Trump said in the opening of a screed on his social media platform Thursday.

    There are some important distinctions in terms of what kind of power a special counsel has. Between 1978 and 1999, as part of an ethics in government law, the attorney general could ask a three-judge panel to appoint an independent prosecutor with near total authority to bring charges. Read more from the Congressional Research Service.

    More recently, attorneys general have appointed special counsels, who have some autonomy, but still ultimately report to the attorney general. That chain of command was abundantly clear when Trump’s attorney general William Barr slow-walked the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Russia investigation in a way that seemed beneficial to Trump.

    Thus, it’s Merrick Garland, or his successors, who will ultimately decide what to do with the findings by Smith and Hur.

    While the White House said it will cooperate with the special counsel, the fact is that it is developing a credibility gap on this issue.

    Biden’s lawyers found classified documents in Biden’s office in November and in his home in December. But when the administration first publicly addressed the findings this month, they didn’t mention the documents found in the home.

    “Not only did this make it look like Biden had something to hide, it set up the kind of drip, drip of disclosures guaranteed to supercharge a Washington scandal,” CNN’s Stephen Collinson wrote Friday.

    The White House, however, has pushed back on that perception, arguing the discoveries of all classified documents were ultimately disclosed.

    “When the president’s lawyers realized that the documents existed, that they were there, they reached out to the Archives. They reached out to the Department of Justice. rightfully so, I may add. That is what you’re supposed to do,” argued White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre at the White House Thursday.

    CNN’s White House team published a deep dive report looking at the final days of Biden’s vice presidency in early 2017, the period that appears to have resulted in these classified documents ending up at his home, locked up next to his Corvette, as Biden said Thursday, and at the Penn Biden Center.

    The discovery that set off this scandal was made by a Biden attorney looking into “a manilla folder marked ‘VP personal,’” according to one person in the report.

    CNN’s reporting, based on that source, is that there are 10 classified documents, including US intelligence memorandums and briefing materials that covered topics including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom. There is also a memo from Biden to Obama and briefing memos meant to prepare Biden for one phone call with the prime minister of Britain and another with Donald Tusk, in his capacity as president of the European Council.

    While there are two probes, each with a special counsel appointed to look into the leaders’ handling of classified material, it’s important not to conflate them. The larger issue for Trump is that he fought giving documents to the National Archives as required by law and may have obstructed attempts by the government to retrieve them.

    “Based on what we know now, Biden is unlikely ever to face charges, whereas Trump is at high risk because of his obstructive conduct and other factors absent from the Biden case,” Norm Eisen, the ethics lawyer who helped Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment, writes for CNN Opinion. “The cases have special counsels and classified documents in common — but little else.”

    Earlier in the Trump classified documents saga in 2022 I talked to the government transparency activist Thomas Blanton at National Security Archive about how the US government classifies way too much material.

    The Biden classified documents saga could help prove his points. He told me there are clearly things related to intelligence sources or nuclear weapons that need to be kept secret. However…

    “The constant struggle is to push against the bureaucratic imperatives that cause ‘secure-a-crats’ to cover their rears for the most part with classified documents, but ensuring that the real secrets that will get people killed get really protected.”

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  • ‘Victory smoke in the Capitol, boys,’ Proud Boys member said on Jan. 6, prosecutors say as trial begins | CNN Politics

    ‘Victory smoke in the Capitol, boys,’ Proud Boys member said on Jan. 6, prosecutors say as trial begins | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Dozens of messages, social media posts and videos show that leaders of the far-right Proud Boys not only planned for the January 6, 2021, US Capitol attack but recruited others to help stop Joe Biden from becoming president, federal prosecutors said Thursday during opening statements in the seditious conspiracy trial.

    “Let’s bring this new year with one word in mind…revolt,” defendant and then-Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio wrote to others in the group on January 1, 2021, according to prosecutors. “New year’s revolution.”

    Prosecutor Jason McCullough told the jury that Proud Boys leaders were afraid a Biden presidency would mean the end of the organization and that, after President Donald Trump infamously said in a presidential debate in 2020, to “stand back and stand by,” the organization reached a turning point.

    “In that moment, some battle lines were drawn. President Trump was for the proud boys, and Joe Biden was for antifa,” McCullough said.

    “The defendants’ mission threatened the very foundations of our government,” McCullough told the jury. “These five defendants had agreed – by any means necessary including use of force – to stop Congress” from certifying the election for Biden.

    The defendants – Tarrio, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, Dominic Pezzola and Ethan Nordean – have all pleaded not guilty to charges, including seditious conspiracy, conspiracy to obstruct and obstructing an official proceeding.

    According to McCullough, the five defendants planned to stop the transfer of power to Biden that day and communicated and organized through messaging apps. McCullough played video of several defendants allegedly tearing down police barricades, attacking officers and ultimately being the first to break into the Capitol, celebrating along the way.

    Why did some Proud Boys dress up like Antifa on January 6?


    09:50

    – Source:
    CNN

    “Victory smoke in the Capitol, boys,” Pezzola, who prosecutors say was the first to break into the Capitol using a riot shield he stole from a police officer, said inside the building, according to a video shown in court. “This is f**king awesome. I knew we could take this mother**ker over [if we] just tried hard enough. Proud of your motherf**king boy.”

    “Don’t f**king leave,” Tarrio allegedly wrote in a public post during the riot.

    Prosecutors played a video of Nordean allegedly celebrating the riot.

    “I was part of f**king storming the Capitol of the most powerful country in the f**king world,” Nordean said.

    On January 7, Rehl allegedly wrote to other Proud Boys: “I’m proud as f**k at what we accomplished yesterday.”

    In their opening statements, defense attorneys repeatedly told jurors that the Proud Boys had no plan to storm the Capitol building on January 6, and were instead caught up in a mob mentality.

    “You will see at trial no evidence that supports the government’s conspiracy claim that these defendants plotted before January 6 to do what the government alleges,” Nordean’s attorney Nick Smith told the jury.

    “It’s only human to say something phenomenal must have caused this,” Smith said of the deadly riot. “But as we often see, that’s not true.”

    But because it is “emotionally unsatisfying” to admit that a mob mentality took over, Smith said, prosecutors “selectively presented messages” to make the Proud Boys a “scapegoat.”

    Tarrio’s attorney Sabino Jauregui also said that his client, who was not in Washington, DC, on January 6, is being blamed for other people’s actions.

    “You see Trump, President Trump, told them the election was stolen,” Jauregui said. “It was Trump that told them to go [to the Capitol]. And it was Trump that unleashed them on January 6. He’s the one that told them to march over there and ‘fight like hell.’”

    He continued: “It’s too hard to blame the politicians on the left and on the right, the ones that use us for their fundraising and their reelection., the ones that pit us against each other… Instead, they go for the easy target, they go for Enrique Tarrio.”

    Jauregui highlighted for the jury that Tarrio, according to Jauregui, had no communication with members of the group that were at the Capitol and never called for attacking the building.

    Rehl’s attorney, Carmen Hernandez, implored the jury to forget everything they had heard about the Proud Boys’ reputation, including allegations that the group is violent or racist.

    “Americans express a lot of opinion about politics, about politicians, about elections, about other public issues,” Hernandez said. “The fact that we state these opinions, I would submit to you, isn’t evidence of a crime.”

    “You all swore to the court that you would put aside any theories, any views you had about the Proud Boys,” Hernandez said, adding, “I am dependent on that.”

    Smith, Jauregui and Hernandez all said that the government has spoken to FBI informants and cooperating Proud Boys who were at the Capitol on January 6. Those witnesses repeatedly emphasized the group had no plan, the attorneys said.

    While several defense attorneys condemned the Capitol riot, Pezzola’s attorney, Roger Roots, used his opening statement to downplay the attack, repeatedly saying that the Proud Boys case is simply about a six-hour delay of Congress.

    “The government makes a big deal of this six-hour recess, from about two o’clock to eight o’clock,” Roots said of Congress’ forced recess on January 6 as rioters stormed the Capitol.

    “Some have called it an attack or even an insurrection,” Roots continued. “The evidence will show that if it was an attack, it might have been one of the lamest attacks that you can imagine.”

    Roots also said his client didn’t “steal” a riot shield from a police officer, as prosecutors have alleged, and suggested that “someone chose not to” fortify the Capitol windows, one of which Pezzola allegedly broke open with the shield.

    Roots closed by asking the jury to question whether Pezzola’s motivation that day was truly to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election, and to look closely at what his client saw as the “victory” that day.

    “Mr. Pezzola described victory, simply, as taking this motherf**ker,” Roots said.

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  • House Oversight chairman seeks Biden family financial transaction data | CNN Politics

    House Oversight chairman seeks Biden family financial transaction data | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Rep. James Comer, in one of his first moves as House Oversight Chairman, is seeking information from the Treasury Department about the Biden family’s financial transactions and calling on a handful of former Twitter executives to testify at a public hearing.

    The new round of letters from the committee come as House Republicans are looking to flex their investigative might and make good on promises to delve into the Biden family finances and alleged political influence over technology companies after Twitter temporarily suppressed a 2020 story about Hunter Biden and his laptop.

    “Now that Democrats no longer have one-party rule in Washington, oversight and accountability are coming,” Comer said of his panel’s investigation into Hunter Biden and the Biden family’s business dealings. “This investigation is a top priority for House Republicans during the 118th Congress.”

    Comer requested Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen provide his panel with bank activity reports for Hunter Biden, President Biden’s brother James Biden and several Biden family associates and their related companies.

    “The Committee on Oversight and Accountability is investigating President Biden’s involvement in his family’s foreign business practices and international influence peddling schemes,” Comer wrote to Yellen.

    Comer tried to acquire these bank activity reports, known as Suspicious Activity Reports, repeatedly when Republicans were in the minority but was largely unsuccessful. Comer has said he has only seen two and did not reveal the source of those reports.

    Comer has previously pointed to the bank activity reports – known as Suspicious Activity Reports – as evidence of potential wrongdoing by Joe Biden’s family members. But such reports are not conclusive and do not necessarily indicate wrongdoing. Each year, financial institutions file millions of suspicious activity reports and few lead to law enforcement inquiries.

    The White House accused Republicans of engaging in “political stunts” following Comer’s request Wednesday.

    “In their first week as a governing majority, House Republicans have not taken any meaningful action to address inflation and lower Americans’ costs, yet they’re jumping out of the gate with political stunts driven by the most extreme MAGA members of their caucus in an effort to get attention on Fox News,” Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s office, said in a statement. “The President is going to continue focusing on the important issues the American people want their leaders to work together on, and we hope House Republicans will join him.”

    Comer also is seeking communications within the Treasury Department, its financial crimes enforcement division and the White House regarding those family members and related businesses and associates, all of which he wants to be returned by January 25.

    The letters to former Twitter officials offer a path to Comer’s investigative schedule ahead. The letters to former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde; former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth; and former deputy general counsel James Baker call on the trio to appear in a public hearing the week of February 6. They come after Comer sent an earlier round of letters in December requesting their testimony.

    “Your attendance is necessary because of your role in suppressing Americans’ access to information about the Biden family on Twitter shortly before the 2020 election,” each of the letters to the former Twitter employees states.

    Republicans have seized on the so-called Twitter files as evidence of government censorship, although none of the messages released so far show the FBI explicitly telling Twitter to suppress a story that included material from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. An FBI agent at the heart of the controversy as well as several federal officials and tech executives have all denied there was any such order, CNN previously reported.

    Roth, meantime, has said publicly that the Hunter Biden story appeared as though it could be the product of a hack-and-leak operation, but he has denied that he personally tried to censor the story.

    “It’s widely reported that I personally directed the suppression of the Hunter Biden story. That is not true. It is absolutely, unequivocally untrue,” Roth told tech journalist Kara Swisher in a podcast interview last year.

    Comer’s demands come as both he and Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan have vowed to investigate the federal government’s influence over tech companies.

    In an interview with CNN earlier this week, Comer suggested that Judiciary staff could sit in on some of his committee’s interviews if there are common areas of interest, like with Twitter.

    “There is some overlap but that won’t be a problem for Jim and I,” Comer said in the interview. “He knows who we’re bringing in. We know who he’s bringing in.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments Wednesday.

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  • Don’t try to make sense of Biden’s border policy | CNN Politics

    Don’t try to make sense of Biden’s border policy | CNN Politics

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    A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden’s immigration policy is confusing and full of contradictions.

    Make some sense of these developments:

    Biden …

    • made his first visit to the border as president on Sunday, but failed to see any migrants …
    • is expanding former President Donald Trump’s border policy, known as Title 42, even though Biden says he doesn’t like it …
    • asked courts to end that Trump-era policy, but seemingly had no workable plan for when they nearly did …
    • has traveled to Mexico City for a summit with North American leaders, but his White House is making very clear they aren’t anticipating any progress on the border crisis …
    • watches on as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, in particular, freelances his own border security with increasingly elaborate stunts to argue the border is too porous. The latest involves adding a wall of shipping containers to the border at El Paso, Texas.

    How did Biden visit an aid center at the border during an admitted crisis and fail to encounter any actual migrants?

    “There just weren’t any at the center when he arrived,” a senior administration official said in Priscilla Alvarez and MJ Lee’s report for CNN. “Completely coincidental. They haven’t had any today.”

    Granted, border crossings have dropped in the new year.

    But Alvarez and Lee point to on-the-ground reporting from CNN’s Rosa Flores that “hundreds of migrants, including children, were living on the street after crossing into the United States in El Paso. And nearly 1,000 additional migrants were in federal custody in detention facilities in El Paso on Sunday, according to the City of El Paso’s migrant dashboard.”

    Abbott hand-delivered a message to Biden on the tarmac in El Paso complaining Biden hasn’t paid enough attention to the border. The strongly worded letter was also posted on Abbott’s website.

    “Your visit avoids the sites where mass illegal immigration occurs and sidesteps the thousands of angry Texas property owners whose lives have been destroyed by your border policies,” Abbott wrote.

    Rather than meet with migrants, Biden focused on meeting with border enforcement personnel, including in a quick stop alongside an iron fence between the US and Mexico. Reporters were kept at a distance. Read the full report from Alvarez and Lee.

    What’s no coincidence is the administration’s hard-to-follow immigration policy.

    As part of the new immigration plan announced last week, Biden said the US would accept up to 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela into a humanitarian “parole program,” but then also made clear Title 42 would be applied in a new way, continuing the policy of turning away more people at the border.

    The idea is to get people to apply legally from home rather than just show up at the border.

    CNN’s Catherine Shoichet does an admirable job of trying to keep track of Biden’s relationship with Title 42, the Trump-era pandemic policy written by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not Congress, and which has morphed into de facto US immigration policy.

    It allows the government to turn away more migrants at the border. When it appeared Title 42 would lapse at the end of 2022, a mass of migrants gathered at the border in anticipation.

    “Officials have claimed court decisions left them with no other choice, but they’ve also chosen to expand the policy beyond any court’s order,” Shoichet writes.

    Take a look at her timeline of the Biden administration’s evolution on Title 42. The recent expansion of the policy came after the Supreme Court required officials to maintain it.

    A group of Democratic lawmakers said they were “deeply disappointed” in the new version of the policy, which they argued would “do nothing to restore the rule of law at the border.”

    “Instead, it will increase border crossings over time and further enrich human smuggling networks,” Sens. Cory Booker and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Ben Ray Lujan of New Mexico and Alex Padilla of California wrote in a joint statement.

    It’s a concern Biden actually shares. Even though he is essentially expanding the policy, the president also acknowledged last week his move could makes things worse because it almost encourages people turned away at the border to try repeatedly to enter the US.

    White House officials are tamping down expectations for Biden’s meeting with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is often referred to in shorthand as AMLO.

    Mexico recently agreed to accept up to 30,000 migrants per month from the four countries included in the new policy who attempt to enter the US and are turned back.

    AMLO has suggested Mexico could accept more. But national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the policy will need time to play out before anyone should expect tweaks.

    While it’s hard to make sense of Biden’s border policy, it’s important to remember the systemic dysfunction of the US border debate that has paralyzed Congress for decades.

    The issue of immigration is top of mind for Republicans who now control the House, but it’s not at all clear there will be any movement toward the kind of bipartisan and comprehensive efforts that could change things.

    Meantime, Biden will be left to the existing policies, even if they were written under the previous administration and kept in place, for now, by the Supreme Court.

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  • Giuliani subpoenaed amid special counsel investigation into Trump’s fundraising | CNN Politics

    Giuliani subpoenaed amid special counsel investigation into Trump’s fundraising | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Special counsel Jack Smith’s team has subpoenaed Donald Trump’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani, asking him to turn over records to a federal grand jury as part of an investigation into the former president’s fundraising following the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the subpoena.

    The subpoena, which was sent more than a month ago and has not been previously reported, requests documents from Giuliani about payments he received around the 2020 election, when Giuliani filed numerous lawsuits on Trump’s behalf contesting the election results, the person said.

    Prosecutors have also subpoenaed other witnesses who are close to Trump, asking specifically for documents related to disbursements from the Save America PAC, Trump’s primary fundraising operation set up shortly after the 2020 election, according to other sources with insight into the probe.

    Taken together, the subpoenas demonstrate prosecutors’ growing interest in following the money after the 2020 election as part of their sweeping criminal probe around Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss of the presidency.

    Save America was part of broader fundraising efforts by Trump and the Republican Party that raised more than $250 million after the election. Since then, the political action committee has compensated several lawyers who now represent Trump and his allies in January 6-related investigations.

    The subpoenas to other witnesses in addition to Giuliani were sent in late December, according to the other sources.

    The information the prosecutors seek is still being collected, the sources said. With Giuliani, the investigators have prioritized getting financial information from him, one person said.

    The inquiry to Giuliani came from David Rody, a former top prosecutor in New York who specializes in gang and conspiracy cases and is assisting Smith with examining a broader criminal conspiracy after the election, according to some of the sources.

    In response to being informed of CNN’s reporting on Giuliani’s subpoena and asked for a statement, Ted Goodman, his adviser, said, “The mayor is unaware of the specific claims by this so-called ‘anonymous source,’ and therefore is not in position to respond.”

    A spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.

    A representative for Trump has not responded to a request for comment.

    CNN previously reported the Justice Department in September subpoenaed witnesses for financial details about the Save America PAC, and that a portion of Smith’s office would dig into possible financial and campaign contribution crimes. The Giuliani subpoena and other December subpoenas represent a new round of inquiry, now from Smith’s office, which took shape over the holidays.

    After the election, Trump and the Republican National Committee raked in millions of dollars as they told supporters the election was being stolen, marketing the fundraising effort as election defense. At the time, some officials working on the fundraising effort knew that Joe Biden’s electoral win was legitimate, despite Trump’s insistence it was fraudulent, the House Select Committee found in its own investigation.

    Smith’s office hasn’t brought any charges. Federal prosecutors in New York previously investigated Giuliani for activities in Ukraine during the Trump presidency. While that led to prosecutors accessing his electronic devices, they declined to charge him with any crime.

    Giuliani is likely to be a central figure in any probe of Trump’s close political circles after the election. After serving as Trump’s private attorney during the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the former chief federal prosecutor and mayor of Manhattan dove into Trump’s attempts to claim electoral victory. He unsuccessfully argued a case before a federal judge in Pennsylvania – where Trump sought to throw out the popular vote – and connected with state lawmakers as he tried to convince them of election fraud.

    In the weeks after the 2020 election, Giuliani also held freewheeling press conferences, repeating allegations that he never could prove.

    A Trump campaign attorney told the January 6 committee that Giuliani had asked to be paid $20,000 a day for his post-election work for Trump. The campaign declined to pay him that, according to election and House select committee public records.

    Subpoenas issued last year to a wide swath of Trump-connected witnesses also asked questions about the Save America PAC, including how its funds were used in 2020 and early 2021, and about Giuliani, as CNN previously reported.

    Giuliani hasn’t personally received distributions directly from the PAC, according to campaign finance records. Yet his company, Giuliani Partners, was paid $63,400 for travel reimbursement by Trump’s campaign committee in mid-December 2020. Giuliani’s New York-based security company also received a $76,500 payment from another Trump-backed entity, the Make America Great Again PAC, for travel expenses, in early February 2021, according to the records.

    In addition to the financial inquiry, Smith’s office is also pursuing possible criminal cases around the Trump campaign’s use of fake electors in battleground states and the pressure on Congress and then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election’s result. In all of those schemes, Giuliani was a central player.

    In his House select committee testimony, Giuliani explained that his team working with Trump pivoted to focus on state legislatures that could block the election result after his attempts failed in the courts. The New York state bar suspended him from practicing law because of his 2020 election efforts, and he’s also facing an attorney discipline proceeding in Washington, DC.

    He declined to answer some questions the House asked about his work for Trump after the election, citing attorney confidentiality. Giuliani could try to make similar claims in the federal investigation, though the Justice Department has legal mechanisms in which it can try to overcome witness refusals to answer questions.

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  • The most chilling warning for Americans from Brazil’s version of January 6 | CNN Politics

    The most chilling warning for Americans from Brazil’s version of January 6 | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    On the face of it, the mob storming of government buildings in Brazil in support of a defeated ex-president making false claims of electoral fraud looks like a copycat assault on democracy inspired by the US Capitol insurrection.

    But for Americans, the reality of the comparison between the insurrection inspired by the 45th US president on January, 6, 2021, and the latest revolt by supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, dubbed “Trump of the Tropics,” is even more troubling. Brazil is in turmoil after hundreds of Bolsonaro supporters stormed congressional buildings, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace in the capital Brasilia. The assault came a week after the inauguration of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who returned to power after a 12-year hiatus following a victory over Bolsonaro in a run-off election on October 30.

    While many elements of the situation in Brazil overlap with the populist conservatism epitomized by former President Donald Trump’s inner circle in the US, it also poses the question of whether the US, under assault from its own anti-democratic movement, is beginning to resemble the political turmoil that has long raged in less stable regions of the world.

    For now, there are growing questions over whether key extremists in Trump’s inner circle, like Steve Bannon, helped fan the violence in Brasilia and doubts over the Brazilian election, as part of a bid to destabilize democracies worldwide.

    Bolsonaro did not explicitly provoke the gathering of protesters as Trump did, and was not in the country at the time of the riot. He did, however, adopt the Trump playbook, sowing doubt about the vote’s legitimacy, refusing to concede his election loss and profiting from disinformation spread on social media. But his behavior is not necessarily an outlier in a nation and a continent where democracy is perpetually fragile and at risk.

    Brazil was a military-run dictatorship until 1985 after the crushing of an earlier attempt at democracy, and civilian self-government since then has often been rocked by corruption, fears of military takeovers and prosecutions of former presidents. The erosion of democracy and the use of violence as a political tool were a feature of much of the Western Hemisphere long before Trump latched onto them.

    So, while it may look like Brazilian extremists are copying their brethren in the US, the world’s most important democracy could actually be importing the characteristics of malfunctioning and chaotic political societies abroad.

    Violence had long been feared following October’s election. Bolsonaro supporters, spurred by his false claims of electoral fraud, that mirrored Trump’s own behavior after the 2020 election, clearly incited his supporters. Just as in the United States, there are elements among Brazilian legislators and in political power in the states who support Bolsonaro and his efforts to undermine democracy.

    The new House majority in Washington is packed with Republican members who voted not to certify President Joe Biden’s election victory in 2020 based on false claims of ballot fraud. And the new Speaker Kevin McCarthy only finally won the job on a 15th ballot after an intervention from Trump – poignantly on the night that marked the second anniversary of Congress returning to work after the Capitol riot.

    In other echoes of January 6, Bolsonaro – like his populist, nationalist political cousin Trump – is currently in Florida. Like the 45th US president, he also prepared to undermine the election in advance and refused to concede defeat after making complaints about voting machines that were rejected by judges. The closest he got was when he said he would comply with the Constitution.

    So far, Brazil’s democracy, as America’s did two years ago, has held firm, and protesters have been flushed out of government buildings. But the Biden administration has been concerned from the start about the implications of Bolsonaro’s election denialism in a nation that is a political and economic fulcrum in Latin America. It warned publicly and in private, weeks before the election that then-President Bolsonaro should not sabotage democracy, clearly understanding the parallels with Trump and more broadly the dangers facing Brazilian democracy since the end of military rule in the 1980s.

    Biden, who has put the threats to global democracy at the center of his foreign policy, condemned the assault on democracy and on the peaceful transfer of power in a tweet. “Brazil’s democratic institutions have our full support and the will of the Brazilian people must not be undermined,” Biden wrote. “I look forward to continuing to work with @LulaOficial,” he wrote, referring to the current president.

    But the violence in Brazil came as a jolt after the last year in which democracy appeared to be making a comeback around the world, including in the United States where voters in some swing states rejected election denialism pushed by many of Trump’s political proteges in the midterm elections.

    The most powerful example that Washington can send to Brazil, and other nations where political systems are under duress, is that democracy bent but didn’t break in 2021, and that those who threatened it are starting to be held to account.

    But two dates, January 6 in the US and January 8 in Brazil, now stand as flashing warning signs that the health and survival of free elections anywhere cannot be taken for granted.

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  • Biden struggles to confirm judges in the South and thwart Trump’s impact | CNN Politics

    Biden struggles to confirm judges in the South and thwart Trump’s impact | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats have moved quickly to appoint scores of judges during the past two years, outpacing former President Donald Trump, but they have stalled in the South.

    The dearth of nominees offered in southern states, notably where both US senators are Republican, threatens to undercut Biden’s large-scale effort to counteract Trump’s effect on the federal judiciary, particularly to bolster civil rights and ensure voter protections.

    The Biden team’s well-documented diversification of the courts – nominees have been overwhelmingly women and people of color, such as Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and offered professional diversity, including public defenders and civil rights lawyers – has withered when it comes to district courts in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Texas, where more than a dozen such court vacancies exist.

    “That is where the entrenchment of hyper-conservatism is real and difficult to uproot,” said Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

    The pattern of vacancies, particularly in the South, is not lost on the Biden selection team, led by political veterans with deep experience in judicial selection and confirmation. (Biden, himself, as a senator from Delaware, once led the Senate Judiciary Committee.)

    “All of these seats are deeply important to us. We care about all of these vacancies,” Paige Herwig, senior counsel to the President, told CNN. “It’s not a secret that a large number of vacancies are in states with two Republican senators. But we are always here in good faith. We are here to work with home state senators.”

    Many states beyond the South with two GOP senators, such as Idaho, Oklahoma and Utah, lack nominees for court vacancies, but the South is disproportionately affected because of its sheer population and number of open seats. The South also endures as a battleground for intense litigation over civil rights and liberties.

    Federal judges are appointed for life and can become a president’s most enduring legacy. Judges’ effect on American life is clear, from the top at the Supreme Court, down to district court judges who decide which litigants even get to trial.

    District courts are “the gateway to access to justice,” Nelson said.

    District court judges have also shown their muscle in recent years by blocking executive branch policy with nationwide injunctions. Biden’s early initiatives, notably over immigration and student-debt relief, were first thwarted in lower courts by Republican-appointed judges.

    During Biden’s first two years, the White House and Senate Democrats plainly prioritized judicial vacancies in blue states, where they could make swift and immediate progress.

    Overall, Biden won confirmations for 97 appointments to the US district courts, appellate bench and Supreme Court over the past two years.

    For the comparable two-year period, Trump, who set out to transform the federal courts the help of White House counsel Don McGahn and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, had named 85 judges. They scouted out likeminded conservative ideologues and then accelerated appointments in the following years by openly encouraging judges to retire to generate more vacancies.

    U.S. Supreme Court says Trump-era border policy to remain in effect while legal challenges play out


    10:08

    – Source:
    CNN

    Like other progressive leaders, Nelson praises the Biden focus on a more diverse bench. Yet she said the White House could step up the pace of nominations and the Senate can move faster on the nominees it has received.

    “Nancy Abudu is an excellent example of someone whose nomination has been stalled,” Nelson said. Abudu, a litigation director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, would, if confirmed, be the first Black woman on the US appeals court for the 11th Circuit, covering Alabama, Georgia and Florida. She was designated for an open Georgia seat and endorsed by the state’s two senators, both of whom are Democrats.

    The Senate Judiciary Committee, which had been evenly split between Democrats and Republicans last year, deadlocked in May on Abudu’s nomination, and she had been awaiting a procedural vote by the full Senate that then would have allowed an up-or-down vote on confirmation. Biden has renominated her for the new Congress.

    The question now is whether the White House will be able to ramp up negotiations with red-state senators and whether the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, will ease the practice of requiring district court nominees to have the backing of home-state senators.

    By the terms of the Constitution, a president seeks the “advice and consent” of the Senate judicial appointments. Senators traditionally have influenced the selection of nominations to district and appellate courts in their home states, even to the point of blocking a disfavored candidate. In recent years, however, presidents have been able to wield more latitude for appeals court nominations.

    The Judiciary Committee, however, will not hold a hearing on a district court nomination unless both home-state senators have signed off, in what’s referred to as the “blue slip” process. These blue slips of paper, as they are relayed to the committee, are intended to signify that a home-state senator has been consulted in the president’s choice. For Biden’s judicial selections, that process poses significant roadblocks.

    Herwig, overseeing the judicial selection machinery, stresses that Biden is trying to generate consensus and says appointments for a Louisiana-based seat on the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit (Judge Dana Douglas) and Indiana-based seat on the 7th Circuit (Judge Doris Pryor), which arose from some dealings with GOP senators, “demonstrate that there are possibilities to work together.” The Senate confirmed Douglas and Pryor, both former US magistrate judges, in December.

    A second seat on the powerful 5th Circuit appellate court, covering Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, is open with no nominee. Judge Gregg Costa, based in Texas, had announced about a year ago that he would be resigning in August 2022.

    While a good portion of the open seats can be chalked up to Democratic and Republican differences, another notable appellate vacancy – for a Maryland seat on the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit – rests in Democratic hands.

    Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, announced her retirement more than a year ago, and made it effective in September 2022. But Biden and Sen. Ben Cardin, Maryland’s senior senator, have been at odds over a successor, and the White House apparently does not want to more forward without Cardin’s backing. Herwig would not comment on that vacancy, and a Cardin spokeswoman said the senator was awaiting word from the White House on his suggested nominees.

    In the meantime, the 4th Circuit, resolving appeals from Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia district courts, remains closely divided with seven Democratic and six Republican appointees.

    Biden’s team signaled from the start its priority for the judiciary, and White House chief of staff Ron Klain, a former Supreme Court law clerk, has been fixated on filling the bench. Klain worked with then-Sen. Biden on the Judiciary Committee and separately helped evaluate judicial candidates in the Clinton and Obama administrations.

    Herwig is a product of the Senate, too, previously serving two Democratic senators who sit on the Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein and Amy Klobuchar.

    In the South, however, where voting rights and immigration disputes rage, change has been slow. Going forward, as Democrats gained one more seat in the November midterm elections toward their Senate majority, southern states are likely to become a critical arena for an administration determined to reshape the bench.

    The Administrative Office of the US Courts reports that as of January 6, there were 82 vacancies on federal district and appellate courts. Biden has designated nominees for only about half of those vacancies. (There are a total 677 authorized judgeships at the trial-level US district courts, 179 on the US courts of appeals and nine on the Supreme Court.)

    The South has a disproportionate share of those vacancies without nominations.

    Of all 50 states, Florida and Louisiana have the most openings with no nominees pending, 4 apiece. Texas has three vacancies with no nominees pending, and Alabama two (one dating to mid-2020) with no nominees offered.

    It is plain, given the number of vacancies and how long some have existed, that it will not be easy to fill them. And it is unclear whether the Democratic White House and Republican senators are truly talking to each other, or actually talking past each other.

    Press secretaries for Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, both members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, deeply invested in the ideology of the bench, and regularly opposing Biden appointees, said the senators were working with the administration on judges.

    In Louisiana, the communications director to Sen. John Kennedy, another member of the Judiciary Committee, said Kennedy’s office had no information to provide on possible appointments in Louisiana.

    Ryann DuRant, press secretary to Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville, said the White House reached out to Tuberville soon after he became a senator in 2021 to address the courts, but that since then, “there has been radio silence from the White House.”

    “When the White House is ready to move forward on Alabama judicial nominees,” DuRant added in a statement, “Senator Tuberville welcomes the opportunity to discuss as a part of his role to provide advice and consent.”

    McKinley Lewis, communications director for Florida Sen. Rick Scott, said the senator welcomed “an open, good faith dialogue with the White House to ensure any nominees to serve on Florida’s federal courts will respect the limited role of the judiciary and will not legislate from the bench.”

    Herwig declined to detail any conservations yet stressed that there was no senator with whom her team would not work.

    It’s unclear whether the Senate Judiciary Committee will feel increased pressure, from its Democratic ranks or from outside liberal interests, to amend the “blue slip” process.

    Trump’s total appointments in four years reached 231, a figure that might be hard for Biden to match, if stalemates continue in Republican-dominated locales.

    There are at least another 20 vacancies expected in 2023, based on information gathered by the Administrative Office of the US Courts. About a third of those are in southern locales.

    At some point, judges weighing retirement, and equally concerned about whether Biden could successfully tap a replacement, may simply opt against stepping down during his remaining presidency.

    In the Trump years, his GOP allies openly encouraged judges thinking about retirement to just do it. It was a sign of how vigorously Republican leaders wanted to shape the courts.

    Speaking specifically of Supreme Court justices, former Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said in a 2018 radio interview, “If you’re thinking about quitting this year, do it yesterday.”

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