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Tag: Executive Branch

  • Trump’s planned farm bailout should require congressional approval

    By hiking tariffs on nearly all imports to the United States earlier this year, President Donald Trump effectively imposed one of the largest tax hikes in American history—and did so without congressional approval.

    Now, the Trump administration is reportedly preparing to spend some of the revenue from those tax increases—also without congressional approval.

    The White House is preparing a bailout for farmers harmed by the trade war. The exact contours of the package remain unclear for now, but Politico and The Wall Street Journal both report that the administration is eying at least $10 billion in aid. We’ll know more early next week, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says an announcement of “substantial support” is expected on Tuesday.

    This much seems clear: tariffs paid by American importers will be used to fund some of the bailout.

    That’s likely to happen, in part, because the slush fund that Trump tapped to bail out farmers during his first term is running dry. That fund—the Commodity Credit Corporation, a New Deal-era program within the Department of Agriculture—has just $4 billion in it, according to Politico. Meanwhile, the government has collected about $150 billion in tariff revenue during the first eight months of the year.

    It also seems likely because that’s what Trump keeps saying he wants to do. “We’re going to take some of that tariff money that we made, we’re going to give it to our farmers,” he said last month.

    Regardless of how it is funded, a farm bailout would be a wasteful and counterproductive bit of policy—and one that could inspire other tariff-hurt industries to start looking for their own handouts. If the bailout is funded with the tariff revenue (without congressional approval), then it would also be another attack on the separation of powers that are fundamental to our constitutional system of government.

    It is Congress that has the sole authority to lay and collect taxes, per Article I of the Constitution. It is also Congress that has the sole authority to determine how tax dollars are spent. If the Trump administration wants to use some of that $150 billion to bail out farmers, it must ask Congress to approve that spending—ideally as part of a budget bill, but even a one-off emergency or supplemental bill would be better than having the executive branch make this decision on its own.

    There is one other complication that should stop the administration from unilaterally spending the tariff revenue, even if the White House decides to ignore the constitutional argument.

    If the Supreme Court rules that Trump’s tariffs are unlawful—as lower courts already have—then it is possible that the federal government would have to refund all that money to the people and businesses that paid the tariffs in the first place.

    If that money has been given away to farmers, then taxpayers will be on the hook to refund the tariff payments—the same American taxpayers who are already paying higher prices because of the tariffs. That’s literally adding insult to injury.

    There is, of course, an easy way out of this mess. If the Trump administration wants to spare farmers the consequences of the trade war, it doesn’t need a messy, possibly unconstitutional bailout. It just needs to end the tariffs.

    Eric Boehm

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  • Here’s Why the Supreme Court Keeps Writing Trump Blank Checks

    SIX MEMBERS OF THE SUPREME COURT do not seem to understand what any high school student knows about the importance of checks and balances to protecting American democracy. Why not?

    Widely used textbooks and lesson plans, popular encyclopedias, and even the federal government’s own websites all stress the Framers’ wise decision to diffuse power among three branches of government, creating a system in which each branch can block or challenge another’s assertion of power.

    This power of each branch to check the ambitions of the others is not merely a theoretical power that should rest limp in the hands of feckless officials. It is a constitutional duty the Framers established to guard against excessive aggregations of power.

    In case after case, however, the six Republican-appointed members of the Supreme Court1 have flouted this crucial principle, abdicating their constitutional obligation to restrain presidential arrogations of unauthorized power. Instead of operating as a check against an overly aggressive presidency, the majority has repeatedly written blank checks allowing President Trump to insert any amount of power that he chooses to fill in.

    In a stream of recent decisions, including many conducted on the so-called shadow docket without the benefits of full litigation, the majority has summarily unleashed the Trump administration from constraints that scores of federal judges—many of them appointed by Republican presidents, including Trump himself—have deemed constitutionally necessary.

    At the end of its most recent term, the six-justice majority stayed injunctions that three different federal judges had issued enjoining President Trump’s executive order purporting to nullify “birthright citizenship,” despite the explicit declaration in the Fourteenth Amendment that “all persons born in the United States” are American citizens. The majority could not quite bring themselves to read this provision out of the Constitution, so they ruled that the lower courts should not use broad injunctions to interfere with the president’s policies.

    The majority complained that, when a federal court “enters a universal injunction against the Government,” it improperly “intrudes” on executive branch prerogatives and “prevents the Government from enforcing its policies against nonparties,” even if those policies are unconstitutional. It is hard to imagine a more stunning abdication of the federal judiciary’s obligation to keep an anti-constitutional executive branch in check.

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    In July, without even bothering to explain its reasons, the justices simply indulged President Trump’s desire to rule by decree, without the niceties of obtaining congressional approval or support. This unsigned decision stayed lower-court rulings that had blocked implementation of his executive order calling for massive restructuring of the government, closing down various operations chartered by Congress, and firing tens of thousands of public servants.2

    In another enhancement of raw presidential power at the expense of legislative authority, the six-justice conservative majority summarily granted a stay allowing the president to push forward in dismantling the Department of Education. Created by Congress, the cabinet-level department is tasked with performing vital functions that are now left in limbo.

    Three times in the past few months, the majority knowingly and summarily disregarded a major Supreme Court precedent that had constrained another president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he attempted to unravel the federal government’s system of bipartisan regulatory agencies. In that 1935 precedent, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the Supreme Court concluded unanimously that presidential power does not extend to firing, for mere policy differences, officials serving in independent agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission. Back then, the Court found that Congress had arranged for commissioners to be removed during their multi-year terms only for misconduct or similar cause.

    Nevertheless, the current majority continued to indulge President Trump’s most extravagant assertions of presidential power, allowing him to sack the Democratic members of various regulatory agencies solely for partisan reasons. In these latest cases, the president’s targets were the Democratic appointees on the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit System Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Federal Trade Commission. As Justice Kagan recognized in dissenting in the NLRB/MSPB case, Congress had provided for federal regulators “to serve their full terms, protected from a President’s desire to substitute his political allies.” But when the majority of the current Court has to choose between Congress and President Trump, the president invariably wins.

    Another blank check came last month when, once again, the majority summarily suspended two lower courts’ rulings that barred the government from canceling commitments for $800 million in grants for ongoing medical research. As Justice Jackson noted in her dissent, the majority’s expedited action to allow President Trump to cancel any grants that might violate the administration’s anti-DEI policies obstructed “potentially life-saving scientific advancements.”

    After cataloguing the majority’s pattern of intervening at the earliest possible moment to give the Trump administration free rein, Justice Jackson observed that, “unfortunately,” this action was simply the “newest entry in the Court’s quest to make way for the Executive Branch.”

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    SO WHAT EXPLAINS this abject deference to President Trump’s whims and wishes? There are several theories on offer.

    Some court-watchers have argued over the years that the conservative justices are motivated by a desire for conservative policy outcomes. (The mirror critique has also long been made about the liberal justices: that, notwithstanding their legal reasoning, their real desire is to see liberal policy outcomes.) But that argument, whatever its merits in the past, does not match today’s circumstances, as Trump’s court victories largely relate to policies that are radical rather than recognizably conservative.

    A second theory is that the Court, guided by Chief Justice John Roberts, is keeping its powder dry—choosing to minimize clashes with Trump now so that it will retain its institutional legitimacy in case of a later, dire showdown. But there is zero evidence for this theory; it amounts to wishful thinking, doesn’t make logical sense, and becomes less plausible by the day.

    I’m persuaded by a third theory often aired: that several of the Republican-appointed justices have embraced the notion of the “unitary executive,” a strain of constitutional interpretation that holds, in essence, that all power in the executive branch is derived from the presidency, that all officers in that branch are merely exercising power on behalf of the president, and that no parts of the executive branch ought to be considered independent of the president or beyond his power to order or fire. This theory, popular among members of the Federalist Society, was spelled out in the Reagan era (although it has earlier antecedents). The justices who served in the executive branch under Republican presidents (Roberts in the Reagan White House, Clarence Thomas elsewhere in the Reagan administration, and Brett Kavanaugh in the George W. Bush White House) seem especially partial to it.

    But even the unitary executive theory doesn’t fully capture the radicalism of where this Court has gone. The vision of the presidency spelled out by Chief Justice Roberts on behalf of the six justices in last year’s Trump v. U.S. is like the unitary executive theory but on steroids. That opinion holds that President Trump (and, indeed, any president) enjoys constitutional immunity to commit federal felonies, making him exempt from accountability in federal courts for violating criminal laws enacted by Congress. (In Senate testimony last year, I explained why that decision is patently wrong, defies both the text of the Constitution and our constitutional history, and is profoundly dangerous.)

    When Roberts, in that ruling, wrote “the President is a branch of government” unto himself, the chief justice may have thought he was merely spelling out a Reagan-era vision of a stronger presidency and a unitary executive. But, as Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith argued earlier this year, Trump v. U.S. is not just a “presidential immunity shield” but also “an executive branch sword”—an aggressive interpretation of the role of the president. With that ruling and the Court’s string of decisions granting Trump an unlimited bank account of power on which to draw, the Court set the stage not for a strong and stable presidency but for chaos in the executive branch, and a reckless and anti-constitutional presidency wielding power without fear of checks and balances. If the Court doesn’t change course, and soon, history will judge these six justices harshly.

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    1

    Chief Justice John Roberts (appointed by President George W. Bush) and Associate Justices Clarence Thomas (George H.W. Bush) and Samuel Alito (George W. Bush), along with the three associate justices appointed by Trump in his first term (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett).

    2

    Because it was an unsigned stay, we don’t know precisely how the justices voted, only that a majority of them, including in this case the liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor for technical reasons, backed Trump. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson alone wrote in dissent.

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  • $500 million to paint the border wall? 5 of Trump’s strangest, most expensive vanity projects

    It’s been nearly two weeks since President Donald Trump declared a crime emergency in the nation’s capital. But while the crime crackdown has yielded somewhat underwhelming results—”nearly 2,000 officers made fewer than 400 arrests,” reports Reason‘s Joe Lancaster—the campaign has been massively successful in galvanizing Trump’s base and providing the president and his Cabinet with ample P.R. opportunities.

    The takeover has allowed Trump to flex his muscles, but it’s coming at a steep cost to American taxpayers. The Intercept reports that the use of military forces in Washington, D.C., could cost $1 million per day. With more National Guard members flooding into the capital, the campaign could end up costing hundreds of millions of dollars, according to The Intercept.

    But this isn’t the first time that Trump has used—or suggested using—taxpayer money on expensive vanity projects. Here are five other especially wasteful examples.

    Joseph Mario Giordano / SOPA Images/Sipa USA/Newscom

    In June, Trump hosted a “big, beautiful” military parade to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Army. The event, which happened to coincide with the president’s 79th birthday, included a barrage of tanks, jet flyovers, and soldiers walking through the nation’s capital, and ended up costing American taxpayers $25 million to $45 million. That’s “$277,778–$500,000 per minute,” Reason‘s Billy Binion reported.

    Trump has also displayed America’s military power at his Independence Day celebrations, including the 2019 “Salute to America,” which ran up a tab of more than $13 million, and the 2020 events in D.C. and Mount Rushmore that cost close to $15 million. Next year’s Independence Day, which will be America’s 250th birthday, is expected to be even bigger. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) appropriated $150 million to the Interior Department for “events, celebrations, and activities surrounding the observance and commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.”

     

    2. Iced Out ICE Vehicles

    Department of Homeland Security

    The OBBBA also allocated nearly $30 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for detention facility maintenance, transportation costs, and recruitment efforts at the agency. ICE appears to be sparing no expense.

    In addition to offering starting salaries of nearly $90,000 and signing bonuses up to $50,000, ICE has also wasted taxpayer money on marketing gimmicks and vehicle upgrades. Recently, the agency spent “$2.4 million for Chevrolet Tahoes, Ford Expeditions, and other vehicles, as well as custom graphic wraps,” writes Reason‘s Autumn Billings. These gold-detailed wraps include the words DEFEND THE HOMELAND, INTEGRITY, COURAGE, and ENDURANCE.

    This vehicle spending is on top of the $700,000 that ICE spent on two gold-wrapped trucks, which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used in a (cringe) recruitment campaign on X.

     

    Polaris/Newscom

    On Tuesday, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that the entire U.S.-Mexico border wall will be painted black. “That is specifically at the request of the president, who understands that in the hot temperatures down here when something is painted black it gets even warmer and it will make it even harder for people to climb,” said Noem.

    During his first stint in the White House, Trump proposed an identical plan. The Washington Post reviewed a copy of federal painting estimates at the time, which showed “costs ranging from $500 million for two coats of acrylic paint to more than $3 billion for a premium ‘powder coating’ on the structure’s 30-foot steel bollards.”

    More than five years later, the cost to paint the border wall is sure to be higher.

    Avalon/Newscom

    In 2018, Trump signed a $3.9 billion agreement with Boeing that would see the airplane manufacturer deliver two new jets to the Air Force One fleet by 2022. The planes are now expected to be delivered by 2027, years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.

    Under the terms of the contract, the cost overruns will be paid for by Boeing. Despite these delays, Trump may soon be flying in a luxury jetliner that was gifted to him by the Qatari government. While the president has called this new Air Force One “free,” renovating the plane will cost Americans millions of dollars. As The New York Times reports, the Pentagon recently transferred $934 million from a nuclear missile project account to a classified project, which “congressional budget sleuths have come to think…almost certainly” includes the renovation of this new jet.

     

    Andrea Hank/ZUMA Press/Newscom

    In January, Trump revived an executive order that he signed in his first administration to establish a National Garden of American Heroes. The garden, which is expected to open next year on America’s 250th birthday, will include 250 life-sized statues of American heroes.

    But the $34 million project has run into a basic, but serious, issue: America doesn’t have enough quality sculptors to complete the garden by next July or a designated location to put it. Daniel Kunitz, editor of Sculpture magazine, told Politico that the idea “seems completely unworkable.”

    Jeff Luse

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  • The real cannabis policy power lies beyond the Oval Office – Cannabis Business Executive – Cannabis and Marijuana industry news

    The real cannabis policy power lies beyond the Oval Office – Cannabis Business Executive – Cannabis and Marijuana industry news





    The real cannabis policy power lies beyond the Oval Office – Cannabis Business Executive – Cannabis and Marijuana industry news





























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  • How Trump Gets Away With It

    How Trump Gets Away With It

    If Donald Trump regains the presidency, he will once again become the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States. There may be no American leader less suited to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” as the Constitution directs the president. But that authority comes with the office, including command of the Justice Department and the FBI.

    We know what Trump would like to do with that power, because he’s said so out loud. He is driven by self-interest and revenge, in that order. He wants to squelch the criminal charges now pending against him, and he wants to redeploy federal prosecutors against his enemies, beginning with President Joe Biden. The important question is how much of that agenda he could actually carry out in a second term.

    Explore the January/February 2024 Issue

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    Trump tried and failed to cross many lines during his time in the White House. He proposed, for example, that the IRS conduct punitive audits of his political antagonists and that Border Patrol officers shoot migrants in the legs. Subordinates talked the former president out of many such schemes or passively resisted them by running out the clock. The whole second volume of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which documented 10 occasions on which Trump tried to obstruct justice, can be read as a compilation of thwarted directives.

    From the November 2023 issue: How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump

    The institutional resistance Trump faced has reinforced his determination to place loyalists in key jobs should he win reelection. One example is Jeffrey Clark, who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. Trump sought to appoint Clark as acting attorney general in early January 2021, but backed off after a mass-resignation threat at the DOJ. People who know him well suggest that he would not let that threat deter him a second time. Trump will also want to fire Christopher Wray, the FBI director, and replace him with someone more pliable. Only tradition, not binding law, prevents the president and his political appointees from issuing orders to the FBI about its investigations.

    The top jobs at the DOJ require Senate confirmation, and even a Republican Senate might not confirm an indicted conspirator to overturn an election like Clark for attorney general. Under the Vacancies Reform Act, which regulates temporary appointments, Trump can appoint any currently serving Senate-confirmed official from anywhere in the executive branch as acting attorney general. Of course, all of the officials serving at the beginning of his new term would be holdovers from the Biden administration.

    Trump’s allies are searching for loyalists among the Republicans currently serving on several dozen independent boards and commissions, such as the Federal Trade Commission, that have “party balancing” requirements for their appointees. Alternatively, Trump could choose any senior career official in the Justice Department who has served for at least 90 days in a position ranked GS-15 or higher on the federal pay scale—a cohort that includes, for example, senior trial attorneys, division counsels, and section chiefs. As Anne Joseph O’Connell, a Stanford law professor and an expert on the Vacancies Reform Act, reminded me, “This is how we got Matthew Whitaker,” the former attorney general’s chief of staff, as acting attorney general. (Whitaker was widely criticized as unqualified.)

    Would some career officials, somewhere among the department’s 115,000 employees, do Trump’s bidding in exchange for an acting appointment? Trump’s team is looking.

    Once Trump has installed loyalists in crucial posts, his first priority—an urgent one for a man facing 91 felony charges in four jurisdictions—would be to save himself from conviction and imprisonment.

    Of the four indictments against him, two are federal: the Florida case, with charges of unlawful retention of classified documents and obstruction of justice, and the Washington case, which charges Trump with unlawful efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Those will be the easiest for him to dispose of.

    To begin with, there is little to stop Trump from firing Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing both of the federal investigations. Justice Department regulations confer a measure of protection on a special counsel against arbitrary dismissal, but he may be removed for “misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or for other good cause.” That last clause is a catchall that Trump could readily invoke.

    David A. Graham: The cases against Trump: A guide

    The regulations state that a special counsel may be fired “only by the personal action of the Attorney General,” but that would not stop Trump either. In the unlikely event that his handpicked attorney general were reluctant, he could fire the attorney general and keep on firing successors until he found one to do his bidding, as Richard Nixon did to get rid of Archibald Cox. Alternatively, Trump could claim—and probably prevail, if it came to a lawsuit—that the president is not bound by Justice Department regulations and can fire the special counsel himself.

    Smith’s departure would still leave Trump’s federal criminal charges intact, but no law would prevent Trump from ordering that they be dropped. He could do so even with a trial in progress, right up to the moment before a jury returned a verdict. No legal expert I talked with expressed any doubt that he could get away with this.

    Dismissing the charges would require the trial judges’ consent. But even if the judges were to object, Trump would almost certainly win on appeal: The Supreme Court is not likely to let a district judge decide whether or not the Justice Department has to prosecute a case.

    Trump will be able to avoid going to prison even if he has already been convicted of federal charges before he is sworn in. Here again, a trial judge is unlikely to order Trump imprisoned, even after sentencing, before he exhausts his appeals. And there is no plausible scenario in which that happens before Inauguration Day.

    At any time while Trump’s appeals are pending, his Justice Department may notify the appellate court that the prosecution no longer wishes to support his conviction. This is known as a confession of error on the government’s part; the effect, if the court grants the request, is to vacate a conviction. Under Attorney General Bill Barr, the Trump administration did something to similar effect in a false-statements case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, moving to dismiss the charges after Flynn had pleaded guilty but before his sentencing. (Trump later pardoned Flynn.) According to the relevant rule of criminal procedure, dismissal during prosecution—including on appeal from a conviction—requires “leave of the court,” but it’s highly unlikely that an appellate court would refuse to grant such a motion to dismiss.

    Trump might also invoke the pardon power on his own behalf. He has already asserted, as far back as 2018, that “I have the absolute right to PARDON myself.” No president has ever tried this, and whether he can is a contested question among legal scholars. Experts who agree with Trump say the Constitution frames the pardon power as total but for one exception, implicitly blessing all other uses. (The exception is that the president may not pardon an impeachment.) Those who disagree include the Justice Department itself, through its Office of Legal Counsel, which concluded in 1974 that a self-pardon would be invalid under “the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.”

    But the debate over self-pardons wouldn’t matter much to Trump in practice. If he pardoned himself of all criminal charges, there would be no one with standing to challenge the pardon in court—other than, perhaps, the Justice Department, which would be under Trump’s control.

    Unlike the federal charges, Trump’s state criminal cases—for alleged racketeering and election interference in Georgia and hush-money payments to a porn star in New York—would not fall under his authority as president. Even so, the presidency would very likely protect him for at least the duration of his second term.

    The Office of Legal Counsel, which makes authoritative interpretations of the law for the executive branch, has twice opined, in 1973 and again in 2000, that “the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions.” That conclusion is binding for federal prosecutors, but state prosecutors are not obliged to follow it.

    No one knows what would happen if Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, or Alvin Bragg, the DA in New York, decided to press ahead with their cases against Trump should he regain the presidency. Like so many outlandish questions pertaining to Trump, this one has no judicial precedent, because no sitting president has ever been charged with felony crimes. But legal scholars told me that Trump would have strong arguments, at least, to defer state criminal proceedings against him until he left the White House in 2029. By then, new prosecutors, with new priorities, may have replaced Willis and Bragg.

    Trump has named a long list of people as deserving of criminal charges, or execution. Among them are Joe Biden, Mark Milley, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, James Clapper, and Arthur Engoron, the judge in his New York civil fraud case.

    If he returns to office, Trump may not even have to order their prosecutions himself. He will be surrounded by allies who know what he wants. One likely DOJ appointee is Mike Davis, a Republican who has substantial government credentials: He was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and chief counsel for nominations to Senator Charles Grassley when Grassley chaired the Judiciary Committee.

    If Davis were acting attorney general, he said on a right-wing YouTube show, he would “rain hell on Washington.” First, “we’re gonna fire a lot of people in the executive branch, in the deep state.” He would also “indict Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and James Biden and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden.” And “every January 6 defendant is gonna get a pardon.” Trump could not immediately appoint an outsider like Davis attorney general. But he could make him a Justice Department section chief, and then appoint him as acting attorney general after 90 days.

    Trump could also appoint—or direct his attorney general to appoint—any lawyer, at any time, as special counsel to the Justice Department, with the authority to bring charges and prosecute a case. Trump might not be able to convict his political enemies of spurious charges, but he could immiserate them with years of investigations and require them to run up millions of dollars in legal fees.

    Likewise, if he managed to place sufficiently zealous allies in the Office of Legal Counsel, Trump could obtain legal authority for any number of otherwise lawless transgressions. Vice President Dick Cheney did that in the George W. Bush administration, inducing the OLC to issue opinions that authorized torture and warrantless domestic surveillance. Those opinions were later repudiated, but they guided policy for years. Trump’s history suggests that he might seek comparable legal blessing for the use of lethal force at the southern border, deployment of federal troops against political demonstrators, federal seizure of state voting machines, or deferral of the next election in order to stay in power. He would be limited only by the willingness of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the career civil service to say no.

    It occurred to me, as I interviewed government veterans and legal scholars, that they might be blinkered by their own expertise when they try to anticipate what Trump would do. All of the abuses they foresee are based on the ostensibly lawful powers of the president, even if they amount to gross ruptures of legal norms and boundaries. What transgressions could he commit, that is, within the law?

    But Trump himself isn’t thinking that way. On Truth Social, in December 2022, he posted that righting a wrong of sufficient “magnitude” (in this case, his fictitious claim of election fraud) “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

    The “take Care” clause of the Constitution calls for the president to see that laws are carried out faithfully. But what if a court rules against Trump and he simply refuses to comply? It’s not obvious who would—or could—enforce the ruling.

    This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Trump Will Get Away With It.”

    Barton Gellman

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  • Volodymyr Zelensky and ‘the spirit of Ukraine’ named Time’s Person of the Year

    Volodymyr Zelensky and ‘the spirit of Ukraine’ named Time’s Person of the Year

    “‘For proving that courage can be as contagious as fear, for stirring people and nations to come together in defense of freedom, for reminding the world of the fragility of democracy — and of peace — Volodymyr Zelensky and the spirit of Ukraine are TIME’s 2022 Person of the Year.’”

    That was Time editor in chief Edward Felsenthal explaining why the publication has named the Ukrainian leader and his people as 2022’s “Person of the Year,” an annual honorific that Time gives to the person or group of people who “most influenced the events of the past 12 months, for good or for ill.” 

    This year’s 10 finalists also included Tesla
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    CEO Elon Musk (who took the title last year, and has remained a news driver with this Twitter takeover this year), U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen (whom the U.S. has “leaned on” to interpret the telltale signs of a recession) and Florida governor (and possible 2024 GOP presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis.

    In fact, some of these finalists were also recently featured in the inaugural MarketWatch 50 list of the investors, CEOs, policy makers, crypto players and influencers who are impacting markets and your money this year.

    But Felsenthal wrote that Zelensky was “the most clear-cut” choice for “Person of the Year” in recent memory, because he “galvanized the world in a way we haven’t seen in decades” following the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine led by President Vladimir Putin on Feb. 25.

    The Time editor notes how Zelensky became a household name and international icon this year for staying in his country throughout the invasion, and rallying support on social media by giving daily speeches remotely. Some 141 countries in the United Nations condemned the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. And almost 1,000 companies, including giants like McDonald’s
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    and Starbucks
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    pulled out of Russia in response. The blue and gold Ukrainian flag became a familiar site on social media, as well, as users and accounts showed their support for Ukraine. 

    The “Person of the Year” report notes that Zelensky has also drawn his share of criticism, however — including from his fellow Ukrainians —for downplaying the threat of invasion before the Russian bombs first fell. And some critics have called his charm offensive via fashion photo shoots and virtual Grammy Awards appearances and the like somewhat out-of-touch with the human casualties of the war in Ukraine.

    “Later we will be judged,” Zelensky told Time reporter Simon Shuster in an accompanying interview. But in the meantime, he says, “I have not finished this great, important action for our country. Not yet.”

    Apart from Musk, DeSantis and Yellen, the other “Person of the Year” finalists included Wyoming GOP Rep. Liz Cheney for her work on the Jan. 6 committee and her vow to do “whatever it takes” to keep former President Donald Trump out of the Oval Office in the next election.

    Amazon
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    founder Jeff Bezos’ ex MacKenzie Scott also made the list for her historic philanthropy, donating almost $2 billion to 343 organizations focused on the support of underserved communities in this year alone.

    And the U.S. Supreme Court was given a nod for its historic decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and end almost 50 years of constitutional precedent that protected abortion rights for American women, along with swearing in its first Black female justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the bench.

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  • Democratic incumbent Warnock wins Georgia’s Senate runoff election — here’s why it matters

    Democratic incumbent Warnock wins Georgia’s Senate runoff election — here’s why it matters

    Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia has defeated his Republican challenger Herschel Walker in their closely watched runoff election, according to an Associated Press projection. 

    While Democrats already had maintained their grip on the Senate by winning other crucial races in last month’s midterm elections, Warnock’s win means his party will have a 51-49 majority in the Senate for the next two years of President Joe Biden’s term.

    That’s an upgrade from their situation over the past two years, when the chamber has been split 50-50, and they’ve controlled it only because Vice President Kamala Harris can cast tiebreaking votes.

    Democrats now are expected to adjust ratios on Senate committees so they have a one-vote majority on each panel. Currently, committee ratios are set at 50-50 to reflect the chamber’s split.

    A Stifel analyst has warned investors that committees next year could end up issuing subpoenas without Republican support, increasing headline risk for some sectors such as tech
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    social media
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    financials
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    and healthcare
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    A 51-49 Senate also is expected to lessen the influence of two moderate Democratic senators — West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema.

    Manchin derailed Biden’s Build Back Better package a year ago, and Democratic-run Washington ended up passing a scaled-back measure in August. Sinema’s recent moves, meanwhile, have included successfully opposing changes to the so-called carried-interest loophole that allows private-equity firms to pay lower tax rates.

    Walker’s loss is another blow for Donald Trump as the former president ramps up his 2024 White House campaign. Trump already saw other allies flop in their Senate midterm races, with, for example, Mehmet Oz coming up short in Pennsylvania and Blake Masters going down in Arizona.

    Warnock had been favored to win by betting markets such as PredictIt, but Cook Political Report said the contest would be close and rated it as a toss-up.

    Walker faced criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for his past treatment of women and gaffes while campaigning.

    Related: Second woman claims Herschel Walker pressured her to have abortion

    The former football star’s loss means the 2022 midterms end on a downbeat note for Republicans, and that’s after their hopes for a red wave were dashed. The GOP took control of the House of Representatives, but will have a slim majority in that chamber.

    Analysts had said voters appeared increasingly focused on issues on which Republicans claimed high ground such as inflation. But exit polls on Nov. 8 suggested the party performed worse than expected because many Democrats and independents voted partly to show their disapproval of Trump — and those voters were energized by the Supreme Court’s June decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

    See: Anti-Trump vote and Dobbs abortion ruling boost Democrats in 2022 election

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  • Trump Organization found guilty in executive tax-fraud scheme

    Trump Organization found guilty in executive tax-fraud scheme

    NEW YORK — Donald Trump’s company was convicted of tax fraud on Tuesday in a case brought by the Manhattan District Attorney, a significant repudiation of financial practices at the former president’s business.

    A jury found two corporate entities at the Trump Organization guilty on all 17 counts, including conspiracy charges and falsifying business records.

    The verdict came on the second day of deliberations following a trial in which the Trump Organization was accused of being complicit in a scheme by top executives to avoid paying personal income taxes on job perks such as rent-free apartments and luxury cars.

    The conviction is a validation for New York prosecutors, who have spent three years investigating the former president and his businesses, though the penalties aren’t expected to be severe enough to jeopardize the future of Trump’s company.

    As punishment, the Trump Organization could be fined up to $1.6 million — a relatively small amount for a company of its size, though the conviction might make some of its future deals more complicated.

    Trump, who recently announced he was running for president again, has said the case against his company was part of a politically motivated “witch hunt” waged against him by vindictive Democrats.

    Trump himself was not on trial but prosecutors alleged he “knew exactly what was going on” with the scheme, though he and the company’s lawyers have denied that.

    The case against the company was built largely around testimony from the Trump Organization’s former finance chief, Allen Weisselberg, who previously pleaded guilty to charges that he manipulated the company’s books and his own compensation package to illegally reduce his taxes.

    Weisselberg testified in exchange for a promised five-month jail sentence.

    To convict the Trump Organization, prosecutors had to convince jurors that Weisselberg or his subordinate, Senior Vice President and Controller Jeffrey McConney, were “high managerial” agents acting on the company’s behalf and that the company also benefited from his scheme.

    Trump Organization lawyers repeated the mantra “Weisselberg did it for Weisselberg” throughout the monthlong trial. They contended the executive had gone rogue and betrayed the company’s trust. No one in the Trump family or the company was to blame, they argued.

    Though he testified as a prosecution witness, Weisselberg also attempted to take responsibility on the witness stand, saying nobody in the Trump family knew what he was doing.

    “It was my own personal greed that led to this,” an emotional Weisselberg testified.

    Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty to dodging taxes on $1.7 million in fringe benefits, testified that he and McConney conspired to hide that extra compensation from his income by deducting their cost from his pre-tax salary and issuing falsified W-2 forms.

    During his closing argument, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass attempted to refute the claim that Trump knew nothing about the scheme. He showed jurors a lease Trump signed for Weisselberg’s company-paid apartment and a memo Trump initialed authorizing a pay cut for another executive who got perks.

    “Mr. Trump is explicitly sanctioning tax fraud,” Steinglass argued.

    The verdict doesn’t end Trump’s battle with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat who took office in January.

    Bragg has said that a related investigation of Trump that began under his predecessor, District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., is “active and ongoing.”

    In that wide-ranging probe, investigators have examined whether Trump misled banks and others about the value of his real estate holdings, golf courses and other assets — allegations at the heart of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ pending lawsuit against the former president and his company.

    The district attorney’s office has also investigated whether any state laws were broken when Trump’s allies made payments to two women who claimed to have had sexual affairs with the Republican years ago.

    Near the end of his tenure last year, Vance directed deputies to present evidence to a grand jury for a possible indictment of Trump. After taking office, though, Bragg let that grand jury disband so he could give the case a fresh look.

    On Monday, he confirmed that a new lead prosecutor had been brought on to handle that investigation, signaling again that it was still active.

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  • Appeals court ends special-master review of Trump documents, in win for Justice Department

    Appeals court ends special-master review of Trump documents, in win for Justice Department

    WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Thursday ended an independent review of documents seized from former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate, removing a hurdle the Justice Department said had delayed its criminal investigation into the retention of top-secret government information.

    The decision by the three-judge panel represents a significant win for federal prosecutors, clearing the way for them to use as part of their investigation the entire tranche of documents seized during an Aug. 8 FBI search of Mar-a-Lag o. It also amounts to a sharp repudiation of arguments by Trump’s lawyers, who for months had said that the former president was entitled to have a so-called “special master” conduct a neutral review of the thousands of documents taken from the property.

    The ruling from the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit had been expected given the skeptical questions the judges directed at a Trump lawyer during arguments last week, and because two of the three judges on the panel had already ruled in favor of the Justice Department in an earlier dispute over the special master.

    The special master litigation has played out alongside an ongoing investigation examining the potential criminal mishandling of national defense information as well as efforts to possibly obstruct that probe. Attorney General Merrick Garland last month appointed Jack Smith, a veteran public corruption prosecutor, to serve as special counsel overseeing that investigation.

    It remains unclear how much longer the investigation will last, or who, if anyone, might be charged. But the probe has shown signs of intensifying, with investigators questioning multiple Trump associates about the documents and granting one key ally immunity to ensure his testimony before a federal grand jury. And the appeals court decision is likely to speed the investigation along by cutting short the outside review of the records.

    The conflict over the special master began just weeks after the FBI’s search, when Trump sued in federal court in Florida seeking the appointment of an independent arbiter to review the roughly 13,000 documents the Justice Department says were taken from the home.

    A federal judge, Aileen Cannon, granted the Trump team’s request, naming veteran Brooklyn judge Raymond Dearie to serve as special master and tasking him with reviewing the seized records and filtering out from the criminal investigation any documents that might be covered by claims of executive privilege or attorney-client privilege.

    She also barred the Justice Department from using in its criminal investigation any of the seized records, including the roughly 100 with classification markings, until Dearie completed his work.

    The Justice Department objected to the appointment, saying it was an unnecessary hindrance to its criminal investigation and saying Trump had no credible basis to invoke either attorney-client privilege or executive privilege to shield the records from investigators.

    It sought, as a first step, to regain access to the classified documents. A federal appeals panel sided with prosecutors in September, permitting the Justice Department to resume its review of the documents with classification markings.

    The department also pressed for access to the much larger trove of unclassified documents, saying such records could contain important evidence for their investigation.

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  • Republicans clinch slim majority in House, likely signaling gridlock ahead

    Republicans clinch slim majority in House, likely signaling gridlock ahead

    Republicans will take over the U.S. House of Representatives two years into President Joe Biden’s term, though their narrow majority looks set to cause headaches for GOP leaders.

    Republican hopes for a strong red wave have been dashed, but the Associated Press said Wednesday that the party won enough House seats — 218 — to control that chamber of Congress, as results from the midterm elections continue to be tabulated.

    The battle for the U.S. Senate went to the Democrats late Saturday. Democrats will retain their hold on the Senate after winning a key race in Nevada, giving Biden’s party control of at least one chamber of Congress for the next two years.

    “Republicans have officially flipped the People’s House!” Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the front-runner to become House Speaker, tweeted late Wednesday. “Americans are ready for a new direction, and House Republicans are ready to deliver.”

    While Republicans will control just one chamber of Congress, they now are expected to deliver a check on Biden’s policy priorities, such as by potentially using a debt-ceiling showdown to force spending cuts. 

    In a statement late Wednesday, President Joe Biden called for bipartisanship: “The American people want us to get things done for them. They want us to focus on the issues that matter to them and on making their lives better. And I will work with anyone — Republican or Democrat — willing to work with me to deliver results.”

    Related: Democrats weigh end run around Republicans to raise debt limit

    And see: Republican lawmakers likely to target ‘woke capitalism’ after the midterm elections, analysts say

    The Republican House majority has yet to be finalized but could be the narrowest of the 21st century, even less than in 2001, when the GOP had a nine-seat majority with two independents.

    Washington is likely to face new periods of gridlock, with Democrats also keeping their hold on the White House since Biden still has two years to serve before the 2024 presidential election. That’s after Democrats in the past two years used party-line votes to push through measures such as March 2021’s stimulus law and this past summer’s package targeting healthcare, climate change and taxes.

    The House switching to red from blue fits the historical pattern in which a first-term president’s party tends to lose congressional ground in the midterms. The GOP highlighted raging inflation in its effort to win over American voters.

    The House seats to flip to the GOP included one held by Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia, who lost to Republican challenger Jen Kiggans, as well as two seats in Florida. But Democrats also flipped House seats and won re-elections in bellwether races, with Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger and Indiana Rep. Frank Mrvan notching victories.

    Read more: Here are the congressional seats that have flipped in the midterm elections

    Democrats have had a grip on the House since the 2018 midterms. They’ve run the Senate for two years, controlling the 50-50 chamber only because Vice President Kamala Harris can cast tiebreaking votes.

    Among the competitive Senate races, Democrats kept their hold on seats in Arizona, Colorado and New Hampshire, while scoring a pick-up in Pennsylvania. Republicans maintained their control of seats in North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin.

    Georgia’s Senate contest is headed to a Dec. 6 runoff, but its outcome has become less significant.

    Related: Ohio’s J.D. Vance tells MarketWatch he wants to end tax loopholes for tech companies and ban congressional stock trading

    Betting markets since late on Election Day have been seeing Democrats staying in charge of the Senate and Republicans winning the House. Ahead of last Tuesday’s voting, betting markets had signaled confidence in GOP prospects for taking over both the Senate and House.

    Analysts had said voters last month appeared increasingly focused on Republican issues such as high prices for gasoline
    RB00,
    -0.35%
    and other essentials, at the expense of Democrats’ agenda items such as climate change and abortion rights.

    But exit polls suggested that Republicans performed worse than expected because many Democrats and independents voted partly to show their disapproval of former President Donald Trump — and those voters were energized by the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe.

    See: Anti-Trump vote and Dobbs abortion ruling boost Democrats in 2022 election

    The former president announced his 2024 White House run late Tuesday. Earlier Tuesday, House Republicans chose Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the current minority leader, as their candidate for speaker. Thirty-one Republicans voted against McCarthy, signaling that he must shore up his support before the vote on the speakership takes place in January.  It’s an early sign of how Republicans’ narrow majority is creating turbulence for the House GOP leadership. 

    Now read: What a Republican-controlled House might mean for tech: Plenty of hand-wringing over Section 230 liability shield

    And see: DeSantis viewed as frontrunner for Republican 2024 presidential nomination after Trump’s candidates flop in midterm elections

    Plus: Senate Republicans pick Mitch McConnell as their leader, as Rick Scott’s challenge flops

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  • Opinion: No, an indictment wouldn’t end Trump’s run for the presidency – he could even campaign or serve from a jail cell

    Opinion: No, an indictment wouldn’t end Trump’s run for the presidency – he could even campaign or serve from a jail cell

    Donald Trump announced his 2024 run for the presidency on Nov. 15. In his address he railed against what he perceived as the “persecution” of himself and his family, but made scant mention of his legal woes.

    There is also the not-so-small matter of a Justice Department investigation into the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.

    The announcement has led some to speculate that Trump may be hoping that becoming a presidential candidate will in some way shield him from prosecution.

    Donald Trump has announced his bid to run in the 2024 presidential race. WSJ’s Alex Leary breaks down the challenges the former president will face on the campaign trail, including new political rivals and a waning influence among voters. Photo Composite: Adele Morgan

    So, does an indictment—or even a felony conviction—prevent a presidential candidate from running or serving in office?

    The short answer is no. Here’s why:

    The U.S. Constitution specifies in clear language the qualifications required to hold the office of the presidency. In Section 1, Clause 5 of Article II, it states: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”

    These three requirements—natural-born citizenship, age, and residency—are the only specifications set forth in the United States’ founding document.

    Congress has ‘no power to alter’

    Furthermore, the Supreme Court has made clear that constitutionally prescribed qualifications to hold federal office may not be altered or supplemented by either the U.S. Congress or any of the states.

    Justices clarified the court’s position in their 1969 Powell v. McCormack ruling. The case followed the adoption of a resolution by the House of Representatives barring pastor and New York politician Adam Clayton Powell Jr. from taking his seat in the 90th Congress.

    The resolution was not based on Powell’s failure to meet the age, citizenship and residency requirements for House members set forth in the Constitution. Rather, the House found that Powell had diverted Congressional funds and made false reports about certain currency transactions.

    When Powell sued to take his seat, the Supreme Court invalidated the House’s resolution on grounds that it added to the constitutionally specified qualifications for Powell to hold office. In the majority opinion, the court held that: “Congress has no power to alter the qualifications in the text of the Constitution.”

    For the same reason, no limitation could now be placed on Trump’s candidacy. Nor could he be barred from taking office if he were to be indicted or even convicted.

    But in case of insurrection…

    The Constitution includes no qualification regarding those conditions—with one significant exception. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies any person from holding federal office “who, having previously taken an oath…to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

    The reason why this matters is the Justice Department is currently investigating Trump for his activities related to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

    Under the provisions of the 14th Amendment, Congress is authorized to pass laws to enforce its provisions. And in February 2021, one Democratic congressman proposed House Bill 1405, providing for a “cause of action to remove and bar from holding office certain individuals who engage in insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

    Even in the event of Trump being found to have participated “in insurrection or rebellion,” he might conceivably argue that he is exempt from Section 3 for a number of reasons. The 14th Amendment does not specifically refer to the presidency and it is not “self-executing”—that is, it needs subsequent legislation to enforce it. Trump could also point to the fact that Congress enacted an Amnesty Act in 1872 that lifted the ban on office holding for officials from many former Confederate states.

    He might also argue that his activities on and before Jan. 6 did not constitute an “insurrection” as it is understood by the wording of the amendment. There are few judicial precedents that interpret Section 3, and as such its application in modern times remains unclear. So even if House Bill 1405 were adopted, it is not clear whether it would be enough to disqualify Trump from serving as president again.

    Running from behind bars

    Even in the case of conviction and incarceration, a presidential candidate would not be prevented from continuing their campaign—even if, as a felon, they might not be able to vote for themselves.

    History is dotted with instances of candidates for federal office running—and even being elected—while in prison. As early as 1798—some 79 years before the 14th Amendment — House member Matthew Lyon was elected to Congress from a prison cell, where he was serving a sentence for sedition for speaking out against the Federalist Adams administration.

    Eugene Debs, founder of the Socialist Party of America, ran for president in 1920 while serving a prison sentence for sedition. Although he lost the election, he nevertheless won 913,693 votes. Debs promised to pardon himself if he were elected.

    And controversial politician and conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche also ran for president from a jail cell in 1992.

    A prison cell as the Oval Office?

    Several provisions within the Constitution offer alternatives that could be used to disqualify a president under indictment or in prison.

    The 25th Amendment allows the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet to suspend the president from office if they conclude that the president is incapable of fulfilling his duties.

    The amendment states that the removal process may be invoked “if the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

    It was proposed and ratified to address what would happen should a president be incapacitated due to health issues. But the language is broad and some legal scholars believe it could be invoked if someone is deemed incapacitated or incapable for other reasons, such as incarceration.

    To be sure, a president behind bars could challenge the conclusion that he or she was incapable from discharging the duties simply because they were in prison. But ultimately the amendment leaves any such dispute to Congress to decide, and it may suspend the president from office by a two-thirds vote.

    Indeed, it is not clear that a president could not effectively execute the duties of office from prison, since the Constitution imposes no requirements that the executive appear in any specific location. The jail cell could, theoretically, serve as the new Oval Office.

    Finally, if Trump were convicted and yet prevail in his quest for the presidency in 2024, Congress might choose to impeach him and remove him from office. Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution allows impeachment for “treason, bribery, and high crimes and misdemeanors.”

    Whether that language would apply to Trump for indictments or convictions arising from his previous term or business dealings outside of office would be a question for Congress to decide. The precise meaning of “high crimes and misdemeanors” is unclear, and the courts are unlikely to second-guess the House in bringing an impeachment proceeding.

    For sure, impeachment would remain an option—but it might be an unlikely one if Republicans maintained their majority in the House in 2024 and 2026.

    Stefanie Lindquist is Foundation Professor of Law and Political Science at Arizona State University. She previously taught at Vanderbilt University, the University of Georgia and the University of Texas.

    This commentary was originally published by The Conversation—No, an indictment wouldn’t end Trump’s run for the presidency—he could even campaign or serve from a jail cell

    More on Trump’s legal problems

    Trump Organization executive says he helped colleagues dodge taxes

    Judge says he’ll appoint monitor to oversee Donald Trump’s company

    Justice Department weighs appointing special counsel if Trump runs in 2024, report says

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  • Donald Trump announces 2024 presidential run: ‘America’s comeback starts right now’

    Donald Trump announces 2024 presidential run: ‘America’s comeback starts right now’

    Donald Trump will seek the presidency for a third time in 2024, the former president announced in a speech from his Florida estate Tuesday night, paving the way for a contentious Republican primary and a potential rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden for the White House in two years.

    “In order to make America great and glorious again, I am tonight announcing my candidacy for president of the United States,” Trump said from Mar-a-Lago.

    The former president spoke a week after midterm elections that saw Democrats keep the Senate, and a number of candidates backed by him lost their races, such as Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz and that state’s GOP gubernatorial candidate, Doug Mastriano. That’s prompted debate about moving on from Trump as the party eyes its 2024 chances.

    Now read: Trump vs. DeSantis: Midterm election results shake up the Republican 2024 field

    And see: Ahead of Trump’s announcement, Mitt Romney calls former president an ‘aging pitcher who keeps losing games’

    Trump — who a House panel has charged with a conspiracy aimed overturning the 2020 presidential election — is likely to face a crowded field in the contest for the GOP presidential nomination, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis seen at this stage as his most formidable opponent. Other potential candidates include former Vice President Mike Pence, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

    See: Here’s how candidates endorsed by Trump performed in the midterm elections

    Trump may view DeSantis as posing his most daunting challenge, given the energy he has spent since the midterm elections lashing out at the the Florida governor. The former president remains a popular figure in the Republican Party and has proven himself adept at sidelining rivals for the affection of the GOP base.

    Speaking to a crowded room at Mar-a-Lago, Trump bashed the Biden administration and claimed, “we built the greatest economy in the history of the world.” Under Biden, he said, the U.S. is a “nation in decline.” Biden fired back in a video posted on Twitter as Trump was speaking: “Donald Trump failed America.”

    “America’s comeback starts right now,” Trump said. “I will fight like I’ve never fought before.”

    During his White House term, Trump presided over impressive gains in the stock market, with the 24.2% rise in the Nasdaq
    COMP,
    +1.45%
    ranking as the best ever during a presidential term since the index made its debut in the early 1970s. The Dow Jones Industrial Average
    DJIA,
    +0.17%
    gained 11.8% and the S&P 500
    SPX,
    +0.87%
    rose 13.7% during the four-year span.

    Read:Stock-market performance under Trump trails only Obama and Clinton

    Some of those gains can be attributed to Trump’s signature legislative achievement: a major corporate-tax cut that saw the top federal rate slashed from 35% to 21%, padding corporate profits and making the shares of large U.S. companies more valuable, often via share buybacks.

    Investors were less enthusiastic about the former president’s trade war with China — a high-profile standoff that often sent stocks tumbling on news of new trade restrictions, or soaring on the perception of easing tensions.

    From the archives (May 2020): Trade-war collateral damage: destruction of $1.7 trillion in U.S. companies’ market value

    The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic shifted the focus of policy makers in both countries, and Biden has largely kept the tariffs his predecessor put in place. Despite these restrictions, the U.S. trade deficit in goods with China set a record of $355 billion in 2021.

    Trump on Tuesday said he wants to eliminate the U.S.’s dependence on China, by bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. He also falsely claimed that inflation is at a 50-year high — it is at a 40-year high.

    Economic policy often took a back seat to the various scandals that plagued Trump in his tumultuous term in office, when he became the first president to ever be impeached twice by the House of Representatives.

    The first impeachment resulted from a 2019 phone call when he asked Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky for a “favor” in announcing the launch of an investigation into Biden, then viewed as a likely Trump rival in the 2020 election. Democrats alleged that Trump withheld aid approved by Congress in an effort to ensure an investigation was announced.

    The second impeachment of Trump followed the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, with a bipartisan majority in the House arguing that he encouraged the attack.

    The former president’s legal troubles have not abated since he left office, and he’s facing several state and local investigations, civil and criminal, while some experts believe he will be indicted by Attorney General Merrick Garland for mishandling defense secrets and obstruction of justice after an FBI raid appeared to show that he lied to the government about classified documents in his possession.

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  • Katie Hobbs wins Arizona governor’s race, flipping state for Democrats

    Katie Hobbs wins Arizona governor’s race, flipping state for Democrats

    PHOENIX — Democrat Katie Hobbs was elected Arizona governor on Monday, defeating an ally of Donald Trump who falsely claimed the 2020 election was rigged and refused to say she would accept the results of her race this year.

    Hobbs, who is Arizona’s secretary of state, rose to prominence as a staunch defender of the legitimacy of the last election and warned that her Republican rival, former television news anchor Kari Lake, would be an agent of chaos. Hobbs’ victory adds further evidence that Trump is weighing down his allies in a crucial battleground state as the former president gears up for an announcement of a 2024 presidential run.

    She will succeed Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who was prohibited by term limit laws from running again. She’s the first Democrat to be elected governor in Arizona since Janet Napolitano in 2006.

    “For the Arizonans who did not vote for me, I will work just as hard for you — because even in this moment of division, I believe there is so much more that connects us,” Hobbs said in a statement declaring victory. “This was not just about an election — it was about moving this state forward and facing the challenges of our generation.”

    Lake did not immediately comment after the race was called.

    The Associated Press called the governor’s race for Hobbs after the latest round of vote releases gave her a big enough lead that the AP determined she would not relinquish it. The AP concluded that, even though Lake had been posting increasingly larger margins in vote updates from Maricopa County, she was not gaining a big enough share to overtake Hobbs and was running out of remaining votes.

    Vote counting had gone on for days since the Tuesday election, as officials continued to tally massive amounts of late-arriving ballots.

    A onetime Republican stronghold where Democrats made gains during the Trump era, Arizona has been central to efforts by Trump and his allies to cast doubt on Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory with false claims of fraud. This year, many Trump-endorsed candidates faltered in general elections in battleground states, though his pick in the Nevada governor’s race, Republican Joe Lombardo, defeated an incumbent Democrat.

    Before entering politics, Hobbs was a social worker who worked with homeless youth and an executive with a large domestic violence shelter in the Phoenix area. She was elected to the state Legislature in 2010, serving one term in the House and three terms in the Senate, rising to minority leader.

    Hobbs eked out a narrow win in 2018 as secretary of state and was thrust into the center of a political storm as Arizona became the centerpiece of the efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost. She appeared constantly on cable news defending the integrity of the vote count.

    The attention allowed her to raise millions of dollars and raise her profile. When she announced her campaign for governor, other prominent Democrats declined to run and Hobbs comfortably won her primary.

    She ran a cautious campaign, sticking largely to scripted and choreographed public appearances. She declined to participate in a debate with Lake, contending that Lake would turn it into a spectacle by spouting conspiracy theories and making false accusations.

    She bet instead that voters would recoil against Lake, who picked verbal fights with journalists as cameras rolled and struck a combative tone toward Democrats and even the establishment Republicans who have long dominated state government.

    Pre-election polls showed the race was tied, but Hobbs’ victory was still a surprise to many Democrats who feared her timidity would turn off voters. She overcame expectations in Maricopa and Pima counties, the metro Phoenix and Tucson areas where the overwhelming majority of Arizona voters live. She also spent considerable time in rural areas, looking to minimize her losses in regions that traditionally support Republicans.

    Lake is well known in much of the state after anchoring the evening news in Phoenix for more than two decades. She ran as a fierce critic of the mainstream media, which she said is unfair to Republicans. She earned Trump’s admiration for her staunch commitment to questioning the results of the 2020 election, a stand she never wavered from even after winning the GOP primary.

    She baselessly accused election officials of slow-rolling the vote count this year and prioritizing Democratic ballots as she narrowly trailed Hobbs for days following the election.

    She has cited a problem with printers at about a third of Maricopa County vote centers that led on-site tabulators to reject some ballots. Election officials told voters to put ballots in a separate box to be counted later, but Republican leaders told their supporters to ignore that instruction and lines in some places backed up.

    The problem affected about 7% of ballots cast in person on Election Day and about 1% of the total cast in the county.

    Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone said he increased security around the elections center Monday in anticipation that the race would be called and emotions could run hot, though he said there was no specific threat. Demonstrators have gathered outside the building for several days but have remained peaceful, he said.

    “I think we’re getting close to the end game so I want to be sure that we’re prepared,” Penzone told reporters in a news conference hours before the race call.

    The sheriff’s office was caught off guard two years ago when armed and angry protesters descended on the elections building in downtown Phoenix after Fox News and the AP called Arizona for Biden, marking the first time a Democrat won the state in more than two decades.

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  • Lavrov taken to hospital at G20 meeting, officials say

    Lavrov taken to hospital at G20 meeting, officials say

    NUSA DUA, Indonesia (AP) — Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was taken to the hospital after suffering a health problem following his arrival for the Group of 20 summit in Bali, multiple Indonesian authorities said Monday.

    Russia’s top diplomat arrived on the resort island the previous evening ahead of the meeting, which begins Tuesday.

    Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova later denied that Lavrov had been hospitalized but did not address whether he had received treatment.

    She posted a video of Lavrov, looking healthy in a T-shirt and shorts, in which he was asked to comment on the report of his treatment.

    “They’ve been writing about our president for 10 years that he’s fallen ill. It’s a game that is not new in politics,” Lavrov says in the video.

    Russia’s state news agency Tass cited Lavrov as saying, “I’m in the hotel, reading materials for the summit tomorrow.”

    Lavrov is the highest-ranking Russian official at the gathering, which U.S. President Joe Biden, China’s Xi Jinping and other leaders are attending.

    Four Indonesian government and medical officials told The Associated Press that Lavrov was receiving treatment at the Sanglah Hospital in the provincial capital, Denpasar.

    All of the officials declined to be identified as they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

    The hospital did not immediately comment.

    Two of the people said Lavrov had been treated for a heart condition.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attendance at the G-20 had been uncertain until last week, when officials confirmed he would not come and that Russia would be represented by Lavrov instead.

    Fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is expected to be among the issues discussed at the two-day G-20 meeting, which brings together officials from countries representing more than 80% of the world’s economic output.

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  • Midterm elections: Democrats hold Senate after Nevada and Arizona calls; Republicans fewer than 10 wins away from House control

    Midterm elections: Democrats hold Senate after Nevada and Arizona calls; Republicans fewer than 10 wins away from House control

    Democrats are projected to retain their hold on the U.S. Senate after winning a key race in Nevada, giving President Joe Biden’s party control of at least one chamber of Congress for the next two years.

    The Associated Press called Nevada’s Senate race for Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto over Republican challenger Adam Laxalt, giving Democrats a 50-seat count in the chamber. With Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote, and the chamber’s two independents causing with Democrats, Democrats will keep control.

    The House of Representatives, meanwhile, remained undecided late Saturday but with Republicans still favored. The GOP has 211 seats to Democrats’ 203, with 218 needed for a majority. Political handicappers give Democrats just a slim chance for retaining control of the House.

    Read: Democrats have 5% to 15% chance of keeping grip on House, Cook Political Report analyst says

    Should Republicans win control of the House, the GOP is expected to deliver a check on Biden’s policy priorities, such as by potentially using a debt-ceiling showdown to force spending cuts. 

    Related: Republican lawmakers likely to target ‘woke capitalism’ after the midterm elections, analysts say

    But holding the Senate gives Biden some advantages, as GOP control could have meant roadblocks for his cabinet picks or other officials, as well as limiting his capacity to shape the federal judiciary.

    Now see: Biden nominating Danny Werfel to head the IRS, White House says

    Democrats have had a grip on the House since the 2018 midterms. They’ve run the Senate for two years, with Vice President Harris’s constitutional role as Senate president positioning her to cast tiebreaking votes. Each party has a chance to pick up an extra vote after a Dec. 6 runoff in Georgia between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker.

    Read: Georgia Senate contest expected to soon overtake Pennsylvania’s as most expensive midterm election

    Democrats in the last two years have used party-line votes to push through measures such as March 2021’s stimulus law and this past summer’s package targeting healthcare, climate change and taxes.

    The House switching to red from blue would fit the historical pattern in which a first-term president’s party tends to lose congressional ground in the midterms. 

    Republicans’ majority is expected to be narrow, however, and that’s already creating turbulence for the House GOP leadership. Some members of the House Freedom Caucus say they’re opposed to Kevin McCarthy, the current House minority leader, becoming the chamber’s next speaker.

    Analysts had said voters in October and November appeared increasingly focused on issues on which Republicans have claimed high ground such as the prices of gasoline
    RB00,
    +2.45%
    and other essentials, at the expense of such Democratic Party agenda items as climate change and abortion and voting rights.

    Exit polls suggested that Republicans performed worse than expected because many Democrats and independents voted partly to show their disapproval of former President Donald Trump — and those voters were energized by the Supreme Court’s June decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

    Check out: Anti-Trump vote and Dobbs abortion ruling boost Democrats in 2022 election

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  • Senate Democrat Mark Kelly projected to have won re-election in Arizona

    Senate Democrat Mark Kelly projected to have won re-election in Arizona

    PHOENIX (AP) — Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly won his bid for reelection Friday in the crucial swing state of Arizona, defeating Republican venture capitalist Blake Masters to put his party one victory away from clinching control of the chamber for the next two years of Joe Biden’s presidency.

    With Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote, Democrats can retain control of the Senate by winning either the Nevada race, which remains too early to call, or next month’s runoff in Georgia. Republicans now must win both those races to take the majority.

    “ Republican Senate nominee Blake Masters earned Donald Trump’s endorsement after claiming ‘Trump won in 2020’ but. under pressure during a debate last month, acknowledged he hadn’t seen evidence that election was rigged. He later resumed adherence to the false claim.”

    The Arizona race is one of a handful of contests that Republicans targeted in their bid to take control of the 50-50 Senate. It was a test of the inroads that Kelly and other Democrats have made in a state once reliably dominated by the GOP. Kelly’s victory suggests Democratic success in Arizona was not an aberration during Donald Trump’s presidency.

    Other Arizona contests, including the closely watched race for governor between Democrat Katie Hobbs and Republican Kari Lake, were too early to call Friday night.

    Kelly, a former NASA astronaut who’s flown in space four times, is married to former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, who inspired the nation with her recovery from a gunshot wound to the head during an assassination attempt in 2011 that killed six people and injured 13. Kelly and Giffords went on to co-found a gun safety advocacy group.

    Kelly’s victory in a 2020 special election spurred by the death of Republican Sen. John McCain gave Democrats both of Arizona’s Senate seats for the first time in 70 years. The shift was propelled by the state’s fast-changing demographics and the unpopularity of Trump.

    Kelly’s 2022 campaign largely focused on his support for abortion rights, protecting Social Security, lowering drug prices and ensuring a stable water supply in the midst of a drought, which has curtailed Arizona’s cut of Colorado River water.

    With President Joe Biden struggling with low approval ratings, Kelly distanced himself from the president, particularly on border security, and played down his Democratic affiliation amid angst about the state of the economy.

    He also styled himself as an independent willing to buck his party, in the style of McCain.

    See: Democrats have up to a 15% chance of keeping their grip on the U.S. House, Cook Political Report analyst says

    Masters, an acolyte of billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, tried to penetrate Kelly’s independent image, aligning him with the Biden administration’s approach to the U.S.-Mexico border and tamp down on rampant inflation.

    Masters endeared himself to many GOP primary voters with his penchant for provocation and contrarian thinking. He called for privatizing Social Security, took a hard-line stance against abortion and promoted a racist theory popular with white nationalists that Democrats are seeking to use immigration to replace white people in America.

    But after emerging bruised from a contentious primary, Masters struggled to raise money and was put on the defense over his controversial positions.

    He earned Trump’s endorsement after claiming “Trump won in 2020,” but under pressure during a debate last month, he acknowledged he hasn’t seen evidence the election was rigged. He later doubled down on the false claim that Trump won.

    After the primary, he scrubbed some of his more controversial positions from his website, but it wasn’t enough for the moderate swing voters who decided the election.

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  • Ukraine troops prepare to reclaim city abandoned by Russians

    Ukraine troops prepare to reclaim city abandoned by Russians

    Russia relinquished its final foothold in a major city in southern Ukraine on Friday, clearing the way for victorious Ukrainian forces to reclaim the country’s only Russian-held provincial capital that could act as a springboard for further advances into occupied territory.

    Russia’s Defense Ministry said its troops finished withdrawing from the western bank of the river that divides Ukraine’s Kherson region at 5 a.m. The area they left included the city of Kherson, the only provincial capital Russia had captured during its nearly nine-month invasion of Ukraine.

    Videos and photos on social media showed residents jubilantly taking to the streets and a Ukrainian flag flying over a monument in a central Kherson square for the first time since the city was seized in early March. Some footage showed crowds cheering on men in military uniform.

    Ukrainian officials have not confirmed the city was back in Ukrainian hands. A spokesperson for Ukraine’s military intelligence agency said “an operation to liberate Kherson” and the surrounding region of the same name was underway.

    “It will be possible to talk about establishing Ukrainian control over the city only after an official report by the General Staff” of the Ukrainian army, Andriy Yusov told The Associated Press.

    Ukrainian intelligence urged Russian soldiers who might still be in the city to surrender in anticipation of Ukrainian forces arriving. “Your command left you to the mercy of fate,” it said in a statement. “Your commanders urge you to change into civilian clothes and try to escape from Kherson on your own. Obviously, you won’t be able to.”

    A Ukrainian regional official, Serhii Khlan, disputed the Russian Defense Ministry’s claim that the 30,000 retreating troops took all 5,000 pieces of equipment with them, saying “a lot” of hardware got left behind.

    The final Russian withdrawal came six weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed the Kherson region and three other Ukrainian provinces, vowing they would remain Russian forever.

    Moscow’s forces still control about 70% of the Kherson region following the pullback ordered amid a Ukrainian counteroffensive.

    The Kremlin remained defiant Friday, insisting the withdrawal in no way represented an embarrassment for Putin. Moscow continues to view the entire Kherson region as part of Russia, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

    He added that the Kremlin doesn’t regret holding festivities just over a month ago to celebrate the annexation of occupied or partially occupied regions of Ukraine.

    Shortly before the Russian announcement, the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the situation in the province as “difficult.” It reported Russian shelling of some villages and towns Ukrainian forces reclaimed in recent weeks during their counteroffensive in the Kherson region.

    The General Staff of Ukraine’s army said the Russian forces left looted homes, damaged power lines and mined roads in their wake. Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak predicted Thursday the departing Russians would seek to turn Kherson into a “city of death” and would continue to shell it after relocating across the Dnieper River.

    Ukrainian officials were wary of the Russian pullback announced this week, fearing their soldiers could get drawn into an ambush in Kherson city, which had a prewar population of 280,000. Military analysts also had predicted it would take Russia’s military at least a week to complete the troop withdrawal.

    Without referencing events unfolding in Kherson, Zelenskyy said in a video message thanking U.S. military personnel on Veterans Day that “victory will be ours.”

    “Your example inspires Ukrainians today to fight back against Russian tyranny,” he said. “Special thanks to the many American veterans who have volunteered to fight in Ukraine and to the American people for the amazing support you have given Ukraine. With your help, we have stunned the world and are pushing Russian forces back.”

    However, some quarters of the Ukrainian government barely disguised their glee at the pace of the Russian withdrawal.

    “The Russian army leaves the battlefields in a triathlon mode: steeplechase, broad jumping, swimming,” Andriy Yermak, a senior presidential adviser, tweeted. Social media videos showed villagers hugging Ukrainian troops.

    Recapturing Kherson city could provide Ukraine a strong position from which to expand its southern counteroffensive to other Russian-occupied areas, potentially including Crimea, which Moscow seized in 2014.

    From its forces’ new positions on the eastern bank, however, the Kremlin could try to escalate the war, which U.S. assessments showed may already have killed or wounded tens of thousands of civilians and hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

    Gen. Ben Hodges, former commanding general of U.S. Army forces in Europe, described the retreat from Kherson as a “colossal failure” for Russia, and said he expects Ukrainian commanders will work to keep the pressure on Russia’s depleted forces ahead of a possible future push for Crimea next year.

    “It’s too early to be planning the victory parade, for sure. But I would expect by the end of this year — so in the next, let’s say, eight weeks — the Ukrainians are going to be in place to start setting the conditions for the decisive phase of this campaign, which is the liberation of Crimea, which I think will happen by the summer,” he said in a telephone interview.

    Meanwhile, a Russian S-300 missile strike overnight killed seven people in Mykolaiv, about 68 kilometers (42 miles) from Kherson’s regional capital, Zelenskyy’s office said Friday morning. Rescue crews sifted through the rubble of a five-story residential building in search of survivors.

    Standing in front of what used to be his family’s apartment, Roman Mamontov, 16, awaited news about his missing mother. Mamontov said he found “nothing there” when he opened the door to look for his mother after the missile struck. Friday was her 34th birthday, the teenager said.

    “My mind was blank at that moment. I thought it could not be true,” he said. “The cake she prepared for the celebration is still there.”

    Zelenskyy called the missile strike “the terrorist state’s cynical response to our successes at the front.”

    “Russia does not give up its despicable tactics. And we will not give up our struggle. The occupiers will be held to account for every crime against Ukraine and Ukrainians,” Zelenskyy said.

    The Russian Defense Ministry didn’t acknowledge striking a residential building in Mykolaiv, saying only that an ammunition depot was destroyed “in the area of the city.”

    Mykolaiv mayor Oleksandr Sienkevych told the AP that Russia could step up its shelling of his city in light of Ukraine’s advances. “The more success the Ukrainian army has, Russia lowers its bar of terrorism,” he said.

    Sienkevych said that S-300 missiles launched from the Kherson region can reach Mykolaiv within one minute. Some 149 civilians have been killed and 700 people seriously wounded in the city since the Feb. 24 start of the war.

    The president’s office said Russian drones, rockets and heavy artillery strikes across eight regions killed at least 14 civilians between Thursday morning and Friday morning.

    The state of the key Antonivskiy Bridge that links the western and eastern banks of the Dnieper in the Kherson region remained unclear Friday. Russian media reports suggested the bridge was blown up following the Russian withdrawal; pro-Kremlin reporters posted footage of the bridge missing a large section.

    But Sergei Yeliseyev, a Russian-installed official in the Kherson region, told the Interfax news agency the bridge hadn’t been blown up.

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  • The $26 billion rise and fall of FTX crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried

    The $26 billion rise and fall of FTX crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried

    Just six months ago, CEOs, celebs and world leaders like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair flocked to him, gathering at a Davos-like conference he hosted in the Bahamas where he lives as one of the most outspoken evangelists for the power of the blockchain.  

    Fast forward to Sunday and Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire came crashing down, the victim of an old-fashioned bank run that quickly exposed the weaknesses of the new finance system he had championed. 

    Almost overnight, Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, had gone from being valued at $32 billion to worthless, leaving scores of investors scrambling to get their deposits back and triggering probes in the U.S. by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and the Department of Justice, according to reports.

    On Thursday, the 30-year-old Bankman-Fried took to Twitter to level with his clients.

    “I fucked up, and should have done better,” he wrote.

    A very rapid rise

    It took less than five years for Bankman-Fried to build a personal fortune that was estimated at its highest point to be more than $26 billion, making him among the richest people in the world.

    His schlubby, boyish appearance — ill-fitting t-shirts, gym shorts and a mop of curly hair — made him look more like a college student ripping bong hits in the basement of a frat house than a finance guru, but fit nicely with the anti-establishment ethos that appealed to crypto enthusiasts.

    The son of law professors at Stanford University, Bankman-Fried was a wunderkind from an early age. He studied physics and mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    After a stint as an ETF trader for Jane Street Capital, a highly respected Wall Street firm that is known for attracting genius quantitative traders, Bankman-Fried became interested in the concept of effective altruism, a philosophy that focuses on using reason and evidence to find solutions that benefit the most people possible. In 2017, he launched Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm focused on digital currencies.

    Over the next year, he began building his fortune through arbitrage trading of Bitcoin
    BTCUSD,
    +11.10%
    between exchanges in the U.S. and Japan, where prices were often slightly higher. In 2019, Bankman-Fried launched the crypto exchange FTX.

    The timing was fortuitous: as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe the following year, interest in cryptocurrencies among people exploded. FTX took off and brought in the big-name celebrity endorsers and partners, like professional athletes Tom Brady and Steph Curry. 

    Bankman-Fried soon found himself feted by some of the biggest institutions in finance, attracting investment from the biggest names on Wall Street and beyond like Softbank
    9984,
    -2.65%
    Group, Sequoia Capital, Blackrock
    BLK,
    +13.26%    .
    Tiger Global Management and Thoma Bravo. He even raised money from billionaire hedge fund legends Paul Tudor Jones and Israel Englander.

    Soon, FTX was among the biggest players in the industry.

    The face of crypto

    Despite his ballooning wealth, Bankman-Fried maintained the appearance and lifestyle of a teenage gamer. He moved to the Bahamas, where he reportedly lived in a penthouse apartment with 10 roommates.

    On Zoom calls, he would often play video games while talking — his favorite game being League of Legends. Profiles of him often noted that he kept a bean bag just feet from his desk to sleep on.

    What set Bankman-Fried apart from other crypto tycoons, was his professed interest in working with regulators to create a more robust framework around the nascent industry and treat it more like a traditional finance network. 

    To that end, Bankman-Fried appeared before Congress to try to explain to skeptical U.S. lawmakers how the crypto industry worked. He also said he welcomed regulation, not always a popular position in the crypto world.

    “FTX believes [government agencies] could play an even more prominent role in the digital-asset ecosystem and bring greater investor protections by closing some regulatory gaps,” he said before a senate panel in February. “FTX believes that such efforts would combine the best aspects of traditional finance and digital-asset innovations.”

    Bankman-Fried even put his great wealth to play in politics, becoming a major campaign donor for the Democratic party. In 2020, he was one of President Joe Biden’s largest single donors and spent nearly $40 million on political campaigns this year for the midterm elections, according to campaign filings.

    As cryptocurrencies have experienced significant declines in prices this year, triggering the collapse of several operations, Bankman-Fried arose as a savior, buying up several failing partners as positioning himself as a kind of Robin Hood for the industry.

    A swift collapse

    For as fast a rise to the top of the world that Bankman-Fried enjoyed, the fall was just as rapid.

    On Sunday, Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of FTX’s competitor, Binance, and an archrival of Bankman-Fried’s, announced on Twitter that his firm, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, was liquidating its sizable holdings of FTT, the coin issued by FTX, “due to recent revelations that have come to light.”

    Bankman-Fried accused Zhao of spreading false rumors. But the damage was done.

    Binance’s move triggered a massive selloff with customers seeking to redeem some $5 billion in deposits. FTX didn’t have it and redemptions froze up.  

    On Tuesday, Bankman-Fried announced that FTX had reached a tentative agreement to be acquired by Binance, due to a “significant liquidity crunch.” The turmoil set off broad declines among several of the most popular cryptocurrencies and even spilled into the world of traditional finance, sending markets tumbling.

    The next day, the chaos increased, with reports that FTX and Bankman-Fried were under investigation by several U.S. agencies. By the end of the day, Binance said it was walking away from the deal because due diligence had revealed that “the issues are beyond our control or ability to help.” 

    Binance’s deal seemed like the only thing preventing FTX from potentially collapsing. “At some point I might have more to say about a particular sparring partner,” Bankman-Fried tweeted on Thursday. “For now, all I’ll say is: well played; you won.”

    Also on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Bankman-Fried had been using some customer deposits to fund risky bets by his Alameda Research firm, setting FTX up for collapse.

    With the Binance lifeline gone and with few options available, Bankman-Fried told investors he needed $8 billion or more to plug the hole in FTX’s books, according to reports. 

    On Twitter, Bankman-Fried said he would focus all his efforts on making sure depositors got their money back. He also tried to explain FTX’s collapse, saying “a poor internal labeling of bank-related accounts meant that I was substantially off on my sense of users’ margin. I thought it was way lower.”

    Said Bankman-Fried: “My #1 priority–by far–is doing right by users,” he wrote. “Right now, we’re spending the week doing everything we can to raise liquidity. I can’t make any promises about that.”

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  • Russians announce withdrawal from part of Kherson, a key position in southern Ukraine

    Russians announce withdrawal from part of Kherson, a key position in southern Ukraine

    Russia’s military has announced that it’s withdrawing from the western bank of the Dnieper River in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, annexed by Moscow in September.

    The top Russian military commander in Ukraine, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, reported to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu Wednesday that it was impossible to deliver supplies to the city of Kherson and other areas on the western bank, and Shoigu agreed with his proposal to retreat and set up defenses on the eastern bank.

    The withdrawal from the city of Kherson is a major setback for Russia — it is the only regional capital Russian forces had seized during the eight-month war.

    Elsewhere villages and towns in Ukraine saw more heavy fighting and shelling Wednesday as Ukrainian and Russian forces strained to advance on different fronts after more than 8 1/2 months of war.

    At least nine civilians were killed and 24 others were wounded in 24 hours, the Ukrainian president’s office said. It accused Russia of using explosive drones, rockets, heavy artillery and aircraft to attack eight regions in the country’s southeast.

    Ukrainian and Russian forces also clashed overnight over Snihurivka, a town about 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of the southern city of Kherson. Ukraine’s army hopes to reclaim the Russian-occupied city, the only regional capital captured during Moscow’s February 24 invasion and a key target of an ongoing counteroffensive.

    Kirill Stremousov, the deputy head of the Kherson region’s Kremlin-appointed administration, said in a Telegram post that the Ukrainian army had “gained a foothold” along a railway line in Snihurivka’s north. In a separate post, he claimed Russian forces had repulsed the Ukrainian advance.

    The Kherson region is one of four provinces of Ukraine that Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed and subsequently placed under Russian martial law. The Russian military has concentrated much of its firepower on securing control of the others – Luhansk, Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia.

    Earlier this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reiterated that the return of all occupied territory was a condition for any peace talks with Russia. The Kremlin is unlikely to give up its internationally unrecognized claim to the regions annexed in September or to Crimea, which Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.

    The president’s office said widespread Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy system continued. Two cities not far from Europe’s largest nuclear power plant were shelled overnight, it said. More than 20 residential buildings, an industrial plant, a gas pipeline and a power line were reportedly damaged in Nikopol, which lies across the Dnieper River from the the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.

    Further west, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, the Ukrainian governor reported “massive” overnight strikes with exploding Iranian-made drones that wounded four energy company workers in the city of Dnipro.

    “Attacks on civilian infrastructure are war crimes in themselves. The Kremlin is at war with Ukrainian civilians, trying to leave millions of people without water and light (for them) to freeze in the winter,” Gov. Valentyn Reznichenko said on Ukrainian TV.

    In a related development, a senior Russian security official arrived in Iran for high-level talks late on Tuesday, Russian media reported.

    News of the trip by Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the powerful Russian Security Council chaired by Putin, came days after Tehran admitted that it had supplied Moscow with the explosive-laden drones, after weeks of official denials.

    A Washington-based think tank linked Patrushev’s visit to likely discussions over the possible sale of Iranian surface-to-surface ballistic missiles to Russia. The Institute for the Study of War said late Tuesday that the Kremlin was “continuing efforts to covertly acquire munitions for use in Ukraine, to mitigate the effects of international sanctions and backfill Russia’s ongoing depletion of domestic munitions stockpiles.”

    The increasingly close military and political cooperation between Moscow and Tehran at the time of the war in Ukraine has worried the United States and other Western powers.

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  • U.K. fracking stocks slump after Sunak reinstates ban

    U.K. fracking stocks slump after Sunak reinstates ban

    Shares in London-listed fracking companies slumped on Wednesday after new U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he would stick by his party’s manifesto pledge to ban the shale gas extraction process in Britain.

    IGas Energy stock
    IGAS,
    -27.66%
    dropped 28% and the equity of Egdon Resources
    EDR,
    -18.21%
    slumped 11%. The shares of AJ Lucas
    AJL,
    +2.99%    ,
    which owns nearly 50% of U.K. fracker Cuadrilla, are quoted on the Australian stock exchange, which was closed.

    The fracking sector is tiny in the U.K. — the two U.K.-quoted companies have a combined valuation of less than £60 million — with few suitable sites for the process to be viable.

    But the industry’s practices are highly controversial, with campaigners arguing it causes small earth tremors, pollutes water tables and is not compatible with lower carbon production targets.

    The shares of IGas Energy had jumped around ninefold since the start of the year, getting an extra recent boost from previous Prime Minister Liz Truss’s decision to go against the Conservative Party’s wishes and allow fracking.

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