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  • E. Jean Carroll battery and defamation trial against Donald Trump begins: What to know | CNN Politics

    E. Jean Carroll battery and defamation trial against Donald Trump begins: What to know | CNN Politics


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The civil battery and defamation trial for columnist E. Jean Carroll against former President Donald Trump is set to begin Tuesday.

    Carroll alleges Trump forcibly raped and groped her in a Manhattan luxury department store dressing room in the mid 1990’s. Trump denies the charges and has said Carroll is “not my type.”

    Unlike his dramatic courtroom appearance in New York state court earlier this month, Trump is unlikely to appear in the Manhattan federal courtroom, his lawyers have said, unless he is called to testify in Carroll’s case or opts to take the stand in his own defense. Because it is a civil case, he is not required to appear.

    Jury selection begins Tuesday and the trial is expected to last up to two weeks.

    Trump is not being criminally prosecuted on Carroll’s rape allegations. Carroll did not specify an amount in her civil lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court but is seeking monetary damages and a retraction of an October 2022 social media statement Trump made about Carroll.

    Here’s what to know:

    Nearly four years after Carroll first went public with the allegations in 2019, a jury is expected to be empaneled. Federal District Judge Lewis Kaplan is expected to winnow down a pool of about 100 prospective jurors.

    The attorneys have asked the judge to quiz the jury pool on issues like their potential biases and their knowledge of Carroll, Trump and the pending legal matters Trump is facing in unrelated cases like his recent indictment in New York County criminal court.

    The jury will remain anonymous to the public and the attorneys, the judge ruled. The decision was in part influenced by Trump’s threats to the state Supreme Court judge overseeing his criminal case in New York.

    Attorneys for Carroll and Trump could give opening statements late in the day Tuesday.

    Carroll filed the suit last November under New York’s 2022 Adult Survivors Act that opened a look-back window for sexual assault allegations like Carroll’s with long-expired statutes of limitations.

    The former Elle columnist first came forward with her story in June of 2019 publishing an excerpt from her book “What Do We Need Men For” in New York Magazine ahead of the book release.

    “And, while I am not supposed to say it, I will. This woman is not my type,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

    “In the meantime, and for the record, E. Jean Carroll is not telling the truth, is a woman who I had nothing to do with, didn’t know, and would have no interest in knowing her if I ever had the chance. Now all I have to do is go through years more of legal nonsense in order to clear my name of her and her lawyer’s phony attacks on me. This can only happen to ‘Trump’!”

    The lawsuit argues the denial of Carroll’s allegations is defamatory and caused her emotional, reputational and professional harm.

    Trump’s lawyer corrects him after error during deposition

    Carroll’s account of the alleged rape after encountering Trump at Bergdorf Goodman in the fall of 1995 or spring of 1996 is detailed in the lawsuit.

    She recalled telling Trump she was 52 at time. Both are now in their 70’s.

    She helped Trump shop for “a girl” when he recognized her leaving the store, Carroll says.

    “Hey, you’re that advice lady!” he said to her, according to the lawsuit. “Hey, you’re that real estate tycoon!” she replied.

    Trump steered what started out as light-hearted shopping to the lingerie department where he suggested Carroll try on a bodysuit, the suit alleges. Carroll says Trump then guided her toward a dressing room, where she jokingly suggested he try on the lingerie.

    Once in the dressing room Trump “lunged at Carroll, pushing her against the wall, bumping her head quite badly, and putting his mouth on her lips,” according to the lawsuit. With Carroll fighting back, Trump pushed her against the wall again, “jammed his hand under her coatdress and pulled down her tights,” the lawsuit says.

    “Trump opened his overcoat and unzipped his pants. Trump then pushed his fingers around Carroll’s genitals and forced his penis inside of her,” the suit alleges.

    Carroll eventually pushed him off with her knee and ran out of the dressing room to exit the store, according to the lawsuit.

    The former president categorically denies that the interaction and assault ever happened.

    After Carroll went public, Trump said he “never met this person.”

    Trump’s counsel has made several legal attempts to dismiss the litigation with Carroll and once tried to countersue her, alleging Carroll violated New York’s anti-SLAPP law prohibiting frivolous defamation lawsuits – a claim rejected by Judge Kaplan.

    Carroll first sued Trump for defamation in 2019 for statements he made denying the allegations at the time. That case has been paused pending further litigation about how to handle the case because Trump was president when he made the statements at issue in the lawsuit.

    Attorneys for the career advice columnist have indicated that Carroll will likely take the stand to tell her account to the jury.

    Trump, however, is unlikely to appear in the Manhattan federal courtroom, his lawyers have said, unless he is called to testify in Carroll’s case or opts to take the stand in his own defense.

    Trump’s attorney told the court that Trump wanted to attend the trial but claimed it would be a burden on the city and court staff to accommodate him given the security protection he receives.

    Judge Kaplan has not decided whether he’ll instruct the jury about Trump’s absence from the defense table.

    Jurors are expected to see at least some parts of Trump’s video deposition taken last October for this case. Excerpts of the deposition were previously unsealed in court filings ahead of the trial.

    Carroll’s lead attorney, Roberta Kaplan, a civil attorney who’s represented women in high-profile sexual assault litigation like victims of Jeffrey Epstein, indicated that her team can put on Carroll’s case without Trump making an appearance. (Carroll’s attorney and the judge are not related.)

    Two longtime friends of Carroll, who’ve confirmed that she confided in them soon after the alleged incident more than two decades ago, can testify to corroborate Carroll’s story, Judge Kaplan ruled over objections from Trump’s legal team.

    Carroll has said when she confided in journalist Lisa Birnbach, her friend told her she’d been raped and should report the incident to the police at the time.

    When she told former local TV anchor Carol Martin a day or so later, Martin warned Carroll that she was no match for Trump’s army of lawyers and said it was best to keep it to herself – which is ultimately what Carroll did until 2019, she says.

    Two other women who allege Trump physically forced himself on them can also testify about their allegations, the judge ruled.

    Jessica Leeds has alleged that Trump, seated next to her on a plane, groped her on a flight from Texas to New York in 1979. Leeds, who first came forward during the 2016 presidential election, said in a deposition for this case that Trump acknowledged remembering her from the plane when she saw him at an event sometime after the alleged incident.

    People Magazine writer Natasha Stoynoff similarly alleges that Trump groped her and tried to forcibly kiss her in 2005 when Stoynoff was at Mar-a-Lago to interview Trump and a then-pregnant Melania Trump on their first wedding anniversary.

    Trump denies both incidents ever happened.

    Attorneys for Carroll are expected to show the jury a black and white photo of Trump where he is interacting with several people, including with his then-wife Ivana, Carroll and her then-husband.

    A transcript of his October 2022 deposition revealed that Trump mistook Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples when he reviewed the photo during the deposition.

    “I don’t know who – it’s Marla,” Trump said when shown the photo. “That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife,” he says when asked to clarify.

    e. jean carroll new day 071619

    E. Jean Carroll: ‘I’m not sorry’ (2019)

    Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, then interjected and said “no, that’s Carroll,” according to the transcript.

    Carroll’s lawyers have said the photo proves Trump had in fact met Carroll and she could be his “type.”

    Trump’s comments on the 2016 campaign trail denying allegations from Leeds and Stoynoff can also be admitted as evidence, the judge ruled.

    Like Carroll, Trump has asserted that the allegations are false and implausible in part because the women aren’t attractive or his ‘type.’

    Jurors may also hear the controversial “Access Hollywood” tape on which Trump can be heard telling show host Billy Bush how he would use his stardom to aggressively come on to women.

    Trump has chalked up his graphic language on the tape, which first surfaced during his 2016 Presidential election campaign, as “locker room talk” that wasn’t actually true.

    Judge Kaplan ruled that a jury could reasonably find that Trump admitted in the Access Hollywood Tape “that he in fact has had contact with women’s genitalia in the past without their consent, or that he has attempted to do so,” and the jury may view accounts from Leeds and Stoynoff as support for that argument.

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  • Sexual assaults in the US military increased by 1% last year | CNN Politics

    Sexual assaults in the US military increased by 1% last year | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The US military saw a 1% increase in sexual assaults last year, according to the Pentagon’s latest annual report.

    There were 7,378 reports of sexual assault against service members in 2022, according to the Fiscal Year 2022 Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military, released on Thursday. That is up from 7,260 reports of assault in 2021.

    All of the services aside from the Army saw an increase in reports from last year, officials said during a briefing on the report on Thursday: the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force saw a 9%, 3.6%, and 13% increase in reports, respectively. The Army, meanwhile, saw a 9% decrease.

    Overall, the number of reports of assault has consistently increased in the military since 2010.

    And while the Defense Department is working through implementing dozens of recommendations from an independent review commission on sexual assault, officials said commanders and service members on the ground still have a responsibility to do their part.

    “At the end of the day, we can only do so much at the headquarters level,” Beth Foster, director of the Office of Force Resiliency, told reporters. “But, you know, really, this is on our commanders, on our [non-commissioned officers], our frontline leaders to make sure that they are addressing this problem. And, you know, the Secretary says … we need to lead on that. And that that is for at every level of the department.”

    In addition to the 7,378 reports of assault that occurred during military service in 2022, there were also 797 Defense Department civilians who reported being assaulted by service members, and 580 service members who reported being assaulted before their military service.

    The report released Thursday looks at the number of sexual assault reports, as opposed to a separate report the Pentagon releases every other year that estimates the total number of service members experiencing sexual assault. Ideally, the Defense Department has said a sign of progress would be seeing the number of reports go up, while the prevalence of sexual assault go down.

    However, the 2021 prevalence survey – released August 2022 – showed an in increase in how many service members were estimated to have experienced assault. The Pentagon estimated that 35,875 service members experienced unwanted sexual contact in 2021.

    Also, within the report released on Thursday was data showing a decrease in how many cases of assault, which had evidence that supported the charges, were referred to court-martial by commanders. Only 37% of cases were referred to court-martial in 2022, which falls in line with a steady decrease over the last 10 years.

    Instead, there has been an increase in cases that are dealt with through administrative action and discharges of offenders. Dr. Nate Galbreath, the deputy director for the Defense Department’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, told reporters on Thursday that the decrease in court-martials is in part because of support being provided to victims of military sexual assault.

    “One of the things that we’ve seen year after a year since 2015, with the addition of the Special Victims Counsel program – which are attorneys that represent victims throughout the military justice process – is that victims have made it abundantly clear that they would like to help see the department hold their offenders appropriately accountable, but they’d like to do it through nonconfrontational means, and that’s essentially what we see in the percentages with administrative actions and discharges and non-judicial punishment,” Galbreath said.

    He added, however, that the decrease in taking sexual assault cases to court is also due to victims not having faith in the military justice system to handle their cases appropriately.

    The military services’ newly appointed Special Trial Counsels, who are appointed officers that report directly to the service secretaries and have exclusive authority to prosecute sexual assault cases, will be charged with restoring “that perception of fairness back into the system.”

    Ultimately, officials reiterated that while work is ongoing, the ongoing trend of sexual assault isn’t going to change “overnight.”

    “We certainly, if we could flip a switch and make this change instantly, we would,” Foster said. “But we know this is going to take some time.”

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  • How Congress lost control of the Supreme Court | CNN Politics

    How Congress lost control of the Supreme Court | CNN Politics

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



    CNN
     — 

    The Supreme Court holds more power than it used to and, thanks to its “shadow docket,” can make consequential decisions that affect every American without so much as a written decision.

    That’s my takeaway from a fascinating and educational new book by Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas who is also a CNN contributor.

    I talked to Vladeck about “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic,” which publishes on May 16. Excerpts of our conversation, conducted by phone, are below.

    WOLF: Can you explain to people what you mean by “shadow docket”?

    VLADECK: The term is not mine. It was coined by University of Chicago law professor Will Baude in 2015.

    Will meant it really as this umbrella term. Not as a pejorative, but just as a description of the fact that the vast majority of rulings that the Supreme Court hands down that we don’t pay attention to.

    They’re not the fancy decisions on the merits docket. They’re not the cases where the court hears oral arguments and writes these lengthy rulings with concurrences and dissents.

    The typical shadow docket ruling is an unsigned, unexplained order. And most of them are banal. But not all of them.

    Will’s insight, which I have rather shamelessly appropriated, is that there’s a lot of really important stuff that happens through unsigned, unexplained orders. Just because they’re unsigned and unexplained doesn’t mean that we ought not to care about them, talk about them, study them and try to divine broader patterns from them.

    WOLF: You write about how the court, without explaining itself, either invalidated or influenced congressional maps in the last election in three states: Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. Right now, Republicans have a four-seat majority in the House. Do you feel like those decisions determined the outcome of who was going to control the House?

    VLADECK: I think it’s close. We’re talking about two decisions from the court in cases from Alabama and Louisiana, and then those decisions were directly followed in Georgia.

    There’s no question that, but for the court’s interventions, at least three House seats in the current Congress would likely have been controlled by Democrats as opposed to Republicans.

    What I think is really hard to say is what other effects might have followed. The New York Times has suggested that those decisions affected control of as many as seven to 10 House seats. That, I think, is a little more circumstantial.

    There’s no question that the decisions in the Alabama and Louisiana cases helped to give the Republicans the majority they currently have in the House. Whether they actually directly affected control, I think is a close call.

    WOLF: Justice Samuel Alito is unapologetic about use of the shadow docket. Chief Justice John Roberts and other conservatives dislike it. How have things changed in recent months? Has it been used more or less since you stopped writing this book?

    VLADECK: With regard to what I think is the problematic behavior on the shadow docket, I think we have seen less of that in the current term. And actually, I think we can see patterns of that go all the way down to October 2021, when Justice (Amy Coney) Barrett wrote this very, very cryptic concurrence in a case about the Covid vaccine mandate for Maine health care workers.

    It was delphic in what it said, but signaled a bit of a break between Barrett and (Brett) Kavanaugh, who joined that opinion, and Justices (Clarence) Thomas, Alito and (Neil) Gorsuch in how often they were going to be willing to vote to intervene on the shadow docket and what kinds of cases they were willing to intervene in.

    Last week, the stay in the Oklahoma death penalty case, Richard Glossip, there were no dissents from that intervention. Even the mifepristone ruling in April, there are only two public dissents.

    One of the really interesting stories here is the court really does seem to have moderated at least some of its behavior. Part of that, I think, is because to at least some degree, the median justices have become convinced that some of the court’s prior behavior is problematic.

    WOLF: Do you have thoughts on motivations behind the rise of the shadow docket, which you pegged to the seating of Justice Barrett and this new conservative supermajority? Do you think that there was some concerted effort by the more conservative justices to exploit this?

    VLADECK: I think the short answer is no. But I know that there are going to be folks who disagree.

    The book tries to unpack some of this chronologically, because I think the story makes a lot of sense when told in sequence.

    Starting in 2017, the court was confronted with an unprecedented flurry of emergency applications from the Trump administration. It reacted to those applications iteratively, one at a time, without actually stepping back and looking at the whole waterfront, so the court actually kept digging itself in deeper and deeper.

    Had the justices actually taken a step back and asked whether this was a practice they wanted to condone, they might not have said yes. And I think with each new intervention, with each successive case, what had previously been extraordinary became ordinary.

    Without there necessarily having been any deliberateness or malice, the conservative majority just routinized the types of interventions that had until 2017 been completely unroutine.

    It’s only when we get to the Covid cases in 2020 and 2021 that now it starts to look like some of this is willful, because it’s only in those cases where we see the court deciding legal questions on the shadow docket through emergency applications that were in front of the justices already on the merits docket.

    There was nothing stopping the court from using merits cases to reach these questions about religious liberty, and the court did it through the shadow docket anyway.

    I really think it started as just an unstructured off-the-cuff reaction to unusually aggressive behavior by the Trump administration and then just sort of morphed into something else as time went on.

    WOLF: You point to the Obergefell decision (legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide) to argue that the court had already spoken on same-sex marriage through years of inaction. There was a patchwork of marriage laws the court had tolerated for a number of years. Reading that made me think we’re returning to that with abortion rights. And certainly with guns. The patchwork nature of rights in this country is growing not shrinking, despite the gay marriage decision.

    VLADECK: I think it’s grown in some respects and is shrinking and others. The more that the Supreme Court constitutionalizes things, the less of a patchwork we have.

    If you look at the Second Amendment context, I think it’s actually less of a patchwork, because more and more variances in how localities regulate guns are being struck down by the courts for violating the federal Constitution. Versus contests where the court is stepping away from constitutional enforcement, like abortion. It’s more contextual than sort of categorical.

    WOLF: I’ve done a lot of writing about the filibuster, which is this custom that has evolved to be a major part of the US government and slowed or stalled legislation in Congress. Your descriptions of how the court has evolved reminded me of that. You argue the justices have essentially grabbed power from Congress over the last 100 years or so to gain more control over their docket.

    VLADECK: When we look at the court today, we see a court that controls virtually all of its docket, a court that decides not just which cases it’s going to hear, but which issues it’s going to decide within the cases it chooses to hear.

    For most of us, we’ve never known anything different. And so we just assume that that’s how the court is supposed to operate.

    The reality is totally different. Until 1891, and really in practice until 1925, virtually all of the court’s docket was mandatory – the court had to decide any case over which it had jurisdiction.

    That made it a lot harder for the justices to have an agenda. It made it a lot harder for the justices to target particular disputes and look around for cases. The rise of certiorari, of docket discretion, is actually a thoroughly untold but undeniable part of the story of why today’s Supreme Court is so powerful, despite the founders’ views that this would be the least dangerous branch.

    The court today actually has a ton of power. Some of that story is about a power grab.

    But a fair amount of the story is about acquiescence and abdication by Congress, which gave the court the certiorari power in the first instance; which never reined it in, even as the court has seemed to used it to claim more and more power; and which in 1988 took all the brakes off of certiorari and said, yep, just about all the court’s docket is going to be discretionary – and which has done absolutely nothing since then to exercise any modicum of control over the court’s docket.

    That’s why the story that the book tries to tell is not just a story about the court. It is a story about the separation of powers and how the shadow docket is in some respects just a symptom of the broader disease of separation of powers dysfunction that we’re seeing right now.

    WOLF: You come back to that 1988 law repeatedly in the book. I wonder what you think Congress should do now to change the court. There are proposals to change the number of justices, to change the terms of justices. What would be your prescription?

    VLADECK: My prescription is sort of even sillier, which is I would just start by doing something. To me, the problem is that Congress has gotten completely out of the business of exercising any leverage over the courts, so much so that when Chief Justice Roberts was invited to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he responds and says that would raise the separation of powers concern.

    No it wouldn’t! Justices testify all the time. Or at least they did historically, and no one ever thought that was unconstitutional.

    There are specific things Congress can do, but the real thing Congress needs to do is just more than nothing. Exercise more control over the court’s docket. Use the budget, if necessary, as a cudgel.

    If nationwide injunctions are a problem that’s responsible for why the court is behaving in this way, make it easier for parties to appeal nationwide injunctions directly to the court without having to go through the emergency application process.

    There are so many things Congress could do. The problem is that we’re stuck in this post-1988 mindset that it is not Congress’ job. When we look at the court today, we look at the ethics issues, the docket issues, the legitimacy debates – a lot of what’s going on here is a court that’s just not remotely checked and not worrying about being checked.

    And this is why I’m a bit more circumspect about adding seats to the court or term limits. I don’t think changing the composition of the court changes the basic problem, which is the power dynamic, the Madisonian idea in Federalist 51, that ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

    That doesn’t change just because you have different bodies in those seats. The way that changes is Congress reasserts its clear constitutional prerogatives over the court. And that’s part of the story the book tries to tell.

    WOLF: You also talked quite a bit about this idea that the court gets most of its power from the legitimacy it has in the public. What should it do to restore its legitimacy?

    VLADECK: “Restore” is a little strong. I have not given up on the court. But I think there’s a lot that the justices can do to at least give a sense that they actually care about public perception, and that they should care about public perception.

    First, I think it would be nice if the justices would stop attacking critics as seeking to delegitimize the court. If you think the criticisms are unfair, then respond on the substance as opposed to attacking the people who are criticizing.

    When it comes to the shadow docket specifically, I think the justices can commit internally to norms about writings providing some rationale whenever the court’s going to grant emergency relief and actually upset the status quo.

    I think the court can commit to taking pains to make sure in each case that it’s explaining how the relevant criteria for emergency relief are met, that it’s explaining why it disagrees with lower courts, who in many cases are writing lengthy opinions that are getting quashed in a sentence.

    More generally, the justices could emulate better behavior when it comes to emergency applications and what the court’s role is in responding to them.

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  • Democratic congressman’s staff attacked by man with baseball bat | CNN Politics

    Democratic congressman’s staff attacked by man with baseball bat | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Virginia Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly said two staffers were injured Monday by a man wielding a bat who came into his district office in Fairfax.

    Connolly told CNN that the assailant who entered his office and attacked two of his aides did so with a metal bat. The attacker struck one senior aide in the head with the metal bat, he said. The attacker also hit an intern – on her first day on the job – in the side with the bat.

    In a statement earlier Monday, Connolly said that both aides were taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries, and City of Fairfax Police Department arrested the man.

    Lawmakers on Capitol Hill facing unprecedented number of threats

    The suspect, whom US Capitol Police identified as 49-year-old Xuan Kha Tran Pham of Fairfax is facing charges for one count of aggravated malicious wounding and one count of malicious wounding, USCP stated.

    “At this time, it is not clear what the suspect’s motivation may have been,” USCP said in their statement. “Based on what we know right now, investigators do not have any information that the suspect was known to the USCP.”

    Pham suffers from schizophrenia, his father said in an interview with CNN, and had previously been charged with assaulting a law enforcement officer before the charge was subsequently dropped, records show.

    The attacker, who is a constituent from his district but who Connolly said he doesn’t know, caused wide damage in his office, shattering glass in a conference room and breaking computers along the way. “He was filled with out of control rage,” Connolly told CNN in a phone interview.

    Connolly said later Monday that the man had contacted his office in the past.

    “He had contacted our office, soliciting help on something, and my staff were helping him,” Connolly told CNN. “But there is no indication today that the two were related at all. And my staff did sense in talking to him that he engaged in bizarre statements. Never threatening, however.”

    The Virginia Democrat said he didn’t “think there’s a motivation” for the incident, adding: “I think we are talking about real mental illness.”

    Connolly said he was at a ribbon cutting at the time for a food bank when the assailant drove to his office and entered the building. The congressman estimates it took police about five minutes to respond to the emergency call for help.

    Neighbors identified Pham as a person captured on a home security camera Monday morning wielding a bat and chasing a woman in his neighborhood.

    The security video, provided to CNN by a homeowner who lives near the suspect, shows a woman screaming as she flees from the man with the bat. The recording was timestamped as occurring at 10:34 a.m., before the attack at the congressional office.

    A law enforcement source confirmed that prior to the attack in the congressional office, the suspect confronted a woman in Fairfax County. He damaged her vehicle with a baseball bat, the source said.

    Pham’s father, Hy Xuan Pham, told CNN his son is schizophrenic and hadn’t taken his medication for three months. He said that he last saw him Monday morning, and later heard from police that he had been arrested.

    “He is in a really bad condition,” the father said in an interview. “All day and all night, he mumbles … he talks and looks like he talks with someone in his brain, and suddenly, he is shouting angrily.”

    The suspect’s father said that he had tried to get his son mental health treatment but hadn’t been able to.

    Virginia court records show that Pham was previously charged in January 2022 in Fairfax with felony assault on a law enforcement officer, several charges of attempted disarmament of a law enforcement officer’s stun gun, and obstructing justice or resisting arrest. The case’s disposition was listed as “nolle prosequi,” which generally means that the district attorney declined to prosecute it. No further details about the case were immediately available Monday afternoon.

    Last year, someone with the same name and city of residence as Pham filed a federal lawsuit against the CIA, alleging in a short handwritten complaint that the agency was guilty of “wrongfully imprisoning me in a lower perspective based on physics called the book world since 1975,” and “brutally torturing me with a degenerating disability consistently since 1988 till the present from the fourth dimension.”

    The CIA moved to dismiss the case, which Pham filed without a lawyer, earlier this year, calling his claims “facially implausible.” The motion is pending.

    Monday’s attack comes amid a string of incidents where members of Congress, their staff and their families have been attacked in recent months.

    In March, a staffer for Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was stabbed in Washington, DC. In February, a man assaulted Democratic Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota in the elevator of her apartment building also in Washington. In October, a man attacked Paul Pelosi, the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, hospitalizing him after hitting Paul Pelosi with a hammer in the couple’s home in San Francisco.

    Connolly said Monday that there needs to be more security funding for members’ offices in their districts.

    “I think we’re gonna have to reassess the security we provide or don’t provide district offices,” Connolly said. “So if you’re a member of Congress and your office happens to be in a federal building, in the courthouse, you’re gonna have security. But if you’re in a commercial office space like me, you have no security. None. And what could go wrong with that? Well, we learned the answer to that this morning.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Donald Trump Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    Donald Trump Fast Facts | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the life of Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States.

    Birth date: June 14, 1946

    Birth place: New York, New York

    Birth name: Donald John Trump

    Father: Fred Trump, real estate developer

    Mother: Mary (Macleod) Trump

    Marriages: Melania (Knauss) Trump (January 22, 2005-present); Marla (Maples) Trump (December 1993-June 1999, divorced); Ivana (Zelnicek) Trump (1977-1990, divorced)

    Children: with Melania Trump: Barron, March 20, 2006; with Marla Maples: Tiffany, October 13, 1993; with Ivana Trump: Eric, 1984; Ivanka, October 30, 1981; Donald Jr., December 31, 1977

    Education: Attended Fordham University; University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Finance, B.S. in Economics, 1968

    As Trump evolved from real estate developer to reality television star, he turned his name into a brand. Licensed Trump products have included board games, steaks, cologne, vodka, furniture and menswear.

    He has portrayed himself in cameo appearances in movies and on television, including “Zoolander,” “Sex and the City” and “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.”

    Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was first used by Ronald Reagan while he was running against President Jimmy Carter.

    For details on investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election, visit 2016 Presidential Election Investigation Fast Facts.

    1970s – After college, works with his father on apartment complexes in Queens and Brooklyn.

    1973 – Trump and his father are named in a Justice Department lawsuit alleging Trump property managers violated the Fair Housing Act by turning away potential African American tenants. The Trumps deny the company discriminates and file a $100 million countersuit, which is later dismissed. The case is settled in 1975, and the Trumps agree to provide weekly lists of vacancies to Black community organizations.

    1976 – Trump and his father partner with the Hyatt Corporation, purchasing the Commodore Hotel, an aging midtown Manhattan property. The building is revamped and opens four years later as the Grand Hyatt Hotel. The project kickstarts Trump’s career as a Manhattan developer.

    1983-1990 – He builds/purchases multiple properties in New York City, including Trump Tower and the Plaza Hotel, and also opens casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, including the Trump Taj Mahal and the Trump Plaza. Trump buys the New Jersey Generals football team, part of the United States Football League, which folds after three seasons.

    1985 – Purchases Mar-a-Lago, an oceanfront estate in Palm Beach, Florida. It is renovated and opens as a private club in 1995.

    1987 – Trump’s first book, “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” is published, and becomes a bestseller. The Donald J. Trump Foundation is established in order to donate a portion of profits from book sales to charities.

    1990 – Nearly $1 billion in personal debt, Trump reaches an agreement with bankers allowing him to avoid declaring personal bankruptcy.

    1991 – The Trump Taj Mahal files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

    1992 – The Trump Plaza and the Trump Castle casinos file for bankruptcy.

    1996 – Buys out and becomes executive producer of the Miss Universe, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants.

    October 7, 1999 – Tells CNN’s Larry King that he is going to form a presidential exploratory committee and wants to challenge Pat Buchanan for the Reform Party nomination.

    February 14, 2000 – Says that he is abandoning his bid for the presidency, blaming discord within the Reform Party.

    January 2004 – “The Apprentice,” a reality show featuring aspiring entrepreneurs competing for Trump’s approval, premieres on NBC.

    November 21, 2004 – Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts Inc. files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

    2005 – Establishes Trump University, which offers seminars in real estate investment.

    February 13, 2009 – Announces his resignation from his position as chairman of Trump Entertainment Resorts. Days later, the company files for bankruptcy protection.

    March 17, 2011 – During an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Trump questions whether President Barack Obama was born in the United States.

    June 16, 2015 – Announces that he is running for president during a speech at Trump Tower. He pledges to implement policies that will boost the economy and says he will get tough on immigration. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re sending people who have lots of problems,” Trump says. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”

    June 28, 2015 – Says he’s giving up the TV show “The Apprentice” to run for president.

    June 29, 2015 – NBCUniversal says it is cutting its business ties to Trump and won’t air the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants because of “derogatory statements by Donald Trump regarding immigrants.”

    July 8, 2015 – In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Trump says he “can’t guarantee” all of his employees have legal status in the United States. This is in response to questions about a Washington Post report about undocumented immigrants working at the Old Post Office construction site in Washington, DC, which Trump is converting into a hotel.

    July 22, 2015 – Trump’s financial disclosure report is made public by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

    August 6, 2015 – During the first 2016 Republican debate, Trump is questioned about a third party candidacy, his attitude towards women and his history of donating money to Democratic politicians. He tells moderator Megyn Kelly of Fox News he feels he is being mistreated. The following day, Trump tells CNN’s Don Lemon that Kelly was singling him out for attack, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

    September 11, 2015 – Trump announces he has purchased NBC’s half of the Miss Universe Organization, which organizes the annual Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants.

    December 7, 2015 – Trump’s campaign puts out a press release calling for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

    May 26, 2016 – Secures enough delegates to clinch the Republican Party nomination.

    July 16, 2016 – Introduces Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate.

    July 19, 2016 – Becomes the Republican Party nominee for president.

    September 13, 2016 – During an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says his office is investigating Trump’s charitable foundation “to make sure it’s complying with the laws governing charities in New York.”

    October 1, 2016 – The New York Times reports Trump declared a $916 million loss in 1995 which could have allowed him to legally skip paying federal income taxes for years. The report is based on a financial document mailed to the newspaper by an anonymous source.

    October 7, 2016 – Unaired footage from 2005 surfaces of Trump talking about trying to have sex with a married woman and being able to grope women. In footage obtained by The Washington Post, Trump is heard off-camera discussing women in vulgar terms during the taping of a segment for “Access Hollywood.” In a taped response, Trump declares, “I said it, I was wrong and I apologize.”

    October 9, 2016 – During the second presidential debate, CNN’s Cooper asks Trump about his descriptions of groping and kissing women without their consent in the “Access Hollywood” footage. Trump denies that he has ever engaged in such behavior and declares the comments were “locker room talk.” After the debate, 11 women step forward to claim that they were sexually harassed or sexually assaulted by the real estate developer. Trump says the stories aren’t true.

    November 8, 2016 – Elected president of the United States. Trump will be the first president who has never held elected office, a top government post or a military rank.

    November 18, 2016 – Trump agrees to pay $25 million to settle three lawsuits against Trump University. About 6,000 former students are covered by the settlement.

    December 24, 2016 – Trump says he will dissolve the Donald J. Trump Foundation “to avoid even the appearance of any conflict with my role as President.” A spokeswoman for the New York Attorney General’s Office says that the foundation cannot legally close until investigators conclude their probe of the charity.

    January 10, 2017 – CNN reports that intelligence officials briefed Trump on a dossier that contains allegations about his campaign’s ties to Russia and unverified claims about his personal life. The author of the dossier is a former British spy who was hired by a research firm that had been funded by both political parties to conduct opposition research on Trump.

    January 20, 2017 – Takes the oath of office from Chief Justice John Roberts during an inauguration ceremony at the Capitol.

    January 23, 2017 – Trump signs an executive action withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration and awaiting congressional approval.

    January 27, 2017 – Trump signs an executive order halting all refugee arrivals for 120 days and banning travel to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days. Additionally, refugees from Syria are barred indefinitely from entering the United States. The order is challenged in court.

    February 13, 2017 – Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigns amid accusations he lied about his communications with Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. Flynn later pleads guilty to lying to the FBI.

    May 3, 2017 – FBI Director James Comey confirms that there is an ongoing investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia during a hearing on Capitol Hill. Less than a week later, Trump fires Comey, citing a DOJ memo critical of the way he handled the investigation into Clinton’s emails.

    May 2017 – Shortly after Trump fires Comey, the FBI opens an investigation into whether Trump “had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests,” citing former law enforcement officials and others the paper said were familiar with the probe.

    May 17, 2017 – Former FBI Director Robert Mueller is appointed as special counsel to lead the probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, including potential collusion between Trump campaign associates and Russian officials. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein makes the appointment because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from investigations into Trump’s campaign.

    May 19, 2017 – Departs on his first foreign trip as president. The nine-day, five-country trip includes stops in Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, a NATO summit in Brussels and a G7 summit in Sicily.

    June 1, 2017 – Trump proclaims that the United States is withdrawing from the Paris climate accord but adds that he is open to renegotiating aspects of the environmental agreement, which was signed by 175 countries in 2016.

    July 7, 2017 – Meets Russian President Vladimir Putin in person for the first time, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany.

    August 8, 2017 – In response to nuclear threats from North Korea, Trump warns that Pyongyang will “face fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Soon after Trump’s comments, North Korea issues a statement saying it is “examining the operational plan” to strike areas around the US territory of Guam.

    August 15, 2017 – After a violent clash between neo-Nazi activists and counterprotesters leaves one dead in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump holds an impromptu press conference in the lobby of Trump Tower and declares that there were “fine people” on both sides.

    August 25, 2017 – Trump’s first pardon is granted to former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt for disregarding a court order in a racial-profiling case. Trump did not consult with lawyers at the Justice Department before announcing his decision.

    September 5, 2017 – The Trump administration announces that it is ending the DACA program, introduced by Obama to protect nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. Trump calls on Congress to introduce legislation that will prevent DACA recipients from being deported. Multiple lawsuits are filed opposing the policy in federal courts and judges delay the end of the program, asking the government to submit filings justifying the cancellation of DACA.

    September 19, 2017 – In a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, Trump refers to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as “Rocket Man” and warns that the United States will “totally destroy North Korea” if forced to defend itself or its allies.

    September 24, 2017 – The Trump administration unveils a third version of the travel ban, placing restrictions on travel by certain foreigners from Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. (Chad is later removed after meeting security requirements.) One day before the revised ban is set to take effect, it is blocked nationwide by a federal judge in Hawaii. A judge in Maryland issues a similar ruling.

    December 4, 2017 – The Supreme Court rules that the revised travel ban can take effect pending appeals.

    December 6, 2017 – Trump recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and announces plans to relocate the US Embassy there.

    January 11, 2018 – During a White House meeting on immigration reform, Trump reportedly refers to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.”

    January 12, 2018 – The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump allegedly had an affair with a porn star named Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels. The newspaper states that Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, arranged a $130,000 payment for a nondisclosure agreement weeks before Election Day in 2016. Trump denies the affair occurred. In March, Clifford sues Trump seeking to be released from the NDA. In response, Trump and his legal team agree outside of court not to sue or otherwise enforce the NDA. The suit is dismissed. A California Superior Court judge orders Trump to pay $44,100 to Clifford, to reimburse her attorneys’ fees in the legal battle surrounding her nondisclosure agreement.

    March 13, 2018 – Trump announces in a tweet that he has fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and will nominate CIA Director Mike Pompeo as Tillerson’s replacement.

    March 20, 2018 – A New York Supreme Court judge rules that a defamation lawsuit against Trump can move forward, ruling against a July 2017 motion to dismiss filed by Trump’s lawyers. The lawsuit, filed by Summer Zervos, a former “Apprentice” contestant, is related to sexual assault allegations. In November 2021, attorneys for Zervos announce she is dropping the lawsuit.

    March 23, 2018 – The White House announces that it is adopting a policy, first proposed by Trump via tweet in July 2017, banning most transgender individuals from serving in the military.

    April 9, 2018 – The FBI raids Cohen’s office, home and a hotel room where he’d been staying while his house was renovated. The raid is related to a federal investigation of possible fraud and campaign finance violations.

    April 13, 2018 – Trump authorizes joint military strikes in Syria with the UK and France after reports the government used chemical weapons on civilians in Douma.

    May 7, 2018 – The Trump administration announces a “zero tolerance” policy for illegal border crossings. Sessions says that individuals who violate immigration law will be criminally prosecuted and warns that parents could be separated from children.

    May 8, 2018 – Trump announces that the United States is withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal.

    May 31, 2018 – The Trump administration announces it is imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from allies Canada, Mexico and the European Union.

    June 8-9, 2018 – Before leaving for the G7 summit in Quebec City, Trump tells reporters that Russia should be reinstated in the group. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 led to Russia’s suspension. After leaving the summit, Trump tweets that he will not endorse the traditional G7 communique issued at the end of the meeting. The President singles out Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for making “false statements” at a news conference.

    June 12, 2018 – Trump meets Kim in person for the first time during a summit in Singapore. They sign a four-point statement that broadly outlines the countries’ commitment to a peace process. The statement contains a pledge by North Korea to “work towards” complete denuclearization but the agreement does not detail how the international community will verify that Kim is ending his nuclear program.

    June 14, 2018 – The New York attorney general sues the Trump Foundation, alleging that the nonprofit run by Trump and his three eldest children violated state and federal charity law.

    June 26, 2018 – The Supreme Court upholds the Trump administration’s travel ban in a 5-4 ruling along party lines.

    July 16, 2018 – During a joint news conference with Putin in Helsinki, Trump declines to endorse the US government’s assessment that Russia interfered in the election, saying he doesn’t “see any reason why” Russia would be responsible. The next day, Trump clarifies his remark, “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.” He says he accepts the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia meddled in the election but adds, “It could be other people also.”

    August 21, 2018 – Cohen pleads guilty to eight federal charges, including two campaign finance violations. In court, he says that he orchestrated payments to silence women “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office.” On the same day, Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort is convicted on eight counts of federal financial crimes. On December 12, Cohen is sentenced to three years in prison.

    October 2, 2018 – The New York Times details numerous tax avoidance schemes allegedly carried out by Trump and his siblings. In a tweet, Trump dismisses the article as a “very old, boring and often told hit piece.”

    November 20, 2018 – Releases a statement backing Saudi Arabia in the wake of the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Virginia resident, killed in October at a Saudi consulate in Turkey. Khashoggi was a frequent critic of the Saudi regime. The Saudis initially denied any knowledge of his death, but then later said a group of rogue operators were responsible for his killing. US officials have speculated that such a mission, including the 15 men sent from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to murder him, could not have been carried out without the authorization of Saudi leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In the statement, Trump writes, “Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”

    December 18, 2018 – The Donald J. Trump Foundation agrees to dissolve according to a document filed in Manhattan Supreme Court. The agreement allows the New York attorney general’s office to review the recipients of the charity’s assets.

    December 22, 2018 – The longest partial government shutdown in US history begins after Trump demands lawmakers allocate $5.7 billion in funding for a border wall before agreeing to sign a federal funding package.

    January 16, 2019 – After nearly two years of Trump administration officials denying that anyone involved in his campaign colluded with the Russians to help his candidacy, Trump lawyer and former New York City mayor, Rudy Giuliani, says “I never said there was no collusion between the campaign, or people in the campaign. I said the President of the United States.”

    January 25, 2019 – The government shutdown ends when Trump signs a short-term spending measure, providing three weeks of stopgap funding while lawmakers work on a border security compromise. The bill does not include any wall funding.

    February 15, 2019 – Trump declares a national emergency to allocate funds to build a wall on the border with Mexico. During the announcement, the President says he expects the declaration to be challenged in court. The same day, Trump signs a border security measure negotiated by Congress, with $1.375 billion set aside for barriers, averting another government shutdown.

    February 18, 2019 – Attorneys general from 16 states file a lawsuit in federal court challenging Trump’s emergency declaration.

    March 22, 2019 – Mueller ends his investigation and delivers his report to Attorney General William Barr. A senior Justice Department official tells CNN that there will be no further indictments.

    March 24, 2019 – Barr releases a letter summarizing the principal conclusions from Mueller’s investigation. According to Barr’s four-page letter, the evidence was not sufficient to establish that members Trump’s campaign tacitly engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government to interfere with the election.

    April 18, 2019 – A redacted version of the Mueller report is released. The first part of the 448-page document details the evidence gathered by Mueller’s team on potential conspiracy crimes and explains their decisions not to charge individuals associated with the campaign. The second part of the report outlines ten episodes involving possible obstruction of justice by the President. According to the report, Mueller’s decision not to charge Trump was rooted in Justice Department guidelines prohibiting the indictment of a sitting president. Mueller writes that he would have cleared Trump if the evidence warranted exoneration.

    May 1, 2019 – The New York Times publishes a report that details how Giuliani, in his role as Trump’s personal attorney, is investigating allegations related to former Vice President Joe Biden, a potential Trump opponent in the 2020 presidential race. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma Holdings. In 2016, the elder Biden pressured Ukraine to oust a prosecutor who had investigated Burisma for corruption. Giuliani suggests that Biden’s move was motivated by a desire to protect his son from criminal charges. Giuliani’s claims are undermined after Bloomberg reports that the Burisma investigation was “dormant” when Biden pressed the prosecutor to resign.

    June 12, 2019 – Trump says he may be willing to accept information about political rivals from a foreign government during an interview on ABC News, declaring that he’s willing to listen and wouldn’t necessarily call the FBI.

    June 16, 2019 – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveils a sign at the proposed site of a Golan Heights settlement to be named Trump Heights.

    June 18, 2019 – Trump holds a rally in Orlando to publicize the formal launch of his reelection campaign.

    June 28, 2019 – During a breakfast meeting at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman reportedly discuss tensions with Iran, trade and human rights.

    June 30, 2019 – Trump becomes the first sitting US president to enter North Korea. He takes 20 steps beyond the border and shakes hands with Kim.

    July 14, 2019 – Via Twitter, Trump tells Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Illhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley to “go back” to their home countries. Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Pressley are natural-born US citizens; Omar was born in Somalia, immigrated to the United States and became a citizen.

    July 16, 2019 – The House votes, 240-187, to condemn the racist language Trump used in his tweets about Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Omar and Pressley.

    July 24, 2019 – Mueller testifies before the House Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence Committee.

    July 25, 2019 – Trump speaks on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump asks Zelensky for a “favor,” encouraging him to speak with Giuliani about investigating Biden. In the days before the call, Trump blocked nearly $400 million in military and security aid to Ukraine.

    August 12, 2019 – A whistleblower files a complaint pertaining to Trump’s conduct on the Zelensky call.

    September 11, 2019 – The Trump administration lifts its hold on military aid for Ukraine.

    September 24, 2019 – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announces the beginning of an impeachment inquiry related to the whistleblower complaint.

    September 25, 2019 – The White House releases notes from the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky. The readout contains multiple references to Giuliani and Barr. In response, the Justice Department issues a statement that says Barr didn’t know about Trump’s conversation until weeks after the call. Further, the attorney general didn’t talk to the President about having Ukraine investigate the Bidens, according to the Justice Department. On the same day as the notes are released, Trump and Zelensky meet in person for the first time on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. During a joint press conference after the meeting, both men deny that Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate Biden in exchange for aid.

    September 26, 2019 – The House releases a declassified version of the whistleblower complaint. According to the complaint, officials at the White House tried to “lock down” records of Trump’s phone conversation with Zelensky. The complaint also alleges that Barr played a role in the campaign to convince Zelensky that Biden should be investigated. Trump describes the complaint as “fake news” and “a witch hunt” on Twitter.

    September 27, 2019 – Pompeo is subpoenaed by House committees over his failure to provide documents related to Ukraine. Kurt Volker, US special envoy to Ukraine, resigns. He was named in the whistleblower complaint as one of the State Department officials who helped Giuliani connect with sources in Ukraine.

    October 3, 2019 – Speaking to reporters outside the White House, Trump says both Ukraine and China should investigate alleged corruption involving Biden and his son. CNN reports that the President had brought up Biden and his family during a June phone call with Xi Jinping. In that call, Trump discussed the political prospects of Biden as well as Elizabeth Warren. He also told Xi that he would remain quiet on the matter of Hong Kong protests. Notes documenting the conversation were placed on a highly secured server where the transcript from the Ukraine call was also stored.

    October 6, 2019 – After Trump speaks on the phone with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the White House announces that US troops will move out of northern Syria to make way for a planned Turkish military operation. The move marks a major shift in American foreign policy and effectively gives Turkey the green light to attack US-backed Kurdish forces, a partner in the fight against ISIS.

    October 9, 2019 – Turkey launches a military offensive in northern Syria.

    October 31, 2019 – Trump says via Twitter that he is changing his legal residency from New York to Florida, explaining that he feels he is treated badly by political leaders from the city and state.

    November 7, 2019 – A judge orders Trump to pay $2 million to settle a lawsuit against his charity filed by the New York state attorney general. According to the suit, Trump breached his fiduciary duty by allowing his presidential campaign to direct the distribution of donations. In a statement, Trump accuses the attorney general of mischaracterizing the settlement for political purposes.

    November 13, 2019 – Public impeachment hearings begin and Trump meets Erdogan at the White House.

    November 20, 2019 – During a public hearing, US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland says he worked with Giuliani on matters related to Ukraine at the “express direction of the President of the United States” and he says “everyone was in the loop.” Sondland recounts several conversations between himself and Trump about Ukraine opening two investigations: one into Burisma and another into conspiracies about Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 US election.

    December 10, 2019 – House Democrats unveil two articles of impeachment, one for abuse of power and one for obstruction of Congress.

    December 11, 2019 – Trump signs an executive order to include discrimination against Jewish people as a violation of law in certain cases, with an eye toward fighting antisemitism on college campuses.

    December 13, 2019 – The House Judiciary Committee approves the two articles of impeachment in a party line vote.

    December 18, 2019 – The House of Representatives votes to impeach Trump, charging a president with high crimes and misdemeanors for just the third time in American history.

    January 3, 2020 – Speaking at Mar-a-Lago, Trump announces that a US airstrike in Iraq has killed Qasem Soleimani, the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force.

    January 8, 2020 – Iran fires a number of missiles at two Iraqi bases housing US troops in retaliation for the American strike that killed Soleimani. No US or Iraqi lives are reported lost, but the Pentagon later releases a statement confirming that 109 US service members had been diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injuries in the wake of the attack.

    January 24, 2020 – Makes history as the first President to attend the annual March for Life rally in Washington, DC, since it began nearly a half-century ago. Trump reiterates his support for tighter abortion restrictions.

    January 29, 2020 – Trump signs the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement into law, which replaces the North American Free Trade Agreement.

    January 31, 2020 – The Trump administration announces an expansion of the travel ban to include six new countries. Immigration restrictions will be imposed on: Nigeria, Eritrea, Tanzania, Sudan, Kyrgyzstan and Myanmar (known as Burma), with exceptions for immigrants who have helped the United States.

    February 5, 2020 – The Senate votes to acquit Trump on two articles of impeachment. Sen. Mitt Romney is the sole Republican to vote to convict on the charge of abuse of power, joining with all Senate Democrats in a 52-48 not guilty vote. On the obstruction of Congress charge, the vote falls along straight party lines, 53-47 for acquittal.

    May 29, 2020 – Trump announces that the United States will terminate its relationship with the World Health Organization.

    July 10, 2020 – Trump commutes the prison sentence of his longtime friend Roger Stone, who was convicted of crimes that included lying to Congress in part, prosecutors said, to protect the President. The announcement came just days before Stone was set to report to a federal prison in Georgia.

    October 2, 2020 – Trump announces that he has tested positive for coronavirus. Later in the day, Trump is transferred to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and returns to the White House on October 5.

    November 7, 2020 – Days after the presidential election on November 3, CNN projects Trump loses his bid for reelection to Biden.

    November 25, 2020 – Trump announces in a tweet that he has granted Michael Flynn a “full pardon,” wiping away the guilty plea of the intelligence official for lying to the FBI.

    December 23, 2020 – Announces 26 new pardons, including for Stone, Manafort and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father, Charles.

    January 6, 2021 – Following Trump’s rally and speech at the White House Ellipse, pro-Trump rioters storm the US Capitol as members of Congress meet to certify the Electoral College results of the 2020 presidential election. A total of five people die, including a Capitol Police officer the next day.

    January 7-8, 2021 – Instagram and Facebook place a ban on Trump’s account from posting through the remainder of his presidency and perhaps “indefinitely.” Twitter permanently bans Trump from the platform, explaining that “after close review of recent Tweets…and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

    January 13, 2021 – The House votes to impeach Trump for “incitement of insurrection.” He is the only president to be impeached twice.

    January 20, 2021 – Trump issues a total of 143 pardons and commutations that include his onetime political strategist, Steve Bannon, a former top fundraiser and two well-known rappers but not himself or his family. He then receives a military-style send-off from Joint Base Andrews on Inauguration morning, before heading home to Florida.

    February 13, 2021 – The US Senate acquits Trump in his second impeachment trial, voting that Trump is not guilty of inciting the deadly January 6 riots at the US Capitol. The vote is 43 not guilty to 57 guilty, short of the 67 guilty votes needed to convict.

    May 5, 2021 – Facebook’s Oversight Board upholds Trump’s suspension from using its platform. The decision also applies to Facebook-owned Instagram.

    June 4, 2021 – Facebook announces Trump will be suspended from its platform until at least January 7th, 2023 – two years from when he was initially suspended.

    July 1, 2021 – New York prosecutors charge the Trump Organization and Trump Payroll Corporation with 10 felony counts and Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg with 15 felony counts in connection with an alleged tax scheme stretching back to 2005. Trump himself is not charged. On December 6, 2022, both companies are found guilty on all charges.

    February 14, 2022 – Accounting firm Mazars announces it will no longer act as Trump’s accountant, citing a conflict of interest. In a letter to the Trump Organization chief legal officer, the firm informs the Trump Organization to no longer rely on financial statements ending June 2011 through June 2020.

    May 3, 2022 – The Trump Organization and the Presidential Inaugural Committee agree to pay a total of $750,000 to settle with the Washington, DC, attorney general’s office over allegations they misspent money raised for former President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

    June 9-July 21, 2022 – The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol holds eight hearings, where it hears from witnesses including top ex-Trump officials, election workers, those who took part in the attack and many others. Through live testimony, video depositions, and never-before-seen material, the committee attempts to paint the picture of the former president’s plan to stay in power and the role he played on January 6.

    August 8, 2022 – The FBI executes a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, as part of an investigation into the handling of presidential documents, including classified documents, that may have been brought there.

    August 12, 2022 – A federal judge unseals the search warrant and property receipt from the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. The unsealed documents indicate the FBI recovered 11 sets of classified documents from its search, including some materials marked as “top secret/SCI” – one of the highest levels of classification, and identify three federal crimes that the Justice Department is looking at as part of its investigation: violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice and criminal handling of government records.

    September 21, 2022 – The New York state attorney general files a lawsuit against Trump, three of his adult children and the Trump Organization, alleging they were involved in an expansive fraud lasting over a decade that the former President used to enrich himself. According to the lawsuit, the Trump Organization deceived lenders, insurers and tax authorities by inflating the value of his properties using misleading appraisals.

    October 3, 2022 – Trump files a lawsuit against CNN for defamation, seeking $475 million in punitive damages.

    November 15, 2022 – Announces that he will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

    November 19, 2022 – Trump’s Twitter account, which was banned following the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, is reinstated after users respond to an online poll posted by Twitter CEO and new owner Elon Musk.

    December 19, 2022 – The Jan. 6 insurrection committee votes to refer Trump to the Department of Justice on at least four criminal charges. Four days later the panel releases its final report recommending Trump be barred from holding office again.

    February 9, 2023 – Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts are restored following a two-year ban in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, a Meta spokesperson confirms to CNN. On March 17, 2023, YouTube restores Trump’s channel.

    March 30, 2023 – A grand jury in New York votes to indict Trump, the first time in American history that a current or former president has faced criminal charges.

    April 4, 2023 – Surrenders and is placed under arrest before pleading not guilty to 34 felony criminal charges of falsifying business records in Manhattan criminal court. Prosecutors allege that Trump sought to undermine the integrity of the 2016 election through a hush money scheme with payments made to women who claimed they had extramarital affairs with Trump. He has denied the affairs. Hours after his arraignment, Trump rails against the Manhattan district attorney and the indictment during a speech at his Florida resort at Mar-a-Lago.

    May 9, 2023 – A Manhattan federal jury finds Trump sexually abused former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll in a luxury department store dressing room in the spring of 1996 and awards her $5 million for battery and defamation.

    May 15, 2023 – A report by special counsel John Durham is released. In it he concludes that the FBI should never have launched a full investigation into connections between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. The report does not recommend any new charges against individuals or “wholesale changes” about how the FBI handles politically charged investigations, despite strongly criticizing the agency’s behavior.

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  • McCarthy tells Republicans he’s ‘nowhere near’ a debt limit deal with Biden as deadline nears | CNN Politics

    McCarthy tells Republicans he’s ‘nowhere near’ a debt limit deal with Biden as deadline nears | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told Republicans during a closed-door meeting on Tuesday that he’s not close to a bipartisan deal with President Joe Biden to avoid a first-ever default on the nation’s debt.

    “We are nowhere near a deal,” McCarthy told Republicans. “I need you all to hang with me.”

    As each day passes without a deal, the clock is ticking closer to a looming deadline for default – which could be catastrophic for the global economy and have financial effects on countless Americans.

    Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen reaffirming in a letter to McCarthy on Monday that it is “highly likely” that the US Treasury will not be able to pay all of its bills in full and on time as soon as June 1. But several Republicans, including House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, have suggested that they do not believe Yellen’s estimate of June 1 as the so-called X-date for potential default and called on her to testify before Congress.

    While McCarthy has maintained that both parties could still obtain a deal by the June 1 deadline, he is also now accusing the president of trying to “disrupt” negotiations by bringing proposals involving Medicare and Social Security back “into the fold.”

    Republican Study Committee Chairman Kevin Hern said McCarthy told members during Tuesday morning’s meeting they should go home and work their districts if a deal isn’t reached by the White House and Republican negotiators by Memorial Day weekend. Members can always be called back, but Hern told reporters that this is a deal that has to be reached between a few key people.

    “The negotiations are with the speaker and his team and the White House and their team. And so the rest of us being here, just waiting around, doesn’t do any good for anyone,” Hern said.

    McCarthy’s continued optimism about securing a deal before next month follows a meeting at the White House with Biden on Monday evening, where he had underscored that both parties are united in their goal of reaching an agreement to raise the nation’s debt limit before the country defaults.

    “I felt we had a productive discussion. We don’t have an agreement yet, but I did feel the discussion was productive in areas that we have differences of opinion,” McCarthy said outside the West Wing, adding that the “tone” of Monday’s meeting was also “better than any other time we’ve had discussions.”

    Monday evening’s meeting at the White House came after negotiations hit a snag and were put on pause Friday, and representatives of each side spent most of the next two days criticizing the other while defending their own positions. But the parties appeared to smooth things over to resume negotiations when Biden and McCarthy spoke over the phone as the president was aboard Air Force One returning to Washington after a trip to Japan.

    Biden, in a statement, called Monday’s discussion in the Oval Office productive while acknowledging that areas of disagreement persist.

    “We reiterated once again that default is off the table and the only way to move forward is in good faith toward a bipartisan agreement,” Biden wrote. “While there are areas of disagreement, the Speaker and I, and his lead negotiators … and our staffs will continue to discuss the path forward.”

    On Monday evening, McCarthy maintained that both he and the president “agree we want to be able to come to an agreement.”

    McCarthy’s team and White House negotiators have been meeting daily in an effort to come to a consensus on the budget and the debt ceiling. Negotiators also met through the night on Monday and reconvened Tuesday morning.

    The speaker on Monday also acknowledged that he does not plan to waive the House’s three-day rule – which requires that legislation be posted for at least three days to allow House members to study it before it can be voted on.

    McCarthy has repeatedly warned that the White House and House GOP must reach a deal this week to avoid default. And if negotiations drag on, waiving the three-day rule could allow the legislation to pass more quickly. However, there are concerns that expediting the legislative process by waiving the rule may lead to members voting to support something they aren’t fully informed on.

    The speaker said he “would give everybody 72 hours, so everybody knows what they’re voting for.”

    Despite continued talks, House members on both sides of the aisle appear remain divided over the approach to debt ceiling discussions.

    House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Monday evening asserted that talks are moving in the “wrong direction.”

    At a hastily called news conference on the steps of the Capitol, Jeffries attacked the GOP for rejecting a White House compromise – to freeze domestic spending at the current levels. Republicans instead want to roll back spending to previous years’ levels and write into law that spending would be capped for several years.

    “They’ve rejected the fact that President Biden is willing to consider freezing spending. It will reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars. This is what the extreme MAGA Republicans say that they want. They rejected. They rejected an unwillingness to not put the country through this again,” the New York Democrat said. He also repeatedly refused to say if House Democrats would accept a spending cut, as McCarthy has demanded.

    Jeffries’ position is critical because McCarthy will almost certainly need House Democratic support to pass any deal cut with the White House.

    During Tuesday’s closed-door meeting with Republicans, at least one hardline member – Rep. Chip Roy of Texas – complained about Republicans seeking a compromise that water downs what they passed in the House, according to a source in the room. Roy said it’s about saving the country, not seeking a deal.

    Still, a number of Republicans – even some who haven’t always backed McCarthy – said they are standing by the speaker and are happy with how he’s negotiated up until this point.

    “I am very confident in Kevin McCarthy as our speaker,” Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina told CNN. “I don’t want Speaker McCarthy’s job. That’s a very tough job … he’s got the five families to deal with and a caucus of one right here. He’s doing a great job of pulling people together.”

    “I do not envy his position. I would not want it. He’s had a lot of success in bringing a lot of different factions together within the party and that is no small feat, and it’s not easy,” Mace said.

    Rep. Tim Burchett, who voted against the House’s GOP debt ceiling plan said that “McCarthy is very good at deal cutting. I trust him.”

    “If he says it’s going to start snowing in Knoxville tomorrow, I am running down … and buying a new sled,” Burchett added.

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  • Instagram lifts ban on anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after launch of presidential bid | CNN Business

    Instagram lifts ban on anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after launch of presidential bid | CNN Business


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Instagram announced Sunday it had lifted its ban on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist who has launched a presidential bid, two years after it shut down Kennedy’s account for breaking its rules related to Covid-19.

    “As he is now an active candidate for president of the United States, we have restored access to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s, Instagram account,” Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Instagram’s parent company Meta said in a statement.

    Kennedy, who has a long history of spreading vaccine misinformation, was banned from Instagram in February 2021.

    A company spokesperson at the time said Instagram had removed his account for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines.”

    While Kennedy’s Instagram account was banned, his Facebook account remained active. Both platforms are owned by Meta.

    Kennedy was a leading anti-vaccination voice during the Covid-19 pandemic, using his social media platforms to sow doubt and misinformation about the shots.

    He has promoted false claims about vaccine links to autism and in 2022 compared vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany.

    His wife, actress Cheryl Hines, publicly condemned Kennedy’s remark as “reprehensible” after he invoked Anne Frank, who was murdered by Nazis as a teenager.

    Hines distanced herself from him in January 2022, tweeting: “His opinions are not a reflection of my own.”

    Kennedy’s return to Instagram, first reported by The Washington Post, will give him access to his more than 769,000 followers.

    The decision comes as traditional media and social media companies attempt to navigate a 2024 election campaign fraught with accusations of misinformation and censorship.

    On Friday, YouTube announced it would no longer remove content featuring false claims that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen, reversing a policy instituted more than two years ago amid a wave of misinformation about the election.

    The decision to reinstate Kennedy comes amid a flurry of activity between the candidate and Silicon Valley.

    On Sunday, Twitter

    (TWTR)     founder Jack Dorsey appeared to endorse Kennedy for president, tweeting a YouTube video titled, “Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. argues he can beat Trump and DeSantis in 2024.” Dorsey added in the tweet, “He can and will.”

    On Monday, Kennedy is due to take part in a live audio chat on Twitter with the company’s owner Elon Musk.

    Meta’s decision to allow Kennedy back on Instagram came a few days after the Democratic presidential candidate publicly complained that the platform was blocking his campaign from creating a new account.

    Stone, the Meta spokesperson, told CNN on Sunday that the restriction was a mistake and that the company had resolved the issue.

    Meta executives have long maintained they believe political candidates should be able to use its platforms to reach voters, even if those candidates sometimes break rules that would get other users banned from its platforms.

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  • With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. interview, Musk again uses Twitter to promote candidates aligned with his views | CNN Business

    With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. interview, Musk again uses Twitter to promote candidates aligned with his views | CNN Business



    CNN
     — 

    Twitter owner Elon Musk has proposed hosting Twitter Spaces interviews with political candidates of all stripes, reflecting the billionaire’s supposed commitment to ideological neutrality and to promoting Twitter as a true “public square.”

    So far, however, Musk appears to be more interested in platforming candidates that align with his own views rather than those who might challenge them. On Monday, Musk is set to share an audio chatroom with Robert Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist and Democratic candidate for president.

    The decision to host Kennedy again highlights, for the second time in as many weeks, Musk’s unique potential to shape public opinion through a combination of his own personal celebrity and his private control of a social media megaphone. But this time, it also deepens doubts about Musk’s claims to open-mindedness — and his willingness to use Twitter as anything other than a tool for his own activism.

    Musk, who built much of his early reputation as an entrepreneur on a concern for ensuring humanity’s survival, has opposed the Covid-19 vaccine and spent much of the pandemic railing against Anthony Fauci, the government’s former top infectious disease expert. Musk has claimed as recently as January that he is “pro vaccines in general” but that they risk doing more harm than good “if administered to the whole population.”

    Medical experts widely agree that the broad application of vaccines helps prevent the spread of disease not only by making it less likely for an individual to get sick, but also by creating herd immunity at the societal level. In other words, part of the purpose of vaccines is to administer them as universally as possible so that even if one person falls ill, the infection cannot find other suitable hosts nearby.

    For years, Kennedy has pushed back on that consensus, including by invoking Nazi Germany in an anti-vaccine speech in Washington last year. Instagram shut down his account in 2021 for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” though the company announced Sunday it has restored Kennedy’s account because he is now running for office. Instagram’s parent, Meta, has also banned accounts belonging to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine advocacy group.

    Kennedy has also attacked the closing of churches, social distancing and government track-and-trace surveillance. At the start of the pandemic, churches were closed and social distancing was enforced across the country to contain the spread of coronavirus, while the government used methods to track cases. (Musk, for his part, also objected to state lockdown orders earlier in the pandemic.)

    It’s unclear if Musk has reached out to other candidates. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    According to a CNN poll published last month, 60% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters say they back President Joe Biden for the top of next year’s Democratic ticket, 20% favor Kennedy and 8% back Williamson. Another 8% say they would support an unnamed “someone else.”

    With the national profile and visibility that comes with running for high office, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine ideology and vocal stances against prior Covid policies were already primed to become a topic of the 2024 presidential race. But by putting Kennedy center stage on Twitter, Musk appears poised to promote these views further to his millions of followers.

    Musk took a similar tack in sharing a stage with Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who announced his White House bid with Musk during a Twitter Spaces event last month plagued by technical glitches. Musk declined to endorse a candidate but has previously tweeted that he would support DeSantis if he ran for president.

    As Twitter’s owner, Musk has shared conspiracy theories and welcomed extreme voices back to the platform who had been suspended for violating Twitter’s rules in the past. He has also laid off more than 80% of Twitter’s staff, including many who had previously been responsible for content moderation.

    All of that, combined now with his direct association with Kennedy, could have significant ramifications both for Twitter as a platform and for Musk’s credibility.

    DeSantis at least has the plausible distinction of being a top challenger to former President Donald Trump. But as a marginal candidate who espouses debunked medical claims, Kennedy and his appearance with Musk could further cement the perception that Twitter actively mainstreams extremism.

    That could be the very thing that drives away more moderate candidates from accepting Musk’s “invitation” to appear alongside him.

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  • Biden postpones Monday events, including meeting with NATO chief, for unplanned root canal | CNN Politics

    Biden postpones Monday events, including meeting with NATO chief, for unplanned root canal | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden was forced to cancel his schedule Monday – including talks with NATO’s outgoing secretary general – because of an unplanned root canal.

    The White House said the procedure had been “successfully completed” by mid-afternoon and the president was “doing just fine.”

    He first began experiencing pain in a lower premolar on Sunday. His physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, said a team from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center performed an exam, including x-rays, and recommended the root canal procedure. The team performed the initial part of the root canal on Sunday.

    After “further discomfort this morning,” O’Connor wrote in a memo, the endodontal specialty team planned to complete the root canal procedure at the White House on Monday. O’Connor said the discomfort was expected.

    The president’s team was not planning to use general anesthesia for the procedure and the 25th Amendment transferring power to the vice president was not invoked, a White House official said.

    Biden did receive local anesthesia as a “numbing” agent, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters.

    The operation is not Biden’s first root canal; when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee in the 1990s, he underwent middle-of-the-night procedures during Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas.

    Three decades later, Biden was forced to scrap a series of events Monday to allow for the dental work. That included a ceremony for college athletes on the South Lawn, which was hosted instead by Vice President Kamala Harris, and an evening reception for diplomats.

    His meeting with NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg was postponed until Tuesday, according to the White House. Hovering over the sit-down will be a personnel issue: Who will replace the outgoing NATO leader when he departs his post later this year?

    Biden hasn’t yet settled on a candidate to support to replace Stoltenberg, a senior US official said. The job traditionally goes to a European, but requires the backing of the American president – NATO’s largest and most powerful member.

    Leaders are expected to try and coalesce around a new leader at July’s NATO summit in Lithuania, meaning Biden must make up his mind soon on who to back.

    He’s already received a pitch on United Kingdom Defense Minister Ben Wallace from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak during an Oval Office meeting last week. A person familiar with the matter said Sunak entered the meeting prepared to sell Biden on Wallace, though afterward Biden told reporters he wasn’t yet convinced.

    “We’re going to have to get a consensus within NATO to see that happen,” he said, calling the UK candidate “very qualified.”

    A senior British official said ahead of the meeting last week that “it’s important that the next NATO secretary general carries on Stoltenberg’s good work of modernization but also understands the importance of defense spending at a critical time.”

    That could be regarded as a potential knock on contenders from nations that haven’t met the NATO pledge of spending 2% of gross domestic product on defense budgets — a group that includes Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, with whom Biden met in the Oval Office last week.

    Some European diplomats speculated her visit to the White House was an opportunity for Biden and his team to sound her out about the top NATO job.

    Frederiksen said afterward she didn’t want to speculate about the potential of heading up the military alliance. She declined to say whether it was discussed with Biden in the Oval Office.

    That hasn’t quieted speculation she may be in a leading position to earn Biden’s endorsement for the job. The alliance has never previously been led by a woman, a factor that could play into Biden’s thinking.

    Other candidates for NATO secretary general could include Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, according to diplomats.

    Stoltenberg’s term ends in October, and his spokesperson has said he will leave then, though his tenure has been extended three times already. He had been expected to take up a post as head of Norway’s central bank, but gave up the job to stay on as secretary general last year.

    He has led the alliance through one of its most consequential periods following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The bloc has remained remarkably united in providing Kyiv military and economic assistance.

    It’s also expanded, with Finland and Sweden both taking steps to join. The two countries have historically remained unaligned, but Russia’s aggression prompted a change of heart.

    Finland’s membership was finalized in April, but Turkey has remained resistant to Sweden joining the defense alliance. Leaders hope the roadblock will be resolved ahead of the NATO summit in July.

    CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Stoltenberg was expecting to become the head of Norway’s central bank. He gave up the job to stay at NATO last year.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Biden campaign expected to add two new senior aides as it staffs up | CNN Politics

    Biden campaign expected to add two new senior aides as it staffs up | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is expected to soon fill out more senior roles, sources familiar with the personnel moves told CNN, adding two veterans of his 2020 run to his 2024 effort – communicator TJ Ducklo and White House digital strategist Rob Flaherty.

    Ducklo, the former White House spokesperson who resigned mere weeks into the Biden administration after threatening a reporter, is returning to the Biden orbit as senior adviser for communications for the 2024 campaign, a campaign official said.

    Ducklo, who previously served as a national press secretary during Biden’s 2020 run, stepped down from his role as deputy press secretary at the White House in 2020 after reports emerged he had threatened a female reporter who asked about his relationship with another reporter.

    Ducklo will start on the campaign in mid-July, the official said. He has served as the chief communication officer and a senior adviser for Nashville Mayor John Cooper for the last year. He worked on the city’s response following The Covenant School shooting and was in close touch with the White House, including helping to organize the Nashville rally attended by Vice President Kamala Harris to support the “Tennessee three” lawmakers, the campaign said.

    While Ducklo has many fierce defenders within the Biden orbit, there are likely some who will be frustrated by the move.

    Anita Dunn, one of the president’s most senior advisers who is deeply involved in 2024 strategy and coordinating with the campaign from the West Wing, has previously defended the decision on Ducklo’s expected campaign role.

    “TJ made a mistake, took responsibility for it, and paid a price,” Dunn told Politico’s “West Wing Playbook” last month in a statement in her personal capacity. But that defense raised eyebrows for some outside the White House, with one former senior White House adviser calling it an “unforced error.”

    Dunn’s allegiance to Ducklo, a former senior White House adviser recently told CNN, “leaves the president vulnerable and exposed to unnecessary criticism and charges of hypocrisy.” But a current White House aide fired back, saying, “The president has values. Taking responsibility when you have done wrong means a lot. So does forgiveness.”

    Tara Palmeri, the reporter Ducklo threatened while she worked for Politico, recently called for his redemption, writing in Puck where she now works, “T.J. and I have spoken many times since. He’s kept me posted on how things are going in Nashville. And I truly believe that he’s coming back in a stronger way, more aware of the impact of his power.”

    Ducklo declined to comment to CNN.

    Flaherty, Biden’s director of digital strategy, is the latest aide to leave a White House role to shift toward the campaign. He is expected to take on a senior role in the reelection effort, sources familiar with the plans told CNN.

    Flaherty is a top official focused on the White House’s use of digital media. The White House’s prioritization of the issue was signaled in a move earlier this year elevating Flaherty’s role to assistant to the president-level for the first time.

    During his time at the White House, Flaherty developed Biden’s strategy on digital platforms in content both serious and light-hearted ways, and also engaged influencers to amplify the administration’s messaging. Those efforts included singer Olivia Rodrigo encouraging Covid-19 vaccination sign-ups for young people, as well as the case from Apple TV’s “Ted Lasso” promoting mental health in the briefing room.

    Flaherty also built the White House’s first texting program and oversaw a shift to vertical-oriented video, a White House official said.

    “So have grateful to have served with this team. No President has invested as much in connecting with Americans wherever they are as @POTUS has. I leave this chair knowing that the fight to vanquish malarkey will be in good hands long after I’m gone,” Flaherty said in a tweet Friday.

    He previously led the Biden’s 2020 campaign’s digital outreach. Flaherty’s last day at the White House will be June 30.

    Though Biden announced his candidacy in late April (with a vertical video shared to social media), his campaign has been slow to announce key personnel moves.

    Campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez and deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks began their roles in May, former White House spokesperson Kevin Munoz is serving in a communications role, and the campaign announced the hiring of communications director Michael Tyler, a seasoned Democratic strategist who previously worked for Sen. Cory Booker’s 2020 campaign and the Democratic National Committee, on Thursday.

    Elizabeth Alexander also took a temporary leave from her role as communications director for first lady Dr. Jill Biden in May to help the campaign build out its communications team.

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  • States accelerate efforts to block Chinese purchases of agricultural land | CNN Politics

    States accelerate efforts to block Chinese purchases of agricultural land | CNN Politics


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    A growing number of states are considering or have passed measures this legislative term to ban “foreign adversaries” and foreign entities – specifically China – from buying farmland.

    Proponents of the laws, mostly Republicans but some Democrats as well, have frequently cited concerns about food security and the need to protect military bases and other sensitive installations. But the moves have stoked anxieties among some experts on US-Chinese relations, including those who see echoes of past discriminatory laws in the United States like the Chinese Exclusion Act.

    Florida last month joined a list of at least seven other states – including Virginia, North Dakota, Montana and Arkansas – to pass variations of such bills this session, according to the National Agricultural Law Center (NALC), which is tracking the issue and conducts research on agricultural and food law. Similar measures are percolating in more than two dozen states and there’s a bill in Congress that seeks to federalize the issue, the NALC said.

    States have previously sought to limit foreign investment, said Micah Brown, a staff attorney at the NALC. What’s new, Brown says, is that some lawmakers are taking aim at specific countries and their governments.

    “2023 is really swinging for the fences here, with a majority of states having some kind of proposal, at least one proposal,” Brown told CNN.

    Of slightly more than 40 million acres of agricultural held by foreign investors in the United States, China held less than 1% of that land – or 383,935 acres – as of the end of 2021, according to a report from the US Department of Agriculture.

    Florida’s law, signed on May 8, prohibits most citizens from “foreign countries of concern” from purchasing land on or within 10 miles of any “military installation or critical infrastructure facility,” including seaports, airports and power plants. It was signed alongside a different bill that bans internet applications like TikTok on Florida government devices, a similar area of focus for state politicians who have concerns about Chinese influence.

    The foreign countries of concern that are named include China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea and Iran, along with agencies and governments operating on their behalf. In public remarks, governor and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis repeatedly called out China.

    “Today, Florida makes it very clear: We don’t want the (Chinese Communist Party) in the Sunshine State. We want to maintain this as the ‘Free State of Florida.’ That’s exactly what these bills are doing,” DeSantis said at a bill signing in May.

    Following the bill’s passage, a group of Chinese citizens who live and work in Florida, along with a real estate company with primarily Chinese and Chinese-American clients, sued state officials, alleging the law would violate their equal protection and due process guarantees under the US Constitution. CNN has reached out to the governor’s office for comment.

    Virginia’s legislation doesn’t name China, though Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has specifically cited the CCP in advocating for the new law. Montana’s applies to “foreign adversaries” as designated by the US Commerce Department, a list that includes China, Iran, North Korea and Russia.

    Brown said the 2023 laws are part of a larger “political flashpoint” prompted out of concerns over Chinese companies attempting to build agricultural sites near military bases in North Dakota and Texas. States including Arkansas and Indiana already had laws restricting certain foreign investments prior to this year’s legislative push.

    In North Dakota, a US subsidiary of Chinese company Fufeng Group attempted to build a wet corn milling plant in Grand Forks that would have sat near an Air Force base there and thus pose what the Department of the Air Force called a “significant threat to national security.”

    The head of Fufeng’s US operation denied the company has a “direct relationship” with the Chinese government in an interview with the Grand Forks Herald last year.

    “We’ve got lots of places in North Dakota they could have built that plant without being a security risk, but instead, they chose to buy land right next to an Air Force base,” North Dakota Republican state Rep. Lawrence Klemin, who co-sponsored the state’s bill, told CNN. “We’ve got two Air Force bases in North Dakota, and we’ve got lots of places where we don’t have them, so why didn’t they do that?” Klemin’s bill was signed in April.

    Texas is also considering a bill that would bar “hostile nations including China,” in the state from purchasing real property, like agricultural land, as Republican State. Sen. Lois Kolkhorst describes her legislation. The bill initially ignited controversy because it would have barred citizens of China and other adversarial countries from buying land in the state, though the bill was later amended to clarify that it would not apply to lawful permanent residents, US citizens and dual citizens and to include an exception for property considered “residence homestead.”

    Several experts on US-China relations with whom CNN spoke warned against knee-jerk responses and called for lawmakers to act on evidence, not suspicion.

    “I think there’s a good reason to want to keep control of strategic interests in one’s own country … but these bills about farmland, these bills about just property in general, to me, it’s transparent that they’re rooted in racism and xenophobia again because we’ve seen this before. It really isn’t the first time,” said Nancy Qian, a professor of economics at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management who has conducted research on US exclusion laws.

    Yan Bennett, the assistant director of the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University, noted that US farmland is appealing for China because the country has food security issues and does not have enough arable land for cultivation.

    “When national security is threatened, yes, we need to take action,” Bennett told CNN. “But not every land purchase by a foreign government or a foreign national is a national security threat, so we need to make sure that we distinguish those purchases from those that are actual threats.”

    An atmosphere of racism and anti-China sentiment threatens other US interests as well, such as possibly deterring Chinese students from wanting to come to the US and obtain advanced degrees, explained Robert Daly, the director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center.

    “If we’re not careful that we are telling the world’s biggest talent pool that they’re an unwelcomed class or a reviled class here in the United States and that will also have implications for Chinese Americans,” Daly told CNN in February. “Real demonstrable security threats have to be met as such. I’m not saying that the Chinese Communist Party does not have plans and intentions that harm America’s interests – it does, and we need to go after those – but based on evidence.”

    In response to efforts in Texas and other states that are considering barring some Chinese citizens from owning US land over national security concerns, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson said earlier this year that trade between the two countries is “mutually beneficial.”

    “To overstretch the concept of national security and politicize economic, trade and investment issues runs counter to the principles of market economy and international trade rules, which undercuts international confidence in the US market environment,” spokesperson Mao Ning said at a news briefing in February.

    Virginia state Sen. Ryan McDougle, a Republican and co-sponsor of his state’s new law, dismissed what he called “ridiculous” concerns about his bill perpetuating racism against Asian-Americans, telling CNN in February it is “focused on a country that has established hostility to the United States.”

    In the near future, the Chinese spy balloon incident earlier this year will prompt increased attention to “the challenges that we are seeing from the CCP” – and thus the issue of Chinese farmland purchases in the US, predicted Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Washington Republican. The longtime China critic is sponsoring a bill in Congress that would that would ban the purchase of public or private agricultural land in the US by foreign nationals linked to the Chinese government.

    “I think people are waking up to the fact that we need to be more aware of what’s going on and prevent something happening that we don’t want to see,” Newhouse said.

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  • First on CNN: Senators press Google, Meta and Twitter on whether their layoffs could imperil 2024 election | CNN Business

    First on CNN: Senators press Google, Meta and Twitter on whether their layoffs could imperil 2024 election | CNN Business



    CNN
     — 

    Three US senators are pressing Facebook-parent Meta, Google-parent Alphabet and Twitter about whether their layoffs may have hindered the companies’ ability to fight the spread of misinformation ahead of the 2024 elections.

    In a letter to the companies dated Tuesday, the lawmakers warned that reported staff cuts to content moderation and other teams could make it harder for the companies to fulfill their commitments to election integrity.

    “This is particularly troubling given the emerging use of artificial intelligence to mislead voters,” wrote Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Vermont Democratic Sen. Peter Welch and Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, according to a copy of the letter reviewed by CNN.

    Since purchasing Twitter in October, Elon Musk has slashed headcount by more than 80%, in some cases eliminating entire teams.

    Alphabet announced plans to cut roughly 12,000 workers across product areas and regions earlier this year. And Meta has previously said it would eliminate about 21,000 jobs over two rounds of layoffs, hitting across teams devoted to policy, user experience and well-being, among others.

    “We remain focused on advancing our industry-leading integrity efforts and continue to invest in teams and technologies to protect our community – including our efforts to prepare for elections around the world,” Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Meta, said in a statement to CNN about the letter.

    Alphabet and Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The pullback at those companies has coincided with a broader industry retrenchment in the face of economic headwinds. Peers such as Microsoft and Amazon have also trimmed their workforces, while others have announced hiring freezes.

    But the social media companies are coming under greater scrutiny now in part due to their role facilitating the US electoral process.

    Tuesday’s letter asked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino how each company is preparing for the 2024 elections and for mis- and disinformation surrounding the campaigns.

    To illustrate their concerns, the lawmakers pointed to recent changes at Alphabet-owned YouTube to allow the sharing of false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, along with what they described as content moderation “challenges” at Twitter since the layoffs.

    The letter, which seeks responses by July 10, also asked whether the companies may hire more content moderation employees or contractors ahead of the election, and how the platforms may be specifically preparing for the rise of AI-generated deepfakes in politics.

    Already, candidates such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appear to have used fake, AI-generated images to attack their opponents, raising questions about the risks that artificial intelligence could pose for democracy.

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  • DOJ says it’s assessing the situation along the Texas-Mexico border amid ‘troubling reports’ over migrant treatment | CNN Politics

    DOJ says it’s assessing the situation along the Texas-Mexico border amid ‘troubling reports’ over migrant treatment | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    The Justice Department is assessing the situation along the Texas-Mexico border following reports that Texas troopers were told to push back migrants into the Rio Grande and ordered not to give them water, calling those reports “troubling” in a statement to CNN.

    The Justice Department’s statement is the first public acknowledgment that the department is assessing the situation but falls short of opening an investigation. An assessment could be the first step toward an investigation.

    “The department is aware of the troubling reports, and we are working with DHS and other relevant agencies to assess the situation,” DOJ spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa told CNN.

    In a Tuesday joint statement with other Texas top officials, including Department of Public Safety Chief Steve McCraw, Gov. Greg Abbott’s office said there have been no orders or directions given under Operation Lone Star that “would compromise the lives of those attempting to cross the border illegally.”

    The Biden administration has repeatedly criticized Abbott’s actions along the US southern border and his decision to transport migrants to Democratic-led cities without coordination. CNN previously reported that the Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department were in ongoing discussions about what actions could be taken against the state.

    White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Wednesday called Abbott’s recent actions at the border a “political stunt” and “shameful” when asked about concerns from the Mexican government over the state’s floating barriers.

    “I saw these reports and I think one of the things and I’ve been very clear about this that this governor has done over and over again is treated this situation we’re seeing at the border in an inhumane way. It is atrocious – the actions that he decides to take. … Instead of dealing with this issue in a way that we can get to a resolution and are working together, he turns it into a political stunt,” Jean-Pierre said Wednesday.

    “This is not surprising. Just yesterday I was asked about abandoned children – or migrant children – not offering them water. This is what we see over and over and over again from this Texas governor, from Gov. Abbott and it is – all we’re asking for – as a country and what we should hold near and dear is the basic human decency. Basic human decency and we are just not seeing this from this governor.”

    Jean-Pierre said she would not speak to the “legal piece” of the situation, adding she would refer any legal action to the Department of Justice.

    Internal discussions about legal action against Texas date back to last year, when Abbott began sending migrants to cities nationwide without alerting them and have continued with the deployment of buoys in the Rio Grande, which pose a potential drowning risk to migrants and now, concern over the treatment of migrants.

    Texas is already facing a lawsuit against its installation of a marine floating barrier. The owner of a Texas canoe and kayaking company filed the lawsuit earlier this month on the same day that Texas started deploying buoys for the barrier in an attempt to deter migrant crossings on the river along the US-Mexico border.

    That suit lists the state of Texas and Abbott, as well as the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard.

    It’s unclear whether the administration will take legal action against Texas, and officials have stressed that border agents have historically worked closely with Texas National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety.

    But it wouldn’t mark the first time the Justice Department has sued on border-related matters. Last year, the Justice Department sued Arizona for placing shipping containers along the US southern border – a move taken by then-Republican Gov. Doug Ducey as an affront to Biden’s immigration policies. Arizona eventually agreed to remove the containers.

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  • GOP hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy finds some fans in a very Trumpy place | CNN Politics

    GOP hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy finds some fans in a very Trumpy place | CNN Politics


    West Palm Beach, Florida
    CNN
     — 

    They wore Trump hats and Trump T-shirts and cheered wildly when former President Donald Trump took the stage to fireworks. But at the Turning Point Action conference in West Palm Beach, Florida, some of the conservative attendees said they had a little space in their hearts for Vivek Ramaswamy – the GOP newcomer running a longshot presidential primary bid against Trump, whom he has promised to pardon if it comes to that.

    What they told CNN they liked most was the way Ramaswamy comes across on TV. The 37-year-old extremely wealthy pharmaceutical entrepreneur has never held public office, but he’s quick and assertive, and has become a frequent guest on cable news and conservative YouTube channels. He’s best known for denouncing “wokeness,” which he says has infected American corporations and investment banks that influence them.

    Karen Colby – standing next to the sequin-packed “Trump Girl Shop” booth featuring “Theresa’s Concealed Carry Handbags.” – said she’d recently seen Ramaswamy on TV. “I forget what he was actually saying, but I said, ‘Dang, I really like him. I like him a lot,’” said Colby, a Republican from Broward County, Florida. “I like his values. I like what he says. I like his no-nonsense attitude. … If he does not earn the position of president, I would love to see him as vice president. President Trump: if you’re listening, choose Vivek.”

    In Republican primary polls, Ramaswamy is competitive with seasoned politicians, though still in single figures and far behind Trump. CNN did not encounter a Turning Point attendee who had something nice to say about former Vice President Mike Pence, who many saw as having betrayed Trump by certifying the 2020 election results. The pro-Trump crowd did not like former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has been critical of the former president. And though Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was popular at the conference last year, he’s now fallen out of favor with this crowd amid his challenge to Trump, according to Turning Point spokesperson Andrew Kolvet.

    Former President Donald Trump, who took the stage as fireworks were set off, remained the clear favorite.

    But that didn’t kill their appetite for one of DeSantis’s signature issues: “wokeness.” And on that subject, they found a lot to like in Ramaswamy, who wrote a book called “Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.” His argument is that corporations make statements about liberal social values and climate change at the expense of their profits, and that that is bad for investors and consumers.

    Dolan Bair, a student at Wheaton College in Illinois, found Ramaswamy’s argument convincing. He thought a lot of big companies “push more liberal agendas,” and “maybe the government should not allow them to hold their liberal values over their consumers and their employees.”

    Dolan Bair, center, said he found liberal values too pervasive in society.

    Sure, Apple and Google were private companies, he said, but they’re so large he couldn’t avoid them. He could buy a different beer than Bud Light but there wasn’t a good option for a non-woke search engine.

    Bair believed gay people had been treated unfairly, even imprisoned, in the past. “But at what point does Pride Month go away?” he asked. “When does when does Pride Month become two months? When does it become Pride Year?” CNN asked how a Pride Year – with more rainbow merchandise at Target, for instance – would affect him personally. “They could be using their money to go into R&D for better products, or lowering their product prices,” he said, echoing an argument made by Ramaswamy.

    Sam Mathew said he agreed with Ramaswamy's call to include gender issues in his platform.

    Sam Mathew was the most ardent Ramaswamy supporter CNN found, decked out in merch bearing the campaign’s slogan, “Truth.” “I like the way Vivek delivers the message on how to bring the country together by following the truth,” Mathew said. What did he mean by truth? “Truth, basically, to me, is exposing the lies,” he said.

    Ramaswamy campaigns on “10 truths,” starting with “God is real,” and “There are only two genders.” CNN asked Mathew why the gender issue was so important, given the scale of national and global problems. “If you don’t have a base, where there’s a man and a woman – and if you’re confusing the young generation with a third gender, or a fourth gender, or a fifth gender – then the whole concept of humanity is lost,” Mathew said.

    Mathew, an Indian American like Ramaswamy, immigrated to the US in the late 80s and went to college in Michigan. Back then, he saw hardly any other Indians in his neighborhood. Mathew knew racism existed. But since the Obama administration, he said, there was too much focus on race from elites. He felt liberal social values were being “pushed” through “constant bombarding” from news media, teachers’ unions, and universities. “I don’t know much about what is being taught, but from what I hear, it’s mostly telling Black kids that White people are bad, in simple terms,” Mathew said.

    In the conference’s presidential straw poll, Trump won 86% of votes. When attendees were asked for their second choice, Ramaswamy got 51%.

    As Trump was about to take the stage at the conference, CNN got a text from Kolvet, the Turning Point spokesperson, asking if If there was interest in an interview with Ramaswamy, a man who has raised his profile with his openness to all media – from network TV to niche podcasts. Shortly before the interview began, Ramaswamy got an email from Jordan Peterson asking him to come for another podcast chat. Peterson is a Canadian psychology professor best known for his opposition to what he calls “cultural Marxism” and his advice to young men that they stand up straight and clean their rooms.

    In his interview with CNN – as he has in many, many other venues – Ramaswamy went to his central point and said wokeness was a “symptom of a cultural cancer” that was filling a hole in the hearts of people who had lost their national identity.

    “I think the way we win is by taking a long, hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves who we really are as individuals – it is not just our race, it is not just our sexual identity or our gender, it is not just our political affiliation,” Ramaswamy said. “Ask ourselves, ‘Who am I as an individual?’ I’m not riding some tectonic plate of group identity. I am me. You are you,” he said.

    “I think the right way to deal with what I view as the last final burning embers of racism is to let that quietly burn out rather than trying to put that fire out by accidentally throwing kerosene on it,” Ramaswamy said.

    Images of Trump, left, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, right, covered with messages written on sticky notes at the Turning Point Action conference.

    Turning Point had set up a wall with three-foot cardboard cutouts of all the candidates’ faces, and invited conference-goers to write what they thought of each on sticky notes. On Ramaswamy’s face, most views had been positive – “the future,” “unite us plz,” “Vivek have my children,” “Trump’s VP.”

    But there was a dark side: two messages had white nationalist references. On one, a Star of David crossed out with the word “soon.” On the other, “1488,” which combines code for a slogan about protecting White children with code for “Heil Hitler.”

    Ramaswamy said he had not seen the notes or ever heard of the 1488 meme. He knew racism still existed and had experienced it. But people faced a choice, he said, whether to “wallow” in it.

    When CNN pointed out the notes to Kolvet, the Turning Point spokesperson, he took them down.

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  • Same old story with aging politicians | CNN Politics

    Same old story with aging politicians | CNN Politics

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



    CNN
     — 

    Whenever a lawmaker who is advancing in years appears infirm or confused in public, or takes some time to convalesce, there are questions about their fitness for office.

    This week, it’s Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate, who froze and appeared confused during a Capitol Hill news conference Wednesday. After recovering off camera, McConnell returned to take questions and later left smiling, telling reporters that he was doing just fine and had just been “sandbagged” when he was unable to speak.

    Earlier this year, McConnell could not hear reporters at a different news conference. Plus, McConnell is known to have fallen at least three times in the past year, according to CNN’s Manu Raju.

    He slipped on ice before a meeting in Finland.

    He fell getting off a plane at Reagan National Airport in Washington.

    His fall at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington led to a concussion and broken ribs that sidelined him for weeks.

    A fall several years ago at home in Kentucky caused a shoulder fracture.

    Writes Raju of the way McConnell walks on Capitol Hill:

    McConnell, 81, was a survivor of polio as a child and has long walked with a slight limp. He walks on stairs one at a time, and at times rests his hand on an aide to assist him through the Capitol.

    It’s notable that fellow Republicans are not concerned about McConnell’s ability to continue to do his job. At least not openly.

    Democrats have increasingly turned on Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who at 90 is a shadow of the imposing figure she once cut on Capitol Hill. A long absence while she recovered from shingles gummed up their ability to move judicial nominees and some legislation and led some of her California colleagues to call for her to step down.

    At a hearing Thursday, she had to be prodded, repeatedly, by fellow Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, to vote “aye” on a procedural vote.

    Difficulties communicating are not exclusively the milieu of older lawmakers. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania won his seat despite suffering a stroke during last year’s campaign. He sought hospital care for depression this year. He now conducts interviews with the help of an iPad that transcribes questions in real time.

    There’s an awkward gray area between legitimate questions about a person’s health and ageism.

    Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley got some early attention for her presidential campaign when she suggested a mental competency test for politicians over 75.

    It was ageist, constitutionally dubious and savvy politics all at the same time.

    Democrats are perpetually on defense about President Joe Biden’s age and acuity. Republicans have turned attacks against Biden, 80, into an art form, with viral videos to highlight his frequent verbal miscues.

    Haley’s proposal highlighted that these attacks on Biden occur without a whiff of irony that Republicans’ own current presidential primary frontrunner, former President Donald Trump, is 77.

    That neither Haley nor any of the other much younger Republicans challenging Trump in the 2024 primary field have so far caught fire is an indication that voters, who often skew older than the general population, don’t seem to care. They like a young and exciting candidate like, say, Barack Obama. They also like an older candidate, like, say, Ronald Reagan or Biden.

    The most powerful force in American politics isn’t age or ideas, but rather incumbency.

    As CNN’s Harry Enten wrote, the most shocking result out of the 2022 midterms was not that Democrats held the Senate or that Republicans only narrowly captured the House. It was that every single Senate incumbent who ran won. Only one incumbent governor running for reelection lost.

    I tried and failed to find a comprehensive look at whether younger or older candidates generally win congressional elections. But CNN recently published an interesting look at which generations are serving as lawmakers.

    Millennials are America’s largest generation by population, but they’re one of the smallest groups that make up Congress. That suggests baby boomers, despite reaching retirement age, are holding onto their seats.

    McConnell’s age of 81 might seem old to the average American, but it’s far from out of the ordinary on Capitol Hill, where the average age for a sitting senator, 64, is eligible for Social Security.

    McConnell has been a senator since 1985, which makes him the 12th longest-serving senator ever. He hasn’t said if he will run for reelection in 2026 or if he will continue to be the GOP leader when the next Congress begins in 2025. The only other longer-serving senator is Sen. Charles Grassley, who is 89, and who won an eighth term last November.

    Biden had more than 36 years logged as a senator when he left to become vice president in 2009. If he had stayed in the Senate, he’d now have a full half-century tenure and be about a year away from eclipsing West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd’s Senate record of 51 years, five months and 26 days.

    Byrd died while in office in 2010, and for the final years of his time as senator, he was frequently absent or had to use double canes or a wheelchair.

    American life expectancy, despite advances in medical care, was 77.4 in 2020. It has declined in recent years, and not just because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

    Researchers point to poor average diet, lack of universal health care and access to guns as factors that keep the Americans from living longer when compared with other countries.

    But the dwindling financial security of retirement programs like Social Security and Medicare means that future generations will likely have to work longer. Their lawmakers will be right there with them.

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  • Could Donald Trump serve as president if convicted? | CNN Politics

    Could Donald Trump serve as president if convicted? | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Donald Trump has been indicted on federal charges related to 2020 election subversion, a stunning third time this year that the former president has faced criminal charges.

    But could the former president, who remains the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, assume the Oval Office again if convicted of the alleged crimes? In short, yes.

    University of California, Los Angeles law professor Richard L. Hasen – one of the country’s leading experts on election law – said Trump still has a path to serving as president should he win reelection in 2024.

    “The Constitution has very few requirements to serve as President, such as being at least 35 years of age. It does not bar anyone indicted, or convicted, or even serving jail time, from running as president and winning the presidency,” he said in an email to CNN.

    Could a president serve from prison? That’s less clear.

    “How someone would serve as president from prison is a happily untested question,” Hasen said.

    The newest criminal counts against Trump include: conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.

    Those are in addition to a total of 40 counts in a separate federal indictment related to the special counsel’s investigation into the mishandling of classified documents, as well as 34 felony criminal charges of falsifying business records in Manhattan related to an alleged hush money payment scheme and cover-up involving an adult film star.

    If Trump were to be convicted before the 2024 election and win the contest, he could try to grant himself a pardon, according to Hasen.

    “Whether he can do so is untested. The Supreme Court may have to weigh in,” Hasen said, adding that Trump could potentially appeal a conviction to the conservative Supreme Court.

    Special counsel Jack Smith told reporters that he will seek a “speedy trial,” but if Trump was to be elected before a trial concluded, he may be able dismiss it entirely.

    Robert Ray, an attorney who defended Trump in his first impeachment trial, said on CNN following Trump’s June indictment in the classified documents case that the former president “would control the Justice Department” if reelected, adding that if the documents case was pending at that time, “he just dismisses the case.”

    Asked about the latest indictment, Trump defense attorney John Lauro told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins he thinks a potential trial could last “nine months or a year.”

    Lauro said he will need to see the evidence but that his client deserves as much time as any other American. “Every single person in the United States is entitled to due process, including the former president,” he said.

    If Trump is convicted of a felony at the federal level or in New York, he would be barred from voting in his adoptive home state of Florida, at least until he had served out a potential sentence.

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  • Britain’s ‘profound economic crisis’ gives Rishi Sunak only unpleasant choices | CNN Business

    Britain’s ‘profound economic crisis’ gives Rishi Sunak only unpleasant choices | CNN Business


    London
    CNN Business
     — 

    Rishi Sunak, Britain’s third prime minister in seven weeks, took office on Tuesday with a pledge to fix the “mistakes” of predecessor Liz Truss and tackle a “profound economic crisis.”

    The task won’t be an easy one, he acknowledged.

    “This will mean difficult decisions to come,” Sunak said in his first speech from No. 10 Downing Street.

    The United Kingdom was already sliding towards a recession when Truss took office in September, as soaring energy bills ate into spending. Now, Sunak has another headache: He must restore the government’s credibility with investors after Truss’ unfunded tax cuts sparked a bond market revolt, forcing the Bank of England to intervene to prevent a financial meltdown. Borrowing costs, including mortgage rates, shot higher.

    Accomplishing this goal will require delivering a detailed plan to put public finances on a more sustainable path. (A government watchdog warned in July that without major action, debt could reach 320% of the UK’s gross domestic product in 50 years.)

    The problem? There’s little appetite for government spending cuts after years of austerity in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. Plus, failing to help households deal with surging living costs could prove politically devastating and further weigh on the economy.

    “It’s not a particularly pleasant economic hand to be dealt [as] a new prime minister,” said Ben Zaranko, a senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

    Finance minister Jeremy Hunt got the ball rolling last week when he reversed £32 billion ($37 billion) in tax cuts that formed the bedrock of Truss’ plan to boost growth.

    Yet Sunak and Hunt — who will stay in his job — still need to find between £30 billion and £40 billion in savings to bring down public debt as a share of the economy in the next five years, according to calculations by IFS, an influential think tank.

    “It is going to be tough,” Hunt said in a tweet. “But protecting the vulnerable — and people’s jobs, mortgages and bills — will be at the front of our minds as we work to restore stability, confidence and long-term growth.”

    Sunak and Hunt won’t have the option of going light on the details. If investors don’t buy into their plan and borrowing costs shoot up again, getting the situation under control would only become trickier, as interest payments on government debt rise.

    “If markets don’t [see] the plans as credible, then filling the fiscal hole could become even harder,” said Ruth Gregory, senior UK economist at Capital Economics.

    One area Sunak may be tempted to tap is the social welfare budget. Questions have swirled about whether the Conservative government may try to avoid boosting state benefits in line with inflation, as is customary. (American recipients of Social Security will receive the biggest cost-of-living adjustment in more than four decades next year.)

    Most UK working-age benefits would typically go up by 10.1% next April based on inflation data. But there’s speculation the increase could be linked instead to average earnings, which are growing at a much slower rate than inflation. That could save £7 billion ($8 billion) in 2023-24, according to IFS.

    Such a move would prove controversial, however — especially since benefits have not kept up with rampant inflation in 2022.

    “I would like to see if we could find a way to increase benefits by inflation, but what I will say is that trade-offs are involved,” former Conservative cabinet minister Sajid Javid told ITV this week.

    A more palatable option, at least for households, would be extracting more taxes from corporations.

    Hunt has already said that corporate taxes will rise from 19% to 25% next spring. The Financial Times has reported that Hunt could also target earnings from oil and gas companies by extending a windfall tax on profits.

    In an interview with the BBC earlier this month, Hunt said he was “not against the principle” of windfall taxes and that “nothing is off the table.” Higher taxes on the financial sector are also under consideration, according to the Financial Times.

    Industry groups are already circling the wagons. Banking trade association UK Finance said its members already pay “a higher rate of taxation overall than any other sector,” and urged the government not to “risk the competitiveness of the UK’s banking and finance industry.”

    Sunak could also walk back Truss’ commitment to boosting defense spending to 3% of the economy by 2030, though that carries its own political risks given Russia’s war in Ukraine. Other countries in the region, such as Germany, have said they will ramp up military investments, and the United Kingdom may be loath to fall behind, Zaranko said.

    Investors and economists expect that the government will announce a mixture of tax increases and spending cuts shortly. Hunt is due to reveal his plans in greater depth on October 31.g

    “Despite the fiscal U-turns, the government will still need to show a fiscally credible path next week in the budget to balance the books,” Sonali Punhani, an economist at Credit Suisse, said in a note to clients this week.

    That could exacerbate the country’s downturn. The Bank of England has projected that the United Kingdom is already in a recession, and a gauge of business activity in October slumped to its lowest level in 21 months.

    “We are seeing quite a dramatic shift in the fiscal outlook from being much looser than we expected just a few weeks ago to being much tighter than we expected,” Gregory of Capital Economics said. “I think the risk is that the recession is deeper or longer than we expect.”

    A weaker economy would present its own complications.

    No one wants to repeat the errors of the brief Truss era, when her gamble that unfunded tax cuts would jumpstart growth backfired spectacularly.

    But business groups are warning that completely abandoning the objective of boosting Britain’s anemic economic growth would create problems, too.

    The austerity of the 2010s produced “very low growth, zero productivity and low investment,” Tony Danker, head of the Confederation of British Industry, told the BBC on Tuesday.

    “The country could end up in a similar doom loop where all you have to do is keep coming back every year to find more tax rises and more spending cuts, because you’ve got no growth.”

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  • The crisis pregnancy center next door: How taxpayer money intended for poor families is funding a growing anti-abortion movement | CNN

    The crisis pregnancy center next door: How taxpayer money intended for poor families is funding a growing anti-abortion movement | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    A few blocks from the Ohio State University campus in Columbus, America’s battle over abortion is playing out under one roof.

    On one side of a squat single-story office building, a Planned Parenthood clinic offers reproductive health care and refers patients for abortions. Next door is a branch of Pregnancy Decision Health Center, a crisis pregnancy center that offers counseling and support for pregnant women – but also works to dissuade them from terminating their pregnancies and has been accused of promoting misinformation about abortion.

    Of the two neighboring organizations, only Planned Parenthood provides medical services such as Pap smears, birth control and STD treatments.

    But the crisis pregnancy center is the one receiving money from the state government. Ohio has funneled nearly $14 million in taxpayer funds to the center and others like it over the last decade, according to government records – even as state leaders have cut funding that previously went to Planned Parenthood for programs such as breast and cervical cancer screenings. 

    Ohio isn’t alone. More than a dozen states devote some of their budget to funding crisis pregnancy centers, a CNN review found. About half of those states distribute federal money intended to help needy families to the centers.

    Some of the organizations that receive money have been accused of spreading abortion misinformation or using the funds to advocate anti-abortion causes instead of helping women. 

    “Public dollars should go to promoting public health,” said Ashley Underwood, the director of Equity Forward, an abortion rights advocacy group. Crisis pregnancy centers, she said, “solely exist to deter people from getting abortion services.”

    Since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this summer, a wave of abortion restrictions has swept the country, leaving millions of women with easier access to crisis pregnancy centers than abortion care. Crisis pregnancy centers far outnumbered abortion clinics across the US even before the court’s ruling, and anti-abortion groups are now planning to expand. 

    Pregnancy center leaders and their state government allies say the organizations deserve taxpayer funds because they provide pregnant women with resources like free diapers and ultrasounds. But some of the centers also lie to women about the safety and potential risks of abortion, according to multiple studies, abortion rights activists, and women who have been to the centers. 

    That kind of deception isn’t typical in any other area of health care, said Dr. Amy Addante, an Illinois OB-GYN who performs abortions and has been a vocal critic of crisis pregnancy centers.

    “The purpose of these centers is to try to stop someone from having an abortion,” said Addante. “I cannot think of any other medical decision or any other aspect of health care where there is a group of individuals whose only intent is to stop you from receiving that health care.”

    Big open windows invite patients and passersby into the waiting room at the Pregnancy Decision Health Center (PDHC). With velvety green chairs, leafy plants, and a coffee station that greets visitors as they come in the door, the crisis pregnancy center could pass for an upscale dental office or spa.

    Outside, PDHC’s sign towers over the neighboring Planned Parenthood, literally casting a shadow over the clinic’s entrance. Inside, the contrast is even starker: Planned Parenthood’s waiting room looks run-down – old chairs crowd the small space, faded informational posters cover the walls, and daylight is blocked by signage on the windows and mirrored doors meant to protect patients’ privacy.

    Multiple times a week, patients looking for Planned Parenthood mistakenly walk through PDHC’s doors, according to a Planned Parenthood clinician, Jennifer, who asked CNN not to use her last name out of security concerns. Some patients have told Planned Parenthood that PDHC employees told them abortion wasn’t safe or said PDHC tried to delay them and make them late for their Planned Parenthood appointments.

    Lillian Williams is the vice president of health services of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio.

    “They’ve provided an array of misinformation, whether it’s about abortion care or even about contraceptive services,” said Lillian Williams, the vice president of health services of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio.

    Ayla Krueger, a 23-year-old Columbus resident, visited PDHC earlier this month with a friend who was seeking an STD test. She said that during their hour-and-a-half visit, an employee claimed that condoms were only 50% effective, the spread of STDs could only be prevented if people followed “God’s plan” of avoiding sex before marriage, and that if a woman who has an STD gets an abortion, “your STDs travel up your cervix into your organs and could kill you.”

    “I was dumbfounded,” Krueger said of the encounter. “My heart was breaking, thinking about girls who don’t understand what they’re walking into there… and possibly getting coerced.”

    Experts said that the center’s rhetoric was not medically accurate. “We do worry about ascending infections in abortions and pregnancy, but the risk is really, really low,” said Dr. Jonas Swartz, an OB-GYN and professor at Duke University Medical Center. “Crisis pregnancy centers regularly overstate the risk of abortions and this is just one example of that.”

    The center also offers “abortion pill reversal,” according to its website, annual reports and pamphlets at the office. Abortion reversal is a medically dubious, unproven treatment that purports to undo a medication abortion but has been denounced by medical groups and found to be dangerous by researchers. A clinical trial that attempted to study abortion reversal was halted prematurely in 2019 when several participants suffered hemorrhaging.

    Kathy Scanlon, PDHC’s president, declined an interview request and didn’t respond to CNN’s questions about Krueger’s allegations or abortion pill reversal.

    “Every woman deserves care and compassion when facing an unexpected pregnancy,” Scanlon wrote in an email, adding that the center provides “practical pregnancy care and support ranging from free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds to parenting education classes and much-needed baby items” such as diapers and car seats.

    Anti-abortion signs sit on a table during the Ohio March for Life in Columbus.

    Research has found that crisis pregnancy centers commonly disseminate misinformation. A study released last year by The Alliance, an abortion rights advocacy group, found that almost two-thirds of crisis pregnancy centers in nine states promoted false or biased information about abortion on their websites. That included false claims that abortions increased the risk of cancer or infertility.  More than a third of clinics also advertised that they offered abortion pill reversal – and state-funded clinics were more likely than privately-funded ones to offer the unproven procedure and less likely to offer prenatal care, according to the study. 

    Similarly, a 2012 academic study of crisis pregnancy centers in North Carolina found that 86% of centers promoted false or misleading medical information on their websites. 

    Crisis pregnancy center leaders say they are working to help women. Peggy Hartshorn, who founded the Columbus center and is now the chair of Heartbeat International, one of the largest global networks of crisis pregnancy centers, said the allegations that the groups spread misinformation are “a false narrative.”

    She said that the information her centers provide to clients is “very well-researched, medically referenced – we document everything with multiple sources.”

    “Deep down in their hearts, women do not want to have abortion,” Hartshorn said. “Pregnancy centers are good for America, they really are.”

    In Ohio, a new six-week abortion ban that went into effect after the Supreme Court decision, is currently on hold amid court battles. The Planned Parenthood clinic near Ohio State University doesn’t perform abortions – it refers patients to a Planned Parenthood surgical center on the other side of town that does.

    The waiting room in the Planned Parenthood near campus.

    That facility, too, has a state-funded crisis pregnancy center operating across the street. On a recent afternoon, a handful of protesters lined the clinic’s fence with signs depicting bloody fetuses and shouted “you are already a mother” and “abortion is murder” whenever a patient came within earshot. One protester – wearing a reflective vest and holding a clipboard, similar to Planned Parenthood volunteers – tried to direct patients away from the abortion clinic and to the crisis pregnancy center across the street. The center told CNN the protesters weren’t affiliated with their organization.

    It’s not rare for pregnancy centers to operate near abortion clinics. More than 100 pregnancy centers around the country are located within 200 meters of an abortion clinic or Planned Parenthood location, according to a CNN analysis. Some – in states like Delaware, Indiana and Michigan – are next door to clinics. 

    Abortion rights advocates say the intention is to mislead women and block them from accessing abortion.  

    “The purpose of co-locating near a legitimate provider is to intercept someone seeking legitimate health care and divert them into walking through their doors instead,” said Tara Murtha, the co-author of a report about pregnancy centers and a spokesperson for the Women’s Law Project. “It’s basically an obstacle course and a systemic barrier to abortion care.”

    Despite the groups’ apparent spreading of misinformation, at least 18 states have funded crisis pregnancy centers with taxpayer money, according to a CNN review of government records and statements from state agencies. The largest is Texas, which has sent more than $200 million to the groups over the last decade. 

    More than a half-dozen states bankroll crisis pregnancy centers at least partly with funds from Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), a federal welfare program. Those federal funds are sent to states as a block grant, which gives state officials wide latitude in how to spend it, including on programs like “alternatives to abortion” grants for crisis pregnancy centers. 

    Research has shown that a smaller percentage of poor families are now receiving cash assistance from the TANF program than in previous decades.

    While about 68% of families with children in poverty received cash assistance through TANF in 1996, when the program was created, that percentage declined to just 21% by 2020, according to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank. The percentage was even lower in some of the GOP-dominated states that use TANF funding to support crisis pregnancy centers, such as Texas and Louisiana.

    “When you look at successes in reducing poverty by strengthening the safety net, cash assistance is the most effective way to help families,” said Aditi Shrivastava, who co-authored the study. “We are seeing states spend less of their money directly on cash assistance, and we don’t think that is what the program should be doing.”

    In the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, some states are piloting new efforts to fund crisis pregnancy centers. Lawmakers in Arkansas and Iowa approved state funding for such groups for the first time this year.

    The states have argued that crisis pregnancy centers deserve taxpayer funding because they provide services to pregnant women in need. 

    “If we are going to be the most pro-life state in the union, we have to be prepared when those mothers come to a facility and they need help,” Arkansas state Rep. Robin Lundstrum said at a legislative hearing about the state’s new program earlier this year.

    In Columbus, Pregnancy Decision Health Center is receiving more than $528,000 from the state government in the current fiscal year, according to government records. All of that comes from federal TANF funds. The funding amounts for about a fourth of the center’s total revenue, while the rest comes from private donations, according to the group’s most recent tax records available.

    People participate in the Ohio March for Life.

    Despite the large amounts of money, there’s little oversight of how the taxpayer dollars are being used. 

    Many of the appropriations are written into spending bills passed by GOP-dominated state legislatures. Pennsylvania, for example, has sent more than $70 million over the last decade to crisis pregnancy centers through Real Alternatives, an anti-abortion group that distributes state funding to crisis pregnancy centers. 

    A 2017 report by the state auditor general found that Real Alternatives used hundreds of thousands of dollars of the money it received from Pennsylvania “to fund its activities in other states,” in what the auditor said was an example of the group “siphoning funds intended to benefit Pennsylvania women.” Real Alternatives denied the allegations in a statement, saying that they had “no basis in fact or law.”

    Michigan, which had contracted with Real Alternatives to distribute funding for crisis pregnancy centers, canceled its contract after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed the funding for it in 2019. In a letter about the veto, Whitmer thanked a watchdog group that had issued a report accusing the organization of only helping a fraction of the pregnant women it had agreed to support.

    Real Alternatives, which also receives TANF money from Indiana, said the Michigan report was “riddled with inaccuracies, distortions, half-truths and defamatory statements.”

    A bill in the Ohio legislature that would have required crisis pregnancy centers receiving state funding to provide their clients with only medically accurate information died in committee in multiple recent legislative sessions. The state’s GOP legislative leaders did not respond to requests for comment.

    Meanwhile, some of the same red states that have bankrolled crisis pregnancy centers have stripped funding from Planned Parenthood. In Ohio, for example, the group never received state funding for abortions, but for years it received money for other services like cancer screenings, STD prevention and treatment, and sex education for teens.

    In 2016, however, Ohio lawmakers banned the state from funding any organization that performs abortions, and the law went into effect after it was upheld by a federal appeals court in 2019. That meant that Planned Parenthood affiliates in Ohio lost about $600,000 a year in state funding, and led to the cancellation of some of their non-abortion health programs.

    While Planned Parenthood does receive some additional reimbursements through Ohio’s Medicaid program for providing non-abortion health care to people on Medicaid plans, it no longer receives state grants.

    Planned Parenthood also lost additional federal funding under Title X, a program that funds birth control and reproductive health services, under a Trump administration rule. But the organization started receiving that money again this year after the Biden administration reversed the rule.

    Maria Gallo, a sexual and reproductive health epidemiologist at Ohio State University, said that state funding for crisis pregnancy centers shows how conservative lawmakers prioritize anti-abortion rhetoric over medical care for women.

    “It’s dangerous in part because they are legitimizing (crisis pregnancy centers),” Gallo said. “They are legitimizing that as a source of medical care when they’re not licensed medical facilities.”

    Crisis pregnancy centers drastically outnumber abortion clinics in the United States. There were 790 abortion clinics operating in 2021, compared with about 2,600 crisis pregnancy centers, according to a database compiled by Reproaction, an abortion-rights group.

    That disparity is only likely to grow in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. Hartshorn, the chair of Heartbeat International, said the organization has created an online training program to help people open new pregnancy centers, especially in places without existing ones.

    “We need more people, we need more places, and we need more paths to pregnancy health,” Hartshorn said.

    Thank you notes are displayed in the Planned Parenthood in Columbus.

    A study by the National Center for Responsive Philanthropy found that the groups have taken in more and more money in recent years: They received over $1 billion in revenue in 2019, the most recent year data was available, compared to about $771 million in 2015. 

    Several women who went to state-funded crisis pregnancy centers told CNN they felt misled and manipulated by the groups, and disturbed that they were getting taxpayer money.

    Last year, a woman who asked to be identified by her middle name, Eve, had just lost her job when she suspected she might be pregnant. She and her boyfriend went to Women’s Care Center in Columbus after finding the group on Google. Money was tight, and she chose the center – which is receiving more than $700,000 from the state of Ohio in the current fiscal year – because it promised free pregnancy testing. 

    Eve’s test was positive, and she asked the staff about an abortion. She said they handed her a pamphlet that warned her the procedure could cause infertility – though abortion doesn’t typically affect a person’s ability to become pregnant in the future. For three hours, Eve said the staff pressured her to carry the pregnancy to term.

    “It became very clear that they were against abortion really quickly,” said Eve, who left the center feeling upset and later got an abortion. The center didn’t respond to questions about Eve’s visit but said in an email they are “absolutely committed to accuracy, excellence and transparency in all we do.”

    One day, Eve said she hopes to have kids. But at the time, she didn’t feel financially or emotionally stable enough to have a baby.

    “Nobody wants to make a decision to have an abortion,” Eve said. “And they made me feel really guilty and bad about it.”

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  • How Kyrsten Sinema’s decision makes Democrats’ 2024 Senate map tighter | CNN Politics

    How Kyrsten Sinema’s decision makes Democrats’ 2024 Senate map tighter | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema decided to shake up the political world on Friday by becoming an independent. The former Democrat is still caucusing with the party in the Senate, so the Democratic caucus still has 51 members. Now, instead of 49 Democrats and two independents within their ranks, the caucus has 48 Democrats and three independents.

    But that simple math hides a more clouded picture for Democrats and for Sinema herself. Sinema’s interests are no longer necessarily the Democrats’ best interests in the next Congress, and the 2024 Senate map became even more complicated for Democrats with Sinema’s decision.

    To be clear, Sinema has always been a thorn in the Democrats side during her time in Congress. Over the last two years, Democrats have had to almost always make sure that any bill or nomination had Sinema’s support to have any chance of passing. That’s the math when you have only 50 Senate seats in a 100-seat chamber. A lot of bills and nominations were never voted on without Sinema and Manchin’s backing.

    From 2013 (Sinema’s first term in Congress) to 2020, Sinema voted against her party more than almost any other member of Congress. She stayed with the party about 69% of the time on votes where at least one half of the Democrats voted differently than half of Republicans. The average Democrat voted with their party about 90% of the time on these votes.

    It’s quite possible that Sinema’s percentage of sticking with the party will lower now that she is an independent. Consider the example of former Sen. Joe Lieberman. The longtime Democrat won reelection as a third-party candidate in 2006, after losing the Democratic primary to a left-wing challenger (the now fairly moderate Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont)

    Relative to the average Senate Democrat, Lieberman voted with the party 10 points less of the time after becoming an independent than he had in his last term as a Democrat. If that happens with Sinema, she’ll become even more conservative than West Virginia’s Joe Manchin (the most conservative member of the Democratic caucus).

    This would make sense because the incentive structure is now very different for Sinema. Ahead of a 2024 reelection campaign, she no longer has to worry about winning a Democratic primary. Sinema has to worry about building a coalition of Democrats, independents and Republicans. That is far more difficult to do if you’re seen as too liberal.

    Indeed, the big reason Sinema became an independent is because it would have been very difficult to win a Democratic primary. Her approval rating among Arizona Democrats in an autumn 2022 CES poll stood at just 25%. A number of Democrats (e.g. Rep. Ruben Gallego and Rep. Greg Stanton) were already lining up to potentially challenge her in a primary.

    A question now is whether Sinema’s decision to become an independent will dissuade some of those Democrats from running. The idea being that Sinema still caucuses with the Democrats, and Democrats wouldn’t want to split the Democratic vote in a general election allowing a Republican to win in a purple state like Arizona.

    It’s an interesting bet from Sinema. After all, Democrats usually don’t run a candidate against independent Sen. Bernie Sanders in Vermont. The Democrats who run against independent Sen. Angus King in Maine have not gained traction in recent elections. Don’t forget the aforementioned Lieberman won as a third-party candidate.

    The electoral math structure was and is totally different in these circumstances, however. Sanders wouldn’t attract a left-wing Democratic challenger because he is already so progressive. Lieberman declared his third-party candidacy after the primary, so Republicans didn’t have time to find a well-known challenger. Republicans also knew that Lieberman, who was an ardent supporter of the Iraq War, was probably the best they could hope for in the deeply Democratic state of Connecticut.

    This leaves the King example. King, like Sinema, is a moderate from not a deeply blue or red state. There’s just one problem for Sinema in this analogy: King is popular. He had previously won the governorship twice as an independent and has almost always sported high favorables.

    Sinema is not popular at all. The CES poll had her approval rating below her disapproval rating with Democrats, independents and Republicans in Arizona. Sinema’s overall approval stood at 25% to a disapproval rating of 58%. Other polling isn’t nearly as dire for Sinema, but the average of it all has her firmly being more unpopular than popular.

    Put another way, Sinema’s current numbers are probably not going to scare off many challengers from either the Democratic or Republican side. Additionally, there’s zero reason for Democrats to cede the ground to Sinema because it would keep a Republican from winning. It isn’t clear at all that Sinema can win as an independent.

    What Sinema’s move did accomplish is that it made the electoral math a lot more complicated in Arizona and therefore nationally. Having two people in the race who are going to caucus with the Democratic Party likely makes it more difficult for the Democrats to win.

    One potential worrisome example for Democrats in a purple state (at least then) was the 2010 Florida Senate race. Then Republican Gov. Charlie Crist decided to run as an independent after it became clear he wouldn’t beat the more conservative Republican Marco Rubio in a Republican primary. Crist, who said he would caucus with the Democrats, split the Democratic vote with then Rep. Kendrick Meek, and Rubio cruised to a win.

    I should point out that Democrats certainly have a chance. The 1968 Alaska Senate race, for example, featured two Democrats (Mike Gravel and then Sen. Ernest Gruening as write-in). Gravel won in the state which Republican Richard Nixon carried, too, by a few points.

    In 2024, Arizona Republicans could nominate an extreme candidate that flames out. They just lost every major statewide race in 2022 because of who they nominated.

    Don’t dismiss the possibility too that Sinema could win like Harry Byrd did in the 1970 Virginia Senate election when both parties nominated candidates. Maybe voters will like Sinema’s new independent registration.

    Sinema also could find herself flaming out when running in the general election without a major party backing her like Gruening did in 1968 or then Sen. Jacob Javits in the 1980 New York Senate race.

    We just don’t know.

    All that said, the Democrats already have a difficult map heading into 2024. Depending on whether the Democrats win the presidency (and have a Democratic vice president who can break Senate ties), they can afford to lose zero to one Senate seats and maintain a majority.

    The vast majority, 23 of the 34, senators up for reelection in 2024 caucus with the Democrats. An abnormally large number (7) represent states Republican Donald Trump won at least once. This includes Arizona.

    With Sinema’s break from the Democratic party, the road is, if nothing else, curvier for Democrats.

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  • Brazil’s election explained: Lula and Bolsonaro face off for a second round in high stakes vote | CNN

    Brazil’s election explained: Lula and Bolsonaro face off for a second round in high stakes vote | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    Brazil votes for a new president on Sunday, in the final round of a polarizing election that has been described as the most important in the country’s democratic history.

    The choice is between two starkly different candidates – the leftist former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, popularly known as Lula, and the far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro – while the country struggles with high inflation, limited growth and rising poverty.

    Rising anger has overshadowed the poll as both men have used their massive clout, on-and-offline, to attack each other at every turn. Clashes among their supporters have left many voters feeling fearful of what is yet to come.

    The race could be a close one. Neither gained over 50% in a first round vote earlier this month, forcing the two leading candidates into this Sunday’s run-off vote.

    Lula da Silva was president for two terms, from 2003 to 2006 and 2007 to 2011, where he led the country through a commodities boom that helped fund huge social welfare programs and lifted millions out of poverty.

    The charismatic politician is known for his dramatic backstory: He didn’t learn to read until he was 10, left school after fifth grade to work full-time, and went on to lead worker strikes which defied the military regime in 1970s. He co-founded the Workers’ Party (PT), that became Brazil’s main left-wing political force.

    Lula da Silva left office with a 90% approval rating – a record tarnished however by Brazil’s largest corruption probe, dubbed “Operation Car Wash,” which led to charges against hundreds of high-ranking politicians and businesspeople across Latin America. He was convicted for corruption and money laundering in 2017, but a court threw out his conviction in March 2021, clearing the way for his political rebound “in a plot twist worthy of one of the Brazilian beloved telenovelas,” Bruna Santos, a senior advisor at the Wilson Institute’s Brazil Center, told CNN.

    His rival, Bolsonaro, is a former army captain who was a federal deputy for 27 years. Bolsonaro was considered a marginal figure in politics during much of this time before emerging in the mid-2010s as the figurehead of a more radically right-wing movement, which perceived the PT as its main enemy.

    He ran for President in 2018 with the conservative Liberal Party, campaigning as a political outsider and anti-corruption candidate, and gaining the moniker ‘Trump of the Tropics.’ A divisive figure, Bolsonaro has become known for his bombastic statements and conservative agenda, which is supported by important evangelical leaders in the country.

    But poverty has grown during his time as President, and his popularity levels took a hit over his handling of the pandemic, which he dismissed as the “little flu,” before the virus killed more than 680,000 people in the country.

    Bolsonaro’s government has become known for its support of ruthless exploitation of land in the Amazon, leading to record deforestation figures. Environmentalists have warned that the future of the rainforest could be at stake in this election.

    The race is a tight one for the two household names who espouse radically different paths to prosperity.

    Bolsonaro’s campaign is a continuation of his conservative, pro-business agenda. Bolsonaro has promised to increase mining, privatize public companies and generate more sustainable energy to bring down energy prices. But he has also has vowed to continue paying a R$600 (roughly US$110) monthly benefit for low-income households known as Auxilio Brasil, without clearly defining how it will be paid for.

    Bolsonaro accelerated those financial aid payments this month, a move seen by critics as politically motivated. “As the election loomed, his government has made direct payments to working-class and poor voters – in a classic populist move,” Santos told CNN.

    Bolsonaro’s socially conservative messaging, which includes railing against political correctness and promotion of traditional gender roles, has effectively rallied his base of Brazilian conservative voters, she also said.

    Lula co-founded the Workers' Party (PT), that became Brazil's main left-wing political force.

    Lula da Silva’s policy agenda has been light on the details, focusing largely on promises to improve Brazilians fortunes based on past achievements, say analysts.

    He wants to put the state back at the heart of economic policy making and government spending, promising a new tax regime that will allow for higher public spending. He has vowed to end hunger in the country, which has returned during the Bolsonaro government. Lula da Silva also promises to work to reduce carbon emissions and deforestation in the Amazon.

    But Santos warns that he’ll face an uphill battle: “With a fragile fiscal scenario (in Brazil) and little power over the budget, it won’t be easy.”

    Lula da Silva faces a hostile congress if he becomes president. Congressional elections on October 3 gave Bolsonaro’s allies the most seats in both houses: Bolsonaro’s right-wing Liberal Party increased its seats to 99 in the lower house, and parties allied with him now control half the chamber, Reuters reports.

    “Lula seems to ignore the necessary search for new engines of growth because the state cannot grow more,” she said.

    A Datafolha poll released last Wednesday showed 49% of respondents said they would vote for Lula da Silva and 45% would go for Bolsonaro, who gained a percentage point from a poll by the same institute a week ago.

    But Bolsonaro fared better than expected in the October 2 first round vote, denying Lula da Silva the outright majority which polls had predicted. The incumbent’s outperformance of the polls in the first round suggests wider support for Bolsonaro’s populist brand of conservatism, and analysts expect the difference in Sunday’s vote to be much tighter than expected.

    There could be any number of other surprises. Fears of violence have haunted this election, with several violent and sometimes fatal clashes between Bolsonaro and Lula da Silva supporters recorded in recent months. From the start of this year until the first round of voting, the US non-profit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) recorded “36 instances of political violence involving party representatives and supporters across the country,” that suggests “even greater tensions and polarization than recorded in the previous general elections.”

    Critics also fear Bolsonaro has been laying the groundwork to contest the election. Though he insists he will respect the results if they are “clean and transparent,” Bolsonaro has repeatedly claimed that Brazil’s electronic ballot system is susceptible to fraud – an entirely unfounded allegation that has drawn comparisons to the false election claims of former US President Donald Trump. There is no record of fraud in Brazilian electronic ballots since they began in 1996, and experts are worried the rhetoric will lead to outbreaks of violence if Lula da Silva wins.

    “In this consequential election, the confidence we have in the strength of Brazilian democratic institutions is going to be challenged,” Santos said.

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