ReportWire

Tag: government organizations – us

  • In a market that’s gone mad, investors can embrace these dependable stocks | CNN Business

    In a market that’s gone mad, investors can embrace these dependable stocks | CNN Business

    [ad_1]

    A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here.


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Many people don’t have the time or inclination to do deep research on stocks.

    It’s often easier to buy an exchange-traded fund that owns a basket of the top blue chips, like Apple

    (AAPL)    , Microsoft

    (MSFT)     and Amazon

    (AMZN)    . Other investors like to bet on themes and memes instead of poring over a company’s financial statements and regulatory filings. Hence the recent craze for momentum stocks like GameStop

    (GME)     and AMC

    (AMC)    .

    But for old-fashioned investors with a little gray in their hair (and veteran business journalists like yours truly) there are other ways to find winning stocks for the long haul.

    I’ve been running stock screens using market data software, first from FactSet and now from Refinitiv, on and off during the more than 20 years I’ve worked at CNN Business. (It was CNNMoney when I first started.)

    I’ve typically done this stock picking feature in early to mid February as a Stocks We Love type of story, pegging it to Valentine’s Day. (Here’s the first one I did in 2002!) So they’ve often been littered with cheesy references to how romantic it is to find a reliable company you can count on for a long-term relationship.

    Well, investing trends have changed a bit in the past two decades. Some would argue that active investing (actually choosing individual companies) is no longer in vogue thanks to the rise of passively run index funds.

    And to be fair, the experts are right, mostly. Investors usually are better off owning an index ETF. If the goal is saving for retirement in particular, a diversified mix of companies is safer than trying the riskier strategy of identifying individual winners and losers.

    But you know what they say about not being able to teach an old dog new tricks? I still believe there’s value in looking for quality stocks at bargain prices. Legendary investors like Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch of Fidelity fame would likely agree.

    With that in mind, I ran one final stock screen for this Valentine’s Day. Like my past screens, I tried to find companies with strong fundamentals (solid sales and earnings growth), low levels of debt and high returns on equity. And perhaps most importantly, I screened for companies trading at a reasonable price based on their estimated earnings.

    This screen wound up identifying 33 companies that could make sense as a buy-and-hold investment. All of them generated double-digit sales growth annually over the past five years and they are all expected to report profit growth of at least 10% a year for the next few years.

    Some of the more prominent companies on the list? IT services/consulting giant Accenture

    (ACN)     made the cut. So did software leader Adobe

    (ADBE)    , semiconductor manufacturer Analog Devices

    (ADI)    , chip equipment juggernaut Applied Materials

    (AMAT)     and Venmo owner PayPal

    (PYPL)    .

    That’s a fair amount of exposure to the tech sector. But several other non-techs made my list too.

    Auto insurer Progressive

    (PGR)     (hi Flo!), health insurer Humana

    (HUM)    , cosmetics retailer Ulta Beauty

    (ULTA)    , UGG boots and Hoka sneakers maker Deckers Outdoor

    (DECK)     and trucker JB Hunt

    (JBHT)     met my criteria.

    As did financial services firm Raymond James

    (RJF)    , perhaps most famous for having its name on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers stadium Tom Brady briefly called home.

    None of these stocks are likely to be moonshots that will surge because of comments that someone makes on Reddit. But they might offer a little more in the way of security and dependability. And after all, isn’t that what we all want from a long-term partner on Valentine’s Day?

    The broader market has continued to rally, in large part due to hopes that inflation pressures (and more Federal Reserve rate hikes) will soon be things of the past. But consumers are still skittish when it comes to buying more costly items.

    Meat processing giant Tyson Foods

    (TSN)     reported disappointing results last week, largely due to a pullback in consumer demand for pricier beef. Luxury apparel retailer Capri Holdings

    (CPRI)    , which owns the Versace, Jimmy Choo and Michael Kors brands, also posted lousy numbers.

    But shoppers still seem to be spending on more affordable goods. Pepsi

    (PEP)     reported sales and earnings last week that topped Wall Street’s targets. Fast food giant Yum! Brands

    (YUM)    , the owner of Taco Bell, KFC and Pizza Hut, issued solid results too.

    That could bode well for several leading consumer companies that are on tap to report earnings this week, including Pepsi competitor Coca-Cola

    (KO)     as well as Restaurant Brands

    (QSR)    , the parent company of Burger King, Popeyes, Tim Horton and Firehouse Subs.

    Kraft Heinz

    (KHC)    , restaurant owner Bloomin’ Brands

    (BLMN)    , Sam Adams brewer Boston Beer

    (SAM)     and food delivery service DoorDash are also scheduled to release their latest results this week.

    The restaurant stocks in particular could do well.

    “Consumers continue to trade goods for services,” said Jharonne Martis, director of consumer research for Refinitiv, in a report. Martis noted that the restaurant and broader leisure sector has continued to outperform other consumer-related industries this year.

    Inflation is obviously still a concern for big consumer brands. Companies have to deal with the challenge of trying to pass on higher costs to customers without driving them away.

    That could become less of a problem though.

    The US government will report both its Consumer Price Index and Producer Price Index for January this week and economists are hoping for a further slowdown in year-over-year prices. Consumer prices rose 6.5% over the past 12 months through December, down from a 7.1% pace in November.

    “There are positive signs. Inflation has passed the peak so there is a little bit of a respite,” said Kathryn Kaminski. chief research strategist with AlphaSimplex.

    Higher prices were a problem for retailers during the holidays. Retail sales fell 1.1% in December from November, according to figures from the US government, following a 0.6% drop in November.

    But retail sales are expected to bounce back as inflation becomes less of an issue. Economists are forecasting a 0.9% increase in retail sales for January when those numbers come out later this week.

    Monday: Earnings from TreeHouse Foods

    (THS)    , Avis Budget

    (CAR)    , FirstEnergy

    (FE)    , IAC

    (IAC)     and Palantir

    Tuesday: US CPI; Japan GDP; UK employment report; earnings from Coca-Cola, Asahi Group, Marriott

    (MAR)    . Cleveland-Cliffs

    (CLF)    , Restaurant Brands, Suncor Energy

    (SU)    , Airbnb, Herbalife

    (HLF)    , GoDaddy

    (GDDY)     and TripAdvisor

    (TRIP)

    Wednesday: US retail sales; UK inflation; weekly crude oil inventories; annual meeting of Charlie Munger’s Daily Journal Co

    (DJCO)    ; earnings from Kraft Heinz, Lithia Motors

    (LAD)    , Sunoco

    (SUN)    , Sonic Automotive

    (SAH)    , Ryder

    (R)    , Barrick Gold

    (GOLD)    , Biogen

    (BIIB)    , Owens Corning

    (OC)    , Krispy Kreme, Cisco

    (CSCO)    , AIG

    (AIG)    , Shopify

    (SHOP)     and Boston Beer

    Thursday: US PPI; US weekly jobless claims: US housing starts and building permits; China housing prices; earnings from US Foods

    (USFD)    , Lenovo

    (LNVGF)    , Nestle

    (NSRGF)    , Paramount Global, Southern

    (SO)    , Hasbro

    (HAS)    , Hyatt

    (H)    , Bloomin’ Brands, WeWork, Applied Materials

    (AMAT)    , DoorDash, DraftKings and Redfin

    (RDFN)

    Friday: Earnings from Deere

    (DE)    , AutoNation

    (AN)    , Sands China

    (SCHYF)     and AMC Networks

    (AMCX)

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Washington Post: Trump campaign commissioned research that failed to prove 2020 election fraud claims | CNN Politics

    Washington Post: Trump campaign commissioned research that failed to prove 2020 election fraud claims | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    A research firm commissioned by former President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign team to prove his electoral fraud claims instead failed to substantiate his theories, the Washington Post reported Saturday.

    The Berkeley Research Group was commissioned to look into voting data from six states, according to the Post, and a source told the publication that the campaign team wanted about a dozen claims tested. People familiar with the matter told the publication that the findings did not match what the team had hoped for, and the findings were never released.

    While some anomalies and “unusual data patterns” were found, the Post reported, they wouldn’t have made a difference to President Joe Biden’s victory.

    The firm’s findings also refuted some of Trump’s voting conspiracies, including the identities of dead people used to vote and Dominion voting systems used to manipulate the outcome, the paper reported.

    The research was conducted in the last weeks of 2020 and before the January 6 US Capitol attack, according to the Post. Two sources told CNN that the House January 6 committee looking into the role Trump played in inciting the insurrection did not know about the firm’s work.
    Trump has continued to repeat his election lies as he focuses on his 2024 White House bid.

    CNN previously reported that following two years of advice from allies and advisers to stop exhaustively relitigating the 2020 election, his first rally late last month showed an attempted forward-driven message of what he would aim to accomplish with a second term.

    The former president has often pushed back on that advice, arguing that his message is strong enough as it is, and one source close to him told CNN his proclivity for focusing on the 2020 election will be tough to break because he still regularly hears from members of his base who believe so-called election integrity is an important talking point as he seeks reelection.

    Another adviser said that despite the defeat of several Trump-backed midterm candidates who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election, Trump has said he does not believe their losses were tied to their election lies.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Second Trump attorney met with Mar-A-Lago probe grand jury in recent weeks | CNN Politics

    Second Trump attorney met with Mar-A-Lago probe grand jury in recent weeks | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Trump attorney Christina Bobb appeared before a federal grand jury in Washington, DC, in recent weeks in connection with the investigation into former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents, two sources have told CNN.

    Bobb’s appearance marks the second Trump lawyer involved with Trump’s handling of government documents to meet with the grand jury recently. CNN reported that Trump attorney Evan Corcoran appeared before the grand jury last month.

    The Wall Street Journal first reported Bobb’s appearance.

    The disclosure of the testimony by the Trump lawyers comes amid a steady drip of recent moves by special counsel Jack Smith to obtain grand jury testimony from very close contacts of the former president, in many cases about what Trump was told and what he said at the end of his presidency and afterward.

    It also comes amid an escalation of activity in Smith’s other Trump probe, looking into the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and efforts to impede the transfer of power following the 2020 election.

    Smith issued a subpoena in that investigation to former Vice President Mike Pence in recent days, seeking documents and testimony. Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien also received a subpoena, as CNN first reported.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • What to know about the lawsuit aiming to ban medication abortion drug mifepristone | CNN Politics

    What to know about the lawsuit aiming to ban medication abortion drug mifepristone | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    A federal judge may rule later this month on a lawsuit seeking to block the use of medication abortion nationwide, in the biggest abortion-related case since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.

    The lawsuit, filed in November by anti-abortion advocates against the US Food and Drug Administration, targets the agency’s 20-year-old approval of mifepristone, the first drug in the medication abortion process

    Medication abortion, which now makes up a majority of abortions obtained in the US, has become a particularly acute flashpoint in the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision last year overturning Roe v. Wade.

    US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, has extended the briefing deadline in the case until February 24.

    Reproductive rights advocates say that if Kacsmaryk sides with the plaintiffs, “it would eliminate the most commonly used method of abortion care,” according to NARAL Pro-Choice America.

    Here’s what to know about the lawsuit:

    The lawsuit, filed last year by a coalition of anti-abortion national medical associations under the umbrella of the “Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine” and several doctors, is seeking a number of actions by the court, chief among them a preliminary and permanent injunction ordering the FDA “to withdraw mifepristone and misoprostol as FDA-approved chemical abortion drugs and to withdraw defendants’ actions to deregulate these chemical abortion drugs.”

    “After two decades of engaging the FDA to no avail, plaintiffs now ask this court to do what the FDA was and is legally required to do: protect women and girls by holding unlawful, setting aside, and vacating the FDA’s actions to approve chemical abortion drugs and eviscerate crucial safeguards for those who undergo this dangerous drug regimen,” the complaint reads.

    The FDA responded to the lawsuit last month by asking the judge to deny the motion for a preliminary injunction, arguing that issuing one in the matter “would upend the status quo and the reliance interests of patients and doctors who depend on mifepristone, as well as businesses involved with mifepristone distribution.”

    The agency also says a ruling against it would set a dangerous precedent.

    “More generally, if longstanding FDA drug approvals were so easily enjoined, even decades after being issued, pharmaceutical companies would be unable to confidently rely on FDA approval decisions to develop the pharmaceutical-drug infrastructure that Americans depend on to treat a variety of health conditions,” the FDA wrote.

    “A preliminary injunction would interfere with Congress’s decision to entrust FDA with responsibility to ensure the safety and efficacy of drugs. In discharging this role, FDA applies its technical expertise to make complex scientific determinations about drugs’ safety and efficacy, and these determinations are entitled to substantial deference.”

    Danco, which makes mifepristone, also made a similar request to the FDA’s in a court filing, stressing that the lawsuit could decimate the company’s business.

    “Danco is a small pharmaceutical company. It sells one drug: Mifeprex,” lawyers for the company wrote in court papers. “Entering the mandatory preliminary injunction plaintiffs seek would force FDA to withdraw approval for Danco’s only product, effectively shuttering Danco’s business.”

    “Congress entrusts decision-making like this with the FDA. And they’re coming in trying to overrule that, saying this medication is unsafe because women bleed. Well, that’s part of having an abortion. It’s also part of having a pregnancy,” said Ryan Brown, an attorney representing Danco in the case. “The bottom line being that they just want to do away with abortion across the board and for any reason.”

    Kacsmaryk was appointed to the court in 2017 by then-President Trump and was confirmed by a 52-46 vote in 2019.

    Since then, he’s helped make Texas a legal graveyard for policies of President Joe Biden’s administration, presiding over 95% of the civil cases brought in Amarillo, Texas.

    In December, Kacsmaryk put on hold the Biden administration’s most recent attempt to end the so-called “Remain in Mexico” program. And he has overseen Texas cases challenging vaccine mandates, the gender identity guidance issued by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the administration’s limits on the use of Covid-19 relief funds for tax cuts.

    Before joining the court, Kacsmaryk served as deputy general counsel at the First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit religious liberty legal group, where he worked mainly on “religious liberty litigation in federal courts and amicus briefs in the US Supreme Court,” according to his White House biography.

    The case is being closely watched by a number of interested parties, including Republican and Democratic state attorneys general. On Friday, two different multi-state coalitions filed amicus briefs with the court urging them to act one way or another in the matter.

    A coalition of 22 Democratic attorneys general urged Kacsmaryk to deny the motion for a preliminary injunction, writing in court papers that “annulling – or even merely limiting – any of the FDA’s actions relating to medication abortion would result in an even more drastic reduction in abortion access across the entire nation, worsening already dire outcomes, deepening entrenched disparities in access to health care, and placing a potentially unbearable strain on the health care system as a whole.”

    And a coalition of 22 Republican attorneys general asked the court to issue the preliminary injunction, arguing the FDA exceeded its authority when it approved the medication.

    “State laws on chemical abortion thus account for the public interests at issue – and they do so with the benefit of democratic legitimacy (and legal authority). The FDA’s actions can make no such claim. By obstructing the judgments of elected representatives, the agency has undermined the public interest,” they wrote.

    Abortion rights advocates have sounded the alarm on the case, stressing that a ruling by Kacsmaryk in favor of the plaintiffs would affect every corner of the country since the lawsuit is targeting a federal agency.

    “If FDA approval of mifepristone is revoked, 64.5 million women of reproductive age in the US would lose access to medication abortion care, an exponential increase in harm overnight,” NARAL said in a statement on Friday, pointing to internal research.

    “This research reveals the high stakes of this lawsuit, and we can only expect the worst from this Trump-appointed federal judge. Americans want access to abortion, but anti-choice bad actors are dead set on restricting reproductive freedom by any means possible,” said Angela Vasquez-Giroux, the group’s vice president of communications and research.

    And activists are mobilizing in Texas around the issue, with the Women’s March planning to hold a rally at the federal courthouse in Amarillo, Texas, on Saturday.

    “We’ve said it before: the fight for reproductive rights now lies in the states, and legal challenges like these are just the latest example of how our fight is bigger than Roe,” said Rachel Carmona, the executive director of Women’s March.

    On Thursday, Kacsmaryk told the plaintiffs that they had until February 24 to respond to a recent filing by the Danco, writing in an order that following the deadline, “briefing will then be closed on the matter, absent any ‘exceptional or extraordinary circumstances.’”

    On Friday, the plaintiffs in the case submitted one response to the FDA’s filing. But the deadline extension means that after the plaintiffs submit a separate response to Danco, the case is ripe for judgment since all required briefings will have been filed.

    Kacsmaryk can rule at any time after that, though he could also call for a hearing, or ask for additional responses as well.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Fact check: Breaking down Biden’s exchanges with Republican senators over Social Security and Medicare | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Breaking down Biden’s exchanges with Republican senators over Social Security and Medicare | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden has gone on the attack over Social Security and Medicare.

    In speeches and tweets this week, Biden and his White House have singled out particular Republican senators – notably including Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin – over proposals from those senators that could affect the retirement and health care programs.

    The Republican senators have responded forcefully, accusing Biden of deceiving the public about where they stand. Here is a fact-check of the exchanges.

    Biden and his White House targeted Lee on Wednesday over a video clip of Lee saying, “I’m here right now to tell you one thing that you probably have never heard from a politician. It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up by the roots and get rid of it.” The clip has gone viral on Twitter this week; a second viral clip features Lee saying moments later, “Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort and need to be pulled up.”

    The videos are authentic, though Biden didn’t tell his Wednesday speech audience in Wisconsin they are from more than 12 years ago – an event in 2010, when Lee was running for the Senate but before he was first elected. And as Lee noted in Wednesday tweets responding to Biden, Biden didn’t mention that Lee added at the same 2010 event that current Medicare beneficiaries should have their benefits “left untouched” and that “the next layer beneath them, those who will retire in the next few years, also probably have to be held harmless.”

    Still, while Biden could have included more context, he was accurate in saying Lee had called for Social Security to be phased out.

    And while Lee said in a tweeted statement on Wednesday that, during his 12 years as a senator, he has not called for “abolishing” Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits, only for “solutions to improve those programs and move them toward solvency,” he has supported benefit cuts. For example, he has endorsed various proposals over the years to raise the Social Security retirement age.

    Since last year, Biden has criticized Scott over particular components of what Scott calls his “12 Point Plan to Rescue America.”

    In the State of the Union address on Tuesday and in speeches on Wednesday and Thursday, the president referred to a part of Scott’s plan that says, “All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” Biden correctly asserted that “all federal legislation” would include Social Security and Medicare, which do not currently require congressional re-approval.

    Scott responded by accusing Biden of being dishonest and confused. Scott argued on Twitter on Wednesday that while his plan does say that “all” federal legislation should sunset in five years and become subject to a new vote by Congress, “This is clearly & obviously an idea aimed at dealing with ALL the crazy new laws our Congress has been passing of late.”

    But the plan itself doesn’t say that.

    The plan’s official text, which remains online on a dedicated website, says “all federal legislation,” period, should be sunset in five years – not all recent legislation, all crazy legislation or all legislation except for the laws that created Social Security and Medicare. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected Scott’s plan last year, McConnell too said that the plan “sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years.”

    Last year, Biden sometimes overstated the support for Scott’s sunset proposal among congressional Republicans, which appears very limited. Biden has been more precise in his speeches this week, attributing the proposal to Scott himself or accurately saying in the State of the Union that “some” Republicans – “I’m not saying it’s a majority” – support it.

    Biden may have created an inaccurate impression, however, by mentioning the sunset proposal during the section of the State of the Union in which he discussed the battle over the debt ceiling. There is no indication that House Republicans are pushing this proposal as part of the current debt ceiling negotiations with the Biden administration, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has, more generally, said cuts to Social Security and Medicare are “off the table” in these negotiations.

    Scott, in turn, has tossed a false claim into the debate with Biden this week by repeatedly accusing the president of having cut billions from Medicare in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. The Inflation Reduction Act did not cut Medicare benefits; rather, it allowed the government and seniors to spend less money to buy prescription drugs – and, in fact, simultaneously made Medicare benefits more generous to seniors. The claim of a Medicare cut was repeatedly debunked last year, when Scott and a Republican campaign organization he chaired used it during the midterm elections.

    On Friday afternoon, the day after McConnell told a Kentucky radio station that Scott’s proposal will be a “challenge” for Scott’s own 2024 re-election campaign in a state with a large population of seniors, Scott announced he is introducing a new bill that would make it more difficult for Congress to make any cuts to Social Security and Medicare and that would send the Inflation Reduction Act’s $80 billion in Internal Revenue Service funding to Social Security and Medicare instead.

    This week and in numerous previous speeches, Biden has castigated Johnson for saying last year that Medicare and Social Security should be treated as discretionary spending, which Congress has to approve every year, rather than as permanent entitlements.

    Biden has accurately cited Johnson’s remarks this week. Here’s what Johnson told a Green Bay radio show in August: “We’ve got to turn everything into discretionary spending, so it’s all evaluated, so that we can fix problems or fix programs that are broken, that are going to be going bankrupt. Because, again, as long as things are on automatic pilot, we just continue to pile up debt.” When Johnson faced criticism for those remarks at the time, he stood by them and said that was his consistent longtime position.

    Johnson, however, claimed Wednesday that Biden was “lying” when the president discussed Johnson’s comments shortly after saying that some Republicans want to “cut” Social Security. Johnson has repeatedly said that his proposal to require annual approval for Social Security spending, and to “fix” and “save” Social Security in light of its poor fiscal shape at present, does not mean that he wants to put the programs on the “chopping block” or even to “cut” it.

    “The Democrats have been accusing me, since the first time I ran for office, of wanting to end Social Security, wanting to cut it, wanting to gut it, wanting to – I’ve never said that. I’ve always been consistent: I want to save it,” he said in a radio interview this week.

    It’s impossible to definitively fact-check this particular dispute without Johnson specifying how he wants to “fix” and “save” the program. His office did not respond to a CNN request for comment.

    White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates noted in an email to reporters on Thursday that, though Johnson accused Biden this week of lying about his stance on Social Security, Johnson also said in interviews this week that Social Security is a “legal Ponzi scheme” and that “Social Security might be in a more stable position for younger workers” if the government had proceeded with Republican President George W. Bush’s controversial and eventually abandoned proposal in the mid-2000s to allow workers born after 1949 to divert a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes into private accounts in which they could buy into the stock market and make other investments.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • ‘This is a lie’: Sinema’s office denies Santos’ account of friendly exchange during State of Union | CNN Politics

    ‘This is a lie’: Sinema’s office denies Santos’ account of friendly exchange during State of Union | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Freshman Rep. George Santos of New York, who has been caught lying extensively about major parts of his life story, may have just been caught in another lie – this time by a United States senator.

    The embattled House Republican, describing his tense encounter with GOP Sen. Mitt Romney ahead of Tuesday’s State of the Union address, claimed he received some positive words of encouragement from Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona independent.

    “Kyrsten Sinema as she was walking by, the senator from Arizona, she said something to the effect of ‘hang in there buddy’ or something like that,” Santos told Newsmax.

    “I said ‘Thank you, madam senator,’” Santos said during the interview. “She was very polite, very kind-hearted as I’ve learned to see her. She’s a good person, unlike Mr. Romney.”

    Sinema’s office made clear on Friday there is no truth to that claim.

    “This is a lie,” Sinema spokeswoman Hannah Hurley told CNN.

    Footage from that night shows Sinema walking in front of Romney as the Utah Republican passes by Santos. Santos appears to turn and speak to Sinema while Romney is talking. While Sinema turned to Santos, the senator’s spokeswoman said her boss and the congressman didn’t speak.

    Romney, on the other hand, didn’t hold back when he saw Santos.

    ‘You don’t belong here’: See tense confrontation between Romney and Santos

    “You don’t belong here,” he told Santos on the floor. He later confirmed the exchange and attacked the New York freshman over his litany of lies, telling reporters that Santos should resign from Congress if he “had any shame at all.” Romney also bashed Santos’ decision to stand in the center aisle where he would get maximum exposure on television during President Joe Biden’s address to Congress.

    “He should be sitting in the back row and staying quiet instead of parading in front of the president and people coming into the room,” Romney told reporters.

    Speaking to reporters the next day, Santos attacked Romney.

    “I think it’s reprehensible that the senator would say such a thing to me in the demeaning way he said,” Santos said. “It wasn’t very Mormon of him.”

    Romney declined to respond.

    “I don’t have any comment on that,” Romney told CNN on Thursday. “I’ve said all I’m going to say on the topic.”

    Santos faces multiple investigations over his finances and repeated lies about his resume and biography. Federal investigators are examining his finances and the New York freshman is expected to face an investigation from the House Ethics Committee.

    House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has so far not called on Santos to resign, but Santos has voluntarily stepped down from two House committees even though McCarthy and his allies initially awarded him the spots.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Washington forges rare political unity in condemning China over balloon drama | CNN Politics

    Washington forges rare political unity in condemning China over balloon drama | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    China’s audacious spy balloon flight across North America has spectacularly backfired by enshrining rare bipartisan unity in Washington.

    The coming together of Republicans and Democrats is certain to stiffen future US strategic, economic and military resolve in the Pacific region and further damage buckled relations with Beijing.

    The fierce congressional reaction to the balloon and the US government’s disclosure of intelligence about it and China’s balloon espionage program, meanwhile, threatened to further damage the world’s most crucial diplomatic relationship – especially after China hit back by accusing the US of being the world’s most gratuitous spy state.

    The unanimity of American anger toward China was exemplified by a House resolution condemning China that passed by a stunning 419-0 margin. It followed a growing realization in Washington, and more broadly across the country, that a long-predicted geopolitical confrontation may now be a reality.

    But despite the united political front in Washington, fury is boiling in both parties over the failure to down the balloon before it traversed the continent amid rising questions about the implications of China’s breach of US airspace. Administration officials faced a gauntlet of criticism from lawmakers during a classified briefing on the issue on Thursday. And Republicans stepped up efforts to brand President Joe Biden as weak over the incursion despite his warning to President Xi Jinping in his State of the Union address earlier this week that he would vigorously defend US sovereignty.

    This growing discord threatens to so politicize China policy that it will drain any efforts to defuse an escalating Cold War. The Biden administration wants to pursue those efforts despite the tensions caused by the balloon crisis.

    There’s also a risk that Republican efforts to leverage the drama for domestic political gain could bust unity over policy toward America’s giant Pacific rival. Such a partisan split would ironically deliver a greater payoff for China’s communist rulers than any information picked up by the balloon over the US.

    The unanimous House vote on the incident had not been assured. It required Republican leaders to omit language critical of Biden and followed unusual bipartisan cooperation fostered by Texas Rep. Mike McCaul, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the top Democrat on the panel, New York Rep. Gregory Meeks. The resolution describes the balloon flight as a brazen violation of US sovereignty. McCaul said the bipartisan nature of the vote was critical and called on everyone to stand together against a “common enemy.”

    “We wanted it to be America against China – not internal fighting, because China would see that as a moment of weakness, that we’re divided on party lines, and we didn’t want to project that,” McCaul told CNN.

    This strong signal sent to Beijing raises the possibility that the spy balloon mission has demonstrably hurt China’s interests – especially if it results in a bipartisan zeal to increase defense spending, the size of US arms and equipment packages to allow Taiwan to defend against a possible Chinese attack and more resources to US allies.

    While there is agreement on the challenge now posed by China, there was mystification and some anger elsewhere in Congress on Thursday, even as officials held classified briefings and the FBI pushed forward on its effort to evaluate intelligence from the remains of the balloon salvaged from the Atlantic after it was shot down on Saturday.

    In a Senate hearing, Democrats as well as Republicans, criticized Defense Department officials and questioned why they did not tell Americans more once the balloon was spotted.

    “You guys have to help me understand why this baby wasn’t taken out long before,” said Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat who could be facing a tough reelection next year. The balloon floated above his state, which hosts US missile installations. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski was furious that the Chinese balloon crossed her state. “As an Alaskan, I am so angry,” Murkowski said. “If you’re going to have Russia coming at you, if you’re going to have China coming at you, we know exactly how they come. They come up and they go over Alaska.”

    Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, said he understood why the White House might have kept China’s balloon program classified but added, “We all understand that some of the desire to keep things classified, it has to do with not wanting to disclose to the public things that might be inconvenient politically for the department.” The White House has previously explained that it waited until the balloon was off the Carolinas to shoot it down based on Pentagon advice that doing so before could endanger lives and property on the ground. Officials also said they took steps to ensure it was not an intelligence threat as it wafted across the country.

    But some Republicans are accusing the White House of a cover-up that they think exposes Biden as feckless and unfit to be commander-in-chief as he eyes reelection, despite his strong role in standing up to Russia over Ukraine.

    “I think the public, and Congress, would never have known about this if the Billings, Montana, paper hadn’t published a picture that showed the balloon and US assets tracking the balloon. I think their plan was clearly to keep this a secret,” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley told CNN after a classified briefing.

    “The United States was grossly unprepared, this administration was grossly unprepared, and frankly I think it was a huge mistake for them not to take down the balloon before it entered the continental United States,” Hawley added.

    While the House vote on the resolution condemning China was unanimous, many Republicans used the debate before the resolution passed to lacerate the Biden administration.

    “We watched in real time from our backyards and workplaces as a foreign aircraft equipped with spyware navigated over our neighborhoods, our military installations and our vital infrastructure,” said Missouri GOP Rep. Ann Wagner, the vice chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

    “The administration again showed the dictatorship in Beijing that they could again be bullied. President Biden’s weakness and indecision sends a dangerous signal to our adversaries like Iran and Russia and North Korea.”

    Still, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney said he came away from the classified briefing more confident in the administration.

    “I believe that the administration, the president, our military and intelligence agencies, acted skillfully and with care,” Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, said.

    Besides the classified briefings, Biden administration officials divulged new information about the balloon to the public Thursday, some of it gleaned by flybys by U-2 spy planes before it was downed. A senior State Department official said the balloon had been capable of conducting signals intelligence collection – or intelligence gathered by electronic means – and was part of a fleet that had flown over “more than 40 countries across five continents.”

    Beijing is likely to be irked by more details being made public about its balloon program, as evidenced by comments by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning in a briefing Thursday.

    “I am not aware of any ‘fleet of balloons,’” Mao said. “That narrative is probably part of the information and public opinion warfare the US has waged on China. As to who is the world’s number one country of spying, eavesdropping and surveillance, that is plainly visible to the international community,” she added.

    Lawmakers were told Thursday that the order to send the balloon was dispatched without Xi’s knowledge, sources familiar with Hill briefings said. But the idea Xi was unaware of balloon “is the working theory and an ongoing intelligence gap,” a source briefed on the matter said.

    Intelligence experts in the United States have been perplexed at the political furor stoked by a mere balloon – a comparatively unsophisticated asset that pales in significance compared to multi-pronged Chinese intelligence operations against the United States including economic, cyber and traditional espionage. Indeed, the US mounts a similarly broad collection mission against China, which was exposed when a Chinese jet fighter collided with a US spy plane in international airspace over the South China Sea in 2001.

    But the balloon flight, over US territory, has had a symbolic impact greater than that so far generated amid years of building tensions with China, including over Taiwan.

    “I would never have imagined that my Saturday afternoon would have been disrupted due to a Chinese spy balloon not – only that floated across most of South Carolina, it floated across the entire continental United States,” said freshman Republican Rep. Russell Fry whose South Carolina district contains coastal areas where the balloon was shot down.

    “It does – if you watch it, and you were there on the ground – sound like it was straight out of a sci-fi movie,” he said on the House floor, blasting the Biden administration for negligence and bemoaning an international incident that unfolded off the shores of Myrtle Beach.

    In the Senate, the dramatic events of the past week have caused a reassessment of years of US-China policy, which has seen efforts by the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations to try to usher China peacefully into the global economy degenerate into a brewing confrontation in the Trump and Biden administrations.

    Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman said at a hearing that the Biden administration did not “see another Cold War, but we do ask everyone to play by the same set of rules.”

    The problem, however, is that China interprets such US calls as an attempt to thwart what it sees as its rightful rise as a regional and global superpower. Sherman argued that US policy in the 21st century designed to head off confrontation had not failed, but that conditions in China had changed.

    “Xi Jinping is not the Xi Jinping of the 1990’s that we all thought we knew,” Sherman told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. She added that China under Xi was “the only country that wants to change that rules-based order, that can successfully do so and are trying to make that happen.”

    “It is true that our way of life, our democracy, our belief in our values, in the rules-based international order is being challenged,” she continued. “And we have to meet that challenge.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Pence subpoenaed by special counsel investigating Trump | CNN Politics

    Pence subpoenaed by special counsel investigating Trump | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Former Vice President Mike Pence has been subpoenaed by the special counsel investigating Donald Trump and his role in January 6, 2021, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.

    Special counsel Jack Smith’s office is seeking documents and testimony related to January 6, the source said. They want the former vice president to testify about his interactions with Trump leading up to the 2020 election and the day of the attack on the US Capitol.

    The subpoena marks an important milestone in the Justice Department’s two-year criminal investigation, now led by the special counsel, into the efforts by Trump and allies to impede the transfer of power after he lost the 2020 election. Pence is an important witness who has detailed in a memoir some of his interactions with Trump in the weeks after the election, a move that likely opens the door for the Justice Department to override at least some of Trump’s claims of executive privilege.

    Pence’s attorney Emmet Flood is known as a hawk on executive privilege, and people familiar with the discussions have said Pence was expected to claim at least some limits on providing details of his direct conversations with Trump. Depending on his responses, prosecutors have the option to ask a judge to compel him to answer additional questions and override Trump’s executive privilege claims.

    ABC News first reported on the subpoena.

    Pence’s office declined to confirm he had been subpoenaed. A spokesman for the special counsel declined to comment to CNN on the matter.

    Months of negotiations preceded the subpoena to the former vice president, CNN has reported.

    Justice Department prosecutors had reached out to Pence’s representatives to seek his testimony in the criminal investigation, according to people familiar with the matter. Pence’s team had indicated he was open to discussing a possible agreement with DOJ to provide some testimony, one person said.

    That request occurred before the department appointed Smith to oversee two Trump-related investigations, the January 6-related probe and another into alleged mishandling of classified materials found at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

    In November, Pence published his memoir that detailed some of his interactions with Trump as the former president sought to overturn the results of his election loss to President Joe Biden. Pence and his team knew that the book’s publication would raise the prospect that the Justice Department would likely seek information about those interactions as part of its criminal investigation, people briefed on the matter told CNN.

    Pence rebuffed an interview request from the House select committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection, but allowed top aides to provide testimony in the House’s probe, as well as in the Justice Department’s criminal investigation. The DOJ successfully secured answers from top Pence advisers Greg Jacob and Marc Short in significant court victories that could make it more likely the criminal investigation reaches further into Trump’s inner circle.

    There are no plans for Trump’s team to challenge the grand jury subpoena of Pence at this time, according to a source familiar with its thinking. But it would still be possible for Trump to attempt to assert executive privilege over some conversations they had, if Pence declines to detail those conversations to the grand jury.

    So far, Trump’s team has lost those challenges when Pence’s deputies and two White House counsel’s office attorneys testified, following Chief Judge Beryl Howell’s rulings that they must answer questions they initially refused to because of confidentiality around the presidency.

    Howell’s tenure as chief judge of the DC District Court ends in mid-March, meaning a different federal judge, James Boasberg, could be the one to field privilege disputes in the continuing grand jury investigation.

    CNN reported earlier Thursday that Smith had also subpoenaed former Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien in both of the Trump-related probes, according to a source familiar with the matter. O’Brien has been asserting executive privilege in declining to provide some of the information that prosecutors are seeking from him, the source said.

    Trump’s former acting Department of Homeland Security secretary was separately interviewed by Justice Department lawyers in recent weeks as part of the probe into 2020 election interference, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

    Rather than appearing before a federal grand jury, former acting secretary Chad Wolf was interviewed under oath by Justice Department lawyers and FBI officials, something one of the sources characterized as a “standard” first step for prosecutors.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Republican AGs sue ATF over new rule regulating pistol-stabilizing braces | CNN Politics

    Republican AGs sue ATF over new rule regulating pistol-stabilizing braces | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    A coalition of primarily GOP-led led states sued the Biden administration Thursday in an effort to block a new federal rule that subjects pistol-stabilizing braces to additional regulations, including higher taxes, longer waiting periods and registration.

    The rule, announced earlier this year by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, went into effect on January 31. Gun control proponents have argued that stabilizing braces effectively transform a pistol into a short-barreled rifle, which is heavily regulated under the National Firearms Act.

    But in the lawsuit filed by 25 Republican state attorneys general, a Second Amendment advocacy coalition and two of its members, and a disabled gun owner who uses the stabilizing braces, the plaintiffs argue the regulations are “arbitrary and capricious” and are not covered by the 1934 law or the Gun Control Act of 1968.

    “The rule regulates pistols and other firearms equipped with stabilizing braces, even though the text, structure, history, and purpose of the NFA and GCA show that the statute does not regulate such weapons,” states the lawsuit, which names US Attorney General Merrick Garland, the ATF and its director as defendants.

    ATF declined to comment on the lawsuit. CNN has reached out to the Justice Department for comment on the suit.

    The coalition of states challenging the rule is led by West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who said Thursday during a news conference announcing the suit that the ATF’s new rule “is also another case of a federal agency not staying in its lane and doing the job the Constitution clearly delegates to Congress – writing laws.”

    “Let’s call this what it is: An effort to undermine Americans’ Second Amendment rights,” he said. “This is an egregious final rule turning millions of common firearms accessories into ‘short-barreled rifles.’ This is a completely nonsensical regulation.”

    According to the new rule, manufacturers, dealers and individual gun owners have 120 days to register tax-free any existing short-barreled rifles covered by the rule. They can also remove the stabilizing brace or surrender covered short-barreled rifles to the ATF, the agency said.

    Restrictions on stabilizing braces have been hotly debated after they were proposed by the ATF in 2020, when the bureau suggested a new rule that would regulate pistol braces under the NFA. The 2020 proposal sparked a major backlash from groups such as the National Rifle Association.

    The regulations challenged on Thursday were given new life in 2021 after pistols with stabilizing braces were used in mass shootings in Boulder, Colorado, and in Dayton, Ohio. At the time, Garland unveiled several proposals aimed at curbing gun violence, including reupping the restriction on pistol braces.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • US officials disclosed new details about the balloon’s capabilities. Here’s what we know | CNN Politics

    US officials disclosed new details about the balloon’s capabilities. Here’s what we know | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Biden administration officials disclosed new information Thursday about the capabilities of the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that traversed the United States last week and what they are learning as the FBI begins analyzing the recovered parts after the balloon was shot down Saturday.

    US officials also detailed what they’ve discovered about the broader spying operation they say the Chinese government has undertaken using a fleet of high-altitude surveillance balloons across the globe.

    But senior Biden officials faced pointed questions on Capitol Hill from lawmakers in public hearings and classified briefings as Congress is demanding more information about why the balloon wasn’t shot down sooner.

    A senior State Department official said Thursday that the balloon “was capable of conducting signals intelligence collection operations” and was part of a fleet that had flown over “more than 40 countries across five continents.”

    The Biden administration has determined that the Chinese balloon was operating with electronic surveillance technology capable of monitoring US communications, according to the official.

    “We know the PRC used these balloons for surveillance,” the official said. “High-resolution imagery from U-2 flybys revealed that the high-altitude balloon was capable of conducting signals intelligence collection operations.”

    Signals intelligence refers to information that is gathered by electronic means – things like communications and radars.

    Lawmakers were told Thursday that the order to send the balloon was dispatched without Chinese President Xi Jinping’s knowledge, sources familiar with the briefing said.

    The FBI has started its initial stages of evaluating the pieces of the balloon that were recovered and brought to the FBI lab in Quantico, Virginia for analysis, senior FBI officials said Thursday.

    Only evidence that was on the surface of the ocean has been delivered to FBI analysts so far, one official said, which includes the “canopy itself, the wiring, and then a very small amount of electronics.” The official said analysts have not yet seen the “payload,” which is where you would expect to see the “lion’s share” of electronics.

    The officials added that understanding the components of the balloon is vital intelligence and could be “important pieces of evidence for future criminal charges that could be brought.”

    Despite the latest revelations about the capabilities of the spy balloon, the Pentagon has insisted since the vessel was first acknowledged publicly that it does not give China capabilities above and beyond what they already have from spy satellites or other means.

    “We did not assess that it presented a significant collection hazard beyond what already exists in actionable technical means from the Chinese,” said Gen. Glenn VanHerck, the commander of US Northern Command and NORAD, on Monday.

    Administration officials from the Pentagon, State Department and intelligence community briefed lawmakers on Capitol Hill Thursday on the balloon, which has prompted criticism from Republicans over allowing it to float across the US before it was shot down off the Atlantic coast.

    The officials told lawmakers that the US has assessed that little new intelligence was gleaned by the Chinese balloon operation because the Chinese appeared to stop transmitting information once the US learned of the balloon, in addition to US measures to protect sensitive intelligence from China’s spying operations, according to the sources.

    The US also believes what they have recovered from the shot-down balloon is beneficial to US intelligence, the sources said.

    Another source familiar with the briefings said officials said the balloon would give the Chinese better photos and signals collection than satellites, as well as a better ability to steer and hover longer over collection targets.

    The Biden officials told Congress that it’s still unclear what the motivation was for the flight of the balloon across the US, which prompted Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone his trip to China. One of the sources said that the US believes senior leadership of the People’s Liberation Army and Chinese Communist Party including Xi were also unaware, and the US believes the Chinese are still trying to figure out how this happened.

    In the classified congressional briefings, the administration officials argued that the US didn’t move earlier to shoot down the balloon in part over fears it could provoke an escalation of military tensions with China or even a military conflict. Biden gave the order to shoot down the balloon whenever the Pentagon felt it was safe to do so, the sources said, so the Pentagon ultimately made the call on when to shoot it down.

    The officials told lawmakers one of the reasons the balloon was not first shot down when it entered Alaskan airspace is that the waters there are cold and deep, making it less likely they could have recovered the balloon, according to the sources.

    The House briefing Thursday morning was tense, the sources said, with several Republicans railing against the administration, including GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who said that the Pentagon made the president – whom she noted she doesn’t like – look weak by their actions.

    In response, the briefers tried to lay out a detailed timeline of the actions, the sources said.

    “The Pentagon was telling us they were able to mitigate in real-time as this was taking place and I believe that’s accurate,” Rep. Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat, told CNN.”I believe the preeminent concern they had, as they expressed in real time, was the safety of US citizens.”

    After the briefing, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said it was wrong for the Biden administration to wait to shoot down the balloon.

    “They should have never let it into our sovereignty, they should have taken it another time,” McCarthy told CNN.

    But Republican Sen. Mitt Romney told CNN he believes the US made right decision to wait before shooting it down.

    “I believe that the administration, the president, our military and intelligence agencies, acted skillfully and with care. At the same time, their capabilities are extraordinarily impressive. Was everything done 100% correctly? I can’t imagine that would be the case of almost anything we do. But I came away more confident,” Romney said Thursday.

    Senators pushed defense officials at an Appropriations Committee hearing on Thursday over the military’s assessment of the Chinese surveillance, with Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana telling officials that he did not know how they could unequivocally say it was not a military threat.

    “You guys have to help me understand why this baby wasn’t taken out long before and because I am telling you that that this ain’t the last time. We’ve [seen] brief incursions, now we’ve seen a long incursion, what happens next?,” said Tester, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee.

    “We don’t understand because quite frankly, we have been briefed in his committee over and over and over again, about the risks that China poses, both economically and militarily,” he said. “China tends to push the envelope all the time until a line is set down.”“

    Pentagon officials said at the hearing that the Defense Department was not concerned about the balloon gathering intelligence over Alaska as it was not near sensitive sites.

    The balloon first crossed into US airspace over Alaska on January 28, Melissa Dalton, assistant secretary of defense for Homeland Defense and Hemispheric Affairs, said during the hearing. When the balloon was spotted, it was not determined to have “hostile intent,” Sims said, and officials did not believe it would impact aviation routes or present a significant intelligence gathering ability. That changed when the balloon began drifting over the lower 48 states, but while it was over Alaska, officials determined it was not over critical infrastructure.

    The House on Thursday passed a symbolic resolution condemning China’s surveillance balloon with a vote of 419 to zero.

    The FBI investigation into recovered balloon is the first of its kind in the bureau’s history, senior FBI officials familiar with the operation said Thursday as they described the initial stages and what’s been recovered so far.

    The officials said that this is the first time the FBI has investigated a spy balloon of this nature and assisted with the processing of such a scene. The officials added that understanding the components of the balloon is vital intelligence and could be “important pieces of evidence for future criminal charges that could be brought.”

    The parts of the balloon recovered on the surface of the ocean have been delivered so far, while recovering additional pieces of the balloon that sunk has been complicated by bad weather, officials said.

    It’s not yet clear where the balloon’s parts were manufactured, the officials said, including whether any of the pieces were made in America. Because analysts have yet to look at the bulk of the equipment on the balloon, the officials said that there has not been a determination as to everything the device was capable of doing and its specific intent.

    Of the small portion they have examined, analysts have not identified any sort of explosive or “offensive material” that would pose a danger to the American public.

    The FBI was alerted to the balloon on February 1, the officials said, because the intelligence community had determined that the balloon had an electronic element to it. By late Sunday – the day after the balloon was shot down – agents had arrived at the scene, and the first pieces of recovered evidence arrived at the FBI lab in Quantico on Monday.

    There was English writing on parts of the balloon that were found, one of the sources familiar with the congressional briefings said, though they were not high-tech components. The source declined to provide detail on what specific parts of the balloon contained English writing.

    Bloomberg News first reported that components of the balloon had English writing on them.

    The State Department official said the balloon was part of a Chinese fleet developed to conduct surveillance operations” with a manufacturer tied to China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the official added.

    The official suggested that the US is eyeing sanctions for the presence of the balloon in US airspace – which US officials have repeatedly called a violation of US sovereignty and international law – noting the US “will also explore taking action against PRC entities linked to the PLA that supported the balloon’s incursion into US airspace.”

    A recovery operation to secure debris from the balloon is ongoing with analysis continuing at an FBI laboratory in Virginia, but the officials’ remarks suggest the US has already established the balloon was operating with electronic surveillance technology.

    However, the US has said it has been able to prevent the balloon from intercepting US communications.

    “The high-altitude balloons’ equipment was clearly for intelligence surveillance and inconsistent with the equipment onboard weather balloons. It had multiple antennas to include an array likely capable of collecting and geo-locating communications. It was equipped with solar panels large enough to produce the requisite power to operate multiple active intelligence collection sensors,” the official added.

    “We could track the exact path of the balloon and ensure no activities or sensitive unencrypted comms would be conducted in its vicinity,” a senior administration official said this week. “The US military took immediate steps to protect against the balloon’s collection of sensitive information, mitigating any intelligence value to the PRC.”

    President Joe Biden suggested Wednesday that bilateral relations with China had not been affected by the balloon fallout, but China reacted angrily to the shootdown, refusing a call with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken canceled a high-stakes trip to Beijing on Friday. New sanctions in response to the balloon would likely further inflame tensions.

    “We know these balloons are all part of a PRC fleet of balloons developed to conduct surveillance operations. These kinds of activities are often undertaken at the direction of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA),” the senior State Department official added.

    China “has overflown these surveillance balloons over more than 40 countries across five continents,” the State Department official said, noting that “the Biden Administration is reaching out to countries directly about the scope of this program and answer any questions.”

    The official said that based on China’s “messaging and public comments, it’s clear that they have been scrambling to explain why they violated US sovereignty and still have no plausible explanation – and have found themselves on their heels.”

    “As we saw with the second balloon over Central and South America that they just acknowledged, they also have no explanation for why they violated the airspace of Central and South American countries,” the official said. “The PRC’s program will only continue to be exposed, making it harder for the PRC to use this program.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Rick Scott: From embattled health care executive to Biden’s top foil | CNN Politics

    Rick Scott: From embattled health care executive to Biden’s top foil | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Florida Sen. Rick Scott has emerged as Joe Biden’s top Republican foil in the days since the president’s State of the Union address, with the White House seizing on a year-old Scott proposal that even GOP leaders recognized at the time as politically toxic.

    As a spending fight looms in Washington and Biden moves toward his 2024 reelection bid, the White House is attempting to make Scott the poster child for the president’s accusations that Republicans are seeking to cut entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare.

    Scott has responded by accusing Biden of lying, airing a misleading ad that alleges Biden cut Medicare and lambasting the president in a barrage of television interviews.

    Biden traveled Thursday to Florida – where Scott was a health care executive and two-term governor – on the latest leg of his post-State of the Union tour.

    The trip was designed in part to stoke a fight with Scott after Biden in his speech Tuesday night seized on the first-term senator’s proposal to sunset all federal programs – including Social Security and Medicare – every five years unless Congress extends those programs.

    Biden’s assertion that some Republicans are seeking to change entitlement programs was met with jeers from Republican lawmakers, who have said spending cuts should be part of any proposal to raise the debt ceiling.

    The president continued pressing that message Wednesday in Wisconsin, telling union workers, “A lot of Republicans, their dream is to cut Social Security and Medicare.” He waved a pamphlet with Scott’s proposal as he spoke.

    Ahead of Biden’s speech Thursday in Tampa, White House aides placed copies of Scott’s proposal on every seat.

    In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Thursday, Scott said Biden has misrepresented the proposal he put forward ahead of the 2022 midterm elections while serving as head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of the Senate GOP.

    “Nobody believes that I want to cut Medicare or Social Security. I’ve never said it,” Scott said.

    Scott said his proposal is intended to eliminate wasteful spending and help ensure the government can “figure out how to start living within our means.”

    “I want to make sure we balance our budget and preserve Medicare and Social Security, and I’ve been clear all along. So what I want to do is get rid of wasteful programs that we never review up here,” he said.

    But Scott’s proposal would sunset all federal legislation – including the two entitlement programs – every five years and require Congress to pass them again.

    Long before he was a US senator, Scott had first-hand experience dealing with America’s federal health care programs – and it became the source of much criticism as he entered the political arena.

    In the 1980s, Scott founded Columbia Hospital Corporation by purchasing a pair of distressed Texas hospitals. He later merged his company with Hospital Corporation of America to create Columbia/HCA, becoming the largest for-profit hospital chain at the time and gaining notoriety on Wall Street for what appeared like cost-cutting in an industry with ballooning expenses.

    In 1997, federal agents unveiled a sweeping investigation into Columbia/HCA that would roil the company for years. On the day the FBI swooped in to seize records from 35 of its hospitals across six states, Scott shrugged off the probe. “It’s not a fun day, but … government investigations are a matter of fact today in health care,” he said on CNN.

    The investigation would unearth what the US Department of Justice later called the “largest health care fraud case in U.S. history.” According to a press release, Columbia/HCA schemed to defraud Medicare, Medicaid and TRICARE, the military’s health care program, of hundreds of millions of dollars. The company pleaded guilty to criminal conduct, including charges related to fraudulent Medicare billing and paying kickbacks to doctors, and it ultimately agreed to pay $1.7 billion in fines, damages and penalties.

    Scott was pushed out as CEO amid the turmoil. He was never charged with a crime, though much of the alleged financial abuses took place during his watch. His time in the corporate world made Scott a wealthy individual, which he would lean on in 2010 when he decided to kickstart a political career by entering the race for Florida governor.

    Scott’s time at the helm of Columbia/HCA was the subject of negative ads from both Republicans and Democrats, but he fended them off with a self-funded campaign that flooded the airwaves with a jobs-focused message. He told the St. Petersburg Times that “mistakes were made” at his former company and that he had “learned hard lessons,” but he also said during a debate that he was “proud of the company I built.” Regardless of the controversy, the little-known Scott defeated a GOP favorite for his party’s nomination, and Floridians narrowly elected him governor that fall.

    During his eight years leading Florida, Scott fought off attempts to extend safety net benefits to Floridians. He frequently challenged the Obama administration over the Affordable Care Act and blocked expansion of Medicaid in Florida. In his first year as governor, he signed a bill to cut unemployment payments and tied benefits to the state’s unemployment rate.

    Democrats continued to make Scott’s time at Columbia/HCA an issue, to no avail. Scott eked out a reelection victory in 2014. He then narrowly unseated longtime Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson in 2018 after spending more than $70 million of his own money on his campaign.

    Marching to the beat of his own drum, Scott declined to be sworn in with his class in January 2019. Instead, he waited until his term as governor had ended and flew to Washington for a separate ceremony. For a time, it made him the country’s most junior senator, but he nevertheless soon found himself in party leadership.

    Scott and other Republicans are aggressively pushing back against Biden’s assertions that the GOP is seeking to cut spending on entitlement programs.

    However, Republican leaders have long recognized Scott’s proposal to sunset all federal programs after five years as rocky political terrain.

    The tense relationship between Scott and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell burst into public view during the 2022 election cycle as Republicans sought to retake the Senate.

    Scott, as NRSC chairman, released a platform called “Rescue America,” which would have subjected all federally elected officials to a term limit of 12 years and closed the Department of Education, amid a slew of other initiatives. It would also have required millions of low-income and middle-class Americans to pay income taxes, which was later dropped in a revised version of the plan.

    And, in what Democrats immediately recognized as an opening to accuse Republicans of attempting to undercut popular programs, Scott’s plan proposed sunsetting all federal legislation in five years – unless Congress extended it.

    McConnell quickly disavowed Scott’s plan, seeking to make clear that the Florida senator did not speak for Senate Republicans.

    “Let me tell you what would not be a part of our agenda,” McConnell said at a news conference last March. “We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half the American people, and sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years.”

    Their frosty relationship did not improve as the 2022 election cycle continued, as the two battled over which candidates to support in primaries and in the general election, and Republicans ultimately fell short of winning a majority.

    After the election, Scott challenged McConnell for the top Senate Republican post but lost.

    The Florida senator said last week that he saw McConnell’s decision to remove him from the Senate Commerce Committee as retribution.

    “He didn’t like that I opposed him because I believe we have to have ideas – fight over ideas,” Scott said on “CNN This Morning.”

    When pressed Thursday by CNN’s Collins about why his proposal left open the opportunity for the government to cut funding for Social Security and Medicare, Scott repeatedly referenced a policy proposal from then-Sen. Biden in 1975 to sunset federal legislation periodically.

    Scott said Biden’s old proposal does less to protect entitlements for seniors than the senator’s plan from last year because “he proposed it year after year after year to reduce Medicare and Social Security. Year after year. I’ve never done that. I don’t believe in that.”

    Asked Thursday about the 1975 proposal mentioned by Scott, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “A bill from the 1970s is not part of the president’s agenda.”

    “The president ran on protecting Medicare and Social Security from cuts. And he reiterated that in the State of the Union,” she said.

    A new ad from Scott released this week in advance of the president’s visit to Florida says that “Joe Biden just cut $280 billion from Medicare” – a claim that was previously debunked when Scott and the NRSC made it in 2022.

    Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is expected to reduce Medicare prescription drug spending by the federal government by $237 billion, according to the most recent Congressional Budget Office estimate, because the law allows the government to spend less money to buy drugs from pharmaceutical companies and not because it cuts benefits to seniors enrolled in Medicare. The law makes Medicare’s prescription drug program substantially more generous to seniors while also saving them money.

    Scott, in his interview with Collins, also defended his recent call for Biden to resign, labeling him “a complete failure.” He said his resignation calls did not specifically stem from Biden’s use of his proposal as an avenue to attack Republicans but expressed his displeasure with the president’s repeated references to his plan.

    “He lies about what I want to get done, and I don’t appreciate it,” Scott said.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Supreme Court under fresh pressure to adopt code of ethics | CNN Politics

    Supreme Court under fresh pressure to adopt code of ethics | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    For decades, Supreme Court justices have dodged questions related to conflicts of interest by saying essentially “Trust us” or “We’re different.” They’ve refused to be bound by an official ethics code and grievance procedures that cover other federal judges.

    But mounting public pressure may finally spur changes. Court sources have told CNN that internal discussions, which date back at least to 2019, have been revived. The timing of any public resolution is uncertain, however, and it appears some justices have been more hopeful than others about reaching consensus.

    This week, in an action that demonstrates the intensifying national concern over the justices’ behavior, the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates approved a resolution urging the high court to adopt a binding code of ethics “comparable” to the code in place for lower-court US judges.

    Unlike liberal groups that have been pounding on the justices to establish ethics rules, neither the ABA nor its policy-making House of Delegates is known for criticizing the high court. The 591-member House of Delegates is more associated with establishment positions than flamethrowing advocacy.

    Separately, members of Congress on Thursday re-introduced legislation that would lead to a code of ethics for Supreme Court justices. A similar bill failed last year, but lawmakers say the increasing public criticism could give the legislation more traction.

    The current accelerated scrutiny of the justices’ extracurricular behavior arises against a backdrop of rulings that have broken norms. The conservative majority has been more willing than prior courts to jettison decades of precedent, most startlingly in last June’s decision reversing the 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion rights landmark. More recently, the court’s stature has been undermined by the early leak of the Dobbs opinion that overturned Roe and other security lapses.

    Together, the substance of cases and refusal to address ethics issues evoke an unaccountable court that will rule as it wishes and act as it wants, without regard for public concern.

    New York University law professor Stephen Gillers believes the court’s standing has been diminished by its reluctance to address ethical concerns.

    “There’s almost no willingness to engage with the repeated call from various venues, and now the ABA,” Gillers said, calling the court’s lack of response “incredible, tone-deaf,” and adding, “I think that has hurt the court’s reputation.”

    Growing criticism of America’s top court, including from members of Congress seeking accountability, could cause the justices to finally act. They previously worked behind the scenes to formalize ethics rules, but the effort stalled. In 2019, Justice Elena Kagan, commenting publicly on the negotiations over a code of ethics, told a US House committee that discussions were underway. “It’s something that is being thought very seriously about,” Kagan said.

    Court sources told CNN that internal discussions have continued and that some justices hope a code might be crafted in due course.

    The justices rarely address recusal, that is, why they decide to sit out a case or are hearing one that critics say could pose a conflict. Their disclosure filings include limited information about their finances, those of their spouses and various reimbursements for travel.

    Activities of spouses have spurred more questions regarding recusals, particularly related to Justice Clarence Thomas. He resolved cases with his colleagues arising from former President Donald Trump’s failed 2020 reelection bid, as his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, worked with White House allies to challenge Joe Biden’s victory.

    Neither Justice Thomas nor Chief Justice John Roberts responded to press inquiries about potential conflicts when information about Ginni Thomas’ activities became public through the US House investigation into the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol.

    Ginni Thomas’ lawyer, Mark Paoletta, suggested in testimony last year before a US House subcommittee that the Supreme Court could continue with the current practice of consulting with, rather than formally following, existing code that covers lower-court judges. During an April 2022 hearing titled “Building Confidence in the Supreme Court through ethics and Recusal reforms,” Paoletta said: “There is nothing wrong with ethics and recusals at the Supreme Court. The justices are ethical and honorable public servants. Moreover, to support any reform legislation right now would be to validate this vicious political attack on the Supreme Court.”

    The Supreme Court’s public information office declined to comment Thursday.

    NYU’s Gillers, who focuses on legal and judicial ethics, traces some of today’s criticism of the court’s ethics to America’s enduring abortion wars and the June decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

    “It’s hard for a lot of people to understand why Roe could be overturned simply because the composition of the court changed,” he said. “Why now, after nearly 49 years of Republicans and Democrats supporting Roe?”

    The reversal, indeed, followed the addition of the new Trump appointees to the court.

    Yet Gillers said the justices’ off-bench behavior and their enduring lack of a formal code of ethics are rightfully being scrutinized and affect the court’s stature.

    The court’s legitimacy has been increasingly debated, even publicly among the justices, since the Dobbs ruling.

    When the ABA House of Delegates voted on its resolution in New Orleans on Monday, an accompanying report said, “The absence of a clearly articulated, binding code of ethics for the justices of the Court imperils the legitimacy of the Court. More than that, this absence potentially imperils the legitimacy of all American courts and the American judicial system, given the Court’s central role enshrined in our federal republic.”

    The nine justices are covered by a federal law dictating that jurists disqualify themselves from a case when their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” but they are exempted from the federal judicial channels for resolving complaints and lack a specific ethics code governing their activities.

    So, for example in 2018, more than 80 complaints filed against US appeals court Judge Brett Kavanaugh, arising from his tumultuous Supreme Court nomination hearings, were summarily dismissed after the Senate confirmed him as a justice.

    US appeals court Judge Timothy Tymkovich, who wrote the judicial council’s dismissal of those complaints, referred to the 1980 judicial conduct law that excludes the nine justices.

    “The allegations contained in the complaints are serious,” he said, “but the Judicial Council is obligated to adhere to the Act. Lacking statutory authority to do anything more, the complaints must be dismissed because an intervening event – Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court – has made the complaints no longer appropriate for consideration under the Act.”

    As he introduced new legislation Thursday, Sen. Dick Durbin, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that “the Supreme Court of the Unites States ought to be the embodiment of objectivity.”

    “Congress must close the inexcusable ‘Supreme Court loophole’ in federal judicial ethics rules by creating and enforcing a code of ethics for Supreme Court Justices,” the Illinois Democrat said.

    Among the provisions in the proposed “Supreme Court Ethics Act” are those that would require the Judicial Conference of the United States, a policy-making arm of the federal judiciary, to craft a code that would apply to the justices and, separately, would direct the Supreme Court itself to appoint an ethics investigations counsel to handle public complaints about potentially unethical conduct by the justices.

    In 2011, Roberts explained some of the factors that allowed the high court to be shielded from strictures related to recusals.

    “Lower court judges can freely substitute for one another,” Roberts wrote in an annual year-end report. “If an appeals court or district court judge withdraws from a case, there is another federal judge who can serve in that recused judge’s place. But the Supreme Court consists of nine Members who always sit together, and if a Justice withdraws from a case, the Court must sit without its full membership. A Justice accordingly cannot withdraw from a case as a matter of convenience or simply to avoid controversy.”

    He also said that the Supreme Court “does not sit in judgment of one of its own Members’ decision whether to recuse in the course of deciding a case.”

    At the time of Roberts’ 2011 statement, outside critics were questioning whether Thomas and Kagan should sit on the first major dispute over the Affordable Care Act – Thomas because of his wife’s opposition to the 2010 health care law and Kagan because of her prior work in the Obama administration.

    Without addressing those justices directly, Roberts wrote, “I have complete confidence in the capability of my colleagues to determine when recusal is warranted. They are jurists of exceptional integrity and experience whose character and fitness have been examined through a rigorous appointment and confirmation process.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • First on CNN: Trump’s former national security adviser subpoenaed in special counsel probes of classified documents, January 6 | CNN Politics

    First on CNN: Trump’s former national security adviser subpoenaed in special counsel probes of classified documents, January 6 | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Former national security adviser Robert O’Brien has been subpoenaed by special counsel Jack Smith in both his investigation into classified documents found at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and the probe related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to a source familiar with the matter.

    O’Brien has been asserting executive privilege in declining to provide some of the information that prosecutors are seeking from him, the source said.

    CNN has reached out to O’Brien for comment.

    O’Brien considered resigning from his post over Trump’s response to the violence on January 6, 2021, but ultimately decided to remain in the job, CNN previously reported. The National Security Council should have been involved in the handling of classified documents at end of the Trump presidency, and O’Brien may have knowledge of how those records ended up at Mar-a-Lago.

    Separately, Trump’s former acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf was interviewed by Justice Department lawyers in recent weeks as part of the ongoing special counsel investigation related to 2020 election interference, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

    Rather than appearing before a federal grand jury, Wolf was interviewed under oath by Justice Department lawyers and FBI officials, something one of the sources characterized as a “standard” first step for prosecutors.

    Wolf declined to comment on his recent interview with federal investigators, which was first reported by Bloomberg. A spokesman for Smith also declined to comment.

    The interview comes after Wolf’s former deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, testified last month before a federal grand jury as part of Smith’s election interference probe. When Cuccinelli was asked at the time whether privilege claims arose, he said: “They did, and I didn’t say anything.”

    O’Brien, Wolf and Cuccinelli were previously interviewed by the House select committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection.

    For the time being, Smith has not sought testimony from a handful of other potentially relevant Trump administration officials, including former Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller or former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, two other sources tell CNN.

    In the days after the January 6 attack, Wolf urged Trump and all elected officials to condemn the violence on Capitol Hill, calling what transpired “tragic and sickening.”

    “While I have consistently condemned political violence on both sides of the aisle, specifically violence directed at law enforcement, we now see some supporters of the President using violence as a means to achieve political ends,” Wolf said at the time. “This is unacceptable.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Southwest explains its meltdown to Congress | CNN Business

    Southwest explains its meltdown to Congress | CNN Business

    [ad_1]


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Congress is receiving new evidence Thursday of internal chaos at Southwest Airlines over the Christmas holiday meltdown.

    The Senate Commerce committee is questioning Southwest executive Andrew Watterson, alongside Southwest pilot union president Casey Murray, Sharon Pinkerton of the Airlines for America trade group, Paul Hudson of Flyers’ Rights, and economist Clifford Winston of The Brookings Institution.

    The pilots’ union characterized the operation as held together by “duct tape,” while Southwest’s chief operating officer is apologized and said the airline “is intensely focused on reducing the risk of repeating the operational disruption.”

    Among the union’s evidence is a message sent during the meltdown to a cockpit computer from the airline’s dispatchers asking what crew is onboard the plane.

    “Sched is asking to confirm who is operating this flight,” the message read. “Pls send emp numbers to confirm. It’s a mess down here.”

    A photograph of the message, which shows the extent of the airline’s breakdown, was included in testimony the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association union, SWAPA, presented at the hearing. (The message and others are seen in all capital letters, standard for this type of cockpit display.)

    As planes stood still at the height of the debacle, crewmembers sat stranded, unable to communicate with their dispatchers and schedulers.

    “No updates here,” another cockpit computer message to pilots read. “Scheduling is so far behind we were told we aren’t allowed to walk over and talk to them.”

    The massive meltdown began in the wake of a large winter storm at Christmastime, one of the busiest travel windows of the year. But while other airlines managed to recover their schedules, Southwest’s legacy technology and manual scheduling processes could not keep up with the rate of changes.

    More than 16,700 flights were canceled and 2 million passengers stranded, scuttling holiday plans and leaving mountains of unclaimed baggage nationwide. Southwest CEO Bob Jordan apologized and the airline offered reimbursements for passengers’ costs, along with bonus points. The Department of Transportation is investigating, including whether the airline scheduled more flights than it could handle.

    The pilots’ union is testified that Watterson and Jordan, who began their roles just over a year ago, “inherited a massive, complex operation held together by duct tape and baling wire.” Technology failures were predictable and avoidable because the system has failed multiple times “with increasing frequency and magnitude.”

    “Since 2011, SWA has averaged one major operational failure every 18 months,” the testimony said. “Warning signs were ignored. Poor performance was condoned. Excuses were made. Processes atrophied. Core values were forgotten.”

    The testimony also provided new details about what was happening behind the scenes while the airline’s schedule fell apart.

    The union says the airline operated more than 500 empty flights to reposition planes – and it contends the aircraft could have carried passengers. More than 10,000 pilots rode in passenger seats, headed to another assignment in a choreography the union called “inefficient.”

    Southwest declined to comment on the union’s allegations ahead of the hearing.

    A copy of Watterson’s testimony, obtained ahead of the hearing by CNN, included an apology to travelers and employees for the disruption. It shows he is prepared to say the difficulty of recovering from the storm “created an unprecedented amount and frequency of required changes to Crew schedules that overwhelmed our Crew Scheduling processes and technology.”

    Southwest says it has been testing a scheduling software update, launched a new team in its command center, improved telephone systems, and is investing in better preparedness for cold weather.

    Watterson said the airline “had an opportunity to test some of these newly-implemented mitigation efforts” when the FAA grounded all departures nationwide last month due to its own computer failure.

    The union criticized the airline for giving executives stock options in the wake of the meltdown while employees lost profit sharing pay because of the airline’s financial hit due to the meltdown. The airline did agree to give some employee groups hardship pay.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Fetterman in Washington hospital ‘for observation’ after feeling lightheaded | CNN Politics

    Fetterman in Washington hospital ‘for observation’ after feeling lightheaded | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Sen. John Fetterman is being kept overnight in a Washington, DC, hospital “for observation,” after being admitted earlier Wednesday after feeling lightheaded, his office said in a statement.

    The Pennsylvania Democrat was elected to the Senate in November while recovering from a stroke he had suffered in May. According to his spokesperson, there was no evidence of a new stroke Wednesday, but he was set to undergo more tests during his hospital stay.

    “Towards the end of the Senate Democratic retreat today, Senator John Fetterman began feeling lightheaded. He left and called his staff, who picked him up and drove him to The George Washington University Hospital. Initial tests did not show evidence of a new stroke, but doctors are running more tests and John is remaining overnight for observation,” Fetterman’s communications director, Joe Calvello, said in the statement.

    Last year, Fetterman checked himself into a hospital in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, several days before the primary. Fetterman won the nomination while in the hospital and underwent a nearly three-hour surgery that same day to implant a defibrillator. He was released from the hospital after a nine-day stay.

    Fetterman’s cardiologist later issued a statement, providing more insight into what caused his stroke and outlining that the Democrat suffers from both atrial fibrillation and cardiomyopathy.

    Calvello said Wednesday night that Fetterman was “in good spirits and talking with his staff and family.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • New GOP-led panel to hold first public hearing Thursday on alleged ‘weaponization’ of federal government | CNN Politics

    New GOP-led panel to hold first public hearing Thursday on alleged ‘weaponization’ of federal government | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    The GOP-led House committee on the alleged “weaponization” of the federal government kicks off Thursday with its first public hearing with a witness list that suggests Republicans on the committee will push a popular narrative among conservatives that has been disputed by federal officials.

    The hearing will be split into two sessions, featuring a swath of current and former lawmakers, former FBI officials and legal experts. They plan to discuss allegations of how the government has been weaponized against Republicans, as well as the general belief among some conservatives that federal officials and mainstream media have been working to silence the right.

    “We’re focused on the whole weaponization of government, and the idea that the government is not working for the American people,” subcommittee chairman Jim Jordan told CNN. “The government is supposed to protect the First Amendment, not have, as Mr. (Jonathan) Turley said, ‘censorship by surrogate,’” he said, referencing one of the witnesses slated for Thursday’s hearing who is a George Washington University Law Center professor.

    The Ohio Republican continued, “I’m sure those will be some of the things that will come up in the course of the hearing,” he added, referencing a line from one of the witnesses GOP members have called.

    Democrats on the panel, however, tell CNN they reject the premise of the weaponization subcommittee itself – and much of their time will be spent disputing GOP messaging.

    “We have an overall strategy, which is to debunk the misrepresentations that are sure to be coming from it,” said Rep. Dan Goldman, a freshman Democrat from New York. “My understanding is that Sens. Grassley and Johnson are going to speak, and I’m glad they are. I hope they talk about how they used their Senate committees to weaponize Russian propaganda and disinformation in 2020.”

    “I think our intention is to make sure that the American people are aware of the actual truth of the matter, and not whatever partisan misinformation that Republicans are going to peddle,” Goldman added.

    Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is being called as one of the Democrats’ witnesses. He told CNN that “one basic question is whether weaponization is the target of the committee or if weaponization is the purpose of the committee” – previewing a potential line of attack.

    In a new memo released Thursday ahead of the subcommittee’s first hearing, the White House called the subpanel a “Fox News reboot of the House Un-American Activities Committee” and “a political stunt that weaponizes Congress to carry out the priorities of extreme MAGA Republicans in Congress.”

    White House Oversight spokesman Ian Sams writes that the committee “plans to weaponize the MAGA agenda against their perceived political enemies” and is “choosing to make it their top priority to go down the rabbit hole of debunked conspiracy theories about a ‘deep state’ instead of taking a deep breath and deciding to work with the President and Democrats in Congress to improve Americans’ everyday lives.”

    The first panel of witnesses to testify before the committee include GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, as well as former congresswoman from Hawaii and ex-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.

    The lawmakers are only slated to deliver opening statements and are not expected to answer any questions while testifying, sources familiar with the committee’s plans tell CNN.

    Gabbard has regularly appeared on Fox News since leaving Congress and frequently uses the network to accuse the FBI and the Justice Department of targeting political opponents of the Biden administration.

    Grassley and Johnson have both previously attacked the Justice Department for how it has handled its investigation into Hunter Biden and its approach to addressing threats against school administrators.

    Grassley has also accused the Justice Department of seeking to criminalize the First Amendment right of parents to protest school policies. The Justice Department has denied doing so, pointing to a line in the memo acknowledging that “spirited debate about policy matters is protected under or Constitution.”

    The witnesses’ previous comments regarding the politization of the Biden Justice Department suggest that the committee plans to push a narrative that is popular among the right, but has been publicly disputed by the FBI. There is little public evidence supporting such claims, which Jordan says are backed up by unnamed whistleblowers. Some allegations have been debunked by fact-checkers or news reports, and Jordan has falsely claimed for years that there is an anti-GOP “deep state” within the FBI.

    Democrats, meanwhile, plan to showcase Raskin’s testimony, who is the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee – which is investigating a series of polarizing issues such as Hunter Biden and the former and current presidents’ possession of classified documents. Raskin, a former member of the House select committee on the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill insurrection, and a key fixture in both of former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trials, has been a crucial messenger for the left in pushing back against the GOP’s claims and controversial probes.

    The second panel of witnesses will feature former FBI special agents Nicole Parker and Thomas Baker, as well as Turley and the Raben Group’s Elliot Williams.

    Parker wrote an op-ed last month detailing how she left the bureau after over 10 years of service because she believed it became “politically weaponized.”

    Baker, meanwhile, published a book in December 2022 titled, “The Fall of the FBI: How a Once Great Agency Became a Threat to Democracy.”

    Turley was a prominent figure during Trump’s impeachment trials often referenced by the right.

    Williams, a CNN analyst, is appearing on behalf of the Democrats. Williams previously served as deputy assistant attorney general for legislative affairs at the Department of Justice, where worked to secure Senate confirmation for both Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates.

    Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democratic member of the subcommittee, cast doubt on the effectiveness of Republicans’ strategy, telling CNN, “I fail to see what they think they’re going to accomplish by those kinds of witnesses. … I don’t know that that adds anything to their credibility or making their case. I’ll leave it at that.”

    But Democrats are also cognizant of one potential disadvantage ahead of Thursday’s hearing – the fact they have not yet met as a group while the Republicans have. Connolly told CNN that, given they were just named as member of the panel last week, they have not yet had the opportunity to begin preparing for the onslaught of investigations GOP members have planned.

    GOP subcommittee members told CNN the purpose of the first hearing is largely to outline the panel’s investigate plans in the months ahead, and set the stage for what viewers should anticipate from the weekly-hearings the committee is hoping to hold.

    “Chairman Jordan wants to introduce people to what the committee hopes to accomplish, and the scope of the problem. Having these senators speak with authority helps set it. They won’t be questioned as witnesses, but they are testifying as to their observations,” GOP Rep. Darrell Issa said.

    “I’m not sure we’re going to learn what we need to learn about what has happened inside government agencies in sufficient detail with these witnesses, but I think they can kind of cast the vision,” Republican subcommittee member Dan Bishop of North Carolina told CNN.

    Bishop said he hopes the work of this panel will pave the way for legislation to address what he claimed were agencies “going off rogue.”

    Jordan and House Judiciary Committee staff have met with series of whistleblowers behind closed doors this week for transcribed interviews regarding claims about the politicization of the Justice Department. The interviews will serve as the basis for much of the subcommittee’s probe, sources with direct knowledge of the interviews tell CNN.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Former Pence chief of staff: FBI search of Pence home for any more classified material ‘not too far off’ | CNN Politics

    Former Pence chief of staff: FBI search of Pence home for any more classified material ‘not too far off’ | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    Marc Short, the former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, suggested Wednesday that an FBI search of Pence’s Indiana home for any additional classified materials is “not too far off into the future.”

    “There have been conversations about a consensual search to be conducted, and I presume that’s not too far off into the future,” Short told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

    Pence would give the FBI full access to look throughout his home, Short added, just as President Joe Biden’s legal team said he had done during a search of Biden’s home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, last week.

    As CNN previously reported, Pence’s representatives have been in talks with the Justice Department over searches of his home, as well as his office in Washington. They have said that they want to completely cooperate, though they do not believe there are additional classified documents in either place.

    A lawyer for Pence found about a dozen documents marked as classified at his home in January.

    In the interview on Wednesday, Short slammed what he saw as a “double standard” in how the FBI and Justice Department have approached retrieving documents from Pence’s and Biden’s homes, saying it took federal agents weeks before they went to the president’s Delaware home but that they had traveled to Pence’s Indiana residence the same day documents were discovered.

    No documents with classified markings were found during the search of the president’s Rehoboth home, according to Biden’s personal lawyer.

    The president defended his handling of the documents issue to PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff on Wednesday, saying he never had to be threatened to cooperate and that he has “voluntarily opened every single aperture” he has for searches.

    “To the best of my knowledge, the kinds of things they picked up are things from 1974, stray papers. There may be something else I don’t know,” he said. “But, one of the things that happened is that what was not done well, is as they packed up my offices to move them, they didn’t do the kind of job that should have been done to go thoroughly through every single piece of literature that’s there.”

    Short said that despite the controversy, Pence is continuing to consider whether he will run for president in 2024.

    “I don’t think he hears concern about (the documents) when he travels across the country,” Short said. “I think he hears encouragement from people as he travels.”

    But an announcement about any potential presidential run is not expected any time soon, according to Short.

    “I think the trajectory of most candidates who get in early to Republican primaries doesn’t really fare too well, so I think there is a benefit to him waiting until the end of this process,” he said.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Initial classified balloon report wasn’t flagged as urgent, drawing criticism | CNN Politics

    Initial classified balloon report wasn’t flagged as urgent, drawing criticism | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]


    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    A day before the suspected Chinese spy balloon entered US airspace over Alaska, the Defense Intelligence Agency quietly sent an internal report that a foreign object was headed towards US territory, military and intelligence officials familiar with the matter told CNN.

    The report – also known as a “tipper” – was disseminated through classified channels accessible across the US government. But it wasn’t flagged as an urgent warning and top defense and intelligence officials who saw it weren’t immediately alarmed by it, according to sources. Instead of treating it as an immediate threat, the US moved to investigate the object, seeing it as an opportunity to observe and collect intelligence.

    It wasn’t until the balloon entered Alaskan airspace, on January 28, and then took a sharp turn south that officials came to believe it was on a course to cross over the continental US – and that its mission might be to spy on the US mainland.

    This timeline of events – previously unreported – helps explain why US defense officials declined to act before the balloon had crossed over US territory. That lack of urgency has become a sharp political flashpoint on Capitol Hill, where some Republicans have criticized the administration for not sounding the alarm sooner.

    “Our government knew a Chinese military spy balloon was going to enter the airspace over the continental U.S. at least TWO DAYS BEFORE it happened Yet they failed to act to stop it,” Sen. Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, tweeted on Wednesday. “Biden must disclose to Americans when they knew the spay [sic] balloon was headed towards the U.S. & explain why they didn’t stop it.”

    Officials familiar with the original DIA report conceded Rubio’s point that they didn’t see the balloon as an urgent threat until it was already over US territory –  even as fresh revelations have emerged about what the US knew about Chinese spy balloons.

    During a closed door briefing on Tuesday, Senate staff repeatedly pressed military officials about who knew what – and when. On Wednesday, Rubio and Sen. Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to President Joe Biden’s top defense and intelligence officials raising questions about the administration’s decision-making after the balloon crossed into Alaskan airspace.

    CNN reported on Tuesday that US officials tracking the balloon’s trajectory recognized it as part of a known aerial surveillance operation run by the Chinese military that officials say has flown dozens of missions world-wide, including half a dozen near or within US airspace. A military intelligence report from April of 2022, exclusively reported by CNN, revealed that the US had tracked previous flights by similar balloons.

    It was only when the balloon turned south that it “got strange,” a senior US official told CNN. “We immediately started talking about shooting it down, then.”

    On January 28, when the balloon entered US airspace near Alaska, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, sent up fighter jets to make a positive identification, according to defense officials, reflecting a subtle shift in urgency.

    Still, officials tracking the balloon saw little reason to be alarmed. At the time, according to US officials, this balloon was expected to sail over Alaska and continue on a northern trajectory that intelligence and military officials could track and study.

    Instead, shortly after the balloon crossed over land, it alarmed officials by making its unexpected turn south.

    On January 31, the balloon had crossed out of Canada and into the Lower 48. And concerns that the balloon had been sent by Beijing explicitly to spy on the mainland US were confirmed when NORAD observed the balloon “loitering” over sensitive military facilities, multiple sources familiar with the intelligence told CNN.

    How much control China exerted over the balloon’s path remains a matter of debate. Although the balloon was equipped with propellers and a rudder that allowed it to turn “like a sailboat,” according to the senior US official, it largely rode the jet stream – one of the reasons US officials were able to predict its path across the US in advance.

    Senior administration officials appear not to have been made aware of the balloon until on or near January 28, when it crossed into Alaskan airspace, including America’s top-ranking general, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley.

    Biden, according to senior administration officials, was not briefed until three days later, on January 31, when the balloon crossed out of Canada and into the continental United States. At that point, Biden asked the military to present options “immediately” to shoot the balloon down, officials said.

    Military officials said it is not necessarily surprising that the president was not briefed until January 31, given the expectations for the balloon at the time.

    The “tipper” sent by the DIA also goes out across government channels routinely, and although US officials have access to these reports, whether they read them or whether those reports are included in briefings to senior policymakers is a matter of discretion.

    “Some of these places send emails and then count that as someone being informed,” the senior US official said.

    As more information about the administration’s decision-making process on the balloon has continued to trickle out, Congress has taken a keen interest.

    “There are still a lot of questions to be asked about Alaska,” a Senate Republican aide told CNN. “Alaska is still part of the United States – why is that okay to transit Alaska without telling anyone, but [the continental US] is different?”

    Some Republican lawmakers have raised pointed questions about why the Biden administration did not move to shoot down the balloon before it crossed down into the continental US – either while it was over Alaska or sooner.

    Military and intelligence officials who spoke to CNN said that it wasn’t known that the balloon was going to dip south into the Lower 48 until the balloon was already over Alaska. Before that, officials didn’t believe that it posed any real risk to the US, and in fact, presented more of an intelligence-gathering opportunity.

    “The domain awareness was there as it approached Alaska,” NORAD commander Gen. Glen VanHerck told reporters on Monday. “It was my assessment that this balloon did not present a physical military threat to North America… And therefore, I could not take immediate action because it was not demonstrating hostile act or hostile intent.”

    Once it was over US territory, officials have argued that the benefits of gathering additional intelligence on the balloon as it passed over far outweighed the risk of shooting it down over land.

    The US sent up U-2 spy planes to track the balloon’s progress, according to US officials.

    One pilot took a selfie in the cockpit that shows both the pilot and the surveillance balloon itself, these officials said – an image that has already gained legendary status in both NORAD and the Pentagon.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus calls on Biden to tap Julie Su to replace Walsh as Labor secretary | CNN Politics

    Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus calls on Biden to tap Julie Su to replace Walsh as Labor secretary | CNN Politics

    [ad_1]



    CNN
     — 

    The Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus is throwing its support behind Julie Su, the deputy Labor secretary, to replace Labor Secretary Marty Walsh who is soon departing the Biden administration – a significant public display of support for an Asian American to join President Joe Biden’s Cabinet.

    “We remain troubled that the Administration has no Secretary-level AANHPI official serving in the Cabinet, the first time we have not had representation at this level since 2000,” CAPAC said in a statement shared with CNN. “President Biden has the opportunity to better realize the ‘most diverse Cabinet in history’ with the elevation of Deputy Secretary Su. CAPAC urges him to seize that opportunity by nominating Julie Su as our next Secretary of Labor.”

    US Trade Representative Katherine Tai, whose parents emigrated from Taiwan, is the only Asian-American woman who is currently in a Cabinet-level position under Biden.

    Walsh is expected to depart the Biden administration soon, according to two people familiar with the matter, marking the first Cabinet secretary departure of Biden’s presidency. Walsh has been offered a job heading the National Hockey League Players’ Association, the people said. His departure has not been officially announced.

    CAPAC’s endorsement of Su to be the next Labor secretary is part of a broader effort in recent years by Asian-American lawmakers to push the Biden White House to appoint more people of Asian backgrounds to high-ranking positions within the administration.

    Early on in the Biden administration, Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Mazie Hirono threatened to vote against Biden’s nominees who weren’t minorities, as they expressed their displeasure at the lack of Asian Americans in the Cabinet. Duckworth went as far as to say that the White House’s attempts to address her concerns about AAPI representation were “insulting.”

    “To be told that you have Kamala Harris, we are very proud of her, you don’t need anybody else, is insulting,” Duckworth said, adding she had been told that “multiple times” by the White House.

    The White House ultimately agreed to add a senior Asian American and Pacific Islander liaison, and the two senators dropped their threat.

    Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington and a member of CAPAC, told CNN on Wednesday that choosing Su to replace Walsh would “fill a gaping hole in the lack of AAPIs at the Cabinet secretary level,” and that she had recently “weighed in personally” on the matter.

    “Julie is someone who knows how to navigate the DOL. She will ensure that DOL is doing all it can to support and advance workers wages, rights, and benefits on the job,” Jayapal added.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Here’s what keeps Jerome Powell up at night and interest rates high | CNN Business

    Here’s what keeps Jerome Powell up at night and interest rates high | CNN Business

    [ad_1]

    A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell threw markets into a tizzy on Tuesday as he spoke about the economy alongside his former boss, Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein, at the Economic Club of Washington.

    Stocks struggled for direction as investors tried to get a read on Powell’s economic outlook, attitude towards inflation and on future interest rate hikes. Wall Street cheered as the Fed chair said the disinflationary process has begun, then soured when he said the road to reaching 2% inflation will be “bumpy” and “long” with more rate hikes ahead.

    Markets soared to new highs, before quickly falling to session lows and then recovering to close the day in the green.

    “Powell doesn’t want to play games with financial markets,” said EY Parthenon chief economist Gregory Daco after the conversation. But at the same time, he said Powell wanted to communicate that the Fed’s “base case was not for inflation to come down as quickly and painlessly as some market participants appear to expect.”

    Here’s why Powell thinks bringing down prices will be more difficult than investors anticipate.

    Structural changes in the labor market: The US economy added an astonishing 517,000 jobs in January, blowing economists’ expectations out of the water. The unemployment rate fell to 3.4% from 3.5%, hitting a level not seen since May 1969.

    The current labor market imbalance is a reflection of the pandemic’s lasting effect on the US economy and on labor supply, said Powell on Tuesday in answer to a question about the report. “The labor market is extraordinarily strong,” he said. Demand exceeds supply by 5 million people, and the labor force participation rate has declined. “It feels almost more structural than cyclical.”

    “If we continue to get, for example, strong labor market reports or higher inflation reports, it may well be the case that we have to do more and raise rates more,” he said.

    Core services inflation: Powell noted that he’s seeing disinflation in the goods sector and expects to soon see declining inflation in housing. But prices remain stubborn for services. Service-sector inflation, which is more sensitive to a strong labor market, is up 7.5% from the year prior through the end of 2022, and has not abated, he said.

    “That sector is not showing any disinflation yet,” Powell said. “There has been an expectation that [higher prices] will go away quickly and painlessly and I don’t think that’s at all guaranteed.”

    Geopolitical uncertainties: Powell also cited concerns that the reopening of China’s economy after the sudden end of Covid-Zero restrictions, plus uncertainty about Russia’s war on Ukraine could also affect the inflation path in ways that remain unclear.

    ▸ The labor market is strong, but tech layoffs keep coming. There were around  50,000 tech jobs cut in January, and the trend has continued into February.

    Video conferencing service Zoom is one of the latest to announce layoffs. The company said Tuesday that it’s cutting 1,300 jobs or 15% of its workforce. 

    Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said in a blog post on Tuesday that Zoom ramped up employment  quickly due to increased demand during the pandemic. The company grew three times in size within 24 months, he said and now it must  adapt to changing demand for its services.

    “The uncertainty of the global economy, and its effect on our customers, means we need to take a hard — yet important — look inward to reset ourselves so we can weather the economic environment, deliver for our customers and achieve Zoom’s long-term vision,” he wrote.

    Yuan added that he plans to lower his own salary by 98% and forgo his 2023 bonus. Shares of Zoom closed nearly 10% higher on Tuesday. 

    The announcement comes just one day after Dell said it would lay off more than 6,500 employees.

    Amazon

    (AMZN)    , Microsoft

    (MSFT)    , Google and other tech giants have also recently announced plans to cut thousands of workers as the companies adapt to shifting pandemic demand and fears of a looming recession.

    ▸ Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis told CNN that he is starting to think that the US economy could avoid a recession and achieve a so-called soft landing.

    It’s hard to have a recession when the job market is still so robust, he told CNN’s Poppy Harlow on Tuesday on CNN This Morning.

    Still, “we have more work to do,” Kashkari told Harlow, adding that the labor market is “too hot” and that is a key reason why it is “harder to bring inflation back down.”

    Although many investors are starting to think the Fed may pause after just two more similarly small hikes, to a level of around 5%, Kashkari said he believes the Fed may have to raise rates further. Kashkari has a vote this year on the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed’s interest-rate setting group.

    ▸ It’s a good time to be in the oil business. BP’s annual profit more than doubled last year to an all-time high of nearly $28 billion.

    The British energy company said in a statement that underlying replacement cost profit rose to $27.7 billion in 2022 from $12.8 billion the previous year. The metric is a key indicator of oil companies’ profitability.

    BP

    (BP)     also unveiled a further $2.75 billion in share buybacks and hiked its dividend for the fourth quarter by around 10% to 6.61 cents per share.

    BP’s shares rose 6% in Tuesday trading following the news. Over the past 12 months, its shares have soared 24%.

    The earnings are the latest in a string of record-setting results by the world’s biggest energy companies, which have enjoyed bumper profits off the back of skyrocketing oil and gas prices.

    Last week, another energy major Shell reported a record profit of almost $40 billion for 2022, more than double what it raked in the previous year after oil and gas prices jumped following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    On Wednesday it was TotalEnergie

    (TTFNF)    s turn. The French company posted annual profit of $36.2 billion for 2022, double the previous year’s earnings.

    Disney has found itself in the middle of a culture war battle that could end up transferring Disney World’s governance to a board appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. And that may be the least of Disney’s problems, writes my colleague Chris Isidore.

    The company faces a media industry in turmoil, plunging cable subscriptions, a still-recovering box office, massive streaming losses, activist shareholders, possible reorganization and layoffs and growing labor disputes with employees. That’s a lot for CEO Bob Iger to handle.

    Iger, who retired as CEO in 2020 only to be brought back in November, has been mostly quiet about his plans for the company since his return. That ends at 4:30 p.m. ET Wednesday when he is set to begin an earnings call with Wall Street investors.

    Click here to read more about what to look for on what is certain to be a closely-followed call.

    [ad_2]

    Source link