House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday officially denied seats on the House Intelligence Committee to Democratic Reps. Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff, the former chairman of the panel.
The decision reflects the increasingly politicized nature of one of Congress’ most important national security committees and was swiftly met with outrage by the two California Democrats, both of whom played key roles in the impeachments of former President Donald Trump.
“I cannot put partisan loyalty ahead of national security, and I cannot simply recognize years of service as the sole criteria for membership on this essential committee. Integrity matters more,” McCarthy wrote in a letter to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries that he posted on Twitter Tuesday night.
McCarthy has cited a “new standard” from Democrats for why he would strip Schiff and Swalwell, both of California, of their committee assignments. The Democrat-led House in 2021 removed GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona from their committees for inflammatory rhetoric, including support for violence against Democratic members of Congress.
In the letter, McCarthy added that “it is my assessment that the misuse of this panel during the 116th and 117th Congresses severely undermined its primary national security and oversight missions – ultimately leaving our nation less safe,” and that he wants the panel to be one of “genuine honesty and credibility that regains the trust of the American people.”
“It’s political vengeance,” Swalwell said following the decision on Tuesday. “It’s too bad because that committee has always been a bipartisan committee, and he’s taking one of the most precious pieces of glassware in the congressional cabinet and smashing it, and the damage is going to be irreparable.”
He added that “if a Democrat advocated for violence against another member of Congress, I would support getting rid of them.”
Schiff told reporters that “if McCarthy thinks this is going to stop me from vigorously pushing back against his efforts to tear down these institutions, he’s going to find out just how wrong he is.”
“I think this is a terrible move on his part and once again, showing McCarthy just catering to the most extreme elements of this conference,” he added.
Schiff will sit on the Judiciary Committee, according to a Democratic aide, while Swalwell told CNN he will sit on the Judiciary and Homeland Security panels.
Some House Republicans have criticized McCarthy’s move ejecting Democrats from the intelligence panel. GOP Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana said in a statement that she opposes the push to remove the Democrats.
“I appreciate these Republican members speaking out against what McCarthy is doing,” Schiff later told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on “AC360.”
“I think it does show that there are Republicans who understand this is very ill considered. It’s just going to damage the institution, it’s not justified,” he added. “These efforts are not at all bipartisan. Indeed, the opposition to it is bipartisan.”
The three Democrats whom McCarthy ousted or plan to oust stood in unity at a Capitol Hill news conference Wednesday.
“The three of us have chosen to stick together because this isn’t about any individual committee assignments, and this is about an institution where the speaker of the House is using his power to go after his political opponents, and to pick them off the field,” Swalwell said.
They all seemed in agreement that the “destructive move” was especially hypocritical, given embattled Rep. George Santos has been seated on committees. Democrats and Republicans have called on Santos, a freshman Republican from New York, to resign following a series of false statements he has made including misrepresenting parts of his identity and his resume.
“This is a Republican speaker who is seating a human fraud, George Santos, on committees, a serial fabricator about every part of his existence. He’s perfectly comfortable with it,” Schiff said.
McCarthy on Tuesday also announced the list of GOP members he is appointing to serve on the select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, with Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan to serve as its chair.
GOP Reps. Dan Bishop of North Carolina and Chip Roy of Texas, who were part of the initial holdouts against McCarthy in the speakership race, also gained spots on the panel. Democrats will have the opportunity to appoint members as well.
The speaker also announced appointments to the select subcommittee on the Coronavirus pandemic, with Greene among the members chosen.
McCarthy expanded both of the select committees, naming more people to the rosters than initially expected due to “overwhelming interest” from members, according to a GOP source familiar. House Republicans will have to put forward a floor resolution to formally amend the ratios, the source added, but doesn’t anticipate it will be an issue.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
Facebook-parent Meta said on Wednesday that it will restore former President Donald Trump’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram in the coming weeks, just over two years after suspending him in the wake of the January 6 Capitol attack.
“Our determination is that the risk [to public safety] has sufficiently receded,” Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg said in a blog post. “As such, we will be reinstating Mr. Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in the coming weeks. However, we are doing so with new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses.”
Trump could be suspended for as much as two years at a time for violating platform policies in the future, Clegg said.
With his Facebook and Instagram accounts reactivated, Trump will once again gain access to huge and powerful communications and fundraising platforms just as he ramps up his third bid for the White House.
The decision, which comes on the heels of a similar move by Twitter, could also further shift the landscape for how a long list of smaller online platforms handle Trump’s accounts.
It was not immediately clear whether Trump will seize the opportunity to return to the Meta platforms.Trump’s reps did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a post on his own platform, Truth Social, Trump acknowledged Meta’s decision to reverse its suspension of his account and said “such a thing should never again happen to a sitting President, or anybody else who is not deserving of retribution.”
Former President Trump’s team was not given advance notice of Meta’s decision, a source familiar with the matter told CNN. Many of his aides and advisers learned of the decision from media reports. Shortly before the announcement, Meta asked for a last-minute meeting with Trump’s lawyers this evening to discuss his possible reinstatement, but were not told what the final decision was. They were still in the meeting when Meta released the news, the source said.
Twitter restored Trump’s account in November following its takeover by billionaire Elon Musk, but the former president has not yet resumed tweeting, opting instead to remain on Truth Social.
But Trump’s campaign earlier this month sent a letter to Meta petitioning the company to unblock his Facebook account, a source familiar with the letter told CNN, making his return more likely.Although Twitter was always Trump’s preferred platform, he has a massive reach on Facebook and Instagram — 34 million followers and 23 million followers, respectively, ahead of his reinstatement. Previous Trump campaigns have lauded the effectiveness of Facebook’s targeted advertising tools and have spent millions running Facebook ads.
Meta’s decision was quickly criticized by a number of online safety advocates and democratic lawmakers. Congressman Adam Schiff said in a tweet that restoring Trump’s “access to a social media platform to spread his lies and demagoguery is dangerous,” noting that Trump has shown “no remorse” for his actions around the January 6 attack. NAACP President Derrick Johnson called the decision “a prime example of putting profits above people’s safety.”
But ACLU Director Anthony Romero called the decision “the right call,” joining several other groups in praising the move. He added: “The biggest social media companies are central actors when it comes to our collective ability to speak — and hear the speech of others — online. They should err on the side of allowing a wide range of political speech, even when it offends.”
The company made the landmark decision to bar Trump from posting on Facebook and Instagram the day after the January 6 attack, in which his supporters stormed the US Capitol in a bid to overturn the 2020 election results.
Many other platforms did the same in quick succession, but Facebook was clear that it planned to revisit the decision at a later date. After Facebook’s independent Oversight Board recommended that the company clarify what was initially an indefinite suspension, Facebook said the former president would remain restricted from the platform until at least January 7, 2023.
Meta earlier this month was considering whether to restore Trump’s accounts with the help of a specially formed internal company working group made up of leaders from different parts of the organization, a person familiar with the deliberations told CNN. The group included representatives from the company’s public policy, communications, content policy, and safety and integrity teams, and was being led by Clegg, who previously served as UK Deputy Prime Minister.
The company said in June 2021 that it would “look to experts to assess whether the risk to public safety has receded” in January 2023 to make a determination about the former president’s account.
“If we determine that there is still a serious risk to public safety, we will extend the restriction for a set period of time and continue to re-evaluate until that risk has receded,” Clegg, then-vice president of global affairs at Meta, said in a statement at the time.
Clegg said in his Wednesday post that the company believes “the public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying — the good, the bad and the ugly — so that they can make informed choices at the ballot box.” But, he said, “that does not mean there are no limits to what people can say on our platform.”
In light of his previous violations, Trump will now face “heightened penalties for repeat offenses,” Clegg said, adding that the policy will also apply to other public figures whose accounts are reinstated following suspensions related to civil unrest.
Clegg told Axios in an interview published Wednesday that the company does not “want — if he is to return to our services — for him to do what he did on January 6, which is to use our services to delegitimize the 2024 election, much as he sought to discredit the 2020 election.”
“In the event that Mr. Trump posts further violating content, the content will be removed and he will be suspended for between one month and two years, depending on the severity of the violation,” Clegg said. However, the possibility of permanent removal of Trump’s accounts — which Clegg had previously indicated could be a consequence of future violations if his account were to be restored — no longer appears to be on the table.
For content that doesn’t violate its rules but “contributes to the sort of risk that materialized on January 6th, such as content that delegitimizes an upcoming election or is related to QAnon,” Meta may limit distribution of the posts, Clegg said. The company could, for example, remove the reshare button or keep the posts visible on Trump’s page but not in users’ feeds, even for those who follow him, he said. For repeated instances, the company may restrict access to its advertising tools.
If Trump again posts content that violates Meta’s rules but “we assess there is a public interest in knowing that Mr. Trump made the statement that outweighs any potential harm” under the company’s newsworthiness policy, Meta may similarly restrict the posts’ distribution but leave them visible on Trump’s page.
–CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Kaitlan Collins and Kristen Holmes contributed to this report.
Criminal charges have been dropped against an Afghan national who served with the US military in Afghanistan and was apprehended after fleeing to the US by crossing the southern border with Mexico.
Abdul Wasi Safi, called Wasi, served alongside US special operations forces in Afghanistan as an Afghan special forces soldier and fled the country after the US’ withdrawal was complete in August 2021. He traveled to the US on his own, and in September 2022 he was detained after he entered over the southern border from Mexico.
Safi’s case has drawn the attention of veteran groups and US lawmakers who pushed for the charges to be dropped and the Biden administration to take action and grant him the right to stay in the country while he awaited a hearing on his asylum claim.
Safi’s immigration attorney, Jennifer Cervantes, told CNN that he intended to seek asylum, but was unfamiliar with the reporting requirements and did not go to an established port of entry.
“He didn’t understand that he needed to go to a port of entry to ask for asylum, otherwise this case would have been very different,” Cervantes said on Wednesday. “Wasi’s not from the southern border, he’s not from Latin America, and so he wasn’t really aware of how to actually present himself for asylum … He thought that he needed to apply as soon as he found a CBP (Customs and Border Protection) official to give him his documents, and that’s exactly what he did.”
Safi was ultimately charged with failing to comply with reporting requirements, but court records show that the charges were dismissed by a Texas judge on Monday.
The news was announced on Tuesday evening by Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee.
“Mr. Safi came across the Rio Grande with a group of migrants after being beaten in another country and desperate to find a way to reach America to see freedom,” Jackson Lee said in a statement on Tuesday. “Unfortunately, his entry was at a non-port of entry and Mr. Safi has been held ever since in detention facilities. What happened over the last couple of weeks was a strategic and forceful effort to bring all agencies together to make the right decision for Mr. Safi.”
Jackson Lee took a role in helping get the charges dropped by reaching out to leadership of US agencies to speak to Safi’s standing as an Afghan soldier and individual who worked alongside US forces, she told CNN on Wednesday.
“I’m very grateful to the leadership of the Department of Defense who answered my call immediately and provided important and valuable information,” she said, though she declined to provide more details on what that assistance looked like.
“I’m grateful to say thank you to my government,” Jackson Lee added. “Thank you to my president, and thank you to the leadership of the different agencies including the Department of Defense that really understood his plight and worked hard to ensure that we moved this process along.”
Sami-ullah Safi, Wasi Safi’s brother who goes by Sami and who also worked alongside the US military in Afghanistan before he became a US citizen in July 2021, celebrated the news on Wednesday but told CNN he still has questions.
“He came to the same country that he fought alongside, and to his surprise he was singled out and treated as a criminal. Is this how America treats its allies and those who sacrificed alongside Americans in Afghanistan?” Sami Safi said. “My service for the military should have been valued. My brother’s service to the military should have been valued.”
According to a letter sent to President Joe Biden by a coalition of US veterans groups, Wasi Safi “served faithfully alongside US Special Operations Forces” and “continued to support the Northern resistance against the Taliban” during the US withdrawal in 2021. But as the Taliban consolidated power, it was clear Wasi Safi would be at extreme risk because of his work with the US special operations community.
Sami Safi previously told CNN that his brother received “multiple voicemails” while he was still in Afghanistan that said his fellow Afghan service members were being captured and killed by the Taliban.
So Wasi Safi began the journey to the US. The letter from the US veterans groups said that he “traveled on foot or by bus through 10 countries, surviving torture, robbery, and attempts on his life, to seek asylum in the United States from the threat on his life and expecting a hero’s welcome from his American allies.” Instead, he was apprehended by Border Patrol and has been in their custody since.
And while the charges against him were dropped, the road for Wasi Safi and his brother is not over.
Cervantes has requested that Customs and Border Patrol drops its retainer on Wasi Safi before he is transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. The detainer is “fairly common,” she said, because CBP “want him to be transferred to ICE and do a credible fear interview.”
“Right now, we’re kind of going back and forth between CBP – I’m asking CBP to release their detainer and actually issue him an OAR parole (an immigration status for Afghan migrants), which is what the United States issues to most Afghans that they brought in because I think that’s the right thing to do in this case,” Cervantes said. “However, if they don’t do that, he’ll be transferred to ICE custody, and we’ll be trying to get him released from ICE.”
She added that she doesn’t have “any doubt” that Wasi Safi will be able to pass the credible fear interview.
“We’ll hopefully be able to get him released from all custody here shortly,” Cervantes said, “and that the government will really see not only his service to the United States – Wasi worked in counterterrorism, so he was trying to prevent terrorist attacks. So not only will they hopefully see that, but also again the threat to his life.”
Sami Safi said his brother’s immigration status is the next hurdle that he is going to start working on immediately.
“The biggest challenge that I have to now start working on would be his immigration status – what status America is willing to give him with all his sacrifice,” he said.
House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark’s daughter was arrested during a protest in Boston and has been arraigned on charges including assault on a police officer.
Riley Dowell, 23, was found by police tagging the Parkman Bandstand monument “NO COP CITY” and “ACAB,” according to a press release from the Boston Police Department. “ACAB” is commonly known as an acronym for the anti-police slogan “All Cops Are Bastards.”
While police tried to arrest Dowell, protesters surrounded officers and one was hit in the face and bleeding, according to the press release. The release referred to Dowell by her birth name.
Dowell has now been arraigned and charged with assault of a police officer, according to a news release from Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden’s office.
“Riley Dowell, 23, was arraigned in the Central Division of Boston Municipal Court today on charges of assault and battery on a police officer, vandalizing property, tagging property, vandalizing a historic marker/monument, and resisting arrest,” the release obtained by CNN affiliate WCVB said. “Judge James Coffey set bail at $500 and ordered Dowell to stay away from Boston Common.”
Dowell is represented by attorney Chris Dearborn, according to the release. Dearborn had no comment when reached by CNN. Dowell’s next court appearance is scheduled for April 19, the release said.
Dowell posted bail and is no longer in police custody, the Boston Municipal Court told CNN in an email Tuesday.
“Last night, my daughter was arrested in Boston, Massachusetts. I love Riley, and this is a very difficult time in the cycle of joy and pain in parenting,” Clark wrote. “This will be evaluated by the legal system, and I am confident in that process.”
Clark began serving as minority whip in the 118th session of Congress after House Democrats elevated her to the position.
Clark is only the second woman after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to serve in one of the top two party leadership positions in Congress.
Previously, the congresswoman served in the leadership role of assistant speaker.
Republican Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana announced on Tuesday that she opposes House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s push to remove three Democrats – Reps. Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell and Ilhan Omar – from committees.
The new House GOP majority is gearing up for a showdown with Democrats over the issue, but pushback from within the House GOP has the potential to complicate an effort to oust Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, in particular. Spartz is the second Republican to suggest she’d vote against such a move. Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina signaled to CNN earlier this month she’d be unlikely to back a measure to oust Omar if it came to the floor.
McCarthy has cited a “new standard” from Democrats for why he would strip them of their committee assignments after the Democrat-led House in 2021 removed GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona from their committees for inflammatory rhetoric and posts.
In her statement, Spartz referenced the previous move by House Democrats, saying that “two wrongs do not make a right.”
“Speaker Pelosi took unprecedented actions last Congress to remove Reps. Greene and Gosar from their committees without proper due process. Speaker McCarthy is taking unprecedented actions this Congress to deny some committee assignments to the Minority without proper due process again,” Spartz continued.
“As I spoke against it on the House floor two years ago, I will not support this charade again,” the congresswoman said.
Democratic leaders have officially renominated Schiff and Swalwell to the House Intelligence Committee. And Omar has officially requested to have a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee.
McCarthy has the power to unilaterally block Schiff and Swalwell from serving on the House Intelligence Committee because it is a select committee. In a letter to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Tuesday night, McCarthy officially denied the California Democrats seats on the panel.
Ousting Omar, however, fromthe House Foreign Affairs Committee would require a vote of the full House of Representatives. Democrats would oppose and it would only take a handful of GOP members to block McCarthy from moving forward given that Republicans control only a razor-thin majority in the House.
Omar told reporters that Pelosi had been “very clear” on why Greene and Gosar had been removed.
“It was because they threatened the lives of their colleagues,” she told reporters. “They posed danger to folks that they would serve on committees with, to the actual institution they were sworn to protect. Unless McCarthy can say how myself, Adam Schiff, and Eric Swalwell are a danger to the institution and our colleagues, then he’s not following the example that was set by Speaker Pelosi.”
Spartz voted “present” duringseveralrounds of votes as McCarthy was trying to lock up the support to win the speakership at the start of the new Congress. Ultimately, however, the congresswoman voted for McCarthy in the final round in which he secured the gavel.
This story has been updated with additional details.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is taking another step to temporarily delay the US defaulting on its debt.
Less than a week after announcing that the nation hit its $31.4 trillion debt ceiling set by Congress, Yellen wrote to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday to say that she is adding to the extraordinary measures that will allow the government to keep paying its bills on time and stall the catastrophic economic and fiscal consequences of a default.
She will stop fully investing the Government Securities Investment Fund of the Thrift Savings Fund, part of the Federal Employees’ Retirement System, in interest-bearing securities of the US.
This is in addition to the measures announced last week, when Yellen said Treasury will begin to sell existing investments and suspend reinvestments of the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund and the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund.
These funds are invested in special-issue Treasury securities, which count against the debt limit. Treasury’s actions would reduce the amount of outstanding debt subject to the limit and temporarily allow it to continue paying the government’s bills on time and in full.
Yellen’s actions are mainly behind-the-scenes accounting maneuvers. No federal retirees or employees will be affected, and the funds will be made whole once the impasse ends, she wrote.
The extraordinary measures should last at least until early June, Yellen has said, though she stressed that her forecast is subject to “considerable uncertainty.”
Despite Yellen’s warnings to Congress to act promptly, little, if any, progress toward a resolution has been made between House Republicans and the White House.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated Monday that the Biden administration is not open to negotiating on the debt limit, pushing back against comments from West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin that the position was “a mistake.”
“It was done three times in the past, in the past administration under Donald Trump, so this is nothing unusual,” she told CNN during a White House briefing. “This is something that should be done without conditions, and we should not be taking hostage key programs that the American people really earned and care about – Social Security, Medicare should not be put into a hostage situation.”
McCarthy also blasted the administration’s position, tweeting last week that he’s ready to meet to discuss “a responsible debt ceiling increase to address irresponsible government spending.” He noted that he accepts President Joe Biden’s invitation to sit down, though no such meeting has been set.
As part of the drawn-out negotiations to win the speaker vote earlier this month, McCarthy promised his conservative members that any effort to lift the debt ceiling would be accompanied by spending cuts.
The Senate, meanwhile, is taking a back seat in the standoff for now. Senate Republicans say they will wait to see how the House GOP maneuvers a way to raise the borrowing limit before deciding if they need to insert themselves into the process.
Despite the current situation, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN Monday that “we won’t default,” without elaborating.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday laid out the severe consequences of a default, saying “every single American will pay the price.” He called on House Republicans to reveal the fiscal measures they want to take.
“Well, I say to my Republican colleagues: If you want to talk about spending cuts, then you have an obligation – an obligation – to show the American people precisely what kind of cuts you are talking about,” he said.
A lawyer for former Vice President Mike Pence discovered about a dozen documents marked as classified at Pence’s Indiana home last week, and he has turned those classified records over to the FBI, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
The FBI and the Justice Department’s National Security Division have launched a review of the documents and how they ended up in Pence’s house in Indiana.
The classified documents were discovered at Pence’s new home in Carmel, Indiana, by a lawyer for Pence in the wake of the revelations about classified material discovered in President Joe Biden’s private office and residence, the sources said. The discovery comes after Pence has repeatedly said he did not have any classified documents in his possession.
It is not yet clear what the documents are related to or their level of sensitivity or classification.
Pence’s team notified congressional leaders and relevant committees of the discovery on Tuesday.
Pence asked his lawyer to conduct the search of his home out of an abundance of caution, and the attorney began going through four boxes stored at Pence’s house last week, finding a small number of documents with classified markings, the sources said.
Pence’s lawyer immediately alerted the National Archives, the sources said. In turn, the Archives informed the Justice Department.
A lawyer for Pence told CNN that the FBI requested to pick up the documents with classified markings that evening, and Pence agreed. Agents from the FBI’s field office in Indianapolis picked up the documents from Pence’s home, the lawyer said.
On Monday, Pence’s legal team drove the boxes back to Washington, DC, and handed them over to the Archives to review the rest of the material for compliance with the Presidential Records Act.
In a letter to the National Archives obtained by CNN, Pence’s representative to the Archives Greg Jacob wrote that a “small number of documents bearing classified markings” were inadvertently boxed and transported to the vice president’s home.
“Vice President Pence was unaware of the existence of sensitive or classified documents at his personal residence,” Jacob wrote. “Vice President Pence understands the high importance of protecting sensitive and classified information and stands ready and willing to cooperate fully with the National Archives and any appropriate inquiry.”
The classified material was stored in boxes that first went to Pence’s temporary home in Virginia before they were moved to Indiana, according to the sources. The boxes were not in a secure area, but they were taped up and were not believed to have been opened since they were packed, according to Pence’s attorney. Once the classified documents were discovered, the sources said they were placed inside a safe located in the house.
Pence’s Washington, DC, advocacy groupoffice was also searched, Pence’s lawyer said, and no classified material or other records covered by the Presidential Records Act was discovered.
The news about Pence come as special counsels investigate the handling of classified documents by both Biden and former President Donald Trump. The revelations also come amid speculation that Pence is readying for a run at the Republican nomination for president in 2024.
Since the FBI searched Trump’s home in Florida for classified material in August with a search warrant, Pence has said that he had not retained any classified material upon leaving office. “No, not to my knowledge,” he told The Associated Press in August.
In November, Pence was asked by ABC News at his Indiana home whether he had taken any classified documents from the White House.
“I did not,” Pence responded.
“Well, there’d be no reason to have classified documents, particularly if they were in an unprotected area,” Pence continued. “But I will tell you that I believe there had to be many better ways to resolve that issue than executing a search warrant at the personal residence of a former president of the United States.”
While Pence’s vice presidential office in general did a rigorous job while he was leaving office of sorting through and turning over any classified material and unclassified material covered by the Presidential Records Act, these classified documents appear to have inadvertently slipped through the process because most of the materials were packed up separately from the vice president’s residence, along with Pence’s personal papers, the sources told ClNN.
The vice president’s residence at the US Naval Observatory in Washington has a secure facility for handling classified material along with other security, and it would be common for classified documents to be there for the vice president to review.
Some of the boxes at Pence’s Indiana home were packed up from the vice president’s residence, while some came from the White House in the final days of the Trump administration, which included last-minute things that did not go through the process the rest of Pence’s documents did.
The discovery of classified documents in Pence’s residence marks the third time in recent history in which a president or vice president has inappropriately possessed classified material after leaving office. Both Biden and Trump are now being investigated by separate special counsels for their handling of classified materials.
Sources familiar with the process say Pence’s discovery of classified documents after the Trump and Biden controversies would suggest a more systemic problem related to classified material and the Presidential Records Act, which requires official records from the White House to be turned over to the National Archives at the end of an administration.
On Friday, the FBI searched Biden’s Wilmington residence for additional classified material, an unprecedented search of a sitting president’s home that turned up six additional items containing classified markings. The search was conducted after Biden’s lawyers discovered classified material in Wilmington following the initial discovery of classified documents at Biden’s private think office in November.
Biden’s attorneys say they are fully cooperating with the Justice Department, seeking to draw a distinction from the Trump investigation.
The FBI obtained a search warrant to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in August. Federal investigators took that step because they believed Trump had not turned over all classified material despite a subpoena and were concerned records at Mar-a-Lago were being moved around.
Last week, Pence told Larry Kudlow in a Fox Business interview that he received the President’s Daily Brief at the vice president’s residence.
“I’d rise early. I’d go to the safe where my military aide would place those classified materials. I’d pull them out, review them,” Pence said. “I’d receive a presentation to them and then, frankly, more often than not Larry, I would simply return them back to the file that I’d received them in. They went in commonly into what was called a burn bag that my military aide would gather and then destroy those classified materials—same goes in materials that I would receive at the White House.”
The Justice Department and eight states sued Google on Tuesday, accusing the company of harming competition with its dominance in the online advertising market and calling for it to be broken up.
The move marks the Biden administration’s first blockbuster antitrust case against a Big Tech company. The eight states joining the suit include California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Virginia.
The fresh complaint significantly escalates the risks to Google emanating from Washington, where lawmakers and regulators have frequently raised concerns about the tech giant’s power but have so far failed to pass new legislation or regulations that might rein in the company or its peers.
For years, Google’s critics have claimed that the company’s extensive role in the ecosystem that enables advertisers to place ads, and for publishers to offer up digital ad space, represents a conflict of interest that Google has exploited anticompetitively.
In Tuesday’s complaint, a copy of which was viewed by CNN, the Justice Department alleged that Google actively and illegally maintained that dominance by engaging in a campaign to thwart competition. Google gobbled up rivals through anticompetitive mergers, the US government said, and bullied publishers and advertisers into using the company’s proprietary ad technology products.
As part of the lawsuit, the US government called for Google to be broken up and for the court to order the company to spin off at least its online advertising exchange and its ad server for publishers, if not more.
Google, the US government alleged, “has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising. Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace, Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies.”
The suit was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Tuesday’s suit marks the federal government’s second antitrust complaint against Google since 2020, when the Trump administration sued over Google’s alleged anticompetitive harms in search and search advertising. That case is still ongoing. Google has also been the target of antitrust litigation by state and private actors.
In a statement, Google said the DOJ suit “attempts to pick winners and losers in the highly competitive advertising technology sector.”
“DOJ is doubling down on a flawed argument that would slow innovation, raise advertising fees, and make it harder for thousands of small businesses and publishers to grow,” a Google spokesperson said, adding that a federal judge last year knocked down a claim that Google colluded with Facebook in a separate antitrust suit led by the state of Texas. That judge also ruled, however, that a number of monopolization claims in the Texas case could move forward.
The lawsuit is a frontal assault against Google’s massive, primary business of advertising. Google generated $209 billion in advertising revenue in 2021, according to its annual report, a figure representing more than 80% of its total revenue. By comparison, the next largest giant in online advertising, Facebook-parent Meta, generated $115 billion in 2021.
Third-party estimates suggest that Google and Facebook accounted for the majority of US digital ad revenues, hitting a peak around 2017, with Google taking about a third of the market. Since then, however, others including Amazon have begun encroaching on that business.
The US complaint echoes concerns that have prompted similar antitrust investigations in the United Kingdom and in the European Union.
Google not only controls the platform publishers use to sell online ad inventory, the Justice Department alleged Tuesday, but also the advertising tools marketers use to claim that inventory and the exchange that facilitates those transactions.
“Google’s pervasive power over the entire ad tech industry has been questioned by its own digital advertising executives,” the complaint said, “at least one of whom aptly begged the question: ‘[I]s there a deeper issue with us owning the platform, the exchange, and a huge network? The analogy would be if Goldman or Citibank owned the NYSE.’”
Tuesday’s complaint marks an opening salvo against Big Tech by DOJ’s antitrust chief, Jonathan Kanter. Kanter has spent months laying the groundwork for a broader offensive against the tech industry’s most dominant companies, reflecting commitments by President Joe Biden and others in the US government to hold powerful firms accountable. Under Kanter, Justice Department antitrust officials have pushed to bring more cases to trial as well as to prosecute cases involving unconventional legal theories.
In 2020, House lawmakers released a 450-page report finding that Google, along with Amazon, Apple and Facebook, hold “monopoly power” in key business segments. The report was the result of a 16-month investigation in which congressional staff reviewed corporate documents and interviewed the tech industry’s many customers and rivals. It concluded, among other things, that Google was uniquely positioned to benefit from its powerful role in the online ad industry.
“With a sizable share in the ad exchange market and the ad intermediary market, and as a leading supplier of ad space, Google simultaneously acts on behalf of publishers and advertisers, while also trading for itself,” the report said.
Since winning a difficult battle to become speaker of the House of Representatives, Republican Kevin McCarthy has made public claims that are misleading, lacking any evidence or plain wrong.
Here is a fact check of recent McCarthy comments about the debt ceiling, funding for the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI search of former President Donald Trump’s resort and residence in Florida, President Joe Biden’s stance on stoves and Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff.
McCarthy’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
McCarthy has cited the example of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, his Democratic predecessor as House speaker, while defending conservative Republicans’ insistence that any agreement to lift the federal debt ceiling must be paired with cuts to government spending – a trade-off McCarthy agreed to when he was trying to persuade conservatives to support his bid for speaker. Specifically, McCarthy has claimed that even Pelosi agreed to a spending cap as part of a deal to lift the debt ceiling under Trump.
“When Nancy Pelosi was speaker, that’s what transpired. To get a debt ceiling, they also got a cap on spending for the next two years,” McCarthy told reporters at a press conference on January 12. When Fox host Maria Bartiromo told McCarthy in a January 15 interview that “they” would not agree to a spending cap, he responded, “Well Maria, I don’t believe that’s the case, because when Donald Trump was president and when Nancy Pelosi was speaker, that’s exactly what happened for them to get a debt ceiling lifted last time. They agreed to a spending cap.”
Facts First: McCarthy’s claims are highly misleading. The deal Pelosi agreed to with the Trump administration in 2019 actually loosened spending caps that were already in place at the time because of a 2011 law. In other words, while congressional conservatives today want to use a debt ceiling deal to reduce government spending, the Pelosi deal allowed for billions in additional government spending above the pre-existing maximum. The two situations are nothing alike.
Shai Akabas, director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank, said when asked about the accuracy of McCarthy’s claims: “I’m going to steer clear of characterizing the Speaker’s remarks, but as an objective matter, the deal reached in 2019 increased the spending caps set by the Budget Control Act of 2011.”
The 2019 deal, which was criticized by many congressional conservatives, also ensured that Budget Control Act’s caps on discretionary spending – which were created as a result of a 2011 debt ceiling deal between a Democratic president and a Republican speaker of the House – would not be extended past 2021. Spending caps vanishing is the opposite of McCarthy’s suggestion that the deal “got” a spending cap.
Pelosi spokesperson Aaron Bennett said in an email that McCarthy is “trying to rewrite history.” Bennett said, “As Republicans in Congress and in the Administration noted at the time, in 2019, Speaker Pelosi and Democrats were eager to reach bipartisan agreement to raise the debt limit and, as part of the agreement, avert damaging funding cuts for defense and domestic programs.”
Facts First: McCarthy’s claims are false. House Republicans did pass a bill that seeks to eliminate about $71 billion of the approximately $80 billion in additional Internal Revenue Service funding that Biden signed into law in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act – but that funding is not going to hire 87,000 “agents.” In addition, Biden has already made clear he would veto this new Republican bill even if the bill somehow made it through the Democratic-controlled Senate, so no funding has actually been “repealed.” It would be accurate for McCarthy to say House Republicans “voted to repeal” the funding, but the boast that they actually “repealed” something is inaccurate.
CNN’s Katie Lobosco explains in detail here why the claim about “87,000 new IRS agents” is an exaggeration. The claim, which has become a common Republican talking point, has been fact-checked by numerous media outlets over more than five months, including The Washington Post in response to McCarthy remarks earlier this January.
Here’s a summary. While Inflation Reduction Act funding may well allow for the hiring of tens of thousands of IRS employees, far from all of these employees will be IRS agents conducting audits and investigations. Many other employees will be hired for the non-agent roles, from customer service to information technology, that make up the vast majority of the IRS workforce. And a significant number of the hires are expected to fill the vacant posts left by retirements and other attrition, not take newly created positions.
The IRS has not yet released a detailed breakdown of how it plans to use the funding provided by the Inflation Reduction Act, so it’s impossible to say precisely how many new “agents” will be hired. But it is already clear that the total won’t approach 87,000.
In his interview with Fox’s Bartiromo on January 15, McCarthy criticized federal law enforcement for executing a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and residence in Florida, which the FBI says resulted in the recovery of more than 100 government documents marked as classified and hundreds of other government documents. Echoing a claim Trump has made, McCarthy said of the documents: “They knew it was there. They could have come and taken it any time they wanted.”
Facts First: It is clearly not true that the authorities could somehow have come to Mar-a-Lago at any time, without conducting a formal search, and taken all of the presidential records they were seeking from Trump. By the time of the search, the federal government – first the National Archives and Records Administration and then the Justice Department – had been asking Trump for more than a year to return government records. Even when the Justice Department went beyond asking in May and served Trump’s team with a subpoena for the return of all documents with classification markings, Trump’s team returned only some of these documents. In June, a Trump lawyer signed a document certifying on behalf of Trump’s office that all of the documents had been returned, though that was not true.
When FBI agents and a Justice Department attorney visited Mar-a-Lago without a search warrant on that June day to accept documents the Trump team was returning in response to the subpoena, a Trump lawyer “explicitly prohibited government personnel from opening or looking inside any of the boxes that remained in the storage room,” the department said in a court filing after the August search. In other words, according to the department, the government was not even allowed to poke around to see if there were government records still at Mar-a-Lago, let alone take those records.
In the August court filing, the department pointedly called into question the extent to which the Trump team had cooperated: “That the FBI, in a matter of hours, recovered twice as many documents with classification markings as the ‘diligent search’ that the former President’s counsel and other representatives had weeks to perform calls into serious question the representations made in the June 3 certification and casts doubt on the extent of cooperation in this matter.”
Facts First: There is no evidence for this claim; Biden has not expressed a desire to control the kind of stove Americans can cook on. McCarthy was baselessly attributing the comments of a single Biden appointee to Biden himself.
It is true that a Biden appointee on the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, Richard Trumka Jr., told Bloomberg earlier this month that gas stoves pose a “hidden hazard,” as they emit air pollutants, and said, “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” But the day before McCarthy’s article was published by the New York Post, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a press briefing: “The president does not support banning gas stoves. And the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is independent, is not banning gas stoves.”
To date, even the commission itself has not shown support for a ban on gas stoves or for any particular new regulations on gas stoves. Commission Chairman Alexander Hoehn-Saric said in a statement the day before McCarthy’s article was published: “I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so.” Rather, he said, the commission is researching gas emissions in stoves, “exploring new ways to address health risks,” and strengthening voluntary safety standards – and will this spring ask the public “to provide us with information about gas stove emissions and potential solutions for reducing any associated risks.”
Trumka told CNN’s Matt Egan that while every option remains on the table, any ban would apply only to new gas stoves, not the gas stoves already in people’s homes. And he noted that the Inflation Reduction Act makes people eligible for a rebate of up to $840 to voluntarily switch to an electric stove.
Defending his plan to bar Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff from sitting on the House Intelligence Committee, a committee Schiff chaired during the Democratic majority from early 2019 to the beginning of this year, McCarthy criticized Schiff on January 12 over his handling of the first impeachment of Trump. Among other things, McCarthy said: “Adam Schiff openly lied to the American public. He told you he had proof. He told you he didn’t know the whistleblower.”
Facts First: There is no evidence for McCarthy’s insinuation that Schiff lied when he said he didn’t know the anonymous whistleblower who came forward in 2019 with allegations – which were subsequently corroborated – about how Trump had attempted to use the power of his office to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Biden, his looming rival in the 2020 election.
Schiff said last week in a statement to CNN: “Kevin McCarthy continues to falsely assert I know the Ukraine whistleblower. Let me be clear – I have never met the whistleblower and the only thing I know about their identity is what I have read in press. McCarthy’s real objection is we proved the whistleblower’s claim to be true and impeached Donald Trump for withholding millions from Ukraine to extort its help with his campaign.” Schiff also made this comment to The Washington Post, which fact-checked the McCarthy claim last week, and has consistently said the samesince late 2019.
The New York Times reported in 2019 that, according to an unnamed official, a House Intelligence Committee aide who had been contacted by the whistleblower before the whistleblower filed a formal complaint did not inform Schiff of the person’s identity when conveying to Schiff “some” information about what the person had said. And Reuters reported in 2019 that a person familiar with the whistleblower’s contacts said the whistleblower hadn’t met or spoken with Schiff.
McCarthy could have fairly repeated Republican criticism of a claim Schiff made in a 2019 television appearance about the committee’s communication with the whistleblower; Schiff said at the time “we have not spoken directly with the whistleblower” even though it soon emerged that the whistleblower had contacted the committee aide before filing the complaint. (A committee spokesperson said at the time that Schiff had been merely trying to say that the committee hadn’t heard actual testimony from the whistleblower, but that Schiff acknowledged his words “should have been more carefully phrased to make that distinction clear.”)
Regardless, McCarthy didn’t argue here that Schiff had been misleading about the committee’s dealings with the whistleblower; he strongly suggested that Schiff lied in saying he didn’t know the whistleblower. That’s baseless. There has never been any indication that Schiff had a relationship with the whistleblower when he said he didn’t, nor that Schiff knew the whistleblower’s identity when he said he didn’t.
President Joe Biden was facing the prospect of an imminent federal investigation after the discovery of classified documents at his former Washington office in November – and it was up to Bob Bauer, his personal attorney, to break the news to the White House, two sources familiar with the matter said.
He finds himself at the center of the legal maelstrom swirling below Biden’s presidency – and has managed a drip-drip-drip of bad news for the president in recent months, with four subsequent discoveries of additional documents since that first November 2 search. The latest came following a nearly 13-hour search the FBI carried out at the president’s Wilmington, Delaware, home on Friday with the permission of Biden’s attorneys.
A veteran Democratic attorney and former White House counsel under President Barack Obama, Bauer has developed a knack for telling powerful people things they need – but don’t necessarily want – to hear, multiple former colleagues said. Part of it lies in his matter-of-fact delivery, they said. The rest comes down to what several described as an unflappable demeanor, even amid spiraling crises.
“He’s fearless in terms of delivering news to a client,” said Valerie Jarrett, a top Obama adviser who worked alongside Bauer in the White House. “He never blinks. You don’t have to wonder whether or not he’s going to get weak-kneed.”
And so, when Jarrett and two other senior advisers agreed they had to tell Obama news he “did not want to hear” on what she described as a “highly sensitive and personal matter,” they sought out Bauer.
Bauer reprised his role as bearer of bad news on November 2. After a White House official transmitted Bauer’s initial heads-up to Biden, Bauer later gave the president a more fulsome briefing, laying out the beginnings of a strategy to navigate the fallout, which continues to guide the White House’s public and private posture and which has come under heated public scrutiny.
That criticism has focused most acutely on the White House’s first statement earlier this month, which acknowledged the discovery of classified documents at the Penn Biden Center office in November, but omitted the discovery of a second batch of documents at Biden’s Wilmington home in late December.
“I’m kind of surprised by it because Bob is usually pretty savvy about this stuff,” a former Obama White House official who worked with Bauer said of the critical omission.
Like the decision not to disclose the initial discovery of classified documents for more than two months, people familiar with the matter said Biden’s team wanted to avoid public disclosures that could be viewed as getting ahead of and undermining DOJ’s investigation.
For months, Bauer was part of the small circle of aides involved in weighing what to disclose and when. That included lawyers inside the White House, like White House special counsel Richard Sauber, and Anita Dunn, Biden’s top communications adviser and Bauer’s wife. Keeping the information closely held was intentional, even as it risked leaving key messaging advisers out of the loop, because the legal concerns were driving the decision-making process.
The group aware of the matter remained exceedingly small – even as it expanded to include Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain and his senior adviser Mike Donilon – until it became inevitable that the president’s team would need to prepare for it to leak out in the media, people familiar with the details said.
The aides understood that not revealing the discovery of a second batch of documents at Biden’s home in that initial statement would generate criticism, but they decided to adhere to Bauer’s legal strategy – wagering that losing some credibility with the press was less important than losing credibility with DOJ officials, according to a source familiar with the matter. Biden’s team also believed that making a more fulsome disclosure would not have lessened the public furor, the source said.
Above all, Biden’s team is motivated by a desire to cooperate and draw DOJ’s investigation to a close. That mentality motivated Biden’s team to quickly agree to an FBI search of his Wilmington home, according to a source familiar with the matter, just nine days after Biden’s attorneys carried out their last search of the property.
That source said Biden’s legal team viewed the FBI search as inevitable, particularly after the discovery of additional documents at the Wilmington home, and decided “the faster this happened, the better.”
“This is a team that has consistently demonstrated they’re far more interested in the long game than whatever the issue of the day driving Twitter may be,” a second person familiar with the strategic planning said. “There’s an understanding that people outside may not get that, but this isn’t some kind of dramatic shift – it’s where they’ve always been even if it doesn’t satisfy the Beltway crowd.”
There would be no divergence from the carefully constructed plans to highlight Biden’s agenda and no changes to his day-to-day schedule. Biden officials would publicly highlight the sharp differences between the Biden and Trump documents investigations, with those distinctions also driving their process behind the scenes.
Weighing heavily on that thinking was a mid-November letter from DOJ’s National Security Division that directed Biden’s legal team not to review or move materials and asked for full cooperation, a source familiar with the matter said, which Biden’s legal team understood as issuing minimal public statements about the ongoing investigation.
Bauer also wanted to avoid creating a precedent of proactively sharing new information about the case and taking the risk of providing an incomplete picture of an ongoing investigation, the source said – one that DOJ might be compelled to correct.
In practice, the White House’s incomplete first public statement on the documents not only undercut the administration’s stated commitment to public transparency; it also caused a ripple effect at the Justice Department, where Attorney General Merrick Garland was preparing to name a special counsel.
Garland had initially planned to leave out details of the investigation during that announcement, according to people briefed on the matter. But the White House’s omission of the Wilmington documents prompted DOJ officials to change course, the people said, and Garland instead laid out a timeline that revealed the second batch of documents had been found weeks earlier – and that the White House knew.
The White House’s omission of that detail in the initial statement embodied the enduring tension between a legal and communications strategy, and while Bauer’s former colleagues said he was always mindful of both, his focus was on providing the best legal advice.
“Bob is politically sophisticated – he understands all of that – but when he’s functioning in the role of lawyer, he behaves like one, which is to say he is conservative in securing, safeguarding the legal interests of his client,” said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Obama who worked with Bauer at the White House.
Nearly a dozen former colleagues and friends who spoke with CNN unanimously described Bauer as a brilliant and savvy attorney who is cautious and rarely rattled. They invariably called him “collaborative,” “brilliant” and a true “lawyer’s lawyer” who demonstrated tremendous integrity in his professional life.
“There is no lawyer in the country who is better equipped to handle a matter like this than Bob Bauer. Full stop,” said Kathy Ruemmler, a former White House counsel who served as Bauer’s principal deputy during the Obama administration.
“The stakes don’t get any higher than this,” said Ben Ginsberg, a veteran Republican election lawyer and Bauer’s decades-long friendly rival. “But Bob spent 40 years on high-stakes matters and representing presidents, public officials and high-profile candidates. From (Biden’s) perspective, Bob is the right person for this.”
Biden’s selection of Bauer to serve as his personal attorney was hardly a surprise to people inside the White House.
Even before serving as general counsel on Biden’s 2020 campaign, where he navigated sexual assault accusations made against Biden by a former Senate staffer, Bauer had been a sounding board and adviser, including when Biden was weighing a run for president following the death of his son Beau in 2015. Bauer worked out an agreement with his law firm to act as an adviser to Biden as he deliberated whether he was ready to mount a bid for the Democratic nomination.
Bauer took the lead on preparing Biden’s 2020 campaign for what they knew could be a messy Election Day – or even week. Then-President Donald Trump and his allies had made more than clear that if things didn’t go their way, they wouldn’t go down easy. Biden campaign officials – and the candidate himself – relied on what one person described as Bauer’s ability to see through the fogginess as they braced for the deluge of conspiracy theories and lies from their opponent.
“Biden has always had total confidence in what Bob tells him,” one person familiar with the men’s relationship said. “You don’t hear him second-guessing him, which isn’t really true for the rest of the team.”
Bauer has also become one of the few people to earn the deep trust of both Obama and Biden, whose innermost circles display little overlap. Bauer has served as personal attorney to both men and was among only a handful of aides who received a thank you in the acknowledgments of Biden’s 2017 memoir.
Don Verrilli, the former solicitor general who served as Bauer’s deputy when he was White House counsel, witnessed up close Obama’s trust in Bauer. And during Zoom meetings between Biden and members of his vice presidential search committee, which Bauer headed, Verrilli saw a similar trust develop.
“It was just evident how much respect (Biden) had for Bob and how much he trusted Bob,” Verrilli said.
Dunn, the White House’s senior adviser for communications, is also among the few to crack both inner circles. Bauer and Dunn now find themselves paired in confronting the Biden documents case. People who have worked with the couple previously say they hold each other’s viewpoints in high regard, even if those don’t always align.
“If you didn’t know they were married, you wouldn’t know they were married. They’re professionals,” said Ruemmler. “He gives his point of view, she gives her point of view. They don’t always agree.”
Bauer’s strategy of maximum cooperation could be put to the test as special counsel Robert Hur takes over the case.
US Attorney John Lausch’s initial review of the Biden’s documents matter was not a full-blown criminal investigation, and he did not use a grand jury. Even an interview with a key witness – Biden attorney Pat Moore, who first discovered the classified material at the Washington office – appears to have been an informal conversation that did not generate a 302 form that the government uses to memorialize interviews.
Now Hur, who has yet to formally take up the role, is in the process of assembling his team, and legal experts expect he will use a grand jury.
Biden’s legal team has stressed they plan to continue to cooperate with the investigation, but a source familiar with the matter said disagreements could eventually emerge with the Department of Justice about what future cooperation actually looks like.
Bauer could, for example, confront the question of whether to make the president available to answer questions from investigators. The White House has not ruled out a presidential interview.
“We’re not going to get ahead of that process with the special counsel and speculate on what they may or may not want or ask for,” said Ian Sams, a spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office.
Rep. Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, announced Monday that he will be “sidelined” in his home state for several weeks as he recovers from multiple injuries suffered in an accident at his Sarasota property last week.
Steube wrote on Twitter that he is recovering from “a fractured pelvis, a punctured lung, and several torn ligaments in my neck.”
“While I will be sidelined in Sarasota for several weeks, I will be carrying out as many of my congressional duties as possible, and our DC and district staff continue to be readily available to assist Floridians in FL-17,” he said in a tweet.
With the elimination of proxy voting and a slim Republican majority in the House, Steube’s absence could impact legislation brought to the floor.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tweeted last week that he had spoken to Steube and “informed him he will serve on the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, and he is eager to get back to work!”
Steube was first elected to the US House in 2018. He comfortably won a third term in November representing Florida’s safely Republican 17th Congressional District.
The former head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York field office was charged in two separate indictments Monday for allegedly working with a sanctioned Russian oligarch after he retired and concealing hundreds of thousands of dollars he received from a former employee of an Albanian intelligence agency while he was a top official at the bureau.
Charles McGonigal, a 22-year veteran of the FBI until he retired in 2018, was arrested Saturday at John F. Kennedy International Airport when returning from international travel, a source familiar with the arrest told CNN. The charges, announced by the US attorney’s offices in the Southern District of New York and Washington, DC, mark a dramatic fall for McGonigal, who has surrendered his passport and is currently prohibited from any international travel.
He entered a plea of not guilty via his attorney at an arraignment Monday afternoon in New York on charges in connection with violating US sanctions, conspiracy, and money laundering for working in 2021 with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was sanctioned for interfering in the 2016 US presidential election.
Prosecutors allege McGonigal and Sergey Shestakov, a former Russian diplomat who has most recently worked as an interpreter in New York federal courts in Manhattan and Brooklyn, violated US sanctions by digging up dirt on Deripaska’s rival at the time he was already sanctioned.
In Washington, McGonigal is charged with concealing connections he had with the person who decades earlier worked for an Albanian intelligence agency, including receiving $225,000 in payments. A prosecutor for the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York indicated that federal prosecutors in Washington, DC, set a remote initial appearance for Wednesday on those charges.
Prosecutors allege McGonigal, as an employee of the FBI, was required to disclose overseas travel and contacts with foreign nationals, which he failed to do.
On Monday, Southern District of New York prosecutors told Magistrate Judge Sarah Cave that they had reached a bail package agreement with McGonigal’s attorney. Cave granted the agreed-upon package to release McGonigal on $500,000 personal recognizance bond co-signed by two undisclosed individuals.
McGonigal must disclose any domestic travel outside of the southern or eastern districts of New York to the court except court appearances in Washington. Defense attorney Seth DuCharme told the court that McGonigal’s work involves international travel and said he might at some point ask for a bail modification.
Prosecutors allege that during several trips overseas to Albania, Austria, and Germany, McGonigal failed to disclose on US government forms that he met with the prime minister of Albania, a Kosovar politician and others.
In one meeting, prosecutors allege McGonigal urged the prime minister of Albania to be “careful about awarding oil field drilling licenses in Albania to Russian front companies.” The former employee of Albanian intelligence who paid him $225,000 had a financial interest in the government’s decision about the contracts.
One of the cash payments – $80,000 – was allegedly given to McGonigal while he sat in a parked car outside of a restaurant in New York City.
Under McGonigal’s direction, the FBI opened an investigation into a US citizen’s foreign lobbying effort based on information he received from the former employee of Albanian intelligence, according to the indictment. McGonigal never disclosed his financial relationship.
The charges out of New York allege that he first met the Russian interpreter, Shestakov, in 2018 while at the FBI through a Russian intelligence officer, known to be a diplomat previously for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Soviet Union and Russian Federation.
After he retired from the FBI in 2018, McGonigal was brought on as a consultant for a New York law firm working on Deripaska’s sanctions, the court filing says. McGonigal traveled to London and Vienna around 2019 to meet with Deripaska and others about getting the Russian oligarch “delisted” from the US sanctions list.
In 2021, they allegedly removed the law firm from the picture and McGonigal and Shestakov worked directly for Deripaska.
The former FBI agent and Shestakov attempted to hide their involvement with Deripaska, using shell companies and forged signatures to receive payments from the Russian oligarch.
In 2021, McGonigal was allegedly working to obtain “dark web” files for Deripaska that he said could reveal “hidden assets valued at more than 500 million us $” and other information that McGonigal believed would be valuable to Deripaska.
That effort was abruptly halted when the FBI seized their personal electronic devices in November of that year.
Shestakov faces one count of false statements for attempting to hide his relationship to the former FBI agent during an interview with FBI agents after the search warrant was executed.
Deripaska, an ally of Putin, was sanctioned by the US in 2018 in response to Russian interference in the 2016 election and was charged with violating US sanctions in September.
He is one of the most well-known oligarchs in Russia and, and his name came up during the Trump-Russia investigation. He was mentioned dozens of times in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which says he is “closely aligned” with Putin.
This headline and story have been updated with additional developments.
The Republican-controlled House has made the Internal Revenue Service a political target after Democrats bolstered the agency with new funding last year.
Within the first week of the new Congress, a dozen GOP lawmakers introduced a bill that would abolish the IRS altogether and replace the entire federal tax code with a national sales tax.
Separately, the House voted to rescind nearly $80 billion in funding for the agency that Democrats approved last year – with many top Republicans repeating the misleading claim that the money will be used to hire 87,000 auditors.
“Instead of adding 87,000 new agents to weaponize the IRS against small business owners and middle America, this bill will eliminate the need for the department entirely by simplifying the tax code with provisions that work for the American people and encourage growth and innovation,” said Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter, a Republican from Georgia who introduced the Fair Tax Act earlier this month.
It’s highly unlikely that either bill will become law, given that Democrats still control the Senate. But the measures highlight how America’s two major political parties have very different strategies when it comes to addressing the embattled tax collection agency – which has seen its budget shrink by more than 15% over the past decade and has struggled to not only process returns on time but also answer taxpayers’ questions. Just 13% of phone calls were answered last year.
Democrats have taken a different approach, making funding the IRS a priority. The Inflation Reduction Act, which passed along party lines last year, approved $80 billion for the IRS over 10 years. By using the money to crack down on tax cheats, it’s estimated that the agency could boost federal revenue by more than $124 billion over that time period.
The Republicans’ Fair Tax Act is not a new idea. A version was first introduced in Congress in 1999. It’s never had enough support to become law, but it puts forth an appealing message to those Americans who love to hate the federal tax agency.
It would get rid of the complicated federal tax system, doing away with the annual task of filing tax returns. Instead, the bill would replace federal taxes on individual and corporate income with a national 23% sales tax in 2025, allowing for adjustments to the rate in later years. Americans would pay Uncle Sam whenever they bought a new good or service for personal consumption.
The bill calls for abolishing the IRS and directing states to collect the new federal tax.
While every consumer would pay the same tax at the cash register, the bill provides for a monthly tax rebate payment, based on the poverty rate and family size. It’s meant to help offset the tax levy on low-income Americans who tend to spend a higher share of their paycheck on goods and services.
A national sales tax appears very simple: one rate all Americans pay on new goods and services they buy.
But some policy experts say the Fair Tax Act is more complicated than it looks.
“Moving away from taxing income and toward taxing consumption is a step in the right direction for a pro-growth and simpler tax code,” said Garrett Watson, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, an independent tax policy nonprofit.
But there could still be complications. First, the tax rate would likely have to be higher than 23% in order for the federal government to pull in the same amount of tax revenue that it does now. One estimate found that a tax rate of about 30% would more likely be able to generate the same amount of revenue– or 44%, if measured the way state sales taxes are typically presented.
Second, a nationwide sales tax could leave low- and middle-income people worse off. The current tax system is progressive, meaning it takes a larger percentage of income from high-earners than low-income groups. Even with the monthly tax rebate, a national sales tax would still be less progressive.
A 2011 independent analysis of a similar national sales tax found that, on average, most income groups would pay more tax than they did under the federal tax system at the time – except the top 5% of earners who would see a tax cut.
Additionally, it’s hard to imagine that lawmakers would pass a bill that does not exclude some things from the sales tax, like health care costs, for example.
“The basic income tax is simple too,” said Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
It’s the deductions, credits and exclusions – like for retirement savings and charitable giving – that make it complicated.
Plus, Americans would likely have to file some paperwork to some tax collection entity in order to receive the rebate, Gleckman said. The administration cost may be less than it is now, but it wouldn’t be zero.
Tax filing season opens Mondayand National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins expects IRS services for taxpayers to improve this year – in part due to the funding increase provided by Congress.
Since the Inflation Reduction Act was passed in August, the IRS has hired 5,000 new customer service agents. The agency has also worked to improve its technology so that taxpayers can ask questions via an automated service online, said Treasury Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo on a call with reporters last week.
The IRS started the year with about 400,000 unprocessed paper individual returns and about 1 million unprocessed business returns. But it’s in much better shape than the prior year, when it had a backlog of 4.7 million unprocessed individual returns and 3.2 million unprocessed business returns, according to the taxpayer advocate’s annual report to Congress.
Taxpayer service, like answering the phones and processing returns in a timely manner, has suffered as the IRS’ budget has shrunk.
The Covid-19 pandemic brought even more challenges for the IRS. It was tasked with administering several rounds of stimulus payments to millions of Americans with a lot of its staff working from home. This caused long delays for many taxpayers who filed a paper return. The IRS is starting to implement a scanning system so that returns filed by paper can quickly be made digital. Previously, paper returns had to be entered manually into the agency’s computer system.
Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona on Monday announced his campaign for US Senate, setting up a potential 2024 clash with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who recently switched her party affiliation from Democrat to independent.
Gallego, a Phoenix-area congressman and retired Marine who served in Iraq, released a video of him telling a group of fellow veterans about his decision to run.
“You’re the first group of people that are hearing this besides my family. I will be challenging Kyrsten Sinema for the United States Senate, and I need all of your support,” Gallego, 43, told the group at a veterans organization in Guadalupe, Arizona.
Sinema has faced fierce criticism from Democrats for opposing elements of President Joe Biden’s agenda. Early last year, while the Arizona senator was still a Democrat, Gallego said some Democratic senators were urging him to run for her seat. Sinema said in December she was switching parties, though she continues to caucus with Senate Democrats and has not said publicly whether she will run for reelection.
“Most families feel that they are one or two paychecks away from going under. That is not the way that we should be living in this country,” Gallego said in his announcement video. “The rich and the powerful, they don’t need more advocates. It’s the people that are still trying to decide between groceries and utilities that need a fighter for them.”
Gallego, who is of Colombian and Mexican descent, would be Arizona’s first Latino senator, if elected. He spoke in both English and Spanish in his announcement video and described the hardship and financial instability his family faced when he was growing up
Gallego said his mother, an immigrant, would “cry, like, every night, being stressed out about how she was gonna raise, like, four kids on a secretary’s salary, you know, with an absent father.”
“Fue una experiencia muy dura,” Gallego added in Spanish, which translates to: “It was a very hard experience.”
Gallego was first elected to the House in 2014. He is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and also chaired the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ campaign arm, BOLD PAC, during the 2022 cycle.
The Arizona Democrat in his announcement video described suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following his deployment to Iraq in 2005.
“Losing all my friends, consistently being shot at and people trying to blow you up all the time – you never really fully come back from war. You’re not the same person,” Gallego said. “Fighting through PTSD, there were some very low moments in my life. But I still didn’t give up. I pushed forward. I found a new way to keep serving.”
Philip Letsou, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, responded to Gallego’s announcement in a statement: “The Democrat civil war is on in Arizona. Chuck Schumer has a choice: stand with open borders radical Ruben Gallego or back his incumbent, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema.”
Several Republicans are considering running for Sinema’s seat. Defeated Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is considering a Senate bid, according to a source close to Lake.
Lake lost the Arizona governor’s race in November to Democrat Katie Hobbs by less than 1 point and has not conceded, falsely claiming as recently as Sunday that she won the election. An Arizona judge in December rejected Lake’s lawsuit attempting to overturn her defeat, concluding there wasn’t clear or convincing evidence of misconduct. Lake, a serial promoter of election lies who denies the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, has appealed the court’s decision. The source told CNN that Lake will not make a final decision on a Senate run until after her court case is completed.
Republican Blake Masters, who lost a challenge in November to incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly by almost 5 points, is also “strongly considering” running for Senate in 2024, according to a spokesperson. Masters has also denied the outcome of the 2020 election but, unlike Lake, conceded his race to Kelly.
Karrin Taylor Robson, who lost to Lake in last year’s Republican primary despite being endorsed by the state’s GOP governor at the time, Doug Ducey, also indicated she could be open to a Senate bid.
“Instead of providing a check on the radical Biden agenda, our Senators continue to enable his disastrous policies, which have been terrible for Arizona,” the former member of the Arizona Board of Regents told CNN in a statement. “While I’m still deciding how I can best serve the state that I love, I agree with the many Arizonans who have reached out, and who, like me, are hopeful that our party will nominate a strong, authentic conservative who will not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.”
In the fervor-filled days leading up to the November 16 launch of the long-awaited Artemis I mission, an uncrewed trip around the moon, some industry insiders admitted to having conflicting emotions about the event.
On one hand, there was the thrill of watching NASA take its first steps toward eventually getting humans back to the lunar surface; on the other, a shadow cast by the long and costly process it took to get there.
“I have mixed feelings, though I hope that we have a successful mission,” former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao said in an opinion roundtable interview with The New York Times. “It is always exciting to see a new vehicle fly. For perspective, we went from creating NASA to landing humans on the moon in just under 11 years. This program has, in one version or another, been ongoing since 2004.”
There have been numerous delays with the development of the rocket at the center of the Artemis I mission: NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rocket ever flown — and one of the most controversial. The towering launch vehicle was originally expected to take flight in 2016. And the decade-plus that the rocket was in development sparked years of blistering criticism targeted toward the space agency and Boeing, which holds the primary contract for the SLS rocket’s core.
NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) repeatedly called out what it referred to as Boeing’s “poor performance,” as a contributing factor in the billions of dollars in cost overruns and schedule delays that plagued SLS.
“Cost increases and schedule delays of Core Stage development can be traced largely to management, technical, and infrastructure issues driven by Boeing’s poor performance,” one 2018 report from NASA’s OIG, the first in a series of audits the OIG completed surrounding NASA’s management of the SLS program, read. And a report in 2020 laid out similar grievances.
For its part, Boeing has pushed back on the criticism, pointing to rigorous testing requirements and the overall success of the program. The OIG report also included correspondence from NASA, which noted in 2018 that it “had already recognized the opportunity to improve contract performance management” and agreed with the report’s recommendations.
Despite all the heated debate that has followed SLS, by all accounts, the rocket is here to stay. And officials at NASA and Boeing said its first launch two months ago was practically flawless.
“I worked over 50 Space Shuttle launches,” Boeing SLS program manager John Shannon told CNN by phone. “And I don’t ever remember a launch that was as clean as that one was, which for a first-time rocket — especially one that had been through as much as this one through all the testing — really put an exclamation point on how reliable and robust this vehicle really is.”
The Artemis program manager at NASA, Mike Sarafin, also said during a post-launch news conference that the rocket “performed spot-on.”
But with its complicated history and its hefty price tag, SLS could still face detractors in the years to come.
Many have questioned why SLS needs to exist at all. With the estimated cost per launch standing at more than $4 billion for the first four Artemis missions, it’s possible commercial rockets, like the massive Mars rocket SpaceX is building, could get the job done more efficiently, as the chief of space policy at the nonprofit exploration advocacy group Planetary Society, Casey Dreier, recently observed in an article laying out both sides of the SLS argument.
(NASA Administrator Bill Nelson noted that the $4 billion per-launch cost estimate includes development costs that the space agency hopes will be amortized over the course of 10 or more missions.)
Boeing was selected in 2012 to build SLS’s “core stage,” which is the hulking orange fuselage that houses most of the massive engines that give the rocket its first burst of power at liftoff.
Though more than 1,000 companies were involved with designing and building SLS, Boeing’s work involved the largest and most expensive portion of the rocket.
That process began over a decade ago, and when the Artemis program was established in 2019, it gave the rocket its purpose: return humans to the moon, establish a permanent lunar outpost, and, eventually, pave the path toward getting humans to Mars.
But the SLS is no longer the only rocket involved in the program. NASA gave SpaceX a significant role in 2021, giving the company a fixed-price contract for use of its Mars rocket as the vehicle that will ferry astronauts to the lunar surface after they leave Earth and travel to the moon’s orbit on SLS. SpaceX’s forthcoming rocket, called Starship, is also intended to be capable of completing a crewed mission to the moon or Mars on its own. (Starship, it should be noted, is still in the development phases and has not yet been tested in orbit.)
Boeing has repeatedly argued that SLS is essential and capable of performing tasks that other rockets cannot.
“The bottom line is there’s nothing else like the SLS because it was built from the ground up to be human rated,” Shannon said. “It is the only vehicle that can take the Orion spacecraft and the service module to the moon. And that’s the purpose-built design — to take large hardware and humans to cislunar space, and nothing else exists that can do that.”
Starship, meanwhile, is not tailored solely to NASA’s specific lunar goals. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has talked for more than a decade about his desire to get humans to Mars. More recently, he has said Starship could also be used to house giant space telescopes.
Yet, another reason critics remain skeptical of SLS is because of its origins. The rocket’s conception can be traced back to NASA’s Constellation program, which was a plan to return to the moon mapped out under former President George W. Bush that was later canceled.
But the SLS has survived. Many observers have suggested a big reason was the desire to maintain space industry jobs in certain Congressional districts and to beef up aerospace supply chains.
Much of the criticism levied against SLS, however, has focused on the actual process of getting the rocket built.
At one point in 2019, former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine considered sidelining the SLS rocket entirely, citing frustrations with the delays.
“At the end of the day, the contractors had an obligation to deliver what NASA had contracted for them to deliver,” Bridenstine told CNN by phone last month. “And I was frustrated like most of America.”
Still, Bridenstine said, when his office reviewed the matter, it found “there were no options that were going to cost less money or take less time than just finishing the SLS” — and the rocket was never ultimately sidelined. (Bridenstine noted he was also publicly critical of delayed projects led by SpaceX and others.)
The SLS rocket ended up flying its first launch more than six years later than originally intended. NASA had allocated $6.2 billion to the SLS program as of 2018, but that price tag more than tripled to $23 billion as of 2022, according to an analysis by the Planetary Society.
Those escalating costs can be traced back to the type of contracts that NASA signed with Boeing and its other major suppliers for SLS. It’s called cost-plus, which puts the financial burden on NASA when projects face cost overruns while still offering contractors extra payments, or award fees.
In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Science last year, current NASA Administrator Bill Nelson criticized the cost-plus contracting method, calling it a “plague.”
More in vogue are “fixed-price” contracts, which have a firm price cap, like the kind NASA gave to Boeing and SpaceX for its Commercial Crew Program.
In an interview with CNN in December, however, Nelson stood by cost-plus contracting for SLS and Orion, the vehicle that is designed to carry astronauts and rides atop the rocket to space. He said that without that type of contract, in his view, NASA’s private-sector contractors simply wouldn’t be willing to take on a rocket designed for such a specific purpose and exploring deep space. Building a rocket as specific and technically complex as SLS isn’t a risk many private-sector companies are anxious to take on, he noted.
“You really have difficulty in the development of a new and very exquisite spacecraft … on a fixed-price contract,” he said.
“That industry is just not willing to accept that kind of thing, with the exception of the landers,” he added, referring to two other branches of the Artemis program: robotic landers that will deliver cargo to the moon’s surface and SpaceX’s $2.9 billion lunar lander contract. Both of those will use fixed-price — often referred to as “commercial” — contracts.
“And even there, they’re getting a considerable investment by the federal government,” Nelson said.
Still, government watchdogs have not pulled punches when assessing these cost-plus contracts and Boeing’s role.
“We did notice very poor contractor performance on Boeing’s part. There’s poor planning and poor execution,” NASA Inspector General Paul Martin said during testimony before the House’s Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics last year. “We saw that the cost-plus contracts that NASA had been using…worked to the contractor’s — rather than NASA’s — advantage.”
Shannon, the Boeing executive, acknowledged in an interview that Boeing and SLS have faced loud detractors, but he said that the value of the drawn out development and testing program would become evident as SLS flies.
“I am extremely proud that NASA — even though there were significant schedule pressures — they could set up a test program that was incredibly comprehensive,” he said. “The Boeing team worked through that test process and hit every mark on it. And you see the results. You see a vehicle that is not just visually spectacular, but its performance was spectacular. And it really put us on the road to be able to do lunar exploration again, which is something that’s very important in this country.”
But the rocket is still facing criticism. During a Congressional hearing with the House’s Science, Space, and Technology Committee in March 2022, NASA’s Inspector General said that current cost estimates for SLS were “unsustainable,” gauging that the space agency will have spent $93 billion on the Artemis program from 2012 through September 2025.
Martin, the NASA inspector general, specifically pointed to Boeing as one of the contractors that would need to find “efficiencies” to bring down those costs as the Artemis program moves forward.
In a December 7 statement to CNN, Boeing once again defended SLS and its price point.
“Boeing is and has been committed to improving our processes — both while the program was in its developmental stage and now as it transitions to an operational phase,” the statement read, noting the company already implemented “lessons learned” from building the first rocket to “drive efficiencies from a cost and schedule perspective” for future SLS rockets.
“When adjusted for inflation, NASA has developed SLS for a quarter of the cost of the Saturn V and half the cost of the Space Shuttle,” the statement noted. “These programs have also been essential to investing in the NASA centers, workforce and test facilities that are used by a broad range of civil and commercial partners across NASA and industry.”
The successful launch of SLS was a welcome winning moment for Boeing. Over the past few years, the company has been mired in controversy, including ongoing delays and myriad issues with Starliner, a spacecraft built for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, and scandal after scandal plaguing its airplane division.
Now that the Artemis I mission has returned safely home, NASA and Boeing can turn to preparing more of the gargantuan SLS rockets to launch even loftier missions.
SLS is slated to launch the Artemis II mission, which will take four astronauts on a journey around the moon, in 2024. From there, SLS will be the backbone of the Artemis III mission that will return humans to the lunar surface for the first time in five decades and a series of increasingly complex missions as NASA works to create its permanent lunar outpost.
Shannon, the Boeing SLS program manager, told CNN that construction of the next two SLS rocket cores is well underway, with the booster for Artemis II on track to be finished in April — more than a year before the mission is scheduled to take off. All of the “major components” for a third SLS rocket are also completed, Shannon added.
For the third SLS core and beyond, Boeing is also moving final assembly to new facilities Florida, freeing up space at its manufacturing facilities to increase production, which may help drive down costs.
Shannon declined to share a specific price point for the new rockets or share any internal pricing goals, though NASA is expected to sign new contracts for the rockets that will launch the Artemis V mission and beyond, which could significantly change the price per launch.
Nelson also told CNN in December that NASA “will be making improvements, and we will find cost savings where we can,” such as with the decision to use commercial contracts for other vehicles under the Artemis program umbrella.
How and whether those contracts bear out remain to be seen: SpaceX needs to get its Starship rocket flying, a massive space station called Gateway needs to come to fruition, and at least some of the robotic lunar landers designed to carry cargo to the moon will need to prove their effectiveness. It’s also not yet clear whether those contracts will result in enough cost savings for the critics of SLS, including NASA’s OIG, to consider the Artemis program sustainable.
As for SLS, Nelson also told reporters December 11, just after the conclusion of the Artemis I mission, that he had every reason to expect that lawmakers would continue to fund the rocket and NASA’s broader moon program.
“I’m not worried about the support from the Congress,” Nelson said.
And Bridenstine, Nelson’s predecessor who has been publicly critical SLS, said that he ultimately stands by SLS and points out that, controversies aside, it does have rare bipartisan support from its bankrollers.
“We are in a spot now where this is going to be successful,” Bridenstine said last month, recalling when he first realized the Artemis program had support from the right and left. “All of America is going to be proud of this program. And yes, there are going to be differences. People are gonna say well, you should go all commercial and drop SLS…but at the end of the day, what we have to do is we have to bring together all of the things that are the best programs that we can get for America and use them to go to the moon.”
A wide range of businesses, internet users, academics and even human rights experts defended Big Tech’s liability shield Thursday in a pivotal Supreme Court case about YouTube algorithms, with some arguing that excluding AI-driven recommendation engines from federal legal protections would cause sweeping changes to the open internet.
The diverse group weighing in at the Court ranged from major tech companies such as Meta, Twitter and Microsoft to some of Big Tech’s most vocal critics, including Yelp and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Even Reddit and a collection of volunteer Reddit moderators got involved.
In friend-of-the-court filings, the companies, organizations and individuals said the federal law whose scope the Court could potentially narrow in the case — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — is vital to the basic function of the web. Section 230 has been used to shield all websites, not just social media platforms, from lawsuits over third-party content.
The question at the heart of the case, Gonzalez v. Google, is whether Google can be sued for recommending pro-ISIS content to users through its YouTube algorithm; the company has argued that Section 230 precludes such litigation. But the plaintiffs in the case, the family members of a person killed in a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris, have argued that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm can be held liable under a US antiterrorism law.
In their filing, Reddit and the Reddit moderators argued that a ruling enabling litigation against tech-industry algorithms could lead to future lawsuits against even non-algorithmic forms of recommendation, and potentially targeted lawsuits against individual internet users.
“The entire Reddit platform is built around users ‘recommending’ content for the benefit of others by taking actions like upvoting and pinning content,” their filing read. “There should be no mistaking the consequences of petitioners’ claim in this case: their theory would dramatically expand Internet users’ potential to be sued for their online interactions.”
Yelp, a longtime antagonist to Google, argued that its business depends on serving relevant and non-fraudulent reviews to its users, and that a ruling creating liability for recommendation algorithms could break Yelp’s core functions by effectively forcing it to stop curating all reviews, even those that may be manipulative or fake.
“If Yelp could not analyze and recommend reviews without facing liability, those costs of submitting fraudulent reviews would disappear,” Yelp wrote. “If Yelp had to display every submitted review … business owners could submit hundreds of positive reviews for their own business with little effort or risk of a penalty.”
Section 230 ensures platforms can moderate content in order to present the most relevant data to users out of the huge amounts of information that get added to the internet every day, Twitter argued.
“It would take an average user approximately 181 million years to download all data from the web today,” the company wrote.
If the Supreme Court were to advance a new interpretation of Section 230 that safeguarded platforms’ right to remove content, but excluded protections on their right to recommend content, it would open up broad new questions about what it means to recommend something online, Meta argued in its filing.
“If merely displaying third-party content in a user’s feed qualifies as ‘recommending’ it, then many services will face potential liability for virtually all the third-party content they host,” Meta wrote, “because nearly all decisions about how to sort, pick, organize, and display third-party content could be construed as ‘recommending’ that content.”
A ruling finding that tech platforms can be sued for their recommendation algorithms would jeopardize GitHub, the vast online code repository used by millions of programmers, said Microsoft.
“The feed uses algorithms to recommend software to users based on projects they have worked on or showed interest in previously,” Microsoft wrote. It added that for “a platform with 94 million developers, the consequences [of limiting Section 230] are potentially devastating for the world’s digital infrastructure.”
Microsoft’s search engine Bing and its social network, LinkedIn, also enjoy algorithmic protections under Section 230, the company said.
According to New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, it is virtually impossible to design a rule that singles out algorithmic recommendation as a meaningful category for liability, and could even “result in the loss or obscuring of a massive amount of valuable speech,” particularly speech belonging to marginalized or minority groups.
“Websites use ‘targeted recommendations’ because those recommendations make their platforms usable and useful,” the NYU filing said. “Without a liability shield for recommendations, platforms will remove large categories of third-party content, remove all third-party content, or abandon their efforts to make the vast amount of user content on their platforms accessible. In any of these situations, valuable free speech will disappear—either because it is removed or because it is hidden amidst a poorly managed information dump.”
Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said Sunday that it’s a “mistake” for the White House to want Democrats to deal with the debt ceiling without negotiating with congressional Republicans.
“I think it’s a mistake because we have to negotiate. This is a democracy that we have. We have a two-party system, if you will, and we should be able to talk and find out where our differences are. And if they are irreconcilable, then you have to move on from there and let people make their decisions,” Manchin, a key Senate moderate, told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
“Using the debt ceiling and holding it hostage hasn’t worked in the past,” Manchin continued, adding that he “respectfully” disagrees with his party’s No. 2 Democrat in the chamber, Majority Whip Dick Durbin, on not negotiating with Republicans.
“Every American has to live within a budget. If they don’t, they’re in trouble financially. Every business that’s successful has to live within a budget. Every state has to live within a budget. Shouldn’t the federal government have some guardrails that, say, ‘Hey, guys … you’re overreaching here and you’re overspending?’ But then pick your priorities. That’s all,” he added.
The US hit the debt ceiling set by Congress on Thursday, forcing the Treasury Department to start taking “extraordinary measures” to keep the government paying its bills and escalating pressure on Capitol Hill to avoid a catastrophic default.
The battle lines for the high-stakes fight have already been set. Hard-line Republicans, who have enormous sway in the House because of the party’s slim majority, have demanded that lifting the borrowing cap be tied to spending reductions. Manchin suggested Sunday he was open to spending cuts.
The White House, however, has countered that it will not offer any concessions or negotiate on raising the debt ceiling. And with the solution to the debt ceiling drama squarely in lawmakers’ hands, fears are growing that the partisan brinksmanship could result in the nation defaulting on its debt for the first time ever – or come dangerously close to doing so.
GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania said Sunday on Fox News that the White House position against negotiating with House Republicans on spending cuts, in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, is “very irresponsible.” He said the first step in addressing the debt ceiling situation is for Speaker Kevin McCarthy to sit down with Biden.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, said in the same interview that he believes the White House will ultimately sit down with McCarthy, which he called “a good thing.”
Fitzpatrick and Gottheimer are the co-chairs of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus in the House.
As to whether Social Security and Medicare should be part of these negotiations, Manchin shared his interest in wanting to create a committee that would make the two programs “more financially secure and stable.” But he said no one who currently receives these benefits should receive any cuts.
“No cuts to anybody that’s receiving their benefits, no adjustments to that. They’ve earned it. They paid into it. Take that off the table,” Manchin said. “But everyone’s using that as a leverage.”
The senator indicated he was open to raising the income cap for Social Security taxes.
“I’m open to basically raising – the easiest and quickest thing we can do is raise the cap,” he said.
Meanwhile, Manchin on Sunday also offered support for fellow Senate moderate Krysten Sinema, calling her a “formidable candidate” for reelection in 2024.
Sinema announced last month she was leaving the Democratic Party and registering as a political independent, fueling fresh interest from Arizona Democrats to challenge her next year.
“I would think that she needs to be supported again, yes, because she brings that independent spirit,” Manchin said.
This story has been updated with additional information.
Bob Bauer, the president’s personal attorney, said in a statement that during the search, which took place over nearly 13 hours Friday, “DOJ took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President’s service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President. DOJ also took for further review personally handwritten notes from the vice-presidential years.”
The federal search of BIden’s home, while voluntary, marks an escalation of the probe into the president’s handling of classified documents and will inevitably draw comparisons to his predecessor, former President Donald Trump – even if the FBI’s search of Trump’s residence was conducted under different circumstances.
The FBI five months ago obtained a search warrant to search Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, an unprecedented step that was taken because federal investigators had evidence suggesting Trump had not handed over all classified materials in his possession after receiving a subpoena to turn over classified documents to the National Archives. Trump’s handling of classified material at Mar-a-Lago is also the subject of a special counsel investigation led by Jack Smith.
The search shows that federal investigators are swiftly moving forward with the probe into classified documents found in Biden’s possession. It was overseen by the office of Trump-appointed US Attorney John Lausch, who has been handling the initial review of the Justice Department’s probe.
Lausch did not request any searches of Biden properties during his initial review, according to a source familiar with the investigation. He also did not wait for Biden team to complete their voluntary searches before recommending a special counsel.
Robert Hur, who was appointed a little more than a week ago, is still transitioning to his role as special counsel. A spokesperson for the Justice Department tells CNN “we expect Special Counsel Hur to be on board shortly.”
The FBI search was done with the consent of the president’s attorneys, people briefed on the matter said. The FBI also previously picked up documents found at the residence, which the Biden team disclosed last week.
The search did not require a search warrant or subpoena, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Bauer said that representatives of Biden’s personal legal team and the White House Counsel’s Office were present during the “thorough search,” during which they had “full access” to the Biden home.
Bauer added that the DOJ “requested that the search not be made public in advance, in accordance with its standard procedures, and we agreed to cooperate.”
The first documents were found in Biden’s private office on November 2 but not publicly revealed until earlier this month when CBS first reported their existence.
Since then, another search in December found a “small number” of records with classified markings in the garage of Biden’s Wilmington house and a third discovery was made at the Wilmington residence in January, when Biden’s legal team searched the rest of the property for documents. They found them, in a room adjacent to the garage.
Bauer said in a January 11 statement that once Biden’s personal attorneys found the classified documents, they left the document where it was found and suspended their search of the space where it was located.
“I think you’re going to find there’s nothing there. I have no regrets,” Biden continued on Thursday.
Neither Biden nor first lady Dr. Jill Biden were present during the search, special counsel to the president Richard Sauber said in a statement.
Biden, Sauber wrote, “has been committed to handling this responsibly because he takes this seriously” and he and his team are “working swiftly to ensure DOJ and the Special Counsel have what they need to conduct a thorough review.”
Bauer said that investigators had full access to Biden’s home during the search, which included “personally handwritten notes, files, papers, binders, memorabilia, to-do lists, schedules, and reminders going back decades.”
Biden is spending this weekend at his Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, home. Asked Friday by the Associated Press if the visit had anything to do with documents being found at Biden’s Wilmington home, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre referred reporters to White House counsel’s office and the Department of Justice, but said that Biden “often travels to Delaware on the weekends.”
This story has been updated with additional reporting.
After the United States hit its debt ceiling on Thursday, the Treasury Department is now undertaking “extraordinary measures” to keep paying the government’s bills.
A default could be catastrophic, causing “irreparable harm to the US economy, the livelihoods of all Americans and global financial stability,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned.
“If that happened, our borrowing costs would increase and every American would see that their borrowing costs would increase as well,” Yellen said. “On top of that, a failure to make payments that are due, whether it’s the bondholders or to Social Security recipients or to our military, would undoubtedly cause a recession in the US economy and could cause a global financial crisis.”
She added: “It would certainly undermine the role of the dollar as a reserve currency that is used in transactions all over the world. And Americans — many people — would lose their jobs and certainly their borrowing costs would rise.”
Dire warnings of debt ceiling trouble aren’t new. Federal lawmakers have reached agreements in the past, and this Congress has some time — until at least early June, according to Yellen’s public estimates — to reach an agreement on whether to raise or suspend the debt limit.
Many economists say they expect an agreement will be reached. However, given the current “extremely fractious political environment,” it could be a long process that would contribute to “flare-ups” in financial market volatility, Moody’s Investors Service said in a note Thursday.
So what happens to the economy in a worst-case scenario of default?
It’s an understandable question with an unsatisfying answer, said Michael Pugliese, vice president and economist with Wells Fargo’s corporate and investment bank.
“The honest truth is, no one knows,” he said. “A widespread default by the US government is not something we’ve ever experienced and not something we’ve ever even come close to experiencing.”
While a default isn’t something that can be modeled in the way a more historically common economic event such as a recession can be, the events of 2011 could lend some perspective as to what would happen if the debt ceiling drama turns into a debacle, said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon.
“2011 was the first time in a long time that we came close to a debt ceiling breach,” he said. “And that was a time when there was a lot of political fragmentation and there was a strong desire to essentially attach spending cuts to any debt ceiling increase.”
The current environment includes similar brinksmanship and desires to attach spending cuts, he said.
But some fear this fight may be tougher than those in the past, a concern reinforced by the fact it took 15 ballots to elect the Speaker of the House in what is normally the easiest vote taken by a new Congress.
The economy nearly 13 years ago was different, as well.
At the time, the Fed was in an easy monetary policy mode and the economy in a weaker position, as it was still recovering from the Great Recession of 2008, Pugliese said. Unemployment was north of 9% in July 2011.
That same year, Treasury projected the “X date” — the date on which it would be unable to pay its obligations on time — would fall on August 2, 2011. That ultimately was the date when Congress passed, and President Barack Obama enacted, a law increasing the ceiling.
The actual economic impact of the debt ceiling run-up in 2011 is hard to isolate and quantify, Pugliese said, noting how the sluggish US economic recovery also experienced spillover effects from global events, notably Europe’s sovereign debt crisis.
Still, there were some indications that the protracted congressional battle contributed to a shake-up in the economy then, he said. Real GDP growth was a weak -0.1% on a quarter-over-quarter annualized basis in the third quarter of 2011. Financial markets were roiled, consumer confidence weakened, the US economic policy uncertainty index set a new high and Standard & Poor’scredit rating agency downgraded the United States to AA+ from AAA.
“I think you would be hard pressed to say [the debt ceiling debacle] was a positive thing,” he said. “I think of it more as one other hurdle among a lot of other hurdles for the economy as it emerged from 9% unemployment at the time.”
This time, if the X date were to come without a resolution, there is speculation that the Treasury could prioritize principal and interest payments to prevent a technical default, Pugliese said. There are potentially other “break the glass” options from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, but those are untested and short-term solutions, he added.
“Someone, somewhere is going to get shortchanged if the government doesn’t have all of its money, whether that’s Social Security beneficiaries, defense contractors, civil service employees, veterans, [etc.],” he said.
Adding to the uncertainty is the current economic climate, Daco said.
“We are going into this delicate period at a time when the US economy is clearly slowing down and at a time when the global economic backdrop is also weakening … so the economic environment against which this debt ceiling debacle is unfolding is one of increased economic softening.”
While a self-inflicted recession would be likely after the point when an X date is hit, some upheaval could come sooner, Daco said.
“Financial markets and private sector actors tend to react ahead of that date,” he said. “If there is the anticipation that we will get very close to that drop-dead date, then financial market volatility generally tends to increase, stock prices tend to react adversely.”
A Treasury default would undermine the global financial system, said Louise Sheiner, policy director at the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy and former senior economist with the Fed and the Council of Economic Advisers.
“If Treasuries become something that people are worried about holding, then that has ripple effects throughout capital markets throughout the world, in ways that are really difficult to predict,” she said.
Considering the potential consequences in the United States and abroad, Sheiner believes the debt ceiling will be lifted or suspended — eventually.
“There’s no other way around it,” she said. “There’s no way that Congress is going to cut spending 20% in the middle of the year. It would plunge the economy into a recession. It would be a terrible policy.”
She added: “If you care about the long-term debt, you have to actually change different laws, Social Security law, Medicare, or the tax law … you want to do that in the appropriate process, you want to do it well thought out. It’s not the kind of thing that should be done under duress.”
CNN’s Maegan Vazquez, Matt Egan and Tami Luhby contributed to this report.
Rep. Greg Steube was discharged from the hospital Saturday after being injured in an accident on his property in Sarasota, Florida, according to a tweet from the Republican congressman.
“I’m grateful to be home and recovering after being discharged from the hospital today,” Steube said from his official Twitter account. “All praise and glory goes to God! Jen and I remain endlessly blessed by the prayers and support from our friends, family, and community.”
On Wednesday, Steube “was knocked approximately 25 feet down off a ladder while cutting tree limbs,” and spent Wednesday evening in the intensive care unit, CNN previously reported.
He was then moved out of the intensive care unit on Thursday, his office said in a statement.
The Florida Republican on Saturday also thanked health care staff at Sarasota Memorial Hospital in a subsequent tweet, and said his office will provide updates next week on his recovery and his return to Washington, DC.
Steube was first elected to the US House of Representatives in 2018. He comfortably won a third term in November representing Florida’s safely Republican 17th Congressional District.
