Tag: iab-elections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story has been updated with additional details.

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January 24, 2023
Fact check: McCarthy’s false, misleading and evidence-free claims since becoming House speaker | CNN Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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January 24, 2023
Bob Bauer: The man behind Biden’s classified documents strategy | CNN Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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January 24, 2023
Arizona Democrat Ruben Gallego announces Senate bid in challenge to Kyrsten Sinema | CNN Politics

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CNN
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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.”

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January 23, 2023
Kamala Harris mourns victims of Monterey Park shooting before speech to mark 50 years since Roe | CNN Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, Harris encouraged abortion rights advocates to stay positive.

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

This story and headline have been updated.

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January 23, 2023
No. 2 Senate Democrat agrees Biden has lost ‘high ground’ in criticism over classified documents | CNN Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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January 22, 2023
Who is Jeff Zients? | CNN Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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January 22, 2023
Jeff Zients to replace Ron Klain as White House chief of staff | CNN Politics

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

Klain is expected to step down in the coming weeks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story has been updated with additional information.

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January 22, 2023
Why a historically small presidential primary field is possible in 2024 | CNN Politics

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

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

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

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

We could be heading toward 1984 or 1992 territory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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January 22, 2023
Faucets in McCarthy’s district are running dry after years of drought. Constituents want him to do more | CNN Politics

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Shortly after Benjamin Cuevas and his family moved into their new home three years ago in Tooleville, California, he realized something was horribly wrong.

In the middle of the day, the water pressure would drop completely. Cranking up both hot and cold could only coax a little drip out of the faucet.

Then there was the water itself, contaminated with chemicals from agriculture runoff and treated with so much chlorine that it turned his family’s black clothing gray in the wash. His daughter and her baby live in the house, and Cuevas’s wife only bathes her granddaughter in the bottled water they receive from the county for drinking.

Cuevas is not alone; the entire town of under 300 people faces the same water crisis. In many rural parts of the state, faucets and community wells are running dry after years of drought and heavy agriculture use pulls more water from the same groundwater residents use.

One local nonprofit told CNN that about 8,000 people in the San Joaquin Valley need thousands of gallons of hauled water just to keep their taps flowing – and that number is growing.

Newly elected House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has represented Tooleville for the past decade – though the small town is just outside his newly redrawn congressional district. The Republican lawmaker has long represented Kern and Tulare counties, and his redrawn seat adds portions of Fresno County.

Throughout his tenure, this region of California has spent more time than any other part of the country in exceptional drought – the US Drought Monitor’s most severe category – a drought scientists say has been made more intense by human-caused climate change. Recent rainfall has put a dent in the region’s surface drought, though experts have told CNN it will do little to solve the ongoing groundwater shortage.

Tulare, Kern and Fresno counties have endured more than 200 weeks in exceptional drought over the past decade, according to Drought Monitor data.

Multiple people CNN spoke to for this story said McCarthy and his office don’t often engage on this issue in the district, especially compared with neighboring members of Congress. And they wish he would do more with his power in Washington – especially now that he holds the speaker’s gavel.

McCarthy proposed an amendment this past summer to set up a grant program to help connect small towns like Tooleville with larger cities that have better water systems. The measure passed the House but died in the Senate. But as more and more wells go dry, McCarthy has made a point to vote against other bills addressing climate change and drought, including the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law.

“In my experience, he has never engaged with us on any of these kinds of emergencies,” said Jessi Snyder, the director of community development at local nonprofit Self-Help Enterprises, who focuses on getting hauled water to entire communities that have gone dry.

In a statement to CNN, McCarthy’s office said he has been “a staunch advocate on water issues in the Central Valley and California” since he was first elected to the House. McCarthy has joined his colleagues to “introduce broad legislative solutions every Congress related to this topic since our water situation continues to worsen,” his spokesperson Brittany Martinez said.

But McCarthy does not mention climate change when talking about his district’s drought, and his office did not respond to questions from CNN about whether he believes climate change is playing a role. Instead, he often blames the drought on state mismanagement of water and has called for new and larger dams and reservoirs to be built to capture rainwater during wet years.

Water experts in California say that’s missing the new reality.

“Part of what’s happening now is the reality that there is no more new water,” said Peter Gleick, co-founder and senior fellow of California-based water nonprofit Pacific Institute. “The knee-jerk response of politicians has always been build another dam; find more water. There is no new reservoir that’s going to magically solve these problems. It’s now a question of managing demand.”

When a call comes in from yet another community whose well has run dry, it’s a race against time for the staff at Self-Help Enterprises.

The Visalia, California-based nonprofit has a self-imposed deadline of just 24 hours to drive out to the impacted community with emergency tanks to keep water flowing for showers, laundry and cleaning, as well as with five-gallon jugs of higher-quality water for drinking.

“The team goes all hands-on deck,” Tami McVay, Self-Help’s director of emergency services, told CNN. “Everybody knows what their role is, and they just go get it done. And we move forward to the next one.”

These days, there’s always a next one. Snyder said the summer of 2022 marked “a new level of crisis” as entire small communities of 80 to 100 homes started running out of water, in addition to individual homes.

“It’s been a real struggle because it’s hard to provide a backup source of water to a whole community instead of one household,” she said.

More than 1,400 wells were reported dry last year, according to the state of California, a 40% increase over the same period in 2021. Self-Help staff see this in person on the ground. New families are flowing into their hauled water program, but none are leaving. During the dry, warm-weather months, McVay estimates her nonprofit fields around 100 calls a day, dropping down to about 30 per week in the winter months.

The punishing multi-year drought is what Brad Rippey, a meteorologist at the US Department of Agriculture, calls California’s “latest misery.” California has spent eight of the last 11 years in drought, with the last three years being the driest such period on record, state officials said in October. Human-caused climate change – which is raising global temperatures and making much-needed rain and snow less frequent in the West – is contributing to the severity, Rippey said.

“The impacts are multiplying. You have these droughts piling on top of droughts with cumulative impacts,” including wildfires, he added.

To supplement the dwindling groundwater supply in Tooleville, officials in Tulare County and nonprofits like Self-Help deliver five-gallon water jugs to the residents for drinking and 16,000 gallons of hauled water into tanks for washing their clothes, doing dishes and taking showers.

There’s so much demand in the warm months for the hauled water that a 16,000-gallon delivery lasted some communities just a few hours before needing to be refilled, Snyder said.

“We literally cannot pump the water out of the tanker trucks fast enough to fill the storage tanks,” she added. “We can’t ever get ahead of it; physics is against us. It’s nuts and really stressful.”

California’s extreme heat wave this summer pushed water usage even higher as residents watered grass and farms pumped more for crops. In Tooleville, Cuevas watched as the orange and lemon trees in his yard withered and died. Outdoor watering restrictions meant he couldn’t save his trees, even as some of his neighbors flouted the restrictions with noticeably green lawns.

“Everything just perished,” Cuevas said. “It’s not a good feeling to see other people enjoying [the water], while you’re doing your part.”

Seeing the nearby Friant-Kern Canal every day – which carries melted snowpack water from Northern California to Central Valley farms – is a nagging reminder of what his family doesn’t have.

“It’s terrible,” Cuevas told CNN. “Just joking, I’d say I’ll go out there and put a hose [in it] running right back to my house.”

Tooleville resident Maria Olivera has lived in town since 1974.

Olivera cooks with bottled water.

As Cuevas’s own trees died, commercial farms in the area were still producing – although their future is also uncertain. Farms are also having to drill deeper wells to irrigate orange groves and acres of thirsty pecan and pistachio trees.

With this rush on groundwater, shallow residential wells don’t stand a chance. In West Goshen, a small town that sits outside McCarthy’s district in Tulare County, resident Jesus Benitez told CNN he burned through three well pumps – costing $1,200 a piece – during the warmer months when his neighbor, a farmer who grows alfalfa and corn, started irrigating his crops.

“They’ve got the money to go every time deeper and deeper in the ground; we don’t have that luxury,” Benitez said.

Two town wells in nearby Seville nearly ran dry this summer, said Linda Gutierrez, a lifelong resident who sits on the town’s water board. Across the street from the town’s wells is a pistachio farm, and when they start irrigating, the groundwater level plummets, she said.

But she doesn’t blame the farmers. Like many who live in the area, her husband is a farm worker. There’s a lot of pride in the region’s far-reaching agriculture, and many feel it should be sustained.

“You can’t not have farmers because you need food, but we have to have water in order to survive,” Gutierrez said. “There’s a very tricky balance to establish. Right now, if they don’t irrigate, we have water, but also a year from now we have no food.”

As big of a societal problem as drought and water shortages are, they are also intensely personal. Self-Help’s McVay gets emotional when talking about school children in the area getting beat up because they don’t have clean clothes or ready access to a shower.

“They don’t have water in their homes to take baths, or brush their teeth, or have clean laundry, and they’re getting bullied,” she said. “Being made fun of because they’re taking baths at the local gas station bathroom. It’s not fair – the stress that it causes the parents because [they] start to feel like they’re failing as a parent.”

Multiple local and state elected officials and leaders of nonprofits focusing on water delivery in the San Joaquin Valley said McCarthy isn’t engaged enough on what they consider one of his district’s most dire crises.

McVay said outreach from McCarthy’s office on dry residential wells is “slim to none, and I am not saying that to discredit them at all.”

“I have had more conversations, more engagement and just more wanting to know how they can assist from Congressman Valadao and his office than probably any other on the federal side,” McVay added.

Snyder said Rep. David Valadao, a Republican representing neighboring Kings County as well as portions of Tulare and Kern, and his staff “will show up in a community at the time of a crisis” and are actively engaged on how they can support efforts to get people water.

Other members of Congress, including Democratic Rep. Jim Costa and Republican Connie Conway, who left office earlier this month, have also been more accessible and engaged on the issue, Snyder said.

“Kevin McCarthy, no,” Snyder added.

While McCarthy is popular in his district and influential among California and Central Valley Republicans, California state Sen. Melissa Hurtado, a Democrat who represents parts of the San Joaquin Valley plagued by drought, told CNN there are concerns that McCarthy’s ambition for House speaker has superseded his district’s needs.

“He’s focused on that leadership position instead of actually working on issues to address the impacts of his district,” Hurtado told CNN. “Quietly, the word out there is it’s been a while that he’s actually delivered something for the region, given his focus on the leadership position. Maybe that’s part of his greater vision for helping this region out.”

McCarthy’s office did not respond to questions about how he’ll use his position as House speaker to address climate change-fueled droughts in California and around the nation. Nor did it respond to the critiques about his lack of engagement.

“The Leader has consistently worked in a bipartisan, bicameral fashion to deliver this life-giving resource for the families, agriculture producers and workers, and communities in the Central Valley and throughout California, and our Republican congressional delegation heavily relies on his steadfast leadership and decades of expertise when crafting their own pieces of water legislation,” McCarthy’s spokesperson Martinez told CNN in a statement. “When Democrats have held the majority, they time and time again blocked the progress and innovation of their House GOP colleagues.”

In July, McCarthy spoke on the House floor about Tooleville’s plight, seeking to set up a federal grant program to help connect it and other small towns to larger cities’ water supply.

“In our district, the community of Tooleville has run out of water as the groundwater table drops and aging infrastructure fails or becomes obsolete,” McCarthy said at the time. “Tulare County advises me that if California’s droughts continue, more small and rural communities in our district with older infrastructure could meet the exact same fate.”

McCarthy’s measure authorized a grant program but didn’t contain any funding. And even though the bill passed the House, it died in the Senate, and it’s unclear whether it will come up again in the new Congress.

Connecting Tooleville’s water infrastructure with that of nearby Exeter has been a decadeslong pursuit that is finally close to happening thanks to a state mandate and funding. The project will mean more reliable and cleaner water for residents like Cuevas. But it’s expected to take eight years for the two systems to fully merge.

McCarthy is also co-sponsoring a bill with Valadao that would enlarge certain reservoirs and kickstart construction on a new reservoir in the Sacramento Valley. But some nonprofit leaders and local officials say these solutions would prioritize agriculture over residents.

“We need more solutions beyond storage and dams,” said Susana De Anda, executive director of the San Joaquin Valley-based environmental justice nonprofit Community Water Center. “[McCarthy] lacks understanding of the real critical problems we’re experiencing around the drought and our communities.”

Seeking to attract younger voters concerned about climate change to the Republican Party, McCarthy last year convened a Climate, Energy and Conservation Task Force to develop the party’s messaging and policies around the issue. And House Republican delegations have attended the last two United Nations climate summits.

But all indications suggest that addressing human-caused climate change is not going to be a focal point of McCarthy’s now that he has the speaker’s gavel. McCarthy and House Republicans have shown they don’t want to move away from planet-warming fossil fuels, and few in the party are willing to connect global temperature rise to worsening droughts and extreme weather.

McCarthy dissolved Democrats’ Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, and he has vowed to investigate Department of Energy grants for electric vehicle components, as well as alleged “collusion” between environmental groups and China and Russia to “hurt American Energy,” according to a recent statement.

“Our representatives don’t talk about climate change; it’s a real problem,” De Anda said. “Climate change is real. Our communities are the canaries in the coal mine. We get hit first.”

It’s part of the reason Cuevas is hoping to move away in a couple years. He’s hopeful the water situation will improve by connecting Tooleville to a larger town’s water system; otherwise, he’s afraid he won’t be able to entice another buyer due to the water issues.

“I’m happy I had a chance to buy it, but we are planning to move,” Cuevas told CNN. “Right now, if I try, I ain’t going to get nothing, not even what I paid for the home.”

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January 21, 2023
First on CNN: New Mexico AG probing campaign finances of GOP candidate accused of orchestrating shootings | CNN Politics

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CNN
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New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez’ office is taking the lead in probing the campaign finances of Solomon Peña, who police say was behind a spate of shootings at Democratic officials’ homes.

The move comes after Albuquerque police said they were investigating whether Peña’s campaign was funded in part by cash from narcotics sales that were laundered into campaign contributions.

“We have formally opened an investigation into the campaign finances,” Lauren Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office, told CNN.

Peña, a Republican and vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump who lost a state House race in 2022, is accused of hiring and conspiring with four men to shoot at the homes of two state legislators and two county commissioners.

He was arrested Monday and is due to appear in district court on January 23 for a hearing that will determine whether he is detained or released with conditions.

The Albuquerque Police Department said in a statement that investigators believe Peña “identified individuals to funnel contributions from an unknown source to his legislative campaign.”

“Detectives are working with other law enforcement agencies to determine whether the money for the campaign contributions was generated from narcotics trafficking, and whether campaign laws were violated,” the department said in the statement.

Campaign finance records show the single largest contributor to Peña’s campaign was José Trujillo, a man who police say Peña recruited to be part of the team of shooters.

Police say Trujillo, who donated $5,155 to Peña’s failed campaign and listed his occupation as “cashier,” was arrested on January 3 – the night of the last of four shootings – on an outstanding felony warrant.

A Bernalillo County sheriff’s deputy found Trujillo with more than $3,000 in cash, nearly 900 narcotics pills worth roughly $15,000 and two guns, one of which was ballistically matched to that day’s shooting, police said. He was stopped driving Peña’s car, said a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

Albuquerque investigators are focused on Trujillo’s large campaign contributions and whether they might have come from drug money, because investigators say Trujillo has no known legitimate source of income and was arrested with drugs and money, the law enforcement official said. In an assault case in which Trujillo was the victim last fall, police records say Trujillo told police he was between homes at the time.

“You have a suspected gunman who claims to be homeless with $3,000 dollars in cash and a bag of drugs making big donations to a campaign. You have to ask yourself where that money is coming from,” said the law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Trujillo’s mother, Melanie Griego, donated $4,000, according to campaign finance records. But Griego staunchly denied making any campaign contributions in an interview with the Albuquerque Journal, telling the newspaper she lives on a “monthly income” and doesn’t have thousands of dollars to invest in a political campaign.

CNN reached out to Peña’s and Trujillo’s attorney but did not immediately receive a response.

A criminal complaint in the court case against Peña says that Trujillo, his father Demetrio and his two brothers conspired with the failed Republican candidate to shoot up the homes of four politicians. The four have not been charged, but additional charges are expected in the case.

A law enforcement source said Peña met members of the shooting team he allegedly recruited when he was in prison serving time for his role in a smash-and-grab team that specialized in stealing cars and driving them through the windows of big box stores to steal high-end electronics.

Peña had to obtain state court approval to run for office as a convicted felon. The state court concluded that under current New Mexico law, Peña was eligible to run because he had served his sentence and completed his parole.

Gunshots were fired into the homes of Bernalillo County Commissioner Adriann Barboa on December 4; incoming state House Speaker Javier Martinez on December 8; then-Bernalillo Commissioner Debbie O’Malley on December 11; and state Sen. Linda Lopez on January 3, according to police.

Peña lost his race to Democratic state Rep. Miguel Garcia 26% to 74%. A week later, he tweeted he “never conceded” the race and was researching his options.

Barboa said, after November’s election but before the shootings, that Peña – who had embraced Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud on social media – had approached some officials at their homes with paperwork he claimed was evidence of election fraud.

“He came to my house after the election. … He was saying that the elections were fake … really speaking erratically. I didn’t feel threatened at the time, but I did feel like he was erratic,” Barboa told “CNN This Morning” on Tuesday.

CNN has reached out to Peña’s campaign website for comment. On Wednesday, his attorney, Roberta Yurcic, said in an email that the allegations against him are “merely accusations.”

“Mr. Peña is presumed innocent of the charges against him,” Yurcic said. “Mr. Peña and I look forward to a full and fair investigation of these claims. I plan to fully defend Mr. Peña and fiercely safeguard his rights throughout this process.”

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January 20, 2023
New Zealand Education Minister Chris Hipkins bids to replace Jacinda Ardern as PM | CNN

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CNN
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Chris Hipkins, New Zealand’s education minister, is bidding to replace Jacinda Ardern as prime minister, after her shock resignation announcement earlier this week.

Hipkins emerged as the only candidate to be nominated for the leadership of the ruling Labour party on Saturday morning.

The Labour Party caucus is due to meet on Sunday to formally endorse and confirm Hipkins as leader, party whip Duncan Webb said.

New Zealand’s next general election is expected to be held on October 14.
Hipkins is a career politician who entered Parliament in 2008, and became a household name leading New Zealand’s pandemic management as Covid-19 response minister in Ardern’s cabinet. Aside from being education minister, he is also minister for police and the public service, and Leader of the House.

Speaking to reporters after nominations closed at 9 a.m. local time in the capital of Wellington, he said he aims to reach consensus about who is “best to lead the Labour party, and therefore, New Zealand forward.”

“I am absolutely humbled and honored,” he said, then added, “there is still a bit to go in this process. There is still a meeting tomorrow and a vote, and I don’t want to get too far ahead of that.”

The minister went on to thank his party members, saying “we have gone through this process with unity and we will continue to do that.”

He committed to leading the country in a “strong, stable and unified” way but cautioned there were challenges ahead.

“I acknowledge that at the moment, we’re going through some economic turbulence and we’re going to have to navigate our way through there,” he said.

Hipkins also told reporters that he is “incredibly optimistic about New Zealand’s future” and is “really looking forward to the job. I am feeling energized and enthusiastic.”

He served almost two years as Covid-19 response minister in a country that kept infections and deaths relatively low after shutting its borders. He also oversaw New Zealand’s phased reopening before fully welcoming back all international travel last July.

Ardern said Thursday that she would stand aside for a new leader, saying she doesn’t believe she has the energy to seek reelection.

Speaking at a news conference then, Ardern said her term would end by February 7, when she expected a new Labour prime minister would be sworn in – though “depending on the process that could be earlier.
Hipkins said Ardern – whose tenure coincided with a terrorist attack, natural disasters and a global pandemic – was “the leader that we needed at the time that we needed it.”

And he acknowledged that, like Ardern, he would be opening himself up to “a lot scrutiny and a lot of criticism” by putting his name forward.

“I go into this job with my eyes wide open, knowing what I’ve what I’ve stepped into,” Hipkins said.

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January 20, 2023
Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine announces he’s running for reelection in 2024 | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia announced Friday that he’s running for reelection in 2024.

“I have been really grappling with what to do with respect to my time in the Senate, and I’m very happy to announce that I’m going to run for a third term in the Senate,” he told reporters at an event in Richmond, Virginia.

Kaine’s announcement will likely come as a relief to Democrats as they face a difficult 2024 map and an uphill climb to hold their narrow majority. An open Virginia seat could have made for a competitive race. The Virginia governorship flipped Republican in 2021.

Video from Kaine’s event Friday was provided by CNN affiliate WTVR in Richmond.

Kaine, a former Virginia governor who was Hillary Clinton’s running mate in her 2016 presidential campaign, explained his decision on Friday, saying, “Here’s why in conversations with friends and especially with Anne and my family I’ve decided to run for a third term. I’m a servant. I love Virginia. I’m proud of what I’ve done. I got a whole lot more I want to do. So those are the four reasons.”

Kaine was first elected to the US Senate in 2012. During a roundtable discussion Friday before his announcement, he told participants he ran for Senate after 16 years in state and local office because there were issues he wanted to “get done,” including tribal recognition, marriage equality, immigration reform and advances in gun safety.

“We’ve done two of the four,” he said, adding that he thought the time might be ripe to reach a long-sought deal on immigration reform. “My gut tells me, and some of my conversations with colleagues, that the super-low unemployment rate in the country is opening the door again to a really good immigration reform discussion.”

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January 20, 2023
Trump struggles with the new politics of abortion as a triumphant March for Life arrives in Washington | CNN Politics

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CNN
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The anti-abortion “March for Life” for decades demonstrated to Republicans that they could not reach the Oval Office without the support of the anti-abortion movement.

On Friday, marchers will gather in Washington with a decades-long mission accomplished, after the Supreme Court’s removal of a constitutional right to an abortion by overturning the Roe v. Wade decision last year.

That means this year’s march will be a time for celebration but also of debate about where the movement goes next with some campaigners seeking to restrict the procedure everywhere. But such a refocused goal carries big risks. Democrats after all belatedly leveraged their own energy over abortion in the midterm elections in a backlash against the right-wing Supreme Court majority that helped stave off a big Republican midterm election wave.

The March for Life also comes at an extraordinary moment when Donald Trump, the president who did more than any other to end Roe after a pact with social conservative voters that helped win him the 2016 GOP nomination, has launched an extraordinary attack on evangelical leaders he sees as insufficiently loyal, as CNN’s Gabby Orr, Kristen Holmes and Kaitlan Collins reported this week.

“Nobody has ever done more for Right to Life than Donald Trump. I put three Supreme Court justices, who all voted, and they got something that they’ve been fighting for 64 years, for many, many years,” Trump said in an interview on Real America’s Voice Monday, referring to the overturning of federal abortion rights.

“There’s great disloyalty in the world of politics and that’s a sign of disloyalty,” Trump told conservative journalist David Brody.

The comment was a window into Trump’s psychology, revealing his transactional understanding of politics and his highly developed sense of fealty he sees owed to him.

The former president is specifically angry over the failure to immediately endorse his 2024 White House bid by some evangelical leaders who remain influential figures in the conservative movement. Trump’s third White House run has so far failed to pick up significant energy.

But Trump has also shown signs recently of questioning whether his purported greatest domestic achievement – the building of a generational conservative Supreme Court majority and its subsequent overturning of Roe – may end up hindering his hopes of a return to the White House in 2025. He wrote on his Truth Social platform earlier this month that the “abortion issue” had been poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those who insisted on no exceptions in the case or rape, incest or life of the mother, which he said “lost large numbers of voters.”

The former president’s comments are backed by exit polls from November’s midterms that showed more than a quarter of voters listing abortion as a top issue. About 61% said they were unhappy with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, and about 7 in 10 of those voters backed a Democratic House candidate.

In his Truth Social comments, Trump appeared to be seeking to offload blame for the Republicans’ failure to win back the Senate and the party’s smaller-than-expected House majority. Trump took on waves of criticism after the election for promoting extreme, election denying candidates who often lost in swing states in the midterm elections.

But it is notable seeing Trump navigate the shifting politics of abortion and apparently sizing up how it could affect his political prospects in future. After all, he was once unapologetically pro-choice before his foray into Republican politics dictated a shift in position and led to the bargain with evangelicals, which included an effective commitment to appoint anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court in return for the crucial votes of social conservatives.

In the past, Trump has been a fixture of the March for Life rally, and in 2020, he became the first sitting president to attend in person as he geared up for his reelection race. He told marchers that “unborn children have never had a stronger defender in the White House.”

There is no sign yet that he will call into Friday’s event, which will include a detour to the US Capitol on its usual route to the Supreme Court to underline how Congress is now a focus of the movement, as Democrats seek to codify Roe v. Wade protections into law.

Trump’s comments on abortion and his feuding with evangelical leaders raise the question of whether the former president has made a tactical error and is harming his 2024 candidacy by targeting a critical GOP primary voting bloc at a time when there are growing questions over whether he is still the dominant force in Republican politics.

Ralph Reed, the executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, told CNN that there is “no path to the nomination without winning the evangelical vote. Nobody knows that better than President Trump because, to the surprise of almost everyone, he won their support in 2016.”

This question is especially acute in Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucuses – for Republicans at least – in the 2024 primary season, which will be the first test of the ex-President’s hold over conservatives and evangelicals especially.

Trump didn’t actually win in Iowa in 2016, coming second to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and just beating out Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, and the state has often not been a true barometer of how the GOP nominating contest will go.

However, it will take on extra significance in 2024 and is likely to be seen as a strong indicator of Trump’s appeal to the conservative base. A loss there would create a painful narrative as he headed into subsequent contests – especially since he strongly carried the state in the general elections in 2016 and 2020.

And it’s easy to come up with a list of potential GOP candidates that might have appeal in the state if they challenge Trump, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, former Vice President Mike Pence or Cruz once again. Only Trump so far is a declared 2024 Republican presidential candidate.

Trump would be in an odd situation in 2024, in that he is in many ways effectively an incumbent given his strong support in the GOP and the fact that he didn’t go away after losing reelection. But at the same time, he’s not a sitting president and looks likely to face a contested primary and so may be more exposed in early contests.

Still, while some conservative base voters might want to move on, there’s still strong goodwill among many toward Trump, gratitude for the change he brought during his term and admiration for his attitude.

“Many people forgave him for his misstatements and his missteps because they generally liked his ability to fight, even if that became a cliché for some people, Trump’s detractors,” said Timothy Hagle, an associate professor of political science at the University of Iowa who is an expert on the state’s politics.

This gets to point often missed about Trump. For many of his supporters, he offered an emotional as much as a political connection. His willingness to say what many grassroots conservatives thought and to assail institutions they despised, like the media or Washington experts and other elites, were as important as many of his often-ill-defined individual political positions.

And it’s also often forgotten that evangelical voters in places like Iowa do not necessarily vote as a bloc, or according to what their leaders or pastors recommend and may prioritize issues such as taxes over social questions if a candidate is deemed to be generally acceptable. That may give Trump more leeway than more conventional candidates in departing from traditional conservative orthodoxy even over abortion.

Still, Hagle said, even small numbers of disaffected Iowa voters could make a difference to Trump’s chances in the state if they don’t show up for him, as could more mainstream GOP caucus voters who may be taking a look at other aspects of his candidacy and those of potential rivals.

“Are they going to support Trump because he fights, or because of his economic position or his position on the border?” Hagle said. “The abortion stuff may not be as important to them, or will they go a different direction at this point?”

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January 20, 2023
Israel’s democracy on the brink amid supreme court showdown with Netanyahu | CNN
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Editor’s Note: A version of this story appears in today’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, CNN’s three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.

Jerusalem
CNN
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Israel’s highest court this week ordered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to fire a key ally, a dramatic move amid an unprecedented confrontation between his government and the judiciary.

The High Court ruled 10-1 on Wednesday that it was unreasonable for Aryeh Deri, leader of the Sephardic ultra-Orthodox party Shas, to serve as a minister. He was appointed interior and health minister just three weeks ahead of the ruling.

But so far, Netanyahu has not taken any action, as political tensions mount. Israel media reported Friday Deri and Netanyahu are in the midst of negotiations over the situation.

Deri has several convictions on his record, most recently on tax charges. Last year he struck a plea bargain with the courts, which saw him serve a suspended sentence after he resigned from parliament and pledged not to return to public office.

Under Israeli law, people convicted of crimes cannot serve as ministers. But Netanyahu’s government passed an amendment to that law earlier this month that essentially created a loophole for Deri.

In Wednesday’s ruling, the justices narrowly focused on Netanyahu’s appointment of Deri despite his assertion he would leave political life as part of the deal for the suspended sentence.

But less than a year after that plea bargain was struck, Netanyahu has now been told he needs to fire Deri – whose 11 seats in parliament he needs to stay in power.

“This is a dramatic decision. The decision is aimed at the prime minister, not Deri,” said Yaniv Roznai, an associate professor and co-director at the Rubinstein Center for Constitutional Challenges, Reichman University in Israel.

Since the ruling, Netanyahu hasn’t reacted much beyond going to see Deri and issuing general words of support. CNN has reached out to his office for further comment.

“When my brother is in distress – I come to him,” Netanyahu said as he went to visit Deri after the ruling on Wednesday.

In a joint statement the same day, the heads of the coalition parties led by Netanyahu’s party Likud said: “We will act in any legal way that is available to us and without delay, to correct the injustice and the serious damage caused to the democratic decision and the sovereignty of the people.”

Deri has seemingly vowed to find a way around the ruling, proclaiming: “They will close the door for us, we will enter through the window. They will close the window for us, we will break through the ceiling.”

But most political and legal experts believe it’s extremely unlikely that Netanyahu or Deri would defy the court’s ruling, or that Deri will pull his Shas party out of Netanyahu’s coalition, a move that would cause the government to fall.

Yonatan Green, executive director of the Israel Law and Liberty Forum, told reporters in a briefing that while he thinks Netanyahu is expected to follow the court order in this case, it sets the stage for future defiance.

“Each successive case of this kind probably brings us a little bit closer to that particular brink,” Green said.

And so experts say one of the most likely paths forward is for Netanyahu to fire Deri, and for the government to bulldoze through judicial reforms that it has already announced.

The Deri ruling comes amid an ongoing battle that has been raging over the judiciary. Netanyahu’s justice minister, Yariv Levin, announced in early January a series of judicial reforms that would give parliament (and by extension the parties in power) the ability to overturn supreme court rulings, appoint judges, and remove from ministries legal advisers whose legal advice is binding.

If parliament gets such powers, it could create a path for Deri to return. But critics say it could also help Netanyahu end his ongoing corruption trial. Netanyahu has repeatedly denied in multiple interviews that the changes would be for his own benefit.

Backers of the reforms have long accused the high court of overreach and elitism. They say the changes would restore balance between the branches of government.

But opponents including former Prime Minister Yair Lapid and the President of the Israeli supreme court Esther Hayut say it will erode Israel’s independent judiciary, weaken the checks and balances between the branches and spell the beginning of the end of Israel’s democracy.

“If Aryeh Deri is not fired, the Israeli government is breaking the law. A government that does not obey the law is an illegal government,” Lapid tweeted.

It was these proposed judicial reforms that drove some 80,000 people onto the streets of Tel Aviv in pouring rain on Saturday to protest the changes.

Organizers hope the protest spurs a movement and mounting public pressure on Netanyahu to back off or limit the scope of the proposed reforms.

UAE and India discussing settling non-oil trade in rupees

The United Arab Emirates is in early discussions with India to trade non-oil commodities in Indian rupees, Reuters cited Emirati Minister for Foreign Trade Thani Al Zeyoudi as saying on Thursday.
Background: The UAE last year signed a wide-ranging free trade agreement with India, which, along with China, is among the biggest trade partners for Gulf Arab oil and gas producers, most of whose currencies are pegged to the US dollar. The large majority of Gulf trade is conducted in US dollars but countries such as India and China are increasingly seeking to pay in local currencies for reasons including lowering transaction costs.

Why it matters: Other countries, including China, have also raised the issue of settling non-oil trade payments in local currencies, the minister said, but discussions weren’t at an advanced stage. China’s president in December visited Saudi Arabia where he participated in a Gulf Arab summit and called for oil trade in yuan as Beijing seeks to establish its currency internationally. The Saudi finance minister said this week that the kingdom would be open to trade in other currencies aside from the US dollar.
Turkey’s opposition to announce presidential candidate to challenge Erdogan

Turkey’s opposition alliance is set to announce in February their presidential candidate to challenge President Tayyip Erdogan’s 20-year rule in elections set for May, Reuters cited an opposition party official as saying on Friday. The six-party alliance is seeking to forge a united platform but has yet to agree a candidate to challenge Erdogan for the presidency.
Background: Turkey’s two main opposition parties, the secularist CHP and center-right nationalist IYI Party, have allied themselves with four smaller parties under a platform that would seek to dismantle Erdogan’s executive presidency in favor of the previous parliamentary system.

Why it matters: Turkey is heading towards one of the most consequential votes in the century-long history of the modern republic and Erdogan signaled on Wednesday that the presidential and parliament elections would be on May 14, a month ahead of schedule.
Kuwaiti leader frees jailed critics in effort to build political cohesion

Kuwait’s Emir Sheikh Nawaf al-Ahmad al-Sabah has pardoned dozens of jailed critics under a new amnesty in an effort to end political feuding that has hampered fiscal reforms as tensions surface between the new government and parliament, Reuters reported. The amnesty pardoned 34 Kuwaitis, most of them convicted for voicing public criticism.
Background: Kuwait has the region’s liveliest parliament and tolerates criticism to a degree that is rare among Gulf Arab states, but the emir has the final say in state affairs and criticizing him is a jailable offence. The cabinet on Tuesday voiced hope that the latest amnesty, which followed the pardoning of dozens of political dissidents in 2021 in a nod to opposition demands, would “create an atmosphere of fruitful cooperation”.

Why it matters: Opposition members made big gains in elections held in September. Tensions recently resurfaced as lawmakers pressed the government for a debt relief bill under which the state would buy citizens’ personal loans – a measure that past governments have taken but which comes as the oil producer seeks to push through fiscal reforms to bolster state finances.
Conservative Gulf Arab states rarely send contestants to international beauty pageants, many of which include segments where women are presented in revealing swimsuits.

But one contestant from the tiny Gulf state of Bahrain avoided that taboo by participating in this year’s Miss Universe in New Orleans in a pink burkini swimsuit that covered her from the neck down, including her arms.

As 24-year-old Evlin Khalifa walked down the catwalk, she unfurled a cape with a flag of Bahrain and the word “equality” in Arabic. A message in English read: “Arab women should be represented… A Muslim woman can also become a Miss Universe.”

The pianist and taekwondo black-belt told the UAE’s The National newspaper that she decided to participate in order to “break stereotypes.”

“Arab women are kind, passionate and brave and they are ready to embrace the challenges of life,” she said. “They can become beauty queens in modesty and can shine in modern pageantry.”

The only other Arab country to send a participant was Lebanon. Miss USA won the pageant.
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January 20, 2023
Opinion: The debt ceiling debate reveals how House Republicans are weaponizing the government | CNN

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Editor’s Note: Julian Zelizer, a CNN political analyst, is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of 25 books, including the New York Times best-seller, “Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends About Our Past” (Basic Books). Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

CNN
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At the same time that House Republicans are setting up a committee to investigate the “weaponization” of government, they are weaponizing the government.

Under the leadership of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the GOP is warning President Biden that they will not vote to raise the debt ceiling when the US reaches its $31.4 trillion borrowing limit unless the administration agrees to draconian spending cuts.

Never one to miss a good brawl, former President Donald Trump is urging his party to “play tough” on the issue to use it as leverage.

If the crisis is not resolved and House Republicans don’t vote to raise the debt ceiling, the government won’t be able to borrow the money it needs to pay for spending that Congress has already approved. The US could be forced to default on its debt, ruining the credit rating that has made Treasury bills and notes one of the safest investments in the world. The government might have to delay paying benefits such as social security and salaries for federal workers.

Delivering a stern warning last week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated that, “failure to meet the government’s obligations would cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans, and global financial stability.”

Fearing that House Republicans are dead serious about deploying this budgetary missile – after all, the party is only a few years away from its concerted effort to overturn a presidential election – the US is expected to hit its ceiling as soon as Thursday, but the real crisis may not come until June. To keep things going, Treasury is investigating options such as shifting funds from one department to the other and temporarily stopping specific forms of federal investments.

The fear running through Washington – and beyond – is that elected officials could prove unable to end the standoff, sending the country into default by this summer, creating global financial chaos and turmoil.

The political battle that is unfolding is a result of Republicans becoming increasingly radicalized in what they are willing to do to achieve partisan power.

The measure at the center of this dangerous game of chicken is not part of the Constitution. The federal debt ceiling was enacted by Congress in 1917 through the Second Liberty Bond Act, shortly before the US entered World War I, with the goal of granting the Department of Treasury increased flexibility in handling federal finances. Before, the department had to wait until Congress authorized more money every time that the government needed it.

For decades, raising the federal debt limit remained a routine matter. Understanding that the government had to pay its bills, even when costs ballooned during times of war, Congress would pass the measure either on a temporary or permanent basis.

To be sure, there were times when Congress came dangerously close to being too late, such as in April 1979 when the vote was not taken until the very last minute, although technical glitches resulted in about $120 million in debt payments being late.

A few months later, the House adopted a rule – named after Rep. Richard Gephardt – which empowered the lower chamber to automatically raise the debt ceiling when they passed a budget resolution, tying the two issues together.

In 1982, the federal debt ceiling was codified into law. The first time that the federal government was forced to take “extraordinary measures” to keep the money flowing was in September of 1985 when Democrats and Republicans could not reach agreement on a budget. Three months later, Congress permanently raised the debt limit to $2.1 billion.

While there were votes taken against raising the debt ceiling between the 1980s and 2011, including by Democrats such as then-Senator Joe Biden in 2006, they were symbolic. Elected officials took this stand only after knowing that there were enough votes for passage. Expressing opposition to President George W. Bush’s spending on the war in Iraq was their goal—not grounding the economy to a halt.

The truce against weaponizing this routine procedure ended in 2011. Tea Party Republicans, a radicalized version of Gingrich-era Republicans, were determined to vote against increasing the debt ceiling unless President Barack Obama agreed to massive spending cuts. The administration realized that the new generation of conservatives was not playing around. In this game of chicken, they resolved not to blink regardless of the fallout.

In May 2011, the Department of Treasury undertook steps to keep paying for its obligations. A few days before funds were set to run out, the administration agreed to pay the ransom. The president signed the Budget Control Act of 2011 that would implement about $920 billion in spending cuts over 10 years and created a Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to make recommendations for further cuts.

The ratings agency S&P weren’t happy with how the negotiations had unfolded, downgrading the credit rating of the US. “The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed.”

Since that confrontation, the Department of Treasury has continued to grapple with this issue, including in 2013 and 2014. Frustrated with having to navigate through these treacherous political waters, Obama warned that “the issue here is whether or not America pays its bills. We are not a deadbeat nation. And so there’s a very simple solution to this: Congress authorizes us to pay our bills.”

Now, President Biden might face his biggest challenge yet. The new Trumpian Republicans are determined to win their faceoff with the administration. Based on reports of how McCarthy won the speakership, the Californian was willing to make concessions to the most radical members about moving forward with this strategy and following it through until the end, if necessary.

What makes this situation so tragic is that there is no reason for this crisis to happen. While vigorous debates about government spending are certainly a legitimate part of politics, forcing a situation that could create economic chaos after Congress has already reached deals over expenditures should not be a legitimate and normal part of politics.

More than almost any other act, this embodies the willingness of the modern GOP to use virtually any procedure of democracy—from Supreme Court appointments to the budget to the Electoral College—as a partisan weapon. House Republicans seem to be making the bet that doing what is necessary to force spending reductions is worth the risk of the financial fallout.

At some level, they must believe that should the crisis not be resolved, voters will blame the president and not them. But in the end the people who would suffer would be voters, living in states red and blue, who would face the consequences.

If Speaker McCarthy wants to show that he is a serious political leader, he should form a coalition with the handful of moderate Republicans and Democrats to quickly enact an increase in the debt ceiling this measure regardless of what risk that might pose to his own future.

All of this is more reason for Congress to consider serious long-term reform. If one of the two major parties is willing to normalize the weaponization of this process, it’s time to change the way that it works, to take away the weapon being used in partisan warfare.

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January 19, 2023
Peru’s crisis is a cautionary tale for democracies | CNN

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CNN
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Peru is seeing some of its worst political violence in recent decades, but the grievances of protesters are all but new; they reflect a system that has failed to deliver for over twenty years.

Sparked by the ousting of former President Pedro Castillo last month, some of Peru’s most intense protests have taken place in the south of the country where dozens of people were killed in violent clashes with security forces over the last few weeks.

This region, around the Andean Mountain range at over ten thousand feet above sea level and home to some of Peru’s most famous archeological sites like the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu and the city of Cusco, is also one of the poorest in the country.

In recent days, protesters from this and other rural regions of Peru have started travelling towards the capital, Lima – sometimes for days – to express their grievances to the country’s leadership and demand that the current president, Dina Boluarte, to step down.

Their anger highlights a much deeper democratic crisis. After years of political bedlam, Peru is a country that has fallen out of love with democracy: both the presidency and congress are widely discredited and perceived as corrupt institutions.

A 2021 poll by LABOP, a survey research laboratory at Vanderbilt University, revealed that only 21% of Peruvians said they are satisfied with democratic rule, the least in any country in Latin American and the Caribbean except Haiti.

Worryingly, more than half of Peruvians who took part in that poll said a military takeover of the country would be justified under a high degree of corruption.

At the core of the crisis are demands for better living conditions that have gone unfulfilled in the two decades since democratic rule was restored in the country. Peru is one of the youngest democracies in the Americas, with free and fair elections having been restored only in the year 2001 after the ousting of right wing leader Alberto Fujimori.

Peru’s economy flourished both under Fujimori and in the years that followed the restoration of democracy, outpacing almost any other in the region thanks to robust exports of raw material and healthy foreign investments. The term Lima Consensus, after the Peruvian capital, was coined to describe the system of free-market policies that Peruvian elites promoted to fuel the economic boom.

But while the economy boomed, state institutions were inherently weakened by a governing philosophy that reduced state intervention to a minimum.

As early as 2014, Professor Steven Levitsky of Harvard University, highlighted a particular Peruvian paradox: While in most democracies public opinion reflects the state of the economy, in Peru presidential approval ratings consistently plummeted during the 2000s, even as growth soared, he wrote in journal Revista.

Levitsky highlighted chronic deficiencies in security, justice, education, and other basic services from Peru’s successive governments as threats to the young democracy’s sustainability.

“Security, justice, education and other basic services continue to be under-provided, resulting in widespread perceptions of government corruption, unfairness, ineffectiveness and neglect. This is a major source of public discontent. Where such perceptions persist, across successive governments, public trust in democratic institutions is likely to erode,” he wrote, an observation that today seems prophetic.

The Covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated this structural weakness at the core of the Peruvian society. Whereas many countries expanded social safety nets to counter the damaging economic impact of lockdowns, Peru had no net to fall back on.

According to the United Nations, over half of the Peruvian populations lacked access to enough food in the months of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the virus swept around the country. Data from Johns Hopkins University also show that Peru recorded the highest per-capita death toll in the world due to coronavirus.

The country’s economy is back on track after the pandemic shock – Peru’s GDP grew an astonishing 13.3% in 2021 – but public trust in democratic institutions has broken down, just as Levitsky predicted.

A poll published September 2022 by IEP showed 84% of Peruvians disapproved Congress’s performance. Lawmakers are perceived not only as pursuing their own interests in Congress, but are also associated with corrupt practices.

The country’s frustrations have been reflected in its years-long revolving door presidency. Current president Boluarte is the sixth head of state in less than five years.

Her predecessor Castillo rose to power in 2021’s general elections, styled as man of the people who would get the country a fresh start. But polarization and the chaos surrounding his presidency – including corruption allegations and multiple impeachment attempts by Congress, which Castillo dismissed as politically motivated – only exacerbated pre-existing tensions.

Most protesters who spoke with CNN on Wednesday said the country needs a fresh start and demanded new elections across the board to restore a sense of legitimacy to public institutions.

But Boluarte and legislators have so far resisted calls for early general elections. On Sunday, the president declared a state of emergency in the areas of the country most affected by the protests, including Lima. The measure is due to last until mid-February but that has not stopped more people from taking to the streets.

Peru’s Attorney General meanwhile has opened an investigation into Boluarte’s handling of the unrest.

But even if the current leadership were to go and yet another politician raised to the presidency, the root causes of Peru’s unrest persist.

As in many other regions of Latin America, addressing those issues requires structural change in terms of social and economic equality, tackling the cost-of-living crisis and fighting corruption.

Across the region, the pandemic has proven a reality check after years of economic and social development under democratic regimes gave the impression that Latin America had finally put the era of coups, dictatorships and revolt behind its back.

Today’s Peru may be a cautionary tale for any democracy that fails to deliver for its people and spins upon itself.

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January 18, 2023
New Zealand leader Jacinda Ardern to resign before upcoming election | CNN

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CNN
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New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced Thursday she will stand aside for a new leader within weeks, saying she doesn’t believe she has the energy to seek re-election in the October polls.

Speaking at a news conference, Ardern said her term would end by February 7, when she expects a new Labour prime minister will be sworn in – though “depending on the process that could be earlier.”

“The decision was my own,” Ardern said. “Leading a country is the most privileged job anyone could ever have, but also the most challenging. You cannot and should not do the job unless you have a full tank, plus a bit in reserve for those unplanned and unexpected challenges.”

“I no longer have enough in the tank to do the job justice,” she added.

She spoke candidly about the toll the job has taken and reflected on the various crises her government has faced – including the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw New Zealand impose some of the world’s strictest border rules, separating families and shutting out almost all foreigners for almost two years.

The 2019 Christchurch terror attack, which killed 51 people at two mosques, was also a defining moment of Ardern’s leadership. Her rapid response won widespread praise; she swiftly introduced gun law reforms, wore a hijab to show her respect for the Muslim community and publicly said she would never speak the name of the alleged attacker.

Just nine months later came the deadly volcanic eruption on Te Puia o Whakaari, also known as White Island, which left 22 people dead.

On Thursday, Ardern said she began considering her departure at the end of 2022.

“The only interesting angle that you will find is that after going on six years of some big challenges, I am human. Politicians are human,” she said. “We give all that we can for as long as we can, and then it’s time. And for me, it’s time.”

Ardern also highlighted achievements made during her tenure, including legislation on climate change and child poverty. “I wouldn’t want this last five and a half years to simply be about the challenges. For me, it’s also been about the progress,” she said.

Bryce Edwards, a political scientist at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington, said Ardern’s resignation was “shocking” but not a complete surprise.

“She is celebrated throughout the world but her government has plummeted in the polls,” he said.

New Zealand’s next general election will be held on October 14.

A look at Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s profile

When Ardern became Prime Minister at 2017 at the age of 37, she was New Zealand’s third female leader and one of the youngest leaders in the world. Within a year, she had given birth in office – only the second world leader ever to do so.

She was re-elected for a second term in 2020, the victory buoyed by her government’s “go hard and go early” approach to the pandemic, which helped New Zealand avoid the devastating outbreaks seen elsewhere.

Ardern gained supporters globally for her fresh and empathetic approach to the role, but her popularity has waned in New Zealand in recent years.

Several polls in late 2022 showed falling support for Ardern and her Labour Party, with some at the lowest level since she took office in 2017, according to CNN affiliate Radio New Zealand.

Edwards, the political analyst, said Ardern’s decision to stand down perhaps spares her a disappointing election result.

“Leaving now is the best thing for her reputation … she will go out on good terms rather than lose the election,” he said.

Edwards said there isn’t “anyone obvious” to replace her, though potential candidates include Police and Education Minister Chris Hipkins, who has a strong relationship with Ardern, and Justice Minister Kiri Allan.

Ardern said she has no firm plans about what she’ll do next – but she is looking forward to spending more time with her family.

Addressing her child and fiance, she said: “For Neve, Mom is looking forward to being there when you start school this year, and to Clarke, let’s finally get married.”

Ardern has been engaged to television host Clarke Gayford since 2019.

Ardern has long enjoyed international popularity, especially among the younger generation, and gained a reputation as a trailblazer while in office.

She has spoken frequently about gender equality and women’s rights; for instance, when announcing her pregnancy in 2018, she underlined women’s ability to balance work with motherhood.

“I am not the first woman to multi-task, I’m not the first woman to work and have a baby, I know these are special circumstances but there will be many women who will have done this well before I have,” she said at the time, with Gayford taking on the role of a stay-at-home dad.

After giving birth, she and Gayford brought their 3-month-old baby to the United Nations General Assembly, with Ardern telling CNN she wanted to “create a path for other women” and help make workplaces more open.

In a 2021 interview with CNN, she reflected on her rise to power, saying: “It was not so long ago that being a woman in politics was a very isolating experience.”

The announcement of her impending resignation on Thursday spurred a wave of support on social media, including from other political leaders, with many pointing out the legacy she is leaving for women in politics.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese tweeted praise for Ardern, saying she “has shown the world how to lead with intellect and strength” and has been “a great friend to me.”

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong also tweeted her best wishes for Ardern, saying she was “a source of inspiration to me and many others.”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shared a photo on Twitter of him and Ardern walking together, thanking her for her friendship and “empathic, compassionate, strong, and steady leadership over these past several years.”

“The difference you have made is immeasurable,” he added.

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January 18, 2023
FEC dismisses RNC complaint that Google’s spam filters were biased against conservatives | CNN Business

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The Federal Election Commission has tossed out claims by the Republican National Committee that Google’s spam filters in Gmail are illegally biased against conservatives, according to an agency letter obtained by CNN.

The decision resolves a joint FEC complaint filed last year spearheaded by the RNC that alleged Gmail’s automated filters had sent Republican fundraising emails to spam at a higher rate than for Democratic candidates during the 2020 election cycle. The RNC didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The FEC decision to dismiss the complaint and close the case is the latest defeat for Republicans who have sought on multiple occasions to bring the agency’s powers to bear against tech platforms over allegations of anti-conservative bias. In 2021, the FEC dismissed a similar RNC claim against Twitter over the company’s decision to temporarily suppress the New York Post’s reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop, saying the content moderation decision appeared to have been made “for a valid commercial reason.”

The FEC took the same stance on the Gmail filtering issue in a letter to Google last week, and which the company provided to CNN on Wednesday.

In the Jan. 11 letter, the FEC said its review “found no reason to believe that [Google] made prohibited in-kind corporate contributions” to Democrats in the form of more favorable email filtering treatment.

In order to be considered a violation, the FEC wrote, “a contribution must be made for the purpose of influencing an election for federal office,” adding that Google’s public statements have made clear its spam filtering exists “for commercial, rather than electoral, purposes.”

Even if it were true that Gmail spam filtering happened to favor Democratic campaigns over Republican ones, the FEC wrote — an allegation the commission neither explicitly endorsed nor rejected — that outcome would not necessarily make Gmail’s underlying conduct an illegal campaign contribution.

In its letter, the FEC cited Google’s public statements claiming that its reasons for spam filtering include blocking malware, phishing attacks and scams.

“In sum, Google has credibly supported its claim that its spam filter is in place for commercial reasons and thus did not constitute a contribution within the meaning of the [Federal Election Campaign Act],” it wrote.

Documents related to the case will be made available to the public by Feb. 10, according to the letter.

“The Commission’s bipartisan decision to dismiss this complaint reaffirms that Gmail does not filter emails for political purposes,” said José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson. “We’ll continue to invest in our Gmail industry-leading spam filters because, as the FEC notes, they’re important to protecting people’s inboxes from receiving unwanted, unsolicited, or dangerous messages.”

While the FEC did not weigh in directly on Gmail’s practices, the letter highlighted the limitations and context surrounding a 2022 academic study that the RNC had leaned heavily upon in its initial complaint.

The study by North Carolina State University researchers had involved an experiment testing the spam filters of Gmail, Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo! Mail. Its findings suggested that of the three email providers, Gmail was the likeliest to mark emails from Republican campaigns as spam.

The RNC had cited the study’s findings as evidence of “illegal, corporate in-kind contributions” to Democratic candidates, including Joe Biden, and called for an FEC investigation.

But the FEC’s letter cited several factors that cast doubt on the RNC’s interpretation of the research, including the study’s own statements of limitations and a Washington Post interview with one of the study’s lead authors, who had said Republicans were “mischaracterizing” the paper.

The study itself acknowledged that it covered a short period of time, and that its findings could have been affected by campaigns’ own tactical decision-making as well as other variables the study did not account for, the FEC wrote, adding that in its response to the RNC allegations Google had said the researchers used a sample of 34 email addresses “when Gmail has 1.5 billion users.”

“Though the NCSU Study appears to demonstrate a disparate impact from Google’s spam filter, it explicitly states that its authors have ‘no reason to believe that there were deliberate attempts from these email services to create these biases to influence the voters,’” the FEC added.

Meanwhile, a separate RNC lawsuit against Google over the same Gmail filtering issue is still ongoing. And Google has continued with an FEC-approved pilot project that allows political campaigns to bypass Gmail’s spam filters. More than 100 political entities are participating in that program, a Google spokesperson told CNN on Wednesday.

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January 18, 2023
North Carolina AG Josh Stein launches 2024 bid for governor | CNN Politics

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CNN
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North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein on Wednesday launched his campaign to succeed term-limited Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and sought to portray himself as an alternative to politicians who “spark division” and “ignite hate.”

The Democrat’s announcement video highlighted homophobic remarks made by North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a potential Republican rival, as well as comments by Robinson suggesting he believes women are inferior to men.

“Robinson wants to tell you who you can marry, when you’ll be pregnant and who you should hate. I’m running for governor because I believe in a very different North Carolina,” Stein says in the video. “One rooted in our shared values of freedom, justice and opportunity for everyone.”

Stein described the 1971 firebombing of his civil rights lawyer father’s office in Charlotte and drew parallels with the violent 2017 White nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as well as the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol.

“I learned early on that some things are worth fighting for no matter the opposition. Today there’s a different set of bomb throwers who threaten our freedoms and our future, while some politicians spark division, ignite hate and fan the flames of bigotry,” Stein said.

Images from the Charlottesville rally and the 2021 insurrection at the Capitol flashed on screen as he described today’s “bomb throwers,” and several images of Robinson were cut together in the video as Stein spoke of politicians who “spark division, ignite hate and fan the flames of bigotry.” Robinson has not launched a campaign for governor but has said it is very likely he will run.

“This is our moment to protect our freedoms and democracy, provide every child a great education and expand economic opportunity to every corner of the state,” Stein said.

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January 18, 2023