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  • Lula da Silva sworn in as Brazil’s president, amid fears of violence from Bolsonaro supporters | CNN

    Lula da Silva sworn in as Brazil’s president, amid fears of violence from Bolsonaro supporters | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva was sworn in as Brazil’s president for the third time on Sunday, as threats of violence loomed from supporters of his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.

    “I promise to maintain, defend and fulfill the constitution, observe the laws, promote the general good of the Brazilian people, support the unity, integrity and independence of Brazil,” Lula said.

    The 76-year-old politician, returning to the presidency after a 12 year hiatus, arrived with his wife, Rosângela da Silva, at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Brasília at 12:20 p.m. local time before heading to congress where a formal congressional session took place.

    Parliamentarians applauded Lula before breaking into a chant of “ole, ole ola, Lula, Lula.”

    The Senate president opened the ceremony by paying respects to Pelé and Pope Benedict with a minute of silence.

    During the ceremony, Lula broke with traditional protocol to tell a short story about the pen he used to sign congressional documents.

    “In 1989 was in a rally in Piaui, then we walked until the San Benedict church, and a citizen gave me this pen and asked me to use this to sign in if I win the election in ’89. I didn’t win the election in ‘89, didn’t win in ‘94, didn’t win ‘98. In 2002 I won, but when I arrived here I had forgotten the pen and signed with a senator pen. In 2006, I signed with the Senate pen, and now I found the pen, and I do in honor of the people of Piaui state,” he said.

    The newly inaugurated president and the first lady then traveled in an open car parade to attend a military honors ceremony outside the presidential palace.

    Looming over the ceremony was the notable absence of Bolsonaro, who left Brazil for Florida on Friday and did not specify his return date.

    His trip to the United States breaks with Brazilian convention of outgoing leaders being present at their successors’ inauguration ceremony. It came as Brazil’s government issued an ordinance on Friday authorizing five civil servants to accompany “future ex-president” Bolsonaro to Miami, Florida, between January 1 and 30, 2023.

    Lula supporters gather to attend his inauguration as new president, in Brasilia, Brazil, Sunday, Jan. 1, 2023.

    Lula won a tight run-off race on October 30, in a stunning comeback that marked the return of the left in power in Brazil following four years of Bolsonaro’s far-right administration.

    Lula accomplished a remarkable return to power after a series of corruption allegations that led to his imprisonment for 580 days. The Supreme Court later ruled it a mistrial, clearing his path to run for reelection.

    After previously governing Brazil for two consecutive terms between 2003 and 2010, Lula will inherit a country with crippling debt and much higher levels of poverty than when he left office.

    Bolsonaro’s former vice president, Hamilton Mourao, addressed the nation in a speech on national television this Saturday on the last day of his government and criticized leaders whose silence created “an atmosphere of chaos.”

    “Leaders that should reassure and unite the nation around a project for the country allowed that silence to create an atmosphere of chaos and social division,” said Mourao, who added that the armed forces had to pay the bill. Since the election results, Bolsonaro had addressed the public only three times. He did not accept election results in those addresses, fomenting his radical base into believing the result could be reversed.

    Lula, his wife Rosangela Silva, Vice President-elect Geraldo Alckmin, right, and his wife, Maria Lucia Ribeiro, ride to Congress for their swearing-in ceremony, in Brasilia, Brazil, Sunday, Jan. 1, 2023.

    Lula vowed to rebuild the country, after thanking the “vow of trust given by the Brazilian people” during a speech addressing Congress.

    “Today our message to Brazil is of hope and reconstruction,” Lula said. “If we are here today, it is thanks to the political conscience of Brazilian society, and the democratic coalition that we built during the campaign.”

    Lula said that democracy was the biggest winner of the Brazilian election after his campaign was able to overcome a series of obstacles.

    “Despite everything, the decision in the ballots prevails, thanks to an electoral system internationally recognized for its efficacy. It was fundamental the courageous attitude of the Judiciary, mostly from the Supreme Electoral Court,” Lula continued.

    Lula proceeded his speech by criticizing the government of Bolsonaro, accusing the former president of using Brazil’s resources to further increase his power.

    “The diagnosis we received from the transition cabinet is appalling. They emptied the resources for health, dismantled education, culture, science, they destroyed the environmental protections, haven’t left resources to school meals, vaccines, public security, forest protection and social assistance,” Lula said.

    Protests led by Bolsonaro supporters have rocked Brazil, following the incumbent's election defeat in October.

    Violence has taken grip of the country with Bolsonaro yet to explicitly concede his election loss, despite his administration saying it is cooperating with the transition of power.

    Security presence at Lula’s inauguration was high, as approximately 8,000 security agents from several security forces were mobilized Sunday, according to the Federal District’s security department.

    Earlier on Sunday, a man was arrested in Brasilia after he was caught trying to get into the inauguration party carrying a knife and fireworks, the State Police of the Federal District said in a statement. The suspect traveled from Rio de Janeiro.

    A Brazilian Supreme Court judge on Wednesday ordered a four-day ban on carrying firearms in the capital that will run through the end of Sunday, as a precautionary measure ahead of the ceremony.

    It will not apply to active members of the armed forces, policemen and private security guards, Judge Alexandre de Moraes wrote.

    Lula da Silva’s team had requested the ban on firearms at the inauguration days after police arrested a man on suspicion of planting and possessing explosive devices at Brasilia International Airport.

    The suspect, identified as 54-year-old gas station manager George Washington de Oliveira Sousa, is a Bolsonaro supporter and told police in a statement, seen by CNN, that he intended to “create chaos” so as to prevent Lula from taking office again in January.

    Moraes’ ban came into force as thousands of Bolsonaro supporters have gathered at military barracks across the country in protest of the election result, asking the army to step in as they claim, with no evidence, that the election was stolen.

    Bolsonaro condemned Sousa’s bombing attempt on Friday, saying “there is no justification” for a “terrorist act.”

    “Brazil will not end on January 1, you can be sure about that,” the outgoing president said in reference to Lula’s inauguration date.

    “Today we have a mass of people who know more about politics,” he added. “They understand they are at risk. Good will win. We have leaders all over Brazil. New politicians or reelected politicians, they will make a difference.”

    Lula praised Brazil’s natural resources and promised a U-turn to his predecessor’s deforestation policy in the Amazon while aiming to maximize the country’s potential.

    “No other country has the conditions Brazil has to become an environmental power. Having creativity, the bioeconomy and socio biodiversity enterprises as starting points, we will start the energy and ecology transition towards sustainable agriculture and mining activities, family agriculture and green industry. Our goal is zero deforestation in the Amazon, zero greenhouse gasses emissions,” Lula said during his address to Congress.

    “We will not tolerate (…) the environmental degradation and deforestation that harmed the country so greatly. This is one of the reasons, albeit not the only one, for the creation of the indigenous people’s ministry,” Lula continued.

    The new Brazilian president promised to address the inequality inflicted on minorities in the country by creating “the ministry of racial equality promotion to expand the affirmative action policy in universities and public service, as well as resuming policies for Black and brown people in the health, education and culture areas.”

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  • A pregnant mom crossed the Rio Grande decades ago to give her unborn child a better life. Now her daughter is becoming a member of Congress | CNN Politics

    A pregnant mom crossed the Rio Grande decades ago to give her unborn child a better life. Now her daughter is becoming a member of Congress | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Delia Ramirez walks toward the microphone determined to make her message heard.

    “It is time – it is past time that we deliver on the promise that we have made to our Dreamers,” she says.

    On a crisp morning in early December, Ramirez is standing steps away from the US Capitol, with its white dome gleaming against the blue sky behind her. This is a rallying cry we’ve heard here time and again – but Ramirez hopes when she says it, the words will carry even more weight. This isn’t merely a talking point from her campaign platform.

    “This,” the Illinois lawmaker says, “is very personal for me.”

    It’s personal because if Congress doesn’t act, Ramirez’s husband could be among hundreds of thousands of people facing possible deportation. And it’s personal because Ramirez herself is about to become a member of Congress.

    She’s called this news conference, flanked by several of her fellow incoming freshmen lawmakers and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat, to push for members of Congress to pass several key pieces of legislation while Democrats still control the US House. Among them: the DREAM Act, which would give a possible pathway to citizenship to some 2 million undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.

    “I am the wife of a DACA recipient. I am the daughter of Guatemalan working immigrants. I know firsthand the challenges and constant fear our families live every single day,” Ramirez tells reporters. “We have to end this.”

    That’s far easier said than done, as decades of debate over immigration reform on Capitol Hill clearly show.

    But Ramirez says no matter how many obstacles pop up in her path, she’ll keep pushing.

    As constant and controversial as conversations around immigration in Washington have become, many lawmakers weighing in don’t have direct personal connections to the issues they’re debating.

    Ramirez, 39, has lived them her entire life.

    Her mom was pregnant with her when she crossed the Rio Grande – a detail Ramirez made a point to include in a candidate bio on her campaign website, which notes that her mom went on to work “multiple low-wage jobs to give her children a fighting chance to escape poverty.”

    Ramirez says over the years some of her political opponents have tried to use details like this from her background against her, accusing her of being in favor of open borders and speaking dismissively about her family during debates. But Ramirez sees her family’s story as a strength that’s helped her connect with voters and better understand the issues that matter to her constituents.

    “I didn’t have to shy away from the fact that I’m working class and my husband’s a DACA recipient, that I’m worried about how I’m going to pay for housing. That is the reality of so many people,” she says. “And I want men and women, young and old, to see me and think, ‘That was my m’hija, That was my daughter.’ Or…’I’m an intern somewhere and I don’t feel seen. But if she could do it, so can I.’”

    Ramirez says the story of her mom’s journey from Guatemala to the United States infused her childhood in Chicago, where Ramirez was born.

    According to the story Ramirez grew up hearing, when her mom crossed the Rio Grande, strong currents nearly swept her away. She’d hidden her pregnancy from others on the journey, but in that moment she called out in desperation, “Help! Help! Save me! Save my daughter!” A man did, Ramirez says, but after that day, her mom never saw him again.

    As she struggled with depression as a teenager, Ramirez says her mom would frequently invoke this part of her past, saying, “I nearly died so that you could be born. Now I have to fight to keep you alive.”

    That struggling teen, Ramirez says, would never have imagined that she’d run a homeless shelter and other successful nonprofits, go on to become a state lawmaker and one day be on the cusp of entering US Congress.

    “But that is the journey, right?” Ramirez says. “Maybe not the Congress part as often as it should be, but the journey of so many people and so many children of immigrants who contribute and do so much for this country.”

    How does her family’s journey shape her view of what’s unfolding now at the border?

    “I am clear that anyone willing to risk dying, starving or even being raped in the long journey through desert, cold and tunnels is crossing because they feel like there is no other solution to their situation. Their migration is the only way they see themselves and loved ones surviving deep poverty and, in some cases, persecution,” Ramirez says.

    “My mother wouldn’t have risked my life or hers had it not been the only option she saw for her unborn child to have a chance at a life and childhood better than hers.”

    As Ramirez shares these and other details from her past with CNN in the Longworth House Office Building one evening in early December, an aide steps in with her phone in hand.

    “It’s time,” he tells her.

    Ramirez is still an Illinois state legislator for a few more weeks, and she needs to vote on a measure that might not pass if she doesn’t.

    She holds the phone in one hand and looks into the camera.

    “Representative Ramirez votes yes,” she says, then hands the phone back to her aide.

    “Done,” she says with a triumphant smile.

    It’s the latest in numerous bills Ramirez has helped pass since her 2018 election to the Illinois General Assembly.

    In that way alone, she knows it will be an adjustment to work as a lawmaker in Washington, where partisan fights often get in the way of passing laws.

    She still remembers the first state bill she sponsored that passed in March 2019 – a measure to expand homelessness prevention programming, a top concern for Ramirez, who previously directed a homeless shelter.

    “It was a very emotional moment,” she says. And the first thing she did after the bill passed, she says, was call her mom and share the news.

    Ramirez in a portrait from her campaign website.

    “I said, ‘Mom, in three months I was able to do more (to prevent homelessness) than I had done in almost 15 years,’” Ramirez recalls.

    Her mom responded that she was proud but reminded Ramirez that her work wasn’t finished.

    “Go hang up, and do more,” she said, according to Ramirez. “And don’t forget where you come from.”

    It’s with that mantra in mind, and with memories of growing up as the daughter of immigrants who worked multiple jobs to support their family in Chicago, that Ramirez is heading to Washington.

    Both her parents are US citizens now, but Ramirez says they’re still struggling to make ends meet.

    “I am the daughter of a woman who at 61 has given so much to this country and is a minimum-wage worker that can’t afford health care, so she’s on Medicaid, and diabetic,” Ramirez says. “I am the daughter of a man who spent 30 years working in an industrial bakery, a union busting company, and the day he retired, he got a frozen pie. He didn’t get a retirement pension and he struggled with Medicare supplemental, covering the cost.”

    Ramirez’s newly redrawn Illinois congressional district is nearly 50% Latino and heavily Democratic, spanning from Chicago’s Northwest side into the suburbs, according to CNN affiliate WLS. She won more than 66% of the vote in the general election, defeating Republican mortgage company executive Justin Burau.

    After Ramirez’s election, her background landed her on many lists of firsts. She will be the first Latina elected to Congress from the Midwest.

    She’s also helped set another record as part of the largest number of Latinos ever in the House of Representatives.

    There’s another notable detail about her background that Ramirez has pointed to regularly in interviews since her election: She has a “mixed-status family.”

    More than 22 million people in the United States live in mixed-status families, according to immigrant advocacy group fwd.us, meaning at least one family member is an undocumented immigrant and others are US citizens, green card holders or other lawful temporary immigrants. But it’s rare to hear a member of Congress use the term to describe themselves.

    Because of her family’s experience, Ramirez knows many of the people who supported her candidacy see her as a voice who will speak out for them, and for so many immigrants who are in the shadows and rarely heard.

    Ramirez married Boris Hernandez in October 2020. They met earlier that year in what she describes as “one of those pandemic loves.”

    Delia Ramirez, left, with her husband, Boris Hernandez, center, and Ramirez's mother.

    She’s best friends with his cousin. Hernandez is originally from the same town in Guatemala as her parents. He came to the United States when he was 14. And for years, like hundreds of thousands of other people, he’s relied on the Obama-era program known as DACA, short for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which granted certain young undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children work permits and protection from deportation.

    On her campaign website and social media feeds, Ramirez has shared photos of Hernandez. And she’s invoked her husband’s story in recent speeches and conversations with constituents.

    Hernandez often stood by her side at campaign events. He occasionally took photos, too (he’s a photographer, in addition to also having worked in nonprofits and early childhood development). He accompanied Ramirez as she voted on Election Day, even though he couldn’t cast a ballot.

    Ramirez acknowledges that she’s privileged compared to many loved ones of DACA recipients. She’s a US citizen, and because of that, Hernandez has a pathway to citizenship no matter what Congress decides. But still, she says, they could end up in a precarious position.

    If a federal judge’s ruling ends DACA – something many immigrant rights advocates warn is likely to happen in the next year – and her husband’s paperwork to adjust his immigration status is pending, Ramirez knows she could have a lot more to worry about in addition to her busy schedule as a first-term congresswoman.

    “I’m going to be fighting to keep my husband here,” she says, “and I’m a member of Congress. …. What happens to the other 2 million (undocumented immigrants that the DREAM Act would protect)? What happens to his brother? What happens to my best friend from high school? What happens to all of them who have no pathway, who don’t have a citizen husband or wife or partner?”

    Ramirez says that question keeps her up at night.

    Standing beside Ramirez outside the Capitol on that morning in December, Congressman-elect Robert Garcia of California praises her for bringing the group of freshmen lawmakers together even before they’ve taken office.

    “She’s been leading on issues of immigration, on DACA for Dreamers, to ensure that our country’s taking care of those who really need our help,” Garcia says.

    Helping Dreamers isn’t the only topic on the agenda during this December news conference; Ramirez and the others are also pushing for extensions to the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit, and more funding for early childhood education programs.

    In her interview with CNN, Ramirez said her plans to fight for policies that help immigrants extend beyond immigration reform. One key issue she wants to work on while in office: housing, an area that she says is critically important to immigrant families and working-class families in general.

    Ramirez ascends a staircase at the US Capitol on November 18, 2022.

    The progressive policies she champions, she says, would benefit immigrants and US citizens alike. “It’s an ‘and,’” she says, “not an ‘or.’”

    Ramirez’s voice cracks with emotion as the news conference ends and she makes her closing argument.

    “It is time to deliver for our Dreamers,” she says. “It is time for Boris Hernandez to finally have a pathway to citizenship.”

    Ramirez says she feels overwhelmed by gratitude that her constituents have given her this chance to represent them, and a strong sense of urgency to deliver the results she knows so many people desperately need.

    Weeks later, the 117th Congress adjourned without taking most of the steps Ramirez and her fellow incoming freshmen had been pushing for.

    And with the balance of power shifting, she knows the battles to come will be even tougher. But for Ramirez, the words she proudly proclaimed in that first news conference outside the Capitol still hold true. She and other new members of the House Progressive Caucus have only just begun to make their voices heard.

    “We’re rooted,” she says, “and we are ready to help with this fight. … Let’s get to work.”

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  • Statue of late civil rights icon John Lewis will be erected in his congressional district where a confederate monument once stood | CNN

    Statue of late civil rights icon John Lewis will be erected in his congressional district where a confederate monument once stood | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A statue of the late civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis will now keep watch over a site in his former Georgia congressional district which once held a monument to the Confederacy.

    Sculptor Basil Watson has been selected to design and create a monument to be placed at the Historic Decatur Courthouse in the district Lewis served for 17 consecutive terms, the DeKalb County Commemorative Task Force announced Thursday.

    The task force was formed to honor Lewis’ legacy and “provide a symbol of inclusivity, equality, and justice” where the Confederate monument stood for more than 100 years.

    “A monument that represented bigotry, division and hatred will be replaced, by a monument to a man who loved, who cherished this nation and brought all people of all colors together,” DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond said, noting the removal of the confederate monument in 2020 was “one of the proudest moments” of his tenure.

    Lewis, who was the son of sharecroppers, survived a brutal beating by police during the landmark 1965 march in Selma, Alabama and went on to become a towering figure of the civil rights movement. Lewis died in July 2020 at the age of 80.

    Speaking at the ceremony announcing his commission on Thursday, Watson said he met the late congressman briefly at an art fair. “Everyone was so excited. We spoke for maybe 30 seconds, but he left an impression,” he said.

    “The John Lewis story is a powerful story that needs to be told,” Watson added.

    Watson is a Jamaican-born artist who immigrated to Georgia in 2002. His work includes sculptural tributes to eight-time Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt in his home country and Queen Elizabeth II in the United Kingdom for her Golden Jubilee, according to his website. Many in Atlanta may be familiar with his statue of Martin Luther King Jr. located near Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

    The courthouse where Lewis’ tribute will be erected is in Decatur Square, a bustling city center just east of Atlanta.

    Until June 2020, about a month before Lewis died, the DeKalb County Confederate Monument to “the lost cause” was removed from the courthouse grounds. The movement of the 30-foot obelisk was ordered by a county judge, after the city called it a threat to public safety. Local activists, demonstrators and students from nearby Decatur High School had also pushed for its removal.

    “This project has been a labor of love for all of us who knew and loved Congressman Lewis. He served our district and the world with such honor and distinction,” Decatur Mayor Patti Garrett said in a news release ahead of the announcement.

    “His statue will stand as a reminder to all who pass that once this great but humble man walked among us, and we are happy we elected him over and over to serve us and the world. He was truly the conscience of the Congress,” Garrett said.

    “The artist will commence work immediately. Once the statue is complete, the task force will sponsor a community-wide event to unveil the work,” the release said.

    The organization hopes to have the tribute in place by 2024.

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  • Incoming Kansas attorney general fined for 2020 Senate campaign finance violations | CNN Politics

    Incoming Kansas attorney general fined for 2020 Senate campaign finance violations | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Federal Election Commission has levied a $30,000 fine on incoming Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach and a private border wall organization he was once affiliated with due to campaign finance violations committed during his unsuccessful 2020 Senate bid.

    In an agreement approved by the FEC last month, about a week after Kobach was elected, he admitted to illegally accepting an in-kind contribution from We Build the Wall, a Steve Bannon-linked group which ran a fundraising campaign to build a private border wall but became ensnarled in allegations of fraud.

    CNN has reached out to attorneys for Kobach and We Build the Wall for comment.

    In 2019, Kobach’s campaign rented We Build the Wall’s 295,000-person email list for just $2,000, a price significantly below the normal rate.

    The campaign was also accused of additional campaign finance violations in connection with We Build the Wall, but the FEC, which is made up of three Democrats and three Republicans, either dismissed those allegations or was equally divided.

    Kobach is an immigration hardliner and a longtime spreader of false election claims who served as Kansas’ secretary of state from 2011 to 2019 and has close ties to former President Donald Trump.

    Kobach was narrowly elected Kansas attorney general in November, defeating Democrat Chris Mann 51% to 49% in the reliably red state. His victory came after two consecutive defeats in recent election cycles – losing bids for the governorship in 2018 and for the GOP nomination for US Senate in 2020.

    He previously served on We Build the Wall’s board and as the organization’s general counsel.

    Two men have pleaded guilty in federal court, and another was convicted of defrauding donors in connection with We Build The Wall. Bannon and the organization itself are now facing charges in New York state. Bannon, who has pleaded not guilty to state charges, had previously been indicted in federal court but was pardoned by then-President Trump at the end of his term.

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  • The Bidens make an island escape ahead of consequential 2024 announcement | CNN Politics

    The Bidens make an island escape ahead of consequential 2024 announcement | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden this week returns to St. Croix, one of his and first lady Jill Biden’s beloved vacation spots, seeking a final opportunity for rest before what is expected to be a contentious 2023 and reelection run.

    As Biden unwinds in a familiar spot – the first couple have visited the US Virgin Islands for more than a dozen years, vacationing there approximately ten times since the mid-2000s – the work on his path forward intensifies back in a frigid Washington, DC. Advisers are already preparing the president’s annual State of the Union address, typically delivered in late January or early February, viewing the speech as an opportunity to lay down the stakes and themes that Biden could adopt on the campaign trail.

    The first couple arrived in St. Croix on Tuesday, along with family members, a gathering of the tight-knit clan who, according to several people with knowledge of recent conversations who have spoken to CNN, have now pledged support for another White House run by Biden. Senior administration officials once viewed this week’s tropical escape as a crucial juncture that would play a major part in deciding his political future, and – while the president does still plan to mull with his family the pros and cons of mounting a reelection bid – people who have discussed the matter with him lately say the decision is essentially made.

    CNN Exclusive: Pelosi and Schumer say Biden should run for re-election in 2024

    Clues that Biden was expected in St. Croix were everywhere in the run-up to his arrival: the jumbo C-17 transport planes sitting among the puddle jumpers at the airport; temporary security checkpoints among the bougainvillea along the quiet coastal road; unusually high numbers of visitors from Washington.

    Even for a popular tourist destination accustomed to a wave of winter travelers, this week’s presidential visit has maxed out the island’s resources. Rental cars were all taken, and hotels were at capacity, according to residents.

    After the Bidens skipped the US Virgin Islands tradition the last two years, this trip may have some of the same vibes as one of their more recent vacations. In the early hours of 2019, when Biden was last contemplating a presidential bid, the couple were photographed taking a selfie at Point Udall in St. Croix on New Year’s Day, catching the first sunrise of the new year at the easternmost point under the American Flag, as the popular tourist spot is known.

    A decision had been made. Several months later, Biden would announce his candidacy for the presidency.

    In 2014, Joe and Jill Biden enjoyed their time on the island so much, they visited St. Croix twice – once to ring in the new year and again for a weekend in March, a quick getaway trip not on the then-vice president’s official schedule.

    In 2015, the couple again passed the week after Christmas there, after deciding he would not run for the White House.

    In 2016, Bidens spent the waning days of his vice presidency relaxing on St. Croix, ahead of Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House.

    Biden’s loyalty to the US territory has been the most high-profile of any American politician in recent history. A sitting American president has not visited St. Croix since Harry S. Truman in 1948. Truman arrived by yacht – the USS Williamsburg – and was hosted at an estate owned by the manufacturer of Jeeps.

    In 1997, President Bill Clinton visited neighboring St. Thomas, another of the US Virgin Islands, for his winter vacation, chartering a catamaran with his family and snorkeling with daughter Chelsea.

    In a 2020 statement, Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. said of Biden, “We consider him our hometown president.” Asked why the Bidens have picked St. Croix as their island getaway, Vanessa Valdivia, the first lady’s press secretary, told CNN, “Over the years, the president and first lady have frequently traveled to a warmer location the week after Christmas, going to the US Virgin Island several times.”

    For the entirety of his presidency, Biden has skipped out when he can on weekends in Washington, DC, in favor of his longtime family home in Wilmington, Delaware, where residence staff and storied rooms aren’t a thing.

    St. Croix, for the first couple, has provided that sort of intense privacy, plus the warmth and beach that the Bidens favor.

    During their visits in the years after Biden served as vice president, when his security apparatus dwindled and normalcy found a return to their daily routine, the first couple could be spotted around the island on occasion with virtually no entourage, driving themselves along the flower-lined roads in a rental Toyota sedan.

    The home they leased was modest – only a few bedrooms – and was available at other times of the year for other tourists on vacation rental websites.

    Yet on Tuesday, law enforcement was busy in the same area making preparations for Biden’s visit, including setting up flood lights and popping up white tents to act as checkpoints along the roadside.

    The Bidens are staying at the home of his friends Bill and Connie Neville in St. Croix, the White House says. The president and first lady have stayed at the home of the tech executive on previous visits to the island.

    The first couple are “beach people,” said a family friend familiar with their vacation preferences. Others who know them well said there is little more they enjoy when relaxing than pitching an umbrella on the beach, tossing a towel onto the sand and closing their eyes under a warm sun.

    Their Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, neighbors are now used to being screened by Secret Service agents during beach walks, the telltale signal the president and/or first lady have walked down from their oceanside vacation residence to the beach for a respite closer to the waves.

    The first lady, in particular, finds peace in her books and soaking up the sun. This spring, staff for Jill Biden – on a solo, whirlwind, three-country visit to Ecuador, Panama and Costa Rica – made sure to schedule private time for the first lady beside the pool at a resort out of Panama City, so she could lay out like dozens of other vacationers, steps from the waterside.

    “They both prefer hot and sunny and humid to wet and snowy and cold,” said another close acquaintance of the Bidens.

    For the first couple, a true respite involves privacy as well, not just sun and warmth. St. Croix has fit the checklist. Locals have spotted the couple in years past at the grocery store, going mostly unnoticed as they shopped for vacation provisions at Seaside Market and Deli. Joe Biden has played rounds of golf at the Buccaneer Resort, a par-70 course described as “challenging, yet very playable” on the property’s website.

    They have attended mass at the white-steepled Holy Cross Catholic Church in the island’s main town Christiansted.

    The break from Washington comes on the heels of a busy holiday season. Jill Biden – so tasked with dozens of White House celebrations, photo lines, family visits and general hosting duties that she had laryngitis for several days – is on her second week off from her teaching duties at Northern Virginia Community College.

    For Joe Biden, the stakes of getting away are not just about rest and recuperation.

    Barring unforeseen events or a sudden change of heart, Biden’s team is laying the groundwork for a reelection announcement in the coming months, putting to rest persistent speculation about whether the 80-year-old president would seek another term.

    CNN has reported that Jill Biden is “all in” on the 2024 campaign despite previous concerns about the deep implications of what a second run might mean for her family and her husband. She has, as one White House official told CNN, “zero concerns” about Joe Biden’s schedule and stamina.

    “This is, ultimately, a family decision,” Joe Biden said at a news conference last month. “I think everybody wants me to run, but we’re going to have discussions about it.”

    Aside from the rigors of launching the final political campaign of his career, Biden will face a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives, intent on stymieing many of his legislative ambitions. Republican leaders have also vowed to mount investigations into Biden’s administration and his family.

    With his legislative prospects dampened, Biden plans to travel extensively in the new year promoting the accomplishments from his first two years in office. It will be an intense period that could ultimately include a rematch with his 2020 opponent, Trump – and one that will require the full backing of his wife of 45 years, along with the support of his extended family.

    If there is a time to speak up on hesitations, either his own or from his offspring, it would be during this vacation.

    Wayne Nichols, who leads Alexander Hamilton tours of St. Croix in the character of the founding father, recalled a 2019 encounter he had with Biden, with whom he engaged while the then-not-quite-presidential candidate was walking alone on the east end of the island.

    At the time, Biden was also mulling a daunting campaign. After passing on a bid in 2016 following the death of his son, he was being encouraged by his family to mount a challenge to Trump.

    Nichols said he stopped Biden to ask if he would run.

    “My question to him was, ‘Well, you’re going to run?’ He goes, ‘Well, I’m running now.’ And I thought, well, technically you’re walking,” Nichols recalled this week, wondering whether he might again cross paths with Biden.

    Nichols came across Joe Biden a second time that week in 2019, while out for a walk on the island – Joe Biden up front, Jill Biden walking a few paces behind – when someone in the group told Jill Biden that her husband ought to run for president.

    “‘When you get up there, let him know that,’” Nichols said she responded.

    As the Bidens make similar deliberations this year, they won’t be getting around in a rented Toyota and their stops on the island will go less unnoticed.

    “I have a feeling this is the place,” Nichols said of Biden often choosing St. Croix as his spot to find stillness for a consequential decision about the future. “Chilling there by the water with the nice weather. They get to talk about it. And I believe he’ll run again, only because I don’t know that he thinks there’s any alternative.”

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  • Biden and his team feeling vindicated by a 2022 turnaround built on the same decades-old principles | CNN Politics

    Biden and his team feeling vindicated by a 2022 turnaround built on the same decades-old principles | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden spent hours during his first foreign trip behind closed doors, attempting to reassure a shaken group of US allies that America was back. It was clear, he later told advisers, just how much work remained to convince them of the durability of that commitment.

    Eighteen months after those meetings in Europe, Biden departed Washington on Tuesday for his year-end vacation, riding the momentum of historic legislative success and the defiance of political gravity that has reshaped the expectations for the critical months – and decisions – ahead. It’s a moment that Biden never seemed to doubt would come, even as his party – and some inside the White House – questioned or outright urged a change in approach to address political and economic headwinds driven primarily by soaring inflation that threatened to drag down his presidency.

    During those 2021 meetings in England and Belgium, Biden found a group of allies genuinely shaken by the January 6 insurrection and the events that led to it. But the president tried to reassure them that the visceral divides that culminated in the violence that day would heal and the bleak moment in US politics would pass.

    He was met with polite appreciation from his foreign counterparts. But the deep skepticism served only to underscore his commitment to a belief that sat at the heart of a pledge that was often pilloried during the campaign as naïve. The only real reassurance, Biden would note, was delivering on what he’d promised.

    “That’s why it’s so important that I succeed in my agenda, whether it’s dealing with the vaccine, the economy, infrastructure,” Biden told reporters in Brussels shortly before he boarded Air Force One for a flight to Switzerland and a sit down with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “It’s important that we demonstrate we can make progress and continue to make progress. And I think we’re going to be able to do that.”

    The moment provided a brief window into the president’s high-stakes theory of the case – one that appeared exceedingly aspirational given his party’s narrow congressional majorities and staunch GOP opposition. But even as this year began, Biden and his team were grasping to break free of a series of crises and the cornerstone of his agenda – a sweeping bill that included numerous administration priorities – appeared in shambles.

    Biden’s anticipated final major action before the end of 2022 serves as an almost poetic coda for his first two years. The $1.7 trillion bipartisan spending package he will sign will lock in key funding priorities and include an overhaul of the law his predecessor cited in the lead up to the January 6 riot.

    The turn from aspirational goals to palpable accomplishments – highlighted over the last several months by Biden’s travel to major corporate groundbreakings in states like Ohio, Arizona and Michigan – underpins the sharp reversal for the White House. That turnaround serves as evidence of Biden’s steely belief in his strategies and policy proposals –an approach deeply rooted over his decades in public service.

    “One thing that is foundational with him is if he says he’s going to do something, he does it,” Steve Ricchetti, one of Biden’s closest and longest-serving advisers, told CNN in an interview, underscoring an approach that has been defined by steady, and at times stubborn, persistence.

    Simple as it may seem, a campaign promise or commitment has tipped internal debates on policy decisions more than once, one White House official noted.

    Biden’s closest confidants also stress that it’s a perspective that is instructive as the White House prepares for the dramatically reshaped Washington that will confront him upon his return from his family vacation to the US Virgin Islands.

    “The whole idea of showing people government can work – we were mocked for that in some corners,” a Biden adviser said. “That’s literally what’s happening now.”

    There are still clear challenges ahead. Inflation remains high even if its grip appears to be easing. Biden’s advisers expect economic growth to slow in the quarters ahead, though they remain cautiously optimistic a recession can be avoided.

    Biden’s approval ratings, while ticking up, remain low and his age remains a real, if less publicly addressed, concern held by Democrats as they wait for an official decision about whether he will seek reelection.

    But Biden’s overarching approach has guided the early-stage planning for the legislative and political implications of a new House Republican majority and served as the basis for aides already working through the outlines of the State of the Union address that will come early next year.

    It’s also a defining element of the structure and message planning of a nascent campaign that has taken shape over the last several months and accelerated. Biden’s senior team has become increasingly confident that a reelection campaign will be green lit in the weeks ahead.

    White House officials view the political salience of his agenda as both an underappreciated element of their ability to defy the expectations of sweeping GOP gains in the midterms and as a critical piece of what comes next. The prospect of divided government – and the exceedingly narrow legislative pathway it brings – has limited effect on an agenda that is now in the implementation phase.

    “It forms the foundation for even stronger achievements as the nation heads into the New Year,” Mike Donilon, the White House senior adviser and long-standing member of Biden’s inner circle, wrote in a political memo circulated to allies this month.

    Biden, advisers said, has laid down strict directives to senior aides and Cabinet officials about the necessity of efficient implementation in the months ahead.

    “It’s not subtle,” a senior administration official said of the message from the top. “We have to get it right and in the moments we don’t, we damn well be ready to explain it – and fix it.”

    For Biden’s tight-knit and long-serving advisers, this is a moment that both vindicates and validates core elements of a campaign and presidency that at various points were dismissed, underestimated or at some points even mocked.

    “A lot of people told him that this wouldn’t resonate, or that it wasn’t the message, or that it’s outdated,” Stef Feldman, the longtime Biden aide who served as the 2020 campaign policy director before following him to the White House, told CNN.

    Biden viewed his infrastructure proposal, in particular, as a central policy plank of his campaign as Democratic primary opponents raced to outdo one another with transformational progressive proposals – none of which included a viable way to pass a bitterly divided Congress.

    Biden and his economic advisers zeroed in on an intensive manufacturing and supply chain agenda that grew more aggressive and transformational as a once-in-a-century pandemic gripped the country. They saw it as the key to reverse the accelerants at the heart of the atmosphere that created the opening for Donald Trump to reach the Oval Office.

    “This was the right moment for his theory of the case,” Feldman said. “He could apply the principles that have really guided him throughout his whole career.”

    Those principles have largely stayed with Biden through his time as a senator and vice president and were refined during the critical two years spent out of office as he weighed yet another run for the presidency.

    “Ever since I’ve talked to the president about the economy, he’s distinguished between the short-term and the long-term, between consumption and investment,” said Jared Bernstein, Biden’s chief economist as vice president who now sits on the Council of Economic Advisers. “These have always been foundational to his economic thinking.”

    The animating principles of Biden’s 2020 campaign hardly diverged from the key themes outlined by Donilon, Biden’s in-house mind-meld, in the 22-page memo he drafted in early 2015 as the then-vice president weighed jumping into the 2016 race.

    From think tanks to business schools to Davos, Biden took the role of a kind of middle class evangelist, pressing for the pursuit of policies that addressed short-term incentives that had driven jobs away and wages down. Those speeches and discussions served as a roadmap of sorts for an agenda that is now largely law. They detailed major infrastructure investments and a incentivizing research and development that had atrophied. There were broad outlines of nascent ideas to connect hollowed out manufacturing centers and communities to new opportunities. Biden proposed changes to the tax code that tracked near where his administration would eventually land as it sought to finance spending plans.

    Even the anecdotes from the period – whether the one about Chinese leader Xi Jinping and American “possibilities” or his father’s sayings about the dignity of work, or the importance of “breathing room” – are the same that populate his speeches as president.

    Ricchetti, who as counselor to the president helped lead the White House legislative effort, pointed to a clear “through-line” from Biden’s days as a senator, through his time as vice president and during the first two years of Trump’s presidency.

    Biden wrote a book detailing his decision not to run for president as he dealt with the pain of his son Beau’s fight with, and eventual death from, brain cancer. That process and the book tour that followed are viewed by Biden’s inner circle as an essential experience in the eventual decision to run in 2020.

    “Much of what we prioritized at that time we took with us and used as the foundation,” Ricchetti said of the years leading up to the campaign.

    If the effort to turn that foundation into a coherent policy agenda was accelerated and expanded in the final months of the campaign, it was turbocharged during a transition that saw Democrats take control of the Senate majority.

    Officials structured the infrastructure, manufacturing, research and development, climate and equity proposals into interlocking pieces, designed to work in tandem even if they were eventually scaled back during the legislative process.

    “At the core of this strategy was that the power of it is that these things work together,” National Economic Council Chairman Brian Deese, one of the architects of the package, said in an interview.

    What the proposals – particularly across industries and policy priorities tied to climate and manufacturing – also represented was a dramatic shift in what had become an entrenched, if not monolithic, economic orthodoxy. Biden would oversee the most consequential pursuit of an industrial policy strategy in decades. He’d do so in many cases with Republican support.

    To be clear, subscribing to the term “industrial policy” still isn’t universally embraced. Even Deese, who has driven and defined its core elements, prefers “Modern American Industrial Strategy.” In its simplest form, it’s the idea that “if you do public investment in a thoughtful way, what you’ll actually do is crowd in private investment,” Deese said.

    Deese likes to point out its roots in the American economy can be traced to Alexander Hamilton.

    But the convergence of factors that led it to once again gain broader, and bipartisan, traction was in many ways tailor-made for Biden.

    A resurgence in research and development funding. Significant public investments designed for critical areas of national and economic security. The elevation of labor unions and a focus on creating the conditions to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US.

    On their face, these issues are politically popular and hardly exclusive to Biden. They’re also exceedingly difficult to turn into policy. At least until the pandemic.

    “There’s a cost associated with industrial weakness,” Deese said. “The pandemic laid bare something that had been the case for years.”

    That was true for semiconductors – the tiny chips essential for everything from cars and washing machines to advanced weapons systems – that drove the bipartisan urgency behind the $280 billion CHIPS and Science law. Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican up for reelection in 2022, drove the effort on Capitol Hill – something that underscored the salience of an issue that scrambled traditional political dynamics.

    For Young, who had pressed for legislation tied to the issue in the year before Biden entered the White House, it was less about embracing a broader shift in economic policy and more about addressing the fact China had pursued exactly that for a decade or longer. Young was one of 17 Senate Republicans who voted to advance the eventual law that has driven new private sector investment or commitments in the last several months.

    The pandemic. The rise of China as key feature of policy making in both parties. A president animated by the idea of long-term economic incentives crafted to connect workers and communities left behind for decades.

    “These policy insights might not have come to fruition were it not for a confluence of events,” Bernstein acknowledged.

    Ted Kaufman has a simple explanation for Biden’s approach and the places where it paid off after two years.

    “There’s a confidence that comes from knowing what you’re doing,” said Kaufman, the former Delaware senator, longtime Biden Senate chief of staff and one of the president’s closest friends. “This is a guy who is so incredibly well qualified to be president because of experience.”

    As to why that experience has rarely been rewarded by voters, Kaufman had another simple explanation.

    “It’s hard because you have a record,” he said.

    In a way it’s both an implicit acknowledgment of the unprecedented factors – most notably Trump, but in some ways the pandemic as well – that created an opening to the presidency for Biden. Another incumbent, or another moment, and advisers note that it wouldn’t be a question of if Biden would win. He wouldn’t have even run.

    Instead, as he weighs running for reelection at age 80, he enters the final two years of this term with much of his agenda now law. Core elements of that agenda were driven by bipartisan consensus. Even Biden’s final bipartisan achievement of the year – the $1.7 trillion spending package – includes an initial $500 million to seed the technology and innovation hubs created by the CHIPS and Science Act in parts of the country outside of traditional tech sectors.

    While Democrats narrowly lost their House majority in the midterm elections, the party expanded its Senate majority by a seat.

    Perhaps most critically for Biden, the voters sharply reject some of the most extreme voices parroting 2020 election lies in critical races for governor and secretary of state.

    In the months leading up to the midterm elections, Biden had started regularly recounting the experience with his foreign counterparts on that first foreign trip in an effort to underscore the stakes.

    In the weeks that followed, after his travel to Indonesia for the G-20 Summit, he was ready to provide an updated version as he stood against the backdrop of a new factory in Arizona to celebrate the announcement by a Taiwanese chip maker of what would mark one of the largest foreign investments in US history.

    “What was clear in those meetings is the United States is better positioned than any other nation to lead the world economy in the years ahead if we keep our focus,” Biden said.

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  • Why 2022 was a tough year for Trump and 2023 may not be much better | CNN Politics

    Why 2022 was a tough year for Trump and 2023 may not be much better | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    This must feel like the year that won’t end for former President Donald Trump, whose actions appear to be catching up with him in public, painful and expensive ways.

    Trump is infamous for escaping accountability, but he’s been put under the microscope in the second half of 2022 in a way that has complicated things for the 2024 contender.

    The FBI searched his Florida resort, where classified documents were seized. His business was found guilty of criminal tax fraud. Documents relating to his tax returns were released by House Democrats, who are expected to release his actual returns before turning over the committee gavel next year to Republicans, who won a smaller-than-expected majority under Trump’s influence. Many candidates Trump backed failed in key Senate races, costing Republicans a majority in that chamber.

    The former president himself hasn’t been charged with any crimes. But a special counsel has been appointed at the Justice Department to oversee two Trump-related investigations – surrounding the hoarding of documents at Mar-a-Lago and the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

    Trump has railed against the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, and his most ardent supporters tried to stonewall it, but it’s hard to objectively dismiss its damning 800-page detailed report, which spells out his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and his role inspiring rioters to attack the Capitol.

    And though the committee’s criminal referrals of Trump to the Justice Department are largely symbolic, the former president still has to wait and see what comes of the DOJ’s own twin probes.

    In the meantime, there’s no sign that the former president – who launched his third nonconsecutive presidential bid last month – has done much to clear the GOP field, with other hopefuls mulling their options over the holidays.

    The ongoing end-of-year revelations chipping away at Trump’s facade of power include large developments like the January 6 committee report – and smaller details.

    Hidden in court documents is the inconvenient truth that even his loudest acolytes on Fox News knew his 2020 election fantasy was false.

    Sean Hannity, the Fox News opinion host, admitted he didn’t “for one second” believe the fraud claims he helped push.

    It might be nice for Fox viewers to hear that from Hannity, but the admission came off the air and in a deposition as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the conservative network, according to the New York Times.

    Hannity, as we know from text messages, was in close contact with Trump’s then-chief of staff, Mark Meadows, in the days leading up to January 6.

    That the conservative elites in Trump’s circle knew the truth adds context to the fears of fraud they pushed to encourage Republican lawmakers to pass new election security laws in key states.

    The release of Trump’s tax information, without his consent, by House Democrats confirmed what anyone could have guessed – that he paid no federal income tax in a year when he was leading the country.

    Even in years like 2018, where he paid about $1 million in federal taxes, the rate he paid, a bit more than 4%, was on par with the bottom half of American taxpayers.

    The special tax rules for real estate barons, which Congress can’t seem to address, help explain why Trump’s tax bill looks so different than that of regular wage-earning Americans. But the end result is that the former president looks like a tax avoider.

    Trump broke with tradition in 2016 by refusing to release any of his personal tax returns. But his team immediately tried to weaponize the release of his information. “If this injustice can happen to President Trump, it can happen to all Americans without cause,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said last week.

    Trump made sure his influence was felt during the 2022 midterms, but after Republicans failed to secure a “red wave,” some members of his party have blamed him for the GOP’s poor showing.

    He must now grapple with polls like CNN’s from earlier this month, which showed that most Republicans and Republican-leaning independents want the party to nominate someone other than Trump in 2024. Their top pick for an alternative? Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The GOP governor, who won a resounding reelection last month, enjoyed much stronger favorability ratings than Trump among Republicans, according to the CNN survey.

    That’s bad news for a man who jumped out in front of the 2024 Republican field and launched another presidential bid at the precise moment he began to appear politically weak.

    Even his most ardent supporters are growing tired of some of his antics. The $99 Trump-themed digital trading cards timed the NFT market all wrong and drew ridicule even from his most loyal supporters.

    “I can’t do this any more,” complained Stephen Bannon, the former adviser who was sentenced to four months in jail for contempt of Congress after ignoring a subpoena from the January 6 committee. (He’s appealed that conviction.)

    Many of the issues that dogged Trump in 2022 won’t be over with the start of the new year – and could even escalate.

    His business, convicted of tax fraud in late 2022, also faces civil charges from the New York attorney general in 2023.

    On the election-stealing front, it’s not just Special Counsel Jack Smith that Trump has to worry about. An Atlanta-area special grand jury investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election in the Peach State has already begun writing its final report, CNN reported earlier this month. That will serve as a mechanism for the panel to recommend whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should pursue indictments.

    While Trump envisions himself returning to the White House, one of the final bipartisan efforts lawmakers agreed on this month was an update to the Electoral Count Act, making clear that attempts like Trump’s after 2020 – to exploit antiquated language in federal election law and undermine the Electoral College – can never occur again.

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  • Biden and Harris celebrate Kwanzaa in social media posts | CNN Politics

    Biden and Harris celebrate Kwanzaa in social media posts | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The White House celebrated Kwanzaa in a pair of pre-recorded videos posted to Twitter on Monday, marking the seven-day non-denominational holiday aimed at honoring African Americans’ ancestral roots.

    Kwanzaa is celebrated each year from December 26 to January 1, with a day dedicated to each of the Nguzo Saba, or seven principles. Celebrants light a kinara, or seven-pronged candle holder, for each principle: unity (umoja), self-determination (kujichagulia), collective responsibility (ujima), cooperative economics (ujamaa), purpose (nia), creativity (kuumba) and faith (imani).

    In a video posted Monday, President Joe Biden and first lady Dr. Jill Biden offered thanks “for the rich heritage of African Americans, which is deep in the story of our nation.”

    “In 2023, it’s our hope that we’ll all remember the wisdom of the seven principles of Kwanzaa, especially the values of unity and faith, as we work to make the promise of our nation real in the lives of every American,” the president said, standing before a kinara in the White House.

    And Vice President Kamala Harris – the nation’s first Black vice president, in addition to being the first woman to hold the role – took the opportunity to share her own experience with Kwanzaa as a child.

    “Growing up, Kwanzaa was always a special time – we came together with generations of friends and family and neighbors,” Harris said. “There were never enough chairs, so my sister and I and the other children would often sit on the floor, and together we lit the candles of the kinara, and then the elders would talk about how Kwanzaa is a time to celebrate culture, community and family, and they of course taught us about the seven principles.”

    Harris said that her favorite principle as a child was the second, kujichagulia, or self-determination, which she called “a deeply American principle – one that guides me each day as vice president.”

    The vice president was joined by her husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff – the first Jewish spouse to serve in his role. Earlier this month, the White House unveiled its first official White House menorah, while Harris hosted the first Hanukkah gathering at the vice president’s residence at the Naval Observatory.

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  • The most underdiscussed fact of the 2022 election: how historically close it was | CNN Politics

    The most underdiscussed fact of the 2022 election: how historically close it was | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A lot of people have tried to draw lessons from the 2022 elections, which ended earlier this month. Whether it be Democrats’ historically strong performance for a party in power during a midterm or the lack of Senate incumbents losing, the takes have been aplenty.

    But perhaps the most important lesson as we head into the 2024 cycle hasn’t gotten enough oxygen: the closeness of the 2022 midterms. Indeed, an examination of the data reveals that 2022 was a historically close election in a historically divided era.

    Let’s start with seat counts in governorships and in the House and Senate. Post-election, neither party dominates. Republicans have maintained the thinnest majority of governorships (52%) and House seats (51%). Democrats will control the Senate with a bare majority (51% of the seats).

    It’s not unusual for any one of these (governorships, House seats or Senate seats) to be narrowly split. After all, we’ve just had two years in which each party has held 50 Senate seats.

    What is unusual is to have all three be so closely divided. By my count, this is apparently the first time since the popular election of senators (1914) when neither party will hold more than 52% of governorships, House seats or Senate seats.

    When you examine the vote counts from the 2022 election, the closeness becomes even more apparent. Republicans won the House popular vote by less than 3 points and would likely have won by about 2 points had both parties run candidates in every district. That would have been the second-closest midterm margin in the House popular vote in the last 70 years.

    The popular vote margins in governor’s and Senate races this year were even closer. There were 36 gubernatorial races in 2022, with Democrats winning more votes cast for governor in total than Republicans – by less than 0.3 points.

    That margin was the closest in midterm- or presidential-year gubernatorial races since at least 1990.

    The margin in Senate races was still tighter. Republican candidates for Senate won more votes than Democratic candidates – by 0.1 points. Democrats likely would have gotten more votes had they run a candidate in Utah instead of endorsing independent Evan McMullin.

    Still, the 0.1-point popular vote margin was the closest in Senate races in any election since at least before the beginning of World War II.

    Not every state held gubernatorial and Senate races this year, but those that did were well representative of the country as a whole when looked at together. They collectively voted for Joe Biden in 2020 by a margin comparable with his actual national popular vote advantage.

    What makes the closeness of the 2022 elections especially notable is how it exemplifies an electorate that has been quite divided for nearly 35 years.

    We have not had a presidential election in which the popular vote was decided by double-digits since 1984. This streak of single-digit elections is the longest since most states began popularly electing presidents in the 1820s.

    The largest margin in the House popular vote since 1984 was the nearly-11-point win Democrats notched in the 2008 election. In fact, the last time the House popular vote margin was 11 points or more was 40 years ago, in 1982. We haven’t seen such a string of close results in the House popular vote in 200 years.

    Political scientists have debated the reasons for this tight set of recent elections. Arguably, the best explanation is political polarization. The era of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats is mostly gone now. The pool of swing voters has, accordingly, shrunk.

    But that hasn’t made swing voters any less valuable today. These voters, who go back and forth between the parties, remain highly sought after by Democrats and Republicans, and they can make all the difference. For instance, a number of purple states (such as Nevada, New Hampshire and Wisconsin) elected candidates of different parties for governor and senator this year.

    The 2024 election will undoubtedly see both parties trying to win over these swing voters. The early read suggests neither party can feel secure about their chances. You can find polls that have Biden (the likely Democratic nominee) and his likely Republican opponent (either former President Donald Trump or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) within a few points of each other among this group.

    The bottom line is: Neither party has a lasting majority from the public. That was true in the historically close election of 2022 and in the historically divided era of the last 35 years. And it could very well also be also true in the next presidential election.

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  • Arizona judge rejects Kari Lake’s election challenge and confirms Hobbs’ victory | CNN Politics

    Arizona judge rejects Kari Lake’s election challenge and confirms Hobbs’ victory | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    An Arizona judge on Saturday rejected Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s lawsuit attempting to overturn her defeat, concluding that there wasn’t clear or convincing evidence of misconduct, and affirming the victory of Democratic Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs.

    Lake, who lost to Hobbs by about 17,000 votes in November, sued in an effort to overturn the election. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson allowed a two-day trial on some of Lake’s claims, which concluded late Thursday afternoon.

    The court ruling marks a major defeat for Lake, who built her candidacy on her support for former President Donald Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud in the 2020 presidential election. She has since falsely claimed to have won last month’s election.

    Saturday’s ruling is also the latest blow for election deniers nationwide and harks back to the long stream of legal losses Trump suffered in 2020 as he sought to challenge his election loss.

    In a tweet after the ruling, Lake, who sat in the courtroom during the trial but did not testify, said she would appeal the decision “for the sake of restoring faith and honesty in our elections.”

    Thompson previously dismissed eight other counts alleged in Lake’s lawsuit prior to trial, ruling that they did not constitute proper grounds for an election contest under Arizona law, even if true. But he permitted Lake an attempt to prove at trial the two remaining counts involving printers and the ballot chain of custody in Maricopa County.

    The county, which spans the Phoenix area and houses a majority of Arizona’s population, was a hotbed of unfounded allegations of voter disenfranchisement in the midterms and 2020 election.

    Technical experts who testified in support of Lake provided analysis that “does not nearly approach the degree of precision” needed to conclude that the election results were tainted,” Thompson said in his ruling.

    After the election, Lake falsely claimed that a mishap with some printers in Maricopa County was part of a deliberate effort to rig the vote against her. But the judge’s ruling noted that Lake’s “own witness testified before this Court that … printer failures were largely the result of unforeseen mechanical failure.”

    According to Thompson’s ruling, Lake’s team had to show that someone intentionally caused the county’s ballot-on-demand printers to malfunction – and as a result of that, enough “identifiable” votes were lost to change the outcome of the election.

    “Every single witness before the Court disclaimed any personal knowledge of such misconduct. The Court cannot accept speculation or conjecture in place of clear and convincing evidence,” Thompson wrote.

    Maricopa County Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Gates, a Republican who helps oversee elections, called the ruling “a win for Arizona voters and American democracy.”

    “Arizona courts have made it clear that frivolous political theater meant to undermine elections will not be tolerated,” Gates said in a statement Saturday.

    During the two-day trial, Lake’s legal team broadly criticized Maricopa County’s management of the election and claimed that long lines led Republican would-be voters to turn away on Election Day.

    Tom Liddy, a lawyer for Maricopa County, faulted Lake’s campaign and the Arizona Republican Party for casting doubt on the validity of early and mail-in votes, which left GOP voters bearing the brunt of minor issues on Election Day.

    “That’s political malpractice,” said Liddy, a Republican. “You reap what you sow.”

    Maricopa County elections co-director Scott Jarrett detailed the causes of printing problems in some polling places on Election Day that resulted in on-site ballot tabulators being unable to read some ballots.

    Jarrett said in some printers, toner wasn’t dark enough – a problem that resulted in voters whose ballots couldn’t be read having to place their ballots in “door 3,” a secure box used for ballots that would need to be counted later at a central location. Jarrett said about 17,000 ballots ended up in “door 3” boxes across the county.

    He also said that at three of the county’s 223 sites, “shrink to fit” settings were improperly selected on ballot printers by technicians who were attempting to solve those toner problems. That resulted in about 1,300 ballots being printed slightly too small for on-site tabulators to process.

    Those ballots were later duplicated by hand and then counted, he said.

    He said he had “no reason to believe” any of the problems were the result of intentional misconduct. All of those votes, he said, were ultimately counted after they were transferred to a bipartisan duplication board.

    Lake’s team had also claimed at the trial that employees at Runbeck, a Maricopa County ballot processing contractor, had improperly inserted their own ballots and those of family members into batches to be counted on site, rather than returning those ballots through proper channels.

    In response, Rey Valenzuela, the Maricopa County co-director of elections in charge of early voting, said that the county had never authorized Runbeck employees to deliver ballots directly to the Runbeck site and that he was not aware of the contractor’s employees ever having done so.

    Lake’s legal team has until Monday to respond. Hobbs is slated to be inaugurated as governor on January 2.

    This is story has been updated with additional details.

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  • January 6 panelist points to Electoral College reform as next priority to safeguard democracy | CNN Politics

    January 6 panelist points to Electoral College reform as next priority to safeguard democracy | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the House January 6 select committee, said reforming the Electoral College to ensure the presidential winner reflects the outcome of the popular vote would be the next step to safeguard democracy.

    “The Electoral College now – which has given us five popular-vote losers as president in our history, twice in this century alone – has become a danger, not just to democracy, but to the American people. It was a danger on January 6,” the Maryland Democrat said in an interview with Margaret Brennan on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that aired Sunday. “There are so many curving byways and nooks and crannies in the Electoral College, that there are opportunities for a lot of strategic mischief. We should elect the president the way we elect governors, senators, mayors, representatives, everybody else. Whoever gets the most votes wins.”

    “The truth is that we need to be continually renovating and improving our institutions,” Raskin said, later noting that he supports the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which represents a pledge made by certain states and the District of Columbia to award their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the popular vote nationwide.

    Under the US Constitution, Americans don’t select their president directly. They vote for their state’s electors, who are then expected to carry out the will of the voters when they vote for president and vice president.

    Democrats Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 both won the national popular vote in their races but lost the Electoral College vote count. Other presidential nominees who lost after winning the popular vote included Andrew Jackson (1824), Samuel Tilden (1876) and Grover Cleveland (1888).

    “The framers [of the Constitution] were great, and they were patriots, but they didn’t have the benefit of the experience that we have lived, and we know that the Electoral College doesn’t fit anymore,” Raskin said.

    Included in the sweeping spending bill that Congress passed last week was a measure aimed at making it harder to overturn a certified presidential election. Raskin described the move, which would reform the 1887 Electoral Count Act, as “necessary” and “the very least we can do and we must do.”

    “But it’s not remotely sufficient,” he said. “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year exporting American democracy to other countries, and the one thing they never come back to us with is the idea that, ‘Oh, that Electoral College thing you have, that’s so great, we think we’ll adopt that too.’”

    Raskin’s remarks come just days after the select committee – which has investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol – issued its final report, a comprehensive overview of the bipartisan panel’s findings on how former President Donald Trump and his allies sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election. In a symbolic move, the committee in its last public meeting referred Trump to the Justice Department on four criminal charges.

    Raskin said the unprecedented referrals were necessary because of the “magnitude of the attack on democracy” on January 6. He also warned of a future coup attempt.

    Raskin talked about security threats members of Congress face amid rising partisan tensions.

    “There’s very dangerous rhetoric going on out there that’s a real break from everything we’ve known in our lifetimes,” he said.

    “What it means to live in a democracy with basic civic respect is that people can disagree without resorting to violence. But the internet has played a negative role, especially for the right wing, the extreme right, which now engages in very dangerous hyperbolic rhetoric that exposes people to danger.”

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  • How the January 6 panel unearthed key details from little-known insiders | CNN Politics

    How the January 6 panel unearthed key details from little-known insiders | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The story of January 6 has largely focused on a cast of very prominent characters, including former President Donald Trump and members of his inner circle who have become household names, like his former attorney Rudy Giuliani and his White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

    But those with notable names were merely the tip of the iceberg for the January 6 committee, which spent 18 months investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The panel interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses behind closed doors, including scores of Trump aides who were hardly ever in the headlines.

    The January 6 committee’s report, which came out Thursday, highlights how investigators tracked down little-known insiders – from the Trump campaign to the National Guard to the Republican National Committee – who witnessed key moments and provided critical information to the panel.

    One critical example of the outsize role of little-known figures: The committee’s report mentions an unnamed White House staffer who told Trump around 1:21 p.m. on January 6, 2021, that “they’re rioting down at the Capitol.” This represents one of the first instances of Trump being told directly that the situation was descending into violence.

    With the panel’s report public and witness interview transcripts trickling out on a daily basis, we’re getting a new glimpse into how these obscure figures played big roles in the inquiry. Some of them even provided information that will be useful to the ongoing criminal probes by the Justice Department and state prosecutors in Georgia, who are investigating Trump’s election schemes.

    Here are a few lesser-known insiders and what they shared with the committee.

    The committee’s dive into the hundreds of millions of dollars that were made in campaign fundraising off Trump’s bogus election fraud claims includes the story of a young RNC staffer who was fired after he pushed back on some of the assertions being made in fundraising emails.

    Ethan Katz, who provided testimony to the committee, was an RNC copywriter who made clear to his superiors he was not comfortable with the false claims the Trump campaign and its allies were making after the election, according to the report.

    His direct boss told the committee that she wasn’t sure why Katz was terminated three weeks after the election. However, it came after Katz repeatedly questioned the direction leadership was taking in Republicans’ post-election fundraising messaging.

    The first confrontation – corroborated by multiple witnesses – came in a meeting with the entirety of the Trump digital team, in which Katz grilled a higher-up on how the campaign was saying it wanted to stop the count in several battleground states while keeping it going in another.

    In the second episode in the report, he refused a directive to write an email declaring Trump the winner in Pennsylvania – an email Katz suspected was meant to preempt the election being called for Joe Biden in that state.

    Another copy writer was assigned the task, the report said, and an email falsely declaring a Trump victory in Pennsylvania was sent on November 4.

    Katz was one of several lower-level digital staffers who spoke to the committee, shedding light on how the campaign and the RNC tried to walk the line between not putting themselves in potential legal jeopardy by blasting out false claims while exploiting Trump’s fraud narrative for fundraising.

    Among the first people the committee identifies as having concocted the fake electors strategy – in which slates of fraudulent Trump electors were put forward as alternatives to Biden electors – is Vince Haley, the deputy assistant to the president for policy, strategy and speechwriting.

    Texts and emails that Haley turned over to the committee show how he repeatedly pushed the idea of using illegitimate GOP slates of presidential electors in battleground states to some of Trump’s closest staff members.

    Supposed election fraud by Democrats is “only one rationale for slating Trump electors,” Haley told Johnny McEntee, an assistant to Trump, in text messages one week after the 2020 election that he turned over to the January 6 committee.

    “We should baldly assert” that state legislators “have the constitutional right to substitute their judgment for a certified majority of their constituents” if that prevents socialism, he said.

    The messages highlight how Trump allies and White House staffers appeared to know that their efforts to overturn the election could be problematic early on but believed they were justified if the plan was successful in keeping Trump in office.

    Haley added, “[i]ndependent of the fraud – or really along with that argument – Harrisburg [Pennsylvania], Madison [Wisconsin] and Lansing [Michigan] do not have to sit idly by and submit themselves to rule by Beijing and Paris,” proposing that conservative radio hosts “rally the grassroots to apply pressure to the weak kneed legislators in those states.”

    Haley then sent McEntee names and contact information for state legislators in six states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan. Trump later called several of those state officials, according to the report.

    Two not-well-known Trump campaign officials who were already of interest to the Justice Department provided especially helpful testimony to the January 6 committee.

    One of them, Georgia-based staffer Robert Sinners, described how he felt misled by campaign higher-ups about the legal sketchiness around the fake electors plan – evidence that might go to show a corrupt intent.

    The second, Trump campaign associate general counsel Joshua Findlay, described fielding concerns from the activists being recruited to be fake electors and recounted to the committee how the campaign’s core team tried to hand off the scheme to the more fringe Trump lawyers.

    Findlay also gave valuable testimony connecting the plot to the former president himself. He told the committee that he was tasked by another campaign official in early December with exploring the feasibility of the plan and that the official conveyed to him that the president wanted the campaign to “look into” the alternative electors proposal.

    When it was decided that Giuliani would be in charge of the gambit, Findlay was left with the impression that it was because Trump wanted Giuliani to lead it. Findlay testified that Trump campaign leadership backed off the plan a few days after he had been told to look into it, with top lawyers bailing on the idea.

    However, the campaign’s director of election day operations, Mike Roman, took on a chief operation role in the gambit.

    The role played by Roman – who declined to answer many of committee’s questions in his testimony, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights – was fleshed out by communications handed over to the committee by Sinners. They showed that Roman was organizing information tracking the effort.

    Sinners told the committee that he would not have participated with the scheme had he known the campaign’s top lawyers were not on board with the plan. He testified that he felt “angry,” according to the report, that “no one really cared if – if people were potentially putting themselves in jeopardy” by doing this, and “we were just … useful idiots or rubes at that point.”

    The Justice Department has been seeking information about Sinners and Findlay. Their committee testimony, along with that of others, showed how the Trump campaign was willing to move forward with the fake electors plot – putting its participants in legal jeopardy – even as its top lawyers sought to distance themselves from the scheme.

    To get to the heart of what was happening in the White House and Trump campaign war rooms, the committee looked to junior staffers – people who were key observers to the action but didn’t have an orchestrating role.

    One such staffer was Angela McCallum, the national executive assistant on Trump’s reelection campaign.

    After the election, McCallum was part of the Trump campaign’s operation to contact hundreds of state legislators to ask for their support for efforts to replace state electors.

    Though McCallum does not appear to have had a leadership role in the operation, nor was she directly quoted by the committee, footnotes from the report show that she turned over several text messages, campaign spreadsheets and even a script for calling state legislators.

    Her insight appears to have given the committee information on the campaign’s outreach efforts to push the fake electors plan. Her notes say that campaign staff tried contacting over 190 Republican state legislators in Arizona, Georgia and Michigan alone.

    McCallum’s text records also show how campaign supervisors viewed the ongoing outreach efforts. In one instance, McCallum provided a text message sent by an operative the committee believes may have brought the fake elector certificates to Washington, based on the message’s photo of the operative in front of the Capitol.

    “This has got to be the cover a book I write one day,” the operative, whom the committee could not find to serve a subpoena, said in the message. “I should probably buy [Mike] [R]oman a tie or something for sending me on this one. Hasn’t been done since 1876 and it was only 3 states that did it.”

    In another message, the operative, who was McCallum’s supervisor, celebrated after reporters published a recorded voicemail McCallum left on a state legislators’ phone.

    “Honest to god I’m so proud of this” because “[t]hey unwittingly just got your message out there,” the message read, according to the report.

    He continued, telling McCallum that “you used the awesome power of the presidency to scare a state rep into getting a statewide newspaper to deliver your talking points.”

    The long delay in sending National Guard troops to the US Capitol on January 6 was among the most glaring security failures that day. Previously unreported testimony revealed for the first time in the committee’s final report shows that one commander on the ground had his forces ready to respond hours before they were given approval to actually do so.

    National Guard Col. Craig Hunter is not a household name, but as the highest-ranking commander on the ground on January 6, his testimony helped the committee untangle conflicting accounts provided by more senior officials and ultimately arrive at a conclusion about what caused the delayed response.

    Hunter provided a detailed timeline of his own actions that day, including that he immediately started preparing his troops to respond at around 2 p.m. ET after hearing that shots had reportedly been fired at the US Capitol.

    “So, at that point in my mind I said, ‘Okay, then they will be requesting the DC National Guard now, so we have to move,” Hunter told the committee, according to its final report.

    Within the hour, Hunter had a plan in place. Over 100 National Guard troops were already loaded on to buses with their gear, and Hunter informed other responding law enforcement agencies that backup was coming as soon as he got approval from his superiors.

    “At 3:10 p.m., Colonel Hunter felt it was time to tell his superiors all that he had done and hopefully get fast approval,” the report says.

    But Hunter was unaware that a looming communications breakdown between senior military leaders – including the acting secretary of Defense and secretary of the Army – would delay approval of his plan for more than three hours.

    At that very moment, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy was putting together a redundant plan for transporting those forces to the Capitol and was not aware that he had already been given authority to issue the order himself, the report says.

    The confusion, coupled with a lack of communication between senior military leaders and commanders on the ground, was a key factor in the delayed response, the report says.

    In hindsight, the failures of top military officials are even more glaring considering Hunter had already devised a plan that could have been put into motion hours earlier.

    They also did not occur in a vacuum. Trump could have personally intervened at any time, to hasten and coordinate the military response, but chose not to.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • No directive: FBI agents, tech executives deny government ordered Twitter to suppress Hunter Biden story | CNN Politics

    No directive: FBI agents, tech executives deny government ordered Twitter to suppress Hunter Biden story | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Internal Twitter communications released by the company’s new owner and CEO, Elon Musk, are fueling intense scrutiny of the FBI’s efforts alongside social media companies to thwart foreign disinformation in the run-up to the 2020 election.

    At the heart of the controversy is Twitter’s decision in October 2020 to block users from sharing a New York Post story containing material from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. Conservative critics have accused Twitter of suppressing the story at the behest of the FBI, something they claim the released communications, dubbed the “Twitter Files,” demonstrate.

    Musk himself has alleged the communications show government censorship, suggesting Twitter acted “under orders from the government” when it suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story.

    But so far, none of the released messages explicitly show the FBI telling Twitter to suppress the story. In fact, the opposite view emerges from sworn testimony by an FBI agent at the center of the controversy. And in interviews with CNN, half a dozen tech executives and senior staff, along with multiple federal officials familiar with the matter, all deny any such directive was given.

    “We would never go to a company to say you need to squelch this story,” said one former FBI official who helped oversee the government’s cooperation with companies including Twitter, Google and Facebook.

    Musk and his conservative allies have insinuated the released messages provide evidence of illicit behavior by the FBI, suggesting the exchange of secret files pertaining to Hunter Biden, and improper payments made to Twitter. But CNN’s interviews with people directly involved with the interactions and with those who have reviewed the documents disprove those claims.

    Matt Taibbi, one of the journalists Musk tapped this month to comb through Twitter internal messages for evidence of free speech violations, said himself on December 2 that “there is no evidence – that I’ve seen – of any government involvement in the laptop story.”

    What is clear, however, is that following Russia’s meddling campaign in 2016, plus after years of interactions with federal agents about how to spot foreign disinformation efforts, Twitter executives were hyper suspicious of anything that looked like foreign influence and were primed to act, even without direction from the government.

    By the time the New York Post published its laptop story on October 14, 2020, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s then head of site integrity, had spent two years meeting with the FBI and other government officials. He was prepared for some kind of hack and leak operation.

    “There were lots of reasons why the entire industry was on alert,” Roth said at a conference in November, not long after he resigned from Twitter. Roth insists he was not in favor of blocking the story and thought the company’s decision was a mistake.

    As the released communications show, Twitter initially acted to suppress the story for a few days in part out of concerns that Hunter Biden, the son of the then-Democratic presidential candidate, was being targeted as part of a foreign election interference operation similar to the one Russia carried out in 2016.

    What Twitter did not know at the time was that Hunter Biden was the subject of a federal criminal investigation. Since as early as 2018, the Justice Department has been investigating Hunter Biden for his business activities in foreign countries. In late 2019, nearly a year before the story first emerged in the New York Post, the FBI had used a subpoena to obtain a laptop that Biden allegedly left behind at a Delaware computer repair store.

    According to sources at the FBI and at Twitter who spoke to CNN, none of that information was disclosed to Twitter executives trying to decide how to treat the laptop story, nor to anyone else for that matter.

    “It was an ongoing investigation, so I would never approve of talking about it,” said the former FBI official.

    While the released Twitter messages have yet to reveal a smoking gun showing the government ordered a social media company to suppress a story, Republicans on Capitol Hill say there are enough questions raised by the internal communications to merit calling tech executives to testify.

    Scrutiny is building around the role of Twitter’s recently-fired deputy general counsel James Baker, a former top FBI official who joined Twitter in the summer of 2020. The released documents show Baker was in regular contact with his former colleagues at the FBI, giving rise to rampant accusations from conservatives that he was the conduit for the government to pressure Twitter.

    In some of the material released by Twitter, an email shows Baker setting up a meeting – in the midst of Twitter’s internal deliberations about how to handle the New York Post story – with Matthew Perry, an attorney in the FBI’s Office of General Counsel. It is not clear what the two discussed.

    The FBI declined to discuss any communications Baker had with FBI officials once he arrived at Twitter.

    Baker is among a number of former Twitter executives called to testify this month by Republican Rep. James Comer, the incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee. Baker declined to comment for this story.

    Rep. James Comer (R-KY) attends a House Oversight Committee hearing on July 27, 2022

    Comer also wants to hear from several former US intelligence officials who, days after the laptop story broke, wrote an open letter saying it had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The group of former officials who signed the letter included former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who, as a CNN contributor, appeared on the network to express his view.

    Though the former officials admitted, “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement,” their letter set the tone for much of the early discussion and coverage of the laptop.

    In a statement to CNN, the FBI said, “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries. As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.

    “The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

    Among the messages given the most attention from Musk and other critics are a series of emails between Roth and Elvis Chan, an FBI special agent based in San Francisco, where he focuses on cybersecurity and foreign influence on social media. On October 13, the day before New York Post story published, Chan instructed Roth to download ten documents on a secure portal.

    Roth responded, “received and downloaded – thanks!”

    Michael Shellenberger, who is among those Musk has entrusted with access to the internal messages, wrote about the Chan communication with Roth. Shellenberger does not describe the contents of the files, but he does insinuate that the timing of the message suggests Chan was secretly providing Roth information about the Hunter laptop.

    At the FBI’s headquarters in Washington, a team reviewing the internal communications released by Musk says it has identified the 10 documents Chan sent to Roth. “I reviewed all 10 of these documents personally and I can say explicitly there is nothing in these 10 documents about Hunter Biden’s laptop or about any related story to that,” an FBI official involved in the review told CNN.

    The official said eight of the documents pertained to “malign foreign influence actors and activities,” the FBI’s terminology for foreign government election meddling. The official said the other two documents were posts on Twitter the FBI flagged as potential evidence of election-related crimes, such as voter suppression activities.

    Another interaction that has drawn suspicion is an internal message from early 2021 that Shellenberger cites showing that the FBI paid Twitter $3.4 million beginning October 2019. In the message, an unnamed associate emails Baker saying, “I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!”

    The FBI says the bureau is obligated under federal law to reimburse companies for the cost they incur to satisfy subpoenas and other legal requests as part of the FBI’s investigative work.

    The FBI describes its discussions with Twitter as the type of information-sharing that Congress and both the Trump and Biden administrations encouraged to help tech companies and social media platforms protect themselves and their users. The released messages appear to show that FBI officials repeatedly noted that it was up to the content moderators at the company to take action if a post violated their rules.

    “All the information exchanged is about the actors and their activity,” a second FBI official who reviewed the communications told CNN. “What we are not providing is specifics about the content and the narrative. We are also not directing the platforms to do anything. We are just providing it for them to do as they see fit under their own terms of service to protect their platforms and customers.”

    After the 2016 election, social media executives knew they had a problem. Russian operatives had used their platforms to run a massive covert influence campaign to help elect Donald Trump, using bots to spread disinformation and sow division among Americans.

    To prepare for the next election, the executives set about bolstering their internal controls, including hiring former law enforcement and intelligence officials. But they also knew they had to forge a closer relationship with the US government to help root out foreign trolls and sources of disinformation.

    President Donald Trump chats with Russia's President Vladimir Putin at a summit in 2017.

    What followed were a series of regular meetings with federal agents that began in May 2018.

    The released communications as well as interviews with people involved in the meetings portray routine, friendly and sometimes tense contacts between company executives and the government officials with whom they regularly interacted. Among the released communications are lively exchanges between Twitter and the FBI, revealing some of the sensitivities — and tensions — at play as the government and Silicon Valley slowly figured out how to work together.

    One former FBI official who spoke to CNN recalls that tech executives would insist on meetings away from their campuses, in part because government agents weren’t welcome. Feelings in Silicon Valley toward the intelligence community were still raw since the Edward Snowden leaks detailed a vast data collection apparatus that targeted the tech companies.

    “Early on, who hosted the meeting was also a political football,” said a person familiar with the meetings between the government and Silicon Valley. “Each company wanted someone else to. There were worries about employees seeing a bunch of feds and leaking it in an inaccurate way.”

    One tech source, however, dismissed this and said companies offered their offices for the meetings out of a shared sense of responsibility.

    Nevertheless, the meetings went ahead. The first one took place at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park. Later meetings were held at Twitter and LinkedIn’s offices, a person familiar with the meetings told CNN.

    Some of the early interactions were terse. Reports published by CNN and other news organizations described complaints from some tech executives that the FBI was sharing only limited information, useless to help the companies protect their platforms.

    A telling moment came early on when a government lawyer lectured tech executives about the limits on what the government can do to help, multiple people who attended the meeting told CNN. One Silicon Valley executive described how the lawyer gave a 20-minute speech about the First Amendment and insisted that “government representatives can’t tell the companies to take any content down.”

    Former Twitter employees and FBI officials involved say that by 2020, their discussions had become better coordinated and useful to both sides. One indicator of how advantageous the relationship had become: By 2020, Facebook was issuing press releases about some of the discussions.

    Musk and other critics of the interactions point to released messages that they claim show a cozy relationship between the government and Twitter. But the messages also show Roth, Twitter’s then head of site integrity, repeatedly pushing back against asks from the FBI.

    At various points, the Twitter communications show Roth resisting pressure to reveal certain information about users absent a formal legal request, such as which third-party VPN services were used by some account-holders to access Twitter.

    Yoel Roth

    Roth also shut down a request that the company share more of its data with intelligence officials.

    Others within Twitter noted the US government’s interest in Twitter’s data and urged colleagues to “stay connected and keep a solid front against these efforts.”

    Conservative critics continue to blame Roth for Twitter’s suppression of the laptop story, but he insists he didn’t make the final call and says he thought it was a mistake. “It is widely reported that I personally directed the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story,” Roth said last month. “It is absolutely, unequivocally untrue.”

    Exactly who in Twitter’s leadership ultimately made the call to block the story remains unclear.

    In December 2020, Roth gave a sworn declaration to the Federal Election Commission saying the government had warned of expected hack-and-leak incidents targeting people associated with political campaigns. Roth said that he learned in the meetings with government agencies there were “rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.”

    Roth did not point to the government as the source of the rumor, but his claim that law enforcement agencies gave general warnings about disinformation campaigns dovetails with recent testimony from Chan, the FBI agent who played a key role in the meetings.

    Chan was deposed this year as part of a lawsuit brought by the Missouri attorney general alleging government censorship of social media. Chan disputed that the government told social media companies to “expect” hack-and-leak campaigns, saying that it would have only warned companies it was a possibility.

    That Hunter Biden might be the target of a hack-and-leak operation was being publicly discussed at the time, after it emerged that Burisma Holdings, a company he worked with in Ukraine had reportedly been hacked by Russian military intelligence early in 2020.

    Chan also testified that government agents never raised Hunter Biden specifically, and that his name came up only when a Facebook analyst asked specifically for relevant information. An FBI agent in the meeting declined to answer, Chan recalled, adding that she was likely not authorized to address the question because at the time the FBI had not publicly confirmed its Hunter Biden investigation.

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  • Trump White House drafted statement attacking Barr after he publicly refuted Trump’s voter fraud claims, transcript reveals | CNN Politics

    Trump White House drafted statement attacking Barr after he publicly refuted Trump’s voter fraud claims, transcript reveals | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    In December 2020, after then-Attorney General William Barr publicly refuted President Donald Trump’s claims that the election was rigged, White House staffers drafted a press release that would’ve called for the firing of anyone who disagreed with Trump’s claims, according to a new transcript from the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021.

    The draft statement ended with, “Anybody that thinks there wasn’t massive fraud in 2020 election should be fired,” according to the deposition.

    The draft statement – which was never sent out, and hadn’t been revealed before Friday – was brought up during the committee’s deposition of Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, according to the transcript. Congressional investigators told him that they likely obtained the statement from the National Archives, which turned over documents from the Trump White House.

    The committee also said during the Cipollone interview that White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson previously testified that Mark Meadows gave her the draft statement – which was a handwritten note – after an Oval Office meeting on the same day Barr made his public comments refuting Trump. It appears that the statement didn’t explicitly name Barr.

    The committee claimed that Hutchinson testified that she was instructed by Meadows to seek Cipollone’s approval before the statement was posted on social media. The committee said Hutchinson testified that Cipollone’s response was, “God, no.” Cipollone said he had no recollection of the draft statement or the episode.

    “By the way, I wasn’t fired,” Cipollone quipped to the committee.

    The Cipollone deposition is one of nearly 50 additional transcripts released Friday night by the January 6 committee. The latest batch contained interviews with key witnesses, including Trump White House insiders and lawyers who worked for the Trump campaign.

    Elaine Chao, who served as Trump’s transportation secretary, said she had no recollection of discussing the 25th Amendment after the insurrection, according to a transcript of her deposition with the January 6 committee released Friday.

    Asked by congressional investigators if she had concerns about Trump’s mental fitness, Chao said that she didn’t go to many White House meetings by the end of Trump’s tenure. Chao was careful not to be too critical of Trump in her interview. She said she had not met with him in some time.

    “By that time, I did not have personal contact with him,” Chao said. “I did not go to the White House, there were no meetings, so I hadn’t been in close proximity to him.”

    Chao, who resigned on January 6, said she stepped down once she realized “the full ramifications of the actions that were taken by some people and the results that occurred.” Asked about Trump’s conduct that day, she said: “I wish he had acted differently.”

    Asked about the inner workings of the Trump White House, and who he trusted among his aides and advisers, Chao said, “I’m not so sure he trusted anyone.”

    Chao said she does not remember talking to other cabinet members that day – even though Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia told the committee he spoke with her.

    Ivanka Trump, who served as senior White House adviser to her father, handed over text messages to the January 6 committee, a newly released transcript of her testimony reveals.

    It wasn’t previously known that she provided text messages to the panel, though video clips from her April deposition were featured during the committee’s public hearings this summer.

    The content of the texts messages remains unclear.

    The committee’s line of questioning did not delve into the contents of her texts, but instead veered into her father’s cell phone habits, including whether he ever sent and received text messages. Ivanka Trump said she “never” exchanged texts with her father on “any device.”

    Still, this is the latest example of how the committee obtained a wealth of evidence, including materials that weren’t previously known.

    Sidney Powell, a conspiracy-peddling attorney who helped Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, said Trump and his allies believed he couldn’t have lost because of his large “rallies” and “common sense,” according to a transcript of her deposition to the January 6 committee released Friday.

    She said that was the consensus in the room at a White House meeting that she attended with Trump, just a few days after the election. She told the committee that Trump’s then-attorney Rudy Giuliani was also there along with White House aides, according to the transcript.

    “He wanted to know the truth,” Powell said, referring to Trump. “And our general consensus was that the vast majority of people had poured out in support of the President. The rallies indicated that. All the information that we had indicated that. And the numbers that we saw on election night simply didn’t jibe with common sense.”

    She also claimed “math geniuses” reached out to her to tell her that Joe Biden’s victory was statistically impossible.

    The testimony shows just how paper-thin the fraud theories emanating from Trump’s orbit actually were.

    Despite her assertions, there is no evidence that the outcome of the 2020 election was tainted by widespread fraud or vote-rigging. Many of the conspiracies Powell has promoted about the election have been thoroughly debunked.

    During the presidential transition, Trump nearly appointed Powell as a special counsel to use the powers of the federal government to investigate her baseless voter fraud theories. Senior White House officials and attorneys vehemently opposed that idea and it never ended up happening.

    Cipollone told the January 6 committee that it “would have been a disaster” if Trump made Powell a special counsel, according to a transcript of his deposition.

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  • Congress passes first legislative response to January 6 Capitol attack | CNN Politics

    Congress passes first legislative response to January 6 Capitol attack | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Congress has passed a measure aimed at making it harder to overturn a certified presidential election, a major moment that marks the first legislative response to the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and then-President Donald Trump’s relentless pressure campaign to stay in power despite his 2020 loss.

    The legislation, which would overhaul the 1887 Electoral Count Act, was included as part of a massive $1.7 trillion government funding bill that the Senate passed on Thursday and the House passed on Friday. It will now go to President Joe Biden to be signed into law.

    The measure to overhaul the Electoral Count Act would clarify that the vice president’s role in overseeing the electoral result certification in Congress is strictly ceremonial. It would raise the threshold to make it harder for lawmakers to force votes attempting to overturn a state’s certified result. Additionally, it includes provisions that would prevent efforts to pass along fake electors to Congress.

    The bill is the result of intense bipartisan negotiations that won over the support of top Republicans, including Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell. But a number of House Republicans have pushed back on efforts to overhaul the election law. So with Republicans set to soon take control of the House, lawmakers pressed to send the bill to Biden’s desk, knowing it was likely to be doomed in the next Congress.

    Sens. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, and Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, announced on Tuesday that the bill had been included as part of the broader government funding package.

    “We are pleased that our legislation has been included in the omnibus appropriations bill and are grateful to have the support of so many of our colleagues. We look forward to seeing this bill signed into law,” the senators said in a joint statement.

    The Electoral Count Act is an 1887 law that Trump has sought to exploit and create confusion over how Congress counts Electoral College votes from each state in a presidential election. Constitutional experts say the vice president currently can’t disregard a state-certified electoral result, but Trump pushed then-Vice President Mike Pence to obstruct the Electoral College certification in Congress as part of his pressure campaign. Pence refused to do so and, as a result, became a target of the former president and his mob of supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6.

    The new legislation seeks to make clear that the vice president only has a ceremonial role in overseeing the certification of the electoral results – and does not have the power to unilaterally accept, reject or settle disputes over electors.

    It would also make it more difficult for members of Congress to attempt to overturn an election by increasing the threshold for the number of House and Senate members required to raise an objection to election results when a joint session of Congress meets to certify them.

    The legislation “raises the threshold to lodge an objection to electors to at least one-fifth of the duly chosen and sworn members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate,” according to a fact sheet. Under current law, just one senator can join one House member in forcing each side to vote on whether to throw out results subject to an objection.

    The bill also includes changes intended to prevent efforts to install fake electors. For example, each state’s governor would be responsible for submission of a certificate that identifies electors – and Congress would not be able to accept a slate of electors submitted by any other official. “This reform would address the potential for multiple state officials to send Congress competing slates,” the fact sheet states.

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  • ‘He knows he lost’: Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Trump acknowledged he lost 2020 election | CNN Politics

    ‘He knows he lost’: Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Trump acknowledged he lost 2020 election | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Shortly after the 2020 election was called for Joe Biden, then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told his aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, that President Donald Trump knew he lost but wanted to keep fighting to overturn the results, according to a newly released transcript from the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.

    The transcript of Hutchinson’s September 14, 2022, interview with the committee, which took place after she testified publicly, was released Thursday by the panel. It details post-election conversations that Hutchinson described, where multiple people said Trump acknowledged he had lost but was unwilling to concede.

    Hutchinson testified that Meadows told her on November 18, 2020, that Trump “has pretty much acknowledged that he’s lost,” the transcript says.

    “A lot of times he’ll tell me that he lost, but he wants to keep fighting it, and he thinks that there might be enough to overturn the election,” Meadows told Hutchinson that day about Trump, according to her retelling of the conversation.

    Hutchinson also testified that in late December 2020, Meadows lamented to her that Trump would get upset any time he mentioned the transition, telling the committee that Meadows said something to the effect of: “he’s just so angry at me all the time I can’t talk to him about anything post-White House without him getting mad that we didn’t win.”

    “Later in the interview, Hutchinson told the committee she spoke with Meadows immediately after a call with Georgia officials on January 2, 2021, where Trump pushed officials to help overturn the election results there.”

    “He said something to the effect of, ‘he knows it’s over. He knows he lost. But we are going to keep trying. There’s a chance he didn’t lose. I want to pull this off for him,’” Hutchinson said, recounting what Meadows told her about Trump.

    In a September 15 deposition, Hutchinson echoed her testimony that she heard about Trump fighting with his security detail on January 6, according to another deposition transcript.

    Hutchinson, who faced an onslaught of public criticism and pushback from Trump allies after she revealed the story she was told about Trump supposedly lunging at the driver of his presidential SUV on January 6, 2021, because he was angry that they wouldn’t take him to the US Capitol. During that public hearing, she said she heard the story from Tony Ornato, who was serving as deputy White House chief of staff at the time.

    But after her public hearing and the avalanche of pushback, Hutchinson said she had “no doubts” about her previous testimony.

    “I have no doubts in the conversation that I had with Mr. Ornato on January 6th. I have no doubts in how I’ve relayed that story privately and publicly” Hutchinson said, according to the transcript, which was released Thursday.

    She also shared that Ornato made “sarcastic offhand remarks” to her about the story at least two times after he initially mentioned it – on January 19 and April 16 – according to the transcript.

    “I have no doubts about the two instances on January 19th and April 16th about the conversation,” Hutchinson added.

    In the April 16 call, Hutchinson described a phone conversation to committee investigators where Ornato made a comment like “it could be worse. The president could have tried to kill – he didn’t say kill – the president could have tried to strangle you on January 6.”

    Hutchinson acknowledged that Ornato did not specify he was referring to the incident on January 6 but she said, “I assumed from the context of our phone call and from the conversations that we had had while still at the White House that he was referencing that incident. I have no reason to believe that he was referencing any other incident.”

    In June, Hutchinson publicly testified that Ornato told her about an altercation between the former president and the head of his Secret Service detail when he was told he could not go to the Capitol on January 6.

    The committee wrote in its report summary, which was released Monday, that they were unable to get Ornato to corroborate Hutchinson’s testimony about the alleged altercation in the presidential SUV.

    The committee summary said both Hutchinson and a White House employee testified to the committee about the Ornato conversation. But “Ornato professed that he did not recall either communication, and that he had no knowledge at all about the president’s anger.”

    The committee also released six more interview transcripts Thursday night, shedding new light on their closed-door sessions with key witnesses.

    In one transcript, Sarah Matthews, a former White House deputy press secretary, told the committee that Trump tried to get then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany to hold briefings about supposed fraud tied to Dominion voting machines – but McEnany refused.

    “She felt uncomfortable promoting the Dominion conspiracy theory, and that the president had asked her to talk about that during interviews” Matthews told committee investigators. “He did request her to do briefings on it as well, but we did not.”

    Matthews added that Trump encouraged McEnany to also put forward these conspiracy theories on cable news hits, which she said made McEnany uncomfortable and led to her attempting to avoid Trump after the election.

    Matthews testified publicly over the summer about how Trump’s conduct on January 6 led her to resign by the end of that day.

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  • Zuckerberg weighed naming Cambridge Analytica as a concern in 2017, months before data leak was revealed | CNN Business

    Zuckerberg weighed naming Cambridge Analytica as a concern in 2017, months before data leak was revealed | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Mark Zuckerberg considered disclosing in 2017 that Facebook

    (FB)     was investigating “organizations like Cambridge Analytica” alongside Russian foreign intelligence actors as part of an election security assessment before ultimately removing the reference at his advisers’ suggestion, according to a 2019 deposition conducted by the Securities and Exchange Commission and reviewed by CNN.

    The omitted reference provides insight into Zuckerberg’s thinking on Cambridge Analytica in the critical months before press reports would reveal that the data analysis firm affiliated with Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign had improperly gained access to tens of millions of Facebook users’ personal information. The data leak prompted a global outcry that led to hearings, an apology tour from Zuckerberg and Facebook’s $5 billion privacy settlement with the US government.

    The deposition transcript suggests that in 2017, Zuckerberg considered Cambridge Analytica a potential election concern on par with Russian election meddling efforts even though he said he did not know about the data leak first discovered by Facebook staffers in 2015. It also points to how Facebook staffers had opportunities to brief Zuckerberg on that leak, but chose not to, prior to reports about the incident that surfaced in 2018.

    Zuckerberg’s remarks in the deposition offer the clearest picture yet of what Zuckerberg knew about Cambridge Analytica, and when. The timeline of events has previously been scrutinized intensely by US lawmakers, state attorneys general and investors who have sued Facebook, now known as Meta, for allegedly breaching its fiduciary duties in connection with the data leak incident.

    Meta declined to comment on the release of the transcript, saying its case with the SEC involving the deposition had been settled for more than three years. The settlement in 2019 for $100 million resolved US government allegations that Facebook had misled investors for years after staffers first discovered the data leak.

    The SEC deposition transcript was released Tuesday by the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a watchdog group, that had obtained the document via a public records request. The transcript was first reported on Tuesday by Reuters, which had obtained the document through a separate records request.

    “This transcript reveals that something changed between January 2017 and September 2017 for Zuckerberg to deem Cambridge Analytica a threat commensurate with Russian Intelligence,” said Zamaan Qureshi, policy advisor at the Real Facebook Oversight Board. “But for reasons the Facebook CEO has still not disclosed, the world would only learn about Cambridge Analytica in March 2018.”

    In September 2017, Zuckerberg released a public statement about Facebook’s efforts to safeguard election integrity, saying the company would look into the impact that foreign actors, “Russian groups and other former Soviet states,” and “organizations like the campaigns” had on Facebook during the 2016 elections.

    But according to the court documents, Zuckerberg had originally proposed naming Russian foreign intelligence and Cambridge Analytica in the same breath.

    “We are already looking into foreign actors including Russian intelligence, actors in other former Soviet states and organizations like Cambridge Analytica,” Zuckerberg initially wrote, according to the draft the SEC produced in the deposition and that Zuckerberg testified was authentic.

    Zuckerberg testified that the reference to Cambridge Analytica was removed after a staffer recommended against naming specific organizations. “This was not something I think was particularly important to the overall communication,” he said, according to the transcript. “So I think when people raised this, I just took it out.”

    The testimony suggests he became aware of Cambridge Analytica around the same time as the general public, through press reporting around the 2016 election on the firm’s marketing claims. But it also suggests that he was kept in the dark about the Cambridge Analytica-linked data leak that predated the election and would eventually lead to Facebook’s broader reckoning with regulators and policymakers.

    The Cambridge Analytica saga began with a psychology professor who harvested data on millions of Facebook users through an app offering a personality test, then gave it to a service promising to use vague and sophisticated techniques to influence voters during a high-stakes election where the winning presidential candidate won narrowly in several key states.

    A 2020 report by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office later cast significant doubt on Cambridge Analytica’s capabilities, suggesting many of them had been exaggerated. But the improper sharing of Facebook data triggered a cascade of events that has culminated in numerous investigations and lawsuits.

    After hearing about Cambridge Analytica’s claims that it could use personal data to build “psychographic profiles” of voters who could then be targeted with effective political advertising, Zuckerberg began asking subordinates whether the firm’s marketing had any merit.

    In one January 2017 email produced by the SEC, Zuckerberg asked staffers to “explain to me what they actually did from an analytics and ad perspective and how advanced it was.”

    Explaining his thought process further, Zuckerberg testified: “Like, are these folks actually doing anything novel? Or are they just talking about data in a puffed-up way …. My understanding from those conversations is that, to summarize it very quickly, it was much closer to the latter.”

    But even though Facebook as an organization knew by that point, in 2017, that Cambridge Analytica had obtained Facebook users’ personal information in violation of the platform’s policies, that incident was never raised to Zuckerberg as a piece of potentially relevant context, according to the deposition. Following Facebook’s discovery of the leak, the company required Cambridge Analytica to delete the data it had improperly obtained through a third party and ordered the firm to sign a certification indicating its compliance.

    Zuckerberg testified that he did not get “fully up to speed” on the 2015 data leak, and Facebook’s response to it, until March 2018, when public reports about the incident emerged.

    In the deposition, Zuckerberg explained that he was not briefed earlier likely because Facebook considered the 2015 incident a “closed case until 2018, when new allegations came up that suggested that maybe Cambridge Analytica had lied to us” about having deleted the Facebook data. (The UK ICO’s report later found that Cambridge Analytica did appear to take some steps toward deleting the data, but it also expressed doubts about whether those steps were effective enough.)

    Zuckerberg reaffirmed in his testimony that had Facebook moved more swiftly to implement an existing and separate plan restricting app developers’ access to Facebook information, the data leak could likely have been avoided from the start.

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  • Iran and Russia were too distracted to meddle in midterm elections, US general says | CNN Politics

    Iran and Russia were too distracted to meddle in midterm elections, US general says | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Domestic unrest in Iran and Russia’s war in Ukraine may have distracted Tehran and Moscow from making more of an effort to influence or interfere in the 2022 US midterm election, a top US military cyberofficial said Monday.

    “We collectively saw much less focus from foreign adversaries, particularly the Russians” in targeting the 2022 election compared to previous elections, Maj. Gen. William J. Hartman, who leads the Cyber National Mission Force of US Cyber Command, the military’s offensive and defensive hacking unit, said at a press briefing at Fort Meade, home to Cyber Command and the National Security Agency.

    Hartman said he was “surprised” by the relative lack of activity from the Russians and Iranians during the midterm election. The US military’s cyber forces have taken a more active role in defending US elections from foreign interference since 2018 by targeting computer networks used by Russia and others to try to sow discord.

    Gen. Paul Nakasone, the head of Cyber Command, confirmed to reporters this month that the command conducted offensive and defensive cyber operations in an effort to protect the midterms from foreign interference and influence.

    Nakasone declined to go into details on the operations, but said the command focused on taking down the computer infrastructure used by foreign operatives “at key times.”

    “There was a campaign plan that we followed and it wasn’t just November 8. it covered before, during and until the elections were certified,” said Nakasone, who also leads the National Security Agency.

    Foreign governments tend to use established agencies to meddle in elections rather than create new organizations to do that on the fly, Hartman said. And the security services in Russia and Iran were preoccupied in the weeks and months before Americans went to the polls in November.

    Iranian security forces carried out a bloody crackdown on protesters this fall after a woman died in the custody of the so-called morality police. Russia’s military, meanwhile, pummeled Ukrainian cities with drone and missile strikes to try to turn the tide of the war.

    As they have since they were caught flat-footed by Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, US officials prepared for a range of foreign actors to try to influence voters or interfere with the vote in 2022.

    Asked in July whether the war in Ukraine would distract Russia from interfering in the US midterm election, FBI Director Christopher Wray said he was “quite confident the Russians can walk and chew gum” and that US officials were preparing accordingly.

    But foreign operatives from Iran and Russia generally reused old tactics and tools in their influence operations during the US midterms rather than try anything brand new, Nakasone told reporters this month.

    While there weren’t any reports of high-impact foreign interference activity during the midterm elections, there were attempts by Russian, Iranian and Chinese operatives to influence voters, according to researchers.

    Suspected Russian operatives used far-right media platforms to denigrate Democratic candidates in battleground states just days before the elections, according to Graphika, a social media analysis firm. For their part, alleged Chinese operatives showed signs of engaging in more “Russian-style influence activities” that stoke American divisions ahead of the midterm vote, according to the FBI.

    On Election Day, pro-Russia hackers took responsible for a cyberattack that knocked the website of the Mississippi secretary of state’s website offline. The incident didn’t affect the tallying of votes.

    “It is likely that a primary objective of the identified pro-Russia actors was to build the perception of influencing the elections—potentially in hopes of supporting future narratives that would undermine the credibility of the election results,” Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm owned by Google, said in an analysis published Monday.

    Mandiant said it had “moderate confidence” that whoever ran that Russian hacktivist group’s channel on the Telegram messaging app was coordinating their operations with actors sponsored by Russia’s military intelligence agency.

    “This year some [foreign groups] seemed most interested in reinforcing the notion that they still posed a threat, even if they didn’t push too hard to actually affect outcomes” of the election, John Hultquist, Mandiant’s vice president of intelligence analysis, told CNN.

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  • Virginia Democrats to hold ‘firehouse’ primary ahead of special House election | CNN Politics

    Virginia Democrats to hold ‘firehouse’ primary ahead of special House election | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Virginia Democrats will choose a nominee on Tuesday for the special election to fill the term of the late Rep. Donald McEachin, who died in November just weeks after winning reelection.

    Democrats in the 4th Congressional District are holding a “firehouse primary” – or one that’s conducted by the party organization, instead of by election officials – across a handful of pop-up voting locations in the Richmond-area district.

    The nominee will enter the February general election as the favorite in what has been a reliably Democratic district, and the outcome of the election isn’t likely to affect the balance of power in the US House, which Republicans are set to control in January.

    Virginia state Sen. Jennifer McClellan, who finished third in the 2021 gubernatorial primary, has the support of Democratic Party leaders and groups ranging from the political arm of the Congressional Progressive Caucus to the moderate-backing Democratic Majority for Israel PAC. If elected, she would be the first Black woman to represent Virginia in Congress.

    Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine campaigned with McClellan, a close ally whose wedding he officiated, over the weekend and members of the Commonwealth’s Democratic congressional delegation have all endorsed her, as have Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney and other local officials. Democrats will not know their nominee until Wednesday, at the earliest, when the counting of ballots begins.

    The coalescing around McClellan was influenced in part by the campaign of scandal-plagued state Sen. Joe Morrissey. His feuds with the party establishment may be part of his appeal among some disenchanted partisans, but his critics point to a more damaging history, including his resignation from the state House in 2014 after a misdemeanor conviction for contributing to the delinquency of a minor – a 17-year-old part-time staffer at his law office with whom he had sex and exchanged nude photos. He was in his mid-50s at the time, but has argued, according to a local report, that he believed the woman was 18. (Morrissey has since married the woman and they have several children.) Morrissey has also been stripped of his law license – twice – and remains disbarred following a 2019 state Supreme Court decision to uphold its revocation.

    Morrissey attacked the state party for holding the primary on a Tuesday instead of a Saturday, saying it would limit voter turnout. In announcing his run, Morrissey called himself a “worker bee” while highlighting his work on criminal justice reform.

    Virginia doesn’t have party registration, so the primary will be open to all voters in the district, provided they sign a pledge to support the Democratic nominee in the general election. Republicans chose their candidate, Leon Benjamin, in a weekend vote.

    Benjamin has run for the seat before, having lost to McEachin earlier this year and in 2020.

    Under Virginia state law, there’s no state-run primary for this special election, so the parties are responsible for selecting their own nominees.

    The district’s Democratic committee chairwoman cheered the “firehouse” voting method as a way to increase participation in the process.

    “A Firehouse Primary allows as many candidates and voters to participate in the democratic process as possible,” Alexsis Rodgers said. “The Fourth Congressional District Democratic Committee is committed to holding a smooth, transparent, and expedient process to select a nominee.”

    Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin last Monday set the date of the special election for February 21, creating a quick turnaround as the parties need to formally select their candidates by December 23.

    With just a week to campaign, a host of Democrats jumped into the race. McClellan and Morrissey are the leading contenders, largely because state Del. Lamont Bagby decided to drop out to help clear the way for McClellan, a fellow leader of the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus. Bagby’s support largely shifted to McClellan.

    McClellan, who has served in the state legislature since 2006 and succeeded McEachin in the state Senate, spoke about her legislative experience and her work in the capitol with the late congressman in her announcement speech last week.

    “This is a bittersweet day for me as I continue to mourn a friend but hear the call to carry on his legacy and carry my servant leadership to Washington,” McClellan said.

    Virginia Democrats lost the governorship and the House of Delegates in 2021 and control only a very narrow majority in the state Senate. If McClellan were to win the congressional special election in February, her vacant Senate seat could weaken Democrats’ ability to block Republican bills – like potential restrictions on abortion.

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  • Lawmakers to push through first legislative response to January 6 Capitol attack by week’s end | CNN Politics

    Lawmakers to push through first legislative response to January 6 Capitol attack by week’s end | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Lawmakers reached an agreement to include in must-pass legislation a measure aimed at making it harder to overturn a certified presidential election, marking the first legislative response to the US Capitol insurrection and then-President Donald Trump’s relentless pressure campaign to stay in power despite his 2020 loss.

    Several congressional sources told CNN that the legislation – to overhaul the 1887 Electoral Count Act – will be added to a bill to fund the federal government before Friday’s deadline to avoid a shutdown. If it becomes law, as is expected, the vice president’s role would be clarified to be completely ceremonial while overseeing the certification of the electoral result. It also would raise the threshold in Congress to make it harder for lawmakers to force votes attempting to overturn a state’s certified result and prevent efforts to pass along fake electors to Congress. The House select committee investigating the US Capitol attack on January 6, 2021, called for the bill’s passage in a summary of its report released Monday.

    The bill is a result of intense bipartisan negotiations over several months that won over the support of top Republicans, including Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, but has drawn pushback from House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy. With Republicans set to take control of the House within days, lawmakers pressed to send the bill to President Joe Biden’s desk knowing its fate is likely doomed in the next Congress.

    One part of the legislation is focused on modernizing and overhauling the Electoral Count Act, an 1887 law that Trump had sought to exploit and create confusion over how Congress counts Electoral College votes from each state. As part of that proposal, senators are attempting to clarify that the vice president only has a ceremonial role in overseeing the certification of the electoral results.

    The bill includes a number of changes aimed at making sure that Congress can clearly “identify a single, conclusive slate of electors from each state,” the fact sheet says.

    This comes as revelations surfaced about an effort by Trump allies to subvert the Electoral College process and install fake GOP electors in seven key states.

    The legislation creates a set of stipulations designed to make it harder for there to be any confusion over the accurate electors. For example, it states that each state’s governor would be responsible for submission of a certificate that identifies electors. Congress would not be able to accept a slate of electors submitted by any other official. “This reform would address the potential for multiple state officials to send Congress competing slates,” the fact sheet states.

    While constitutional experts say the vice president currently can’t disregard a state-certified electoral result, Trump pushed then-Vice President Mike Pence to obstruct the Electoral College certification in Congress as part of his pressure campaign. But Pence refused to do so and, as a result, became a target of the former President and his mob of supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6.

    The proposal “raises the threshold to lodge an objection to electors to at least one-fifth of the duly chosen and sworn members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.” Currently, only one member of each body is required to make an objection.

    Final legislative text of the sweeping government funding bill has not yet been formally unveiled but is expected to be released imminently as lawmakers race the clock to avert a shutdown at the end of the week.

    The expectation on Capitol Hill is that Congress will be able to avoid a shutdown, but pressure is on for lawmakers as congressional leaders have little room for error given the tight timeline they are facing. Government funding is currently set to expire on Friday at midnight.

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