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  • Republican-controlled states target college students’ voting power ahead of high-stakes 2024 elections | CNN Politics

    Republican-controlled states target college students’ voting power ahead of high-stakes 2024 elections | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Republican-controlled legislatures around the country have moved to erect new barriers to voting for high school and college students in what state lawmakers describe as an effort to clamp down on potential voter fraud. Critics call it a blatant attempt to suppress the youth vote as young people increasingly bolster Democratic candidates and liberal causes at the ballot box.

    As turnout among young voters grows, new proposals that change photo ID requirements or impose other limits have emerged.

    Laws enacted in Idaho this year, for instance, prohibit the use of student IDs to register to vote or cast ballots. A new law in Ohio, in effect for the first time in Tuesday’s primary elections, requires voters to present government-authorized photo ID at the polls, but student IDs are not included. Identification issued by universities has not traditionally been accepted to vote in the Buckeye State, but the new law eliminates the use of utility bills, bank statements and other documents that students have used before.

    A proposal in Texas would eliminate all campus polling places in the state. Meanwhile, officials in Montana – where Democrat Jon Tester is seeking a fourth term in one of 2024’s highest-profile Senate contests – have appealed a court decision striking down additional document requirements for those using student IDs to vote.

    And voting rights advocates say a longstanding statute in Georgia, which bars the use of student IDs from private universities, has made it more difficult for students at several schools – including Spelman and Morehouse, storied HBCUs in Atlanta – to participate in Georgia’s competitive US Senate and presidential elections.

    “Republican legislatures … are pretty transparently trying to keep left-leaning groups from voting,” said Charlotte Hill, interim director of the Democracy Policy Initiative at UC-Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. Rather than trying to sway young voters, lawmakers seem willing “to shrink the eligible electorate,” she added.

    Proponents say the changes are needed to protect against voter fraud and shore up public confidence in elections – battered by widespread, and false, claims of a stolen presidency in 2020. And they contend that the forms of identification provided by secondary schools and colleges vary too widely to serve as a reliable way to establish a voter’s identity and residency.

    “They are issued by colleges, universities, public and private high schools, and some have address and pictures, while some do not,” Idaho state Sen. Scott Herndon, a Republican and one of the sponsors of the new law, said in an email to CNN.

    During a legislative hearing earlier this year, Herndon said his goal was straightforward: “Make sure that people who are voting at the polls are who they say they are.”

    The efforts to clamp down on student IDs and campus voting come against a backdrop of gains for Democrats among this demographic group. Exit polls analyzed by the Brookings Institution found that people ages 18 to 29 – especially young women – made a pronounced shift toward Democrats in last year’s midterm elections, helping to blunt an expected “red wave” for Republicans.

    And voter registration among 18-24 year-olds increased in several states last year over 2018 levels – including Kansas and Michigan, where voters decided on ballot measures on abortion, following the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to data from Tufts University’s nonpartisan Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, or CIRCLE. CIRCLE conducts research into youth civic engagement.

    An analysis by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found that voting on college campuses soared in last month’s election for a state Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin. In that contest, the liberal candidate who prevailed, Janet Protasiewicz, had made protecting abortion rights a central feature of her campaign.

    Among the voting wards in the city of Eau Claire, for instance, the highest turnout came from the ward that served several University of Wisconsin dorms – with nearly 900 votes cast, up from 150 in a Supreme Court race four years earlier, the paper found. Protasiewicz won 87% of those votes.

    Prominent conservatives have spotlighted these voting trends.

    “Young voters are the issue,” Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s former Republican governor, wrote in a widely noticed Twitter post following the state Supreme Court election. “It comes from years of radical indoctrination – on campus, in school, with social media, & throughout culture,” said Walker, who is president of Young America’s Foundation, which works to popularize conservative ideas among young people. “We have to counter it or conservatives will never win battleground states again.”

    In an interview with CNN this week, Walker said his group is not seeking to change the ground rules for voting among younger Americans. But, he said, conservatives have been “overlooking ways to communicate to young people sooner than a month or two before the election.”

    One longtime GOP lawyer has discussed ways to curtail youth voting.

    The Washington Post, citing a PowerPoint presentation along with an audio recording of portions of the presentation obtained by liberal journalist Lauren Windsor, reported that GOP lawyer Cleta Mitchell recently urged Republicans to limit campus voting during a private gathering of Republican National Committee donors.

    Mitchell, who tried to help former President Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, did not respond to a CNN interview request through a spokesperson for her current organization.

    In Idaho, notably, the number of young people ages 18 and 19 registered to vote soared 81% between the week of the midterm elections in November 2018 and the same time period in November 2022 – the highest gain in the nation – according to data collected by CIRCLE.

    One of the new laws in the state, which will take effect in January, drops student IDs from the list of accepted identification to vote. Now only these forms of ID can be used: a driver’s license or ID issued by the state’s transportation department, a US passport or identification with a photo issued by the US government, tribal identification or a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

    Student IDs had been accepted for voting for more than a decade in the state.

    State Rep. Tina Lambert, who authored the House version of the bill, declined a CNN interview request, citing a busy schedule.

    But she said in an email that students should be able to navigate the new law. “Students of voting age are smart and able,” Lambert wrote. “They are able to get the ID needed to vote. Most of them have IDs already, that they use for all the other things that they need legal ID for.”

    The law also has the support of Idaho Republican Secretary of State Phil McGrane, who told legislators this year that the change would help “maintain confidence in our elections” – although he said that he doesn’t know of any “instances of students trying to commit voter fraud.”

    He also noted that student identification was rarely used. Just 104 of the nearly 600,000 voters who cast ballots in Idaho’s general election last year did so using student ID, McGrane said.

    “Even if one person out there can only use a student ID to vote, that still matters. That’s still a vote,” said Saumya Sarin, a freshman at the College of Idaho in Caldwell, Idaho, and a volunteer with Babe Vote, a nonpartisan group that has worked to boost youth voter registration in the state. She testified against the proposal in the state legislature earlier this year.

    Saumya Sarin addresses the media at a press briefing announcing that BABE VOTE filed suit challenging the new law that removes student IDs as acceptable identification for voting in Idaho at the Idaho Statehouse in Boise on Friday, March 17.

    Sarlin, who turns 19 this week, said she presented a US passport last year when she voted for the first time, but she noted that she had “several friends off the top of my head” who don’t have the forms of identification now required in Idaho.

    “I think the direction that the youth are going with their vote scares the people who are currently in power a little bit because it works against them,” she said.

    Sarlin said she’s become active on voting issues to take a stand against state policies she opposes, including Idaho’s limits on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth and abortions. Idaho has a near-total ban on abortions and last month made it a crime to help a pregnant minor obtain an abortion in another state without parental consent.

    Babe Vote and the League of Women Voters of Idaho have filed a lawsuit in an effort to block the Idaho voter ID laws. The measures “were not driven by any legitimate or credible concerns about the ‘integrity’ of the state’s elections,” the groups argue in their civil complaint. “Instead, they are part of a broader effort to roll back voting rights, particularly for young voters by weaponizing imaginary threats to election integrity.”

    A separate lawsuit, brought by March for Our Lives Idaho and the Idaho Alliance for Retired Americans, in federal court also seeks to block the new laws.

    Not all proposals to restrict student voting have been successful to date.

    A bill introduced in February by GOP state Rep. Carrie Isaac in Texas to prohibit polling places on college campuses has not yet made it out of committee. Another Isaac bill would ban voting on K-12 campuses.

    She told CNN this week that the measures are needed because polling places are sites of raw emotions and high stress, and she doesn’t want that kind of environment in schools.

    “I don’t think it’s smart to invite people that would not otherwise have business on campus on our campuses,” Isaac said. “In Texas, we have two weeks of early voting that people are coming in, that would not otherwise be there. And I think we should do anything and everything to make our campuses as safe as possible.”

    She said she’s confident that college students can find ways to vote off-campus.

    In Georgia, a state that will be a key battleground in the 2024 White House contest, student IDs are accepted as a form of voter identification, but only if they are issued by public colleges in the state. Seven out of the 10 Historically Black Colleges and Universities Georgia are private, making it more difficult for students who attend those universities to cast their ballots, voting rights advocates say.

    Former state Sen. Cecil Staton, a Republican who sponsored the 2006 photo ID law, said the government can ensure consistent standards for student IDs at state schools. “We didn’t feel like we had that same ability with private schools,” he said.

    Aylon Gipson – a Morehouse student from Alabama and a fellow with the voting rights group Campus Vote Project – said he has a lot of friends who have had problems at the polls as a result of Georgia’s law, especially underclassmen who don’t have a driver’s license.

    Gipson, a junior economics major at Morehouse College, poses for a portrait in the library of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College in Atlanta on May 1.

    “I’ve seen specific instances where students will call me and say, ‘Hey, I tried to go in and vote, but I got turned around at this polling station,’ or specifically our on-campus polling station, because they didn’t have an ID or they didn’t have a valid license to be able to vote with,” Gipson said. “I think it’s disenfranchising students who attend these HBCUs simply because of the fact that we’re private.”

    And in Ohio, which will see a hotly contested US Senate race next year as Democrat Sherrod Brown seeks reelection in a state where the GOP controls the legislature and governor’s office, Tuesday’s primary election marks the first election with the new photo ID rules in place. Voting rights advocates say the new restrictions could spell problems for students who have moved to Ohio for college and are no longer allowed to provide dormitory, utility bills or other documents to establish their legal residency when voting.

    Getting the form of ID now required in Ohio, such as a state driver’s license, will invalidate identification students may possess from their home state.

    “It seems as if this specific group – out-of-state college students, who have every right to vote – have been targeted and singled out,” said Collin Marozzi, deputy policy director of the ACLU of Ohio.

    Legislators, he said, are sending a “poor signal to these college students: ‘We want your money for our colleges. We want your money for our economy. But we don’t really want you to have a voice in the future of this state.’ “

    Students in Ohio still can opt to vote absentee by mail if they don’t want to surrender their identification from the state where they used to live – provided they include the last four digits of their Social Security number on the application. (The law establishing new photo ID requirements also reduces the window to request and return absentee ballots.)

    “For that college student, they make a decision: Am I a voter in Ohio or, say, in Pennsylvania?” said Rob Nichols, a spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican. “If you want to hang on to your Pennsylvania license, you can do so, vote absentee, give the last four digits of your Social, and you are on your merry way.”

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

    How Congress lost control of the Supreme Court | CNN Politics

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



    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • The man behind ChatGPT is about to have his moment on Capitol Hill | CNN Business

    The man behind ChatGPT is about to have his moment on Capitol Hill | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    For a few months in 2017, there were rumors that Sam Altman was planning to run for governor of California. Instead, he kept his day job as one of Silicon Valley’s most influential investors and entrepreneurs.

    But now, Altman is about to make a different kind of political debut.

    Altman, the CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company behind viral chatbot ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E, is set to testify before Congress on Tuesday. His appearance is part of a Senate subcommittee hearing on the risks artificial intelligence poses for society, and what safeguards are needed for the technology.

    House lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are also expected to hold a dinner with Altman on Monday night, according to multiple reports. Dozens of lawmakers are said to be planning to attend, with one Republican lawmaker describing it as part of the process for Congress to assess “the extraordinary potential and unprecedented threat that artificial intelligence presents to humanity.”

    Earlier this month, Altman was one of several tech CEOs to meet with Vice President Kamala Harris and, briefly, President Joe Biden as part of the White House’s efforts to emphasize the importance of ethical and responsible AI development.

    The hearing and meetings come as ChatGPT has sparked a new arms race over AI. A growing list of tech companies have deployed new AI tools in recent months, with the potential to change how we work, shop and interact with each other. But these same tools have also drawn criticism from some of tech’s biggest names for their potential to disrupt millions of jobs, spread misinformation and perpetuate biases.

    As the CEO of OpenAI, Altman, perhaps more than any other single figure, has come to serve as a face for a new crop of AI products that can generate images and texts in response to user prompts. This week’s hearing may only cement his stature as a central player in AI’s rapid growth – and also add to scrutiny of him and his company.

    Those who know Altman have described him as a brilliant thinker, someone who makes prescient bets and has even been called “a startup Yoda.” In interviews this year, Altman has presented himself as someone who is mindful of the risks posed by AI and even “a little bit scared” of the technology. He and his company have pledged to move forward responsibly.

    “If anyone knows where this is going, it’s Sam,” Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, wrote in a post about Altman for the latter’s inclusion this year on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people. “But Sam also knows that he doesn’t have all the answers. He often says, ‘What do you think? Maybe I’m wrong?’ Thank God someone with so much power has so much humility.”

    Others want Altman and OpenAI to move more cautiously. Elon Musk, who helped found OpenAI before breaking from the group, joined dozens of tech leaders, professors and researchers in signing a letter calling for artificial intelligence labs like OpenAI to stop the training of the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.”

    Altman has said he agreed with parts of the letter. “I think moving with caution and an increasing rigor for safety issues is really important,” Altman said at an event last month. “The letter I don’t think was the optimal way to address it.”

    OpenAI declined to make anyone available for an interview for this story.

    The success of ChatGPT may have brought Altman greater public attention, but he has been a well-known figure in Silicon Valley for years.

    Prior to cofounding OpenAI with Musk in 2015, Altman, a Missouri native, studied computer science at Stanford University, only to drop out to launch Loopt, an app that helped users share their locations with friends and get coupons for nearby businesses.

    In 2005, Loopt was part of the first batch of companies at Y Combinator, a prestigious tech accelerator. Paul Graham, who co-founded Y Combinator, later described Altman as “a very unusual guy.”

    “Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking ‘Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19,’” Graham wrote in a post in 2006.

    Loopt was acquired in 2012 for about $43 million. Two years later, Altman took over from Graham as president of Y Combinator. The position allowed Altman to connect him with numerous powerful figures in the tech industry. He remained at the helm of the accelerator until 2019.

    Margaret O’Mara, a tech historian and professor at the University of Washington, told CNN that Altman “has long been admired as a thoughtful, significant guy and in the remarkably small number of powerful people who are kind of at the top of tech and have a lot of sway.”

    During the Trump administration, Altman gained new attention as a vocal critic of the president. It was against that backdrop that he was rumored to be considering a run for California governor.

    Rather than running, however, Altman instead looked to back candidates who aligned with his values, which include lower cost of living, clean energy and taking 10% off the defense budget to give to research and development of future technology.

    Altman continues to push for some of these goals through his work in the private sector. He invested in Helion, a fusion research company that inked a deal with Microsoft last week to sell clean energy to the tech giant by 2028.

    Altman has also been a proponent of the idea of a universal basic income and has suggested that AI could one day help fulfill that goal by generating so much wealth it could be redistributed back to the public.

    As Graham told The New Yorker about Altman in 2016, “I think his goal is to make the whole future.”

    When launching OpenAI, Musk and Altman’s original mission was to get ahead of the fear that AI could harm people and society.

    “We discussed what is the best thing we can do to ensure the future is good?” Musk told the New York Times about a conversation with Altman and others before launching the company. “We could sit on the sidelines or we can encourage regulatory oversight, or we could participate with the right structure with people who care deeply about developing A.I. in a way that is safe and is beneficial to humanity.”

    In an interview at the launch of OpenAI, Altman explained the company as his way of trying to steer the path of AI technology. “I sleep better knowing I can have some influence now,” he said.

    If there’s one thing AI enthusiasts and critics can agree on right now, it may be that Altman clearly has succeeded in having some influence over the rapidly evolving technology.

    Less than six months after the release of ChatGPT, it has become a household name, almost synonymous with AI itself. CEOs are using it to draft emails. Realtors are using it to write iistings and draft legal documents. The tool has passed exams from law and business schools – and been used to help some students cheat. And OpenAI recently released a more powerful version of the technology underpinning ChatGPT.

    Tech giants like Google and Facebook are now racing to catch up. Similar generative AI technology is quickly finding its way into productivity and search tools used by billions of people.

    A future that once seemed very far off now feels right around the corner, whether society is ready for it or not. Altman himself has professed not to be sure about how it will turn out.

    O’Mara said she believes Altman fits into “the techno-optimist school of thought that has been dominant in the Valley for a very long time,” which she describes as “the idea that we can devise technology that can indeed make the world a better place.”

    While Altman’s cautious remarks about AI may sound at odds with that way of thinking, O’Mara argues it may be an “extension” of it. In essence, she said, it’s related to “the idea that technology is transformative and can be transformative in a positive way but also has so much capacity to do so much that it actually could be dangerous.”

    And if AI should somehow help bring about the end of society as we know it, Altman may be more prepared than most to adapt.

    “I prep for survival,” he said in a 2016 profile of him in the New Yorker, noting several possible disaster scenarios, including “A.I. that attacks us.”

    “I try not to think about it too much,” Altman said. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”

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  • US senator introduces bill to create a federal agency to regulate AI | CNN Business

    US senator introduces bill to create a federal agency to regulate AI | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Days after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified in front of Congress and proposed creating a new federal agency to regulate artificial intelligence, a US senator has introduced a bill to do just that.

    On Thursday, Colorado Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet unveiled an updated version of legislation he introduced last year that would establish a Federal Digital Platform Commission.

    The updated bill, which was reviewed by CNN, makes numerous changes to more explicitly cover AI products, including by amending the definition of a digital platform to include companies that offer “content primarily generated by algorithmic processes.”

    “There’s no reason that the biggest tech companies on Earth should face less regulation than Colorado’s small businesses – especially as we see technology corrode our democracy and harm our kids’ mental health with virtually no oversight,” Bennet said in a statement. “Technology is moving quicker than Congress could ever hope to keep up with. We need an expert federal agency that can stand up for the American people and ensure AI tools and digital platforms operate in the public interest.”

    The revised bill expands on the definition of an algorithmic process, clarifying that the proposed commission would have jurisdiction over the use of personal data to generate content or to make a decision — two key applications associated with generative AI, the technology behind popular tools such as OpenAI’s viral chatbot, ChatGPT.

    And for the most significant platforms — companies the bill calls “systemically important” — the bill would create requirements for algorithmic audits and public risk assessments of the harms their tools could cause.

    The bill retains existing language mandating that the commission ensure platform algorithms are “fair, transparent, and safe.” And under the bill, the commission would continue to have broad oversight authority over social media sites, search engines and other online platforms.

    But the added emphasis on AI highlights how Congress is rapidly gearing up for policymaking on a cutting-edge technology it is scrambling to understand. The debate over whether the US government should establish a separate federal agency to police AI tools may become a significant focus of those efforts following Altman’s testimony this week.

    Altman suggested in a Senate hearing on Tuesday that such an agency could restrict how AI is developed through licenses or credentialing for AI companies. Some lawmakers appeared receptive to the idea, with Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy even asking Altman whether he would be open to serving as its chair.

    “I love my current job,” Altman demurred, to laughter from the audience.

    Thursday’s bill does not explicitly provide for such a licensing program, though it directs the would-be commission to design rules appropriate for overseeing the industry, according to a Bennet aide. Bennet’s office did not consult with OpenAI on either the original bill or Thursday’s revised version.

    But even as some lawmakers have embraced the concept of a specialized regulator for internet companies — which could conflict with existing cops on the beat at agencies including the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission — others have warned of the potential risks of creating a whole new bureaucracy.

    Gary Marcus, a New York University professor and self-described critic of AI “hype,” told lawmakers at Tuesday’s hearing that a separate agency could fall victim to “regulatory capture,” a term that describes when industries gain dominating influence over the government agencies created to hold them accountable.

    Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a former state attorney general who has prosecuted consumer protection cases, said no agency can be effective without proper support.

    “I’ve been doing this stuff for a while,” Blumenthal said. “You can create 10 new agencies, but if you don’t give them the resources — and I’m not just talking about dollars, I’m talking about scientific expertise — [industry] will run circles around them.”

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  • Exclusive: Senior US general ordered Twitter announcement of drone strike on al Qaeda leader that may have instead killed civilian | CNN Politics

    Exclusive: Senior US general ordered Twitter announcement of drone strike on al Qaeda leader that may have instead killed civilian | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The senior general in charge of US forces in the Middle East ordered that his command announce on Twitter that a senior al Qaeda leader had been targeted by an American drone strike in Syria earlier this month – despite not yet having confirmation of who was actually killed in the strike, according to multiple defense officials.

    Nearly three weeks later, US Central Command still does not know whether a civilian died instead, officials said. CENTCOM did not open a review of the incident, officially known as a civilian-casualty credibility assessment report, until May 15 – twelve days after the strike. That review is ongoing.

    One defense official with direct knowledge of the situation told CNN that some of CENTCOM Commander Gen. Erik Kurilla’s subordinates urged him to hold off on the tweet until there was more clarity on who was actually killed.

    Two other officials denied that, and said they were not aware of any staffers voicing consternation or disagreement with the announcement.

    Either way, the statement ultimately posted to Twitter from the official CENTCOM Twitter account did not identify the supposed senior al Qaeda leader, raising more questions about what had occurred.

    “At 11:42 am local Syrian time on 3 May, US Central Command Forces conducted a unilateral strike in Northwest Syria targeting a senior Al Qaeda leader,” the tweet read. “We will provide more information as operational details become available.”

    The tweet has not been taken down and CENTCOM has not tweeted about the strike again.

    The episode raises questions about how thoroughly CENTCOM has implemented the military’s civilian harm mitigation policy – a process for preventing, mitigating and responding to civilian casualties caused by US military operations.

    The policy was developed in 2022 after a botched US drone strike in Kabul killed 10 civilians in August 2021.

    Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said on Tuesday that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is “absolutely” confident in the Defense Department’s civilian harm mitigation efforts.

    “In terms of CENTCOM’s strike, as you know, they conducted that strike on the third of May. They are investigating the allegations of civilian casualties,” Ryder said at a Pentagon news briefing. “So, you know, I think our record speaks for itself in terms of how seriously we take these. Very few countries around the world do that. The secretary has complete confidence that we will continue to abide by the policies that we put into place.”

    CENTCOM acknowledged last week following a Washington Post report questioning the strike that the operation may have resulted in a civilian casualty and said in a statement that it was “investigating” the incident. The civilian casualty review was not launched until a week after the Post began presenting information to CENTCOM suggesting that the strike had killed a civilian.

    CENTCOM still has not opened a formal investigation into the strike, known as a 15-6 investigation, defense officials told CNN. The officials said the civilian casualty review first needs to determine that a noncombatant was indeed killed in the strike. Then, a commander needs to decide that there are other unanswered questions remaining about the operation that require a more thorough investigation. A 15-6 investigation was launched less than a week after the errant Kabul strike.

    Defense officials told CNN that in the immediate aftermath of the strike, Kurilla and his staff had high confidence that they had killed the senior al-Qaeda leader, though they declined to say why they were so convinced. But they also knew it would likely take a few days to confirm the person’s identity definitively. The US has no military footprint in northwest Syria, an area still recovering from the effects of a devastating earthquake.

    But as the days passed, CENTCOM still could not determine the identity of who they had killed. Some defense officials considered that a red flag, they told CNN.

    By May 8, CENTCOM still had not confirmed the person’s identity, and began receiving information from the Washington Post that raised questions about whether a civilian had been killed, defense officials said. The Post’s information led CENTCOM to open a review into the strike, and whether it had killed a civilian, on May 15.

    There is still some disagreement within the administration about the identity of the person killed, defense officials told CNN. Some intelligence officials continue to believe that the target of the strike was a member of al-Qaeda, even if he wasn’t a senior leader. But there is a growing belief inside the Pentagon that the man – identified by his family as Loutfi Hassan Mesto, a 56-year-old father of ten – was a farmer with no ties to terrorism.

    Mesto’s family told CNN that he had been out grazing his sheep when he was killed. Loutfi never left his village during the Syrian uprisings and did not support any political faction, his brother said.

    Mohamed Sajee, a distant relative living in Qurqaniya, also told CNN that Loutfi was never known to be in favor or against the Syrian regime.

    “It’s impossible that he was with al Qaeda, he doesn’t even have a beard,” he said.

    The Syrian Civil Defense, also known as the White Helmets, told CNN they arrived on the scene of the strike after being contacted on their local emergency number.

    “The team noticed only one crater caused by the missile, which was next to the man’s body,” the White Helmets said, also confirming that the man had been grazing his sheep.

    “When the team arrived, his wife, neighbors, and other people were at the location,” the group added.

    The White Helmets tweeted on May 3 that they had recovered the body of Mesto, who they described as “a civilian aged 60” who was killed in a missile strike while grazing sheep. CENTCOM was aware of the White Helmets’ tweet, officials said, but the group’s information was not considered solid enough yet to open a review.

    The May 3 incident bears a stunning similarity to another CENTCOM operation: a US drone strike in Kabul during the closing days of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which killed 10 Afghan civilians, including 7 children. The Pentagon initially claimed it had eliminated an ISIS-K threat and defended the operation for weeks, with Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley going as far as to call it a “righteous” strike in a Pentagon briefing two days later.

    A suicide bombing at Kabul’s international airport three days earlier, which killed 13 US service members, had added pressure on CENTCOM to act against any potential threats, and officials believed at the time that another attack was imminent.

    Austin ultimately decided no one would be punished over the botched operation, even as he instructed Central Command and Special Operations Command to improve policies and procedures to prevent civilian harm more effectively.

    Austin committed to adjusting Defense Department policies to better protect civilians, even establishing a civilian protection center of excellence in 2022.

    “Leaders in this department should be held to account for high standards of conduct and leadership,” Austin said at the time.

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  • New Iowa law restricts gender identity education, bans books with sexual content | CNN Politics

    New Iowa law restricts gender identity education, bans books with sexual content | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a sweeping bill into law Friday that will restrict education about gender identity and sexual orientation and ban books with certain sexual content from school libraries, as well as require schools to notify parents if their child asks to use a new name or pronoun.

    Iowa is just one of several Republican-led states to pass laws strengthening what advocates often describe as “parental rights” over the past few years.

    The controversial movement, which critics argue is aimed at limiting the rights of LGBTQ and other marginalized students, emerged as a top issue for the national Republican Party during the Covid-19 pandemic and is expected to play a key role during the 2024 election cycle.

    The Human Rights Campaign, a civil rights organization, likened Iowa’s parental rights law to legislation enacted in Florida last year that opponents dubbed “Don’t Say Gay.” The Florida law banned certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom and set off a social and political firestorm.

    Iowa state Sen. Ken Rozenboom, chair of the education committee, has said that the parental rights bill “matches up with what most schools are doing now.”

    “But we need to rein in those schools that believe that ‘the purpose of public education is to teach [students] what society needs them to know.’ We must put parents back in charge of their children’s education,” he wrote in his newsletter in March.

    Iowa has passed several new laws this year addressing parents’ rights. In March, Reynolds signed into law a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, as well as a law that makes it easier for families to use taxpayer dollars to send their children to private K-12 schools regardless of their income.

    The new Iowa law, also known as SF 496, touches on a range of education-related issues.

    It prohibits instruction relating to gender identity or sexual orientation to students in kindergarten through sixth grade.

    The law also requires school administrators to notify parents if their child “requests an accommodation” related to their gender identity, including using a name or pronoun that is different than the one “assigned to the student in the school district’s registration forms or records.”

    When it comes to books, the law puts restrictions on school libraries for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. The libraries can only have books deemed “age-appropriate,” which, according to the law, excludes any materials with “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act.”

    School employees found to be in repeated violation of some of these provisions could face disciplinary action, according to the law.

    Similar laws restricting what books are allowed in libraries have recently gone into effect in other states, including Florida, Missouri and Utah.

    “Vague language in the laws regarding how they should be implemented, as well as the inclusion of potential punishments for educators who violate them, have combined to yield a chilling effect,” according to a report published in April by PEN America, a nonprofit that works to defend free expression and tracks book bans.

    Laws like the one in Florida give incentives to teachers, media specialists and school administrators to proactively remove books from shelves, the report said.

    There were more book bans across the country during the fall 2022 semester than in each of the prior two semesters, according to PEN America. The bans were most prevalent in Texas, Florida, Missouri, Utah and South Carolina.

    About one-third of the titles banned are books about race or racism or feature characters of color. About 26% of the titles have LGBTQ+ characters or themes.

    “Those children tell us all the time that finding books that reflect their experiences and answer questions they would never ask adults is lifesaving for them,” said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and executive director of the Freedom to Read Foundation.

    The past year has brought an escalation to the book ban movement, with many state lawmakers introducing legislation that could have an impact on what’s available at public and school libraries.

    “We’re looking at over 31 bills that oppose some kind of restriction on the ability of librarians to create collections that serve the needs of every student or attempt to censor books based on one group’s opinion,” Caldwell-Stone added.

    There are at least 62 “parental rights” bills that have been introduced in 24 states this year, according to FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy.

    Most have yet to become law. But last year, six bills were signed by governors – two in Florida, two in Arizona and one each in Georgia and Louisiana.

    Many of the bills focus on parents’ right to know what their children are learning in classrooms, particularly around issues of race and gender.

    The Republican-controlled US House passed its own “Parents Bill of Rights” bill in March, though the Senate is not expected to take up the legislation.

    Overall, a record number of anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced this year. Some focus on education, but others concern health care, bathroom access and drag performances.

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  • Exclusive: Ukraine has cultivated sabotage agents inside Russia and is giving them drones to stage attacks, sources say | CNN Politics

    Exclusive: Ukraine has cultivated sabotage agents inside Russia and is giving them drones to stage attacks, sources say | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Ukraine has cultivated a network of agents and sympathizers inside Russia working to carry out acts of sabotage against Russian targets and has begun providing them with drones to stage attacks, multiple people familiar with US intelligence on the matter told CNN.

    US officials believe these pro-Ukrainian agents inside Russia carried out a drone attack that targeted the Kremlin in early May by launching drones from within Russia rather than flying them from Ukraine into Moscow.

    It is not clear whether other drone attacks carried out in recent days – including one targeting a residential neighborhood near Moscow and another strike on oil refineries in southern Russia – were also launched from inside Russia or conducted by this network of pro-Ukrainian operatives.

    But US officials believe that Ukraine has developed sabotage cells inside Russia made up of a mix of pro-Ukrainian sympathizers and operatives well-trained in this kind of warfare. Ukraine is believed to have provided them with Ukrainian-made drones, and two US officials told CNN there is no evidence that any of the drone strikes have been conducted using US-provided drones.

    Officials could not say conclusively how Ukraine has managed to get the drones behind enemy lines, but two of the sources told CNN that it has established well-practiced smuggling routes that could be used to send drones or drone components into Russia where they could then be assembled.

    A European intelligence official noted that the Russian-Ukrainian border is vast and very difficult to control, making it ripe for smuggling – something the official said the Ukrainians have been doing for the better part of the decade that they’ve been at war with pro-Russian forces.

    “You also have to consider that this is a peripheral area of Russia,” the official said. “Survival is everyone’s problem, so cash works wonders.”

    Who exactly is controlling these assets is also murky, the sources told CNN, though US officials believe that elements within Ukraine’s intelligence community are involved. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has set general parameters for what his intelligence and security services are allowed to do, two of the sources said, but not every operation requires his sign-off.

    Asked for comment, a spokesperson for the head of the Ukrainian Security Service suggested to CNN that the mysterious explosions and drone strikes inside Russia would continue.

    “We will comment on instances of ‘cotton’ only after our victory,” he said. Quoting the head of the Security Service, Vasyl Malyuk, the spokesperson added that regardless, “‘cotton’ has been burning, is burning, and will continue burning.”

    “Cotton” is a slang-word that Ukrainians use to mean explosions, usually in Russia or Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine. Its origins date back to the early weeks of the war and stem from the fact that the Russian word for a “pop” is very similar to the Ukrainian word for cotton.

    There has been a steady drumbeat of mysterious fires and explosions inside Russia over the last year, targeting oil and fuel depots, railways, military enlistment offices, warehouses and pipelines. But officials have noticed an uptick in these attacks on Russian soil in recent weeks, beginning with the attack on the Kremlin building. It appears to be “a culmination of months of effort” by the Ukrainians to set up the infrastructure for such sabotage, said one of the sources familiar with the intelligence.

    “There has been for months now a pretty consistent push by some in Ukraine to be more aggressive,” this person said, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of US intelligence. “And there has certainly been some willingness at senior levels. The challenge has always been their ability to do it.”

    A specialist inspects the damaged facade of an apartment building after a reported drone attack in Moscow on May 30, 2023.

    Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, has consistently proposed some of the most brazen plans for operations against Russia and values symbolic acts, US officials told CNN.

    Classified Pentagon documents leaked online earlier this year revealed that the CIA urged Budanov to “postpone” attacks on Russia on the anniversary of its invasion of Ukraine, according to the Washington Post. Budanov agreed to the CIA’s request, the classified documents reportedly said. But drones were spotted near Moscow on February 28, just days after the one-year anniversary of the war.

    Another leaked US intelligence report obtained by CNN, which is sourced to signals intelligence, says that Zelensky in late February “suggested striking Russian deployment locations in Russia’s Rostov Oblast” using drones, since Ukraine does not have long-range weapons capable of reaching that far.

    It is not clear whether that plan moved forward, but oil facilities in Rostov Oblast have caught on fire after being hit by suspected drones several times over the last year – attacks Russia is now investigating and has blamed on “criminal actions by the Armed formations of Ukraine.”

    “All I will comment on is that we’ve been killing Russians,” Budanov told Yahoo News last month when asked about the car bomb attack that killed the daughter of a prominent Russian political figure in Moscow’s suburbs last year. The US intelligence community assessed that that operation was authorized by elements within the Ukrainian government.

    “And we will keep killing Russians anywhere on the face of this world until the complete victory of Ukraine,” Budanov added.

    Publicly, senior US officials have condemned the strikes inside Russia, warning of the potential for an escalation of the war. But speaking privately to CNN, US and western officials said that they believe the cross-border attacks are a smart military strategy that could divert Russian resources to protecting its own territory, as Ukraine gears up for a major counteroffensive.

    On Tuesday, the UK’s Foreign Secretary told reporters that Ukraine has “the right to project force beyond its borders to undermine Russia’s ability to project force into Ukraine itself. Legitimate military targets beyond its own borders are internationally recognized as being part of a nation’s self-defense…We should recognize that.”

    French Vice Admiral Nicolas Vaujour, chief of operations of the Joint Staff, told CNN on Friday that the attacks inside Russia are merely “part of war” and offer an opportunity to send a message to Russia’s population.

    “There is a war there and it could concern you [the Russian public] in the future,” Vaujour said of the attacks. “And so it’s a good way for Ukrainians to address a message not only to Vladimir Putin, but to the Russian population,” he added.

    Regarding the attacks, he said that it wasn’t “forbidden” for Ukraine to think about that.

    Ukrainian officials, moreover, have said privately that they plan to continue the attacks inside Russia because it is a good distraction tactic that is forcing Russia to be concerned with its own security at home, according to a US source who has spoken to Ukrainian officials in recent days.

    In an intelligence update, the UK Ministry of Defense said that attacks by pro-Ukrainian partisan groups and drone strikes in the border region of Belgorod have forced Russia to deploy “the full range of military firepower on its own territory.”

    “Russian commanders now face an acute dilemma,” the update said, “of whether to strength defences in Russia’s border regions or reinforce their lines in occupied Ukraine.”

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

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

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    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • Wagner chief rejects Russian Defense Ministry efforts to rein in his force | CNN

    Wagner chief rejects Russian Defense Ministry efforts to rein in his force | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The boss of the Russian private military company Wagner says he won’t sign contracts with Russia’s Defense Ministry, rejecting an attempt to bring his force in line.

    Yevgeny Prigozhin’s comments follow an announcement by the Russian Ministry of Defense Saturday that “volunteer units” and private military groups would be required to sign a contract with the ministry.

    The order – signed by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu – said the move would “give the voluntary formations the necessary legal status,” and create “unified approaches” to their work.

    The order did not name the Wagner group but the move is seen a way of controlling the influential military force.

    Prigozhin – who has publicly feuded with defense chiefs – said the move did not apply to Wagner.

    “The orders and decrees issued by (Defense Minister Sergei) Shoigu apply to employees of the Ministry of Defense and military personnel. PMC ‘Wagner’ will not sign any contracts with Shoigu,” Prigozhin said in a Telegram post.

    Wagner, he said, would “absolutely” pursue the “the interests of the Russian Federation and the Supreme Commander-in-Chief.”

    Prigozhin and Wagner have played a prominent role in the Ukraine war. In May he said his troops had capture Bakhmut in a costly and largely symbolic gain for Russia.

    The Wagner chief has previously criticized Russia’s traditional military hierarchy, blaming Russian defense chiefs for “tens of thousands” of casualties and stating that divisions could end in a “revolution.”

    He also accused Russian military leaders “sit like fat cats” in “luxury offices,” while his fighters are “dying,” and later accused the Russian Defense Ministry of trying to sabotage his troops’ withdrawal from Bakhmut, claiming the ministry laid mines along the exit routes.

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  • Biden kicks off reelection bid with union rally in Philadelphia | CNN Politics

    Biden kicks off reelection bid with union rally in Philadelphia | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden kicked off his reelection campaign Saturday at a union rally in his frequent haunt of Pennsylvania, the state that remains an intersection of his personal and political identities that he hopes can propel him to a second term.

    The first official rally of his final political campaign was a moment for Biden to underscore recent economic wins that undergird his argument for another four years in the White House.

    “Just think back. Remember what it was like when I came to office, we came into office. Remember the mess we inherited,” Biden told the audience in Philadelphia. “Now look at where we are today.”

    To a roaring crowd, who repeatedly cheered “four more years,” the president touted several accomplishments, including the bipartisan infrastructure law, a coronavirus relief package, a bipartisan semiconductor chip manufacturing law and the recently negotiated debt ceiling deal that helped avert a US default.

    Biden also criticized recent Republican tax proposals while describing what he called his middle-class vision for the American economy, referring to it several times as “Biden-omics.”

    Biden made only brief mention of Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, steering clear of the former president’s recent federal indictment and arraignment but hitting him on infrastructure.

    “Under my predecessor, infrastructure week became a punchline,” Biden said. “On my watch, we’re making infrastructure a decade headline.”

    First lady Jill Biden, who spoke shortly before her husband, highlighted the president’s optimism. Wearing a corsage to mark their 46th wedding anniversary Saturday, the first lady recalled how she met Biden following the death of his first wife and baby daughter in a tragic car accident that also injured his two sons.

    “What I love about Joe is that even though he has faced unimaginable tragedies, his optimism is undaunted,” Jill Biden said. “His strength is unshakeable.”

    She added that the president was “not done.”

    “He’s ready to finish the job,” she said. “He’s ready to win, and with your help, he will.”

    Though his economic wins were the centerpiece of Biden’s opening campaign event, polls show many voters give him poor marks for his handling of the economy, particularly as prices have soared post-pandemic. Recent figures have shown inflation easing, however, and fears of an imminent recession have faded.

    Biden has said more Americans will come to reward him for his economic stewardship once the benefits of some of his signature legislative achievements, including a new infrastructure law, begin taking hold.

    Labor groups that threw their backing behind Biden ahead of his speech include the AFL-CIO, which said it was the earliest point in a presidential election cycle it had ever endorsed a candidate.

    “There’s absolutely no question that Joe Biden is the most pro-union president in our lifetimes,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “From bringing manufacturing jobs home to America to protecting our pensions and making historic investments in infrastructure, clean energy and education, we’ve never seen a president work so tirelessly to rebuild our economy from the bottom up and middle out.”

    Supporters cheer before Biden speaks at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

    Biden, who made his first stop after announcing his reelection bid a legislative conference for North America’s Building Trades Unions in Washington, has long relied on union support for his political ambitions.

    “I’m more honored by your endorsement than you can imagine – coming this early, it’s going to make a gigantic difference in this campaign,” Biden said during Saturday’s event in Philadelphia, where he called himself “the most pro-union president in American history.”

    Not all unions have thrown their support behind Biden’s reelection bid. The powerful United Auto Workers said last month it was holding off on endorsing Biden, citing concerns over his policies that would encourage a transition to electric vehicles, according to a memo from the union.

    The UAW has more than 400,000 members, and Biden has touted its support in the past. Last year he called American autoworkers “the most skilled autoworkers in the world.” The group’s membership is mostly concentrated in Michigan, a presidential election battleground.

    Biden also rankled union members last year when he signed legislation that averted a nationwide rail strike – a step he said was necessary to prevent a stoppage of important freight movement.

    Biden’s campaign has leaned into his economic record, including releasing a 60-second ad titled “Backbone” last month. The spot struck a populist tone, mixing audio of the president speaking about “investing in places and people that have been forgotten” and a narrator ticking through the administration’s work to boost infrastructure and manufacturing in the country.

    “Joe Biden’s building an economy that leaves no city, no town, no American behind,” the narrator says.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Bernie Sanders launches Senate probe into Amazon warehouse safety conditions | CNN Business

    Bernie Sanders launches Senate probe into Amazon warehouse safety conditions | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday launched a Senate investigation into working and safety conditions at Amazon warehouses, adding to federal scrutiny on the labor practices of one of the country’s largest employers.

    Sanders, the chairman of the Senate committee on health, education, labor and pensions, also unveiled a website where Amazon workers can submit stories about their experiences at the company to help inform the investigation.

    “The company’s quest for profits at all costs has led to unsafe physical environments, intense pressure to work at unsustainable rates, and inadequate medical attention for tens of thousands of Amazon workers every year,” Sanders wrote in a letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announcing the probe.

    Over the years, some Amazon workers have described the “grueling” experience of long hours racing around warehouses that can be the size of 28 football fields while the company tracks their every move.

    Sanders has been one of Amazon’s most vocal and high-profile antagonists. He has sparred with the company over its labor practices and joined a rally of workers looking to unionize one of its facilities. In 2018, following heavy criticism from Sanders, Amazon announced it was raising its minimum wage for US employees to $15 an hour.

    In his letter Tuesday, Sanders argued that Amazon warehouses “are uniquely dangerous,” and cited recent citations from the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration against Amazon.

    After inspecting three Amazon warehouse facilities, OSHA issued hazard letters in January related to injury risks from workers lifting packages. An Amazon spokesperson at the time said the company “strongly” disagrees with OSHA’s claims and intends to appeal.

    Sanders also cited a report from a group of labor unions that said Amazon’s rate of serious injuries at warehouses was more than double the rate at non-Amazon warehouses, as well as “concerning stories from workers around the country about the toll that working at Amazon warehouses takes on their bodies.” (Amazon said it disputes how the data in the labor unions’ report characterizes serious injury rate.)

    Steve Kelly, an Amazon spokesperson, told CNN that the company “reviewed the letter and strongly disagree with Senator Sanders’ assertions.”

    “We take the safety and health of our employees very seriously,” Kelly, the Amazon spokesperson, said in a statement. “There will always be ways to improve, but we’re proud of the progress we’ve made which includes a 23% reduction in recordable injuries across our U.S. operations since 2019. We’ve invested more than $1 billion into safety initiatives, projects, and programs in the last four years, and we’ll continue investing and inventing in this area because nothing is more important than our employees’ safety.”

    Sanders also has an open invitation to come tour one of its facilities, the company said.

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  • McCarthy floats potential impeachment inquiry into Garland over IRS whistleblower claims | CNN Politics

    McCarthy floats potential impeachment inquiry into Garland over IRS whistleblower claims | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Speaker Kevin McCarthy is floating the possibility that the House could open an impeachment inquiry into Attorney General Merrick Garland over Internal Revenue Service whistleblower allegations that Justice Department leadership improperly interfered in the Hunter Biden probe, which Garland has denied.

    “If it comes true what the IRS whistleblower is saying, we’re going to start impeachment inquiries on the attorney general,” McCarthy said Monday on Fox News.

    In congressional testimony publicly released on Thursday, two IRS whistleblowers alleged to lawmakers that the president’s son had been given preferential treatment by the Justice Department.

    McCarthy said on Fox News that the IRS agents who came forward “watched the abuse of power in how Hunter Biden was treated.”

    The allegation that the DOJ has been politicized against conservatives has been central to how House Republicans approach their congressional investigations, though there is scant evidence backing up most of their claims.

    Garland rejected those claim during a Friday news conference.

    “Some have chosen to attack the integrity of the Justice Department … by claiming that we do not treat like cases alike,” Garland said. “This constitutes an attack on an instutiton that is essential to American democracy … nothing could be further from the truth.”

    Regarding the Hunter Biden probe, the whistleblowers made several explosive allegations, including that the IRS had recommended far more serious charges for the president’s son and that US Attorney in Delaware David Weiss was blocked from bringing charges in other states.

    Garland said Friday that Weiss was “permitted to continue his investigation and to make a decision to prosecute any way in which he wanted to and in any district in which he wanted to.”

    “I don’t know how it would be possible for anybody to block him from bringing a prosecution, given that he has this authority,” Garland said.

    Hunter Biden will plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and struck a deal with federal prosecutors to resolve a felony gun charge, the Justice Department said Tuesday in court filings.

    As part of the plea agreement, the Justice Department has agreed to recommend a sentence of probation for the two counts of failing to pay taxes in a timely matter for the years 2017 and 2018, according to sources. Hunter Biden owed at least $100,000 in federal taxes for 2017, and at least $100,000 in 2018, but did not pay what was due to the IRS by the deadlines.

    A judge will have the final say on any sentence.

    Garland said Friday he would “support Mr. Weiss explaining or testifying” about the allegations raised by the whistleblowers “when he deems it appropriate.”

    McCarthy said on Fox News Monday, “We have requested by July 6, Weiss to come in and answer these questions because the IRS whistleblowers took copious notes.”

    The federal prosecutor overseeing the Hunter Biden investigation sent a letter to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan in early June saying that he had “ultimate authority” over the probe.

    Weiss, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, makes clear in a letter obtained by CNN that he was granted this authority, cutting against Republican claims that Garland and the DOJ are “weaponized” against conservatives and politicizing the Hunter Biden case.

    “I want to make clear that, as the attorney general has stated, I have been granted ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges and for making decisions necessary to preserve the integrity of the prosecution, consistent with federal law, the Principles of Federal Prosecution, and Departmental regulations” Weiss wrote to Jordan on June 7.

    In response, Jordan has asked Weiss to explain and provide further information about the letter stating he had “ultimate authority” over the probe.

    Jordan asked in a letter to Weiss why he was the one to respond to Congress on June 7, when the initial letter from Jordan about alleged retaliation against the IRS whistleblowers was addressed to Garland. “Who instructed you to sign and send your June 7 letter to the committee?,” Jordan asked.

    Hunter Biden’s lawyer pushed back in a statement on Friday against the whistleblowers’ claims, saying it was “preposterous and deeply irresponsible” to suggest that federal investigators “cut my client any slack” during their “extensive” five-year probe.

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  • Pence says he doesn’t recall ‘any pressure’ from Trump in calling Arizona governor | CNN Politics

    Pence says he doesn’t recall ‘any pressure’ from Trump in calling Arizona governor | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Former Vice President Mike Pence says he doesn’t recall “any pressure” from Donald Trump in 2020 asking him to call Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey about their loss in the presidential election.

    “I did check in with, not only Gov. Ducey, but other governors and states that were going through the legal process of reviewing their election results, but there was no pressure involved,” Pence said of the former president in an interview that aired Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

    Pence, now a contender, like Trump, for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, told CBS he was “calling to get an update. I passed along that information to the president. And it was no more, no less than that.”

    CNN reported that Trump had pressured Ducey to find fraud in Arizona’s 2020 election to help overturn his narrow loss to Joe Biden and had repeatedly pressured Pence to help him find evidence of fraud. Pence spoke to Ducey multiple times, though he did not pressure the GOP governor as he had been asked, sources told CNN.

    Trump publicly attacked Ducey, a former ally, over the state’s certification of the results. As Ducey was certifying the election results in November 2020, Trump appeared to call the governor – with a “Hail to the Chief” ringtone heard playing on Ducey’s phone. Ducey did not take that call but later said he spoke with Trump, though he did not describe the specifics of the conversation.

    Asked by CBS if he was pressured by Trump to influence Ducey, Pence said, “No, I don’t remember any pressure.”

    “In the days of November and December, this was an orderly process,” he said. “You remember there were more than 60 lawsuits underway. States were engaging in appropriate reviews, and these contacts were no more than that.”

    The Washington Post was first to report on Trump pressuring Ducey to overturn the election results.

    Ducey left office earlier this year after two terms as governor. A spokesman for Ducey told CNN on Saturday that the former governor “stands by his action to certify the election and considers the issue to be in the rear view mirror – it’s time to move on.”

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  • Pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood gives up law license amid 2020-related disciplinary case | CNN Politics

    Pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood gives up law license amid 2020-related disciplinary case | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Lin Wood, a prominent right-wing attorney and election denier, has given up his law license in an apparent move to stave off disciplinary proceedings tied to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

    Wood is formally retiring from practicing law, and the disciplinary cases against him in Georgia are being dismissed, according to court filings and a letter Wood sent to the state bar this week. His retirement is “unqualified, irrevocable, and permanent,” the court filings state.

    “I have retired from the active practice of law as I have been planning to do since late 2019,” Wood told CNN.

    The situation stems from Wood’s conduct after the 2020 election. He filed a series of meritless lawsuits after then-President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, which were filled with debunked theories about massive voter fraud that went nowhere in the courts. He was never formally part of the Trump campaign’s legal team, though he promoted the same election lies that Trump embraced.

    “By permitting (Wood) to transfer to Retired Status and thereby prohibiting (Wood) from practicing law in this state or any other state or jurisdiction, the Office of General Counsel believes that it has achieved the goals of disciplinary action, including protecting the public and the integrity of the judicial system and the legal profession,” Robert Remar, an attorney representing the State Bar of Georgia, wrote in a court filing.

    In a Telegram post on Wednesday, Wood said, “Anyone who suggests that my voluntary retirement from the GA B.A.R. was out of fear of disbarment, does not know me or has not followed me very long.”

    The disciplinary proceedings against Wood are one of several against lawyers who helped Trump in his ill-fated quest to stay in power. His personal attorney at the time, Rudy Giuliani, saw his law license suspended in 2021. And another pro-Trump attorney, John Eastman, is currently in the middle of a disciplinary trial for attempting to subvert Congress’ election certification on January 6, 2021.

    These and other lawyers in Trump’s orbit are also being scrutinized in special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal investigation into the Trump team’s wide-ranging attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and potentially interfere with the lawful transfer of power.

    Long before the 2020 election, Wood became famous for successfully handling high-profile defamation lawsuits, most notably the case of Richard Jewell, the Atlanta security guard who was falsely accused of being the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bomber. But his activities amid the 2020 presidential election became increasingly unhinged, including calling for the execution of senior US officials and promoting QAnon conspiracies.

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  • A top House Republican backs Biden’s decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine, while a prominent Democrat disagrees | CNN Politics

    A top House Republican backs Biden’s decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine, while a prominent Democrat disagrees | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    A top House Republican said Sunday he agreed with the Biden administration’s contentious decision to supply cluster munitions to Ukraine as part of a new military aid package, while a prominent progressive Democrat said the US risks “losing our moral leadership” over the move.

    House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, and Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, made their remarks in separate interviews with CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

    McCaul said the weapons “would be a game-changer” in the war in Ukraine, noting that “Russia is dropping with impunity cluster bombs” on Ukrainian territory.

    “All the Ukrainians and (President Volodymyr) Zelensky are asking for is to give them the same weapons the Russians have to use in their own country against Russians who are in their own country,” he said. “They do not want these to be used in Russia.”

    ‘That’s crossing a line’: Democrat responds to Biden’s decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine

    The munitions, also known as cluster bombs, spread shrapnel that is designed to kill troops or take out armored vehicles such as tanks, but they also scatter “bomblets” across large areas that can fail to explode on impact and can pose a long-term risk to anyone who encounters them, similar to landmines.

    Over 100 countries, including the UK, France and Germany, have outlawed the munitions under the Convention on Cluster Munitions, but the US and Ukraine are not signatories to the ban – a point that McCaul emphasized on Sunday.

    CNN previously reported that President Joe Biden mulled over the decision before approving the weapons transfer on Friday.

    Biden said in an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that it was a “difficult decision” but he was ultimately convinced to send the controversial weapons because Kyiv needs ammunition in its counteroffensive against Russia.

    US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told ABC on Sunday that the administration was “mindful of the concerns about civilian casualties” but reiterated that Ukrainian forces plan to use the cluster munitions to “defend their own territory, hitting Russian positions.”

    National security adviser Jake Sullivan sought Sunday to downplay any concern that Biden’s decision would present any “fracture” with allied countries that oppose the use of such weapons ahead of the president’s high-stakes trip to Europe.

    “We have heard nothing from people saying this cast doubt on our commitment, this cast doubt on coalition unity or this cast doubt on our belief that the United States is playing a vital and positive role as leader of this coalition in Ukraine,” he told reporters traveling with Biden en route to London.

    Lee, however, told CNN that cluster bombs “should never be used. That’s crossing a line.”

    “They don’t always immediately explode. Children can step on them,” she said. “The president’s been doing a good job managing this war, this Putin aggressive war against Ukraine. But I think that this should not happen.”

    Asked by Tapper if the US could be engaging in war crimes by providing the weaponry, Lee said, “What I think is that we … would risk losing our moral leadership because, when you look at the fact that over 120 countries have signed the convention on cluster munitions saying that they should never be used, they should never be used.”

    The remarks underscore the sensitivity surrounding cluster munitions, which US forces began phasing out in 2016 because of the danger they pose to civilians.

    Another Democrat, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, said Sunday he appreciated that the Biden administration “grappled with the risk and reached agreements with the Ukrainian military” about the use of the munitions but he has “real qualms” about the decision.

    “There is an international prohibition. And the US says, ‘But here is a good reason to do something different.’ It could give a green light to other nations to do something different as well,” Kaine said.

    Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate, welcomed the sending of cluster munitions to Ukraine but said the US was taking “too long” to supply weapons to the country.

    “The best thing we can do now is to step up,” Barrasso told Fox News. “It just does seem to me there is so much delay in the activity of this administration and ultimately getting to Ukraine what they need.”

    Lee and McCaul also diverged Sunday on the chaotic 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan, which has reemerged as a topic after the recent release of a State Department report that found that both the Trump and Biden administrations’ decisions to pull all US troops from Afghanistan had detrimental consequences.

    “I don’t believe the (Biden) administration deserves any blame for this,” Lee said.

    “We have to remember that Donald Trump made this agreement with the Taliban. Secondly, the Trump administration literally gutted our State Department and our diplomatic corps. I believe that the State Department and those who were involved in the end of the Afghanistan war, which should have happened before then, I believe, did the best they could,” Lee said.

    McCaul called the report “damaging” and said the entire ordeal was a “huge foreign policy blunder.”

    The report was publicly released on June 30, more than a year after the 90-day review of the evacuation was completed and includes findings around the tumultuous final weeks of the US presence in Afghanistan, as well as several recommendations for improvement moving forward.

    The Biden administration’s frenzied withdrawal after 20 years of US involvement has come under immense scrutiny by predominantly Republican lawmakers. However, accusations about who was responsible for the chaotic final weeks have fallen largely along party lines, with Republicans pointing fingers at the Biden administration and Democrats, including the White House, casting blame on the Trump administration for the deal that set the US withdrawal into motion.

    Asked on June 30 about the report and whether he admitted there were “mistakes during the withdrawal,” Biden noted that he had vowed that al Qaeda “wouldn’t be there.”

    “I said we’d get help from the Taliban,” the president said. “I was right.”

    McCaul on Sunday said the president’s response was “devoid of reality.”

    “It’s a little bit eerie that a president of the United States would … be so disillusioned about what’s happening on the ground in Afghanistan, the idea that al Qaeda is gone,” the Texas Republican said. “He just really wants to sweep Afghanistan under the rug.”

    Since retaking control of Afghanistan, the Taliban has rolled back decades of progress on human rights.

    According to a recent report by United Nations experts, the Taliban has committed “egregious systematic violations of women’s rights,” by restricting their access to education and employment and their ability to move freely in society.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Judge denies Trump bid to move hush money case to federal court | CNN Politics

    Judge denies Trump bid to move hush money case to federal court | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A federal judge on Wednesday denied Donald Trump’s effort to move the New York indictment charging him with falsifying business records into federal court, finding that Trump failed to show that any of the allegedly illegal conduct related to his role as president.

    Judge Alvin Hellerstein previewed at a court hearing several weeks ago that he would not accept the case and would return it to state court.

    Trump, who has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection to hush money payments made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, is set to go to trial in Manhattan for this case in March 2024.

    The judge stated in his ruling that the payments to Daniels, an adult film actress and director, were not related to presidential duties.

    “The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the matter was a purely a personal item of the President – a cover-up of an embarrassing event. Hush money paid to an adult film star is not related to a President’s official acts,” the judge wrote. “Whatever the standard, and whether it is high or low, Trump fails to satisfy it.”

    The judge also rejected Trump’s argument that he should have immunity given his position as president at the time he signed reimbursement checks to Michael Cohen, his then-personal attorney who facilitated the hush money payment to Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.

    “Reimbursing Cohen for advancing hush money to Stephanie Clifford cannot be considered the performance of a constitutional duty. Falsifying business records to hide such reimbursement, and to transform the reimbursement into a business expense for Trump and income to Cohen, likewise does not relate to a presidential duty. Trump is not immune from the People’s prosecution in New York Supreme Court,” the judge found.

    A spokesperson for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg told CNN that the district attorney’s office is “very pleased with the federal court’s decision and look forward to proceeding in New York State Supreme Court.”

    A Trump campaign spokesman, meanwhile, said Wednesday that “this case belongs in a federal court and we will continue to pursue all legal avenues to move it there.”

    In another blow to Trump, the judge said that federal election law, the Federal Election Campaign Act, doesn’t pre-empt the state charges, falsifying a business record with the intent to commit or conceal another crime. Trump has signaled he will make the argument that the federal statute should preempt the state claim before the judge presiding over the case in state court.

    “FECA does not preempt the application of a general state law to conduct related to a federal election except if the law, or its application, constitutes a specific regulation of conduct covered by FECA,” the judge wrote.

    “The only elements are the falsification of business records, an intent to defraud, and an intent to commit or conceal another crime,” the judge said, adding, “Trump can be convicted of a felony even if he did not commit any crime beyond the falsification, so long as he intended to do so or to conceal such a crime.”

    The judge also rejected Trump’s claim that the case should be moved to federal court because of hostility at the state level.

    “There is no reason to believe that the New York judicial system would not be fair and give Trump equal justice under the law,” the judge wrote.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Suspended Texas AG Ken Paxton seeks to have most impeachment articles tossed | CNN Politics

    Suspended Texas AG Ken Paxton seeks to have most impeachment articles tossed | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Attorneys for suspended Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton have asked that the majority of the articles of impeachment brought against him be dismissed, arguing he can’t be tried for alleged actions that took place before his current term.

    In a filing to the state Senate’s impeachment court on Monday, Paxton’s attorneys sought to dismiss 19 of the 20 articles of impeachment, citing a rule known as “prior-term doctrine.” The rule, they argued, would prevent an official from being impeached over alleged conduct that precedes their most recent election.

    The move comes after the Texas House of Representatives impeached Paxton in May for alleged misconduct, including allegations that he used his office to favor the interests of a prominent donor. He has denied the allegations. Under the Texas Constitution, Paxton is suspended from office while the matter is pending but would be reinstated if acquitted by the Senate.

    CNN has reached out to the Texas Senate about the filings.

    In a second motion filed Monday, Paxton’s team also asked that evidence of “any alleged conduct” that occurred prior to January 2023 when Paxton began his third term in office be excluded from the state Senate’s trial.

    “The allegations making up the Articles contain unsupported, vague, and irrelevant assertions of non-impeachable conduct,” the motion to exclude evidence stated, adding that the articles “are not based on any alleged conduct that occurred after the election of November 2022, or after [Paxton] began his third term in January 2023.”

    Paxton’s attorneys said at the outset of the motion that the state House and its counsel “promised the public that the evidence against the Attorney General is ‘clear, compelling and decisive’ and ‘ten times worse than what has been public.’”

    But, they argued, “now that the House Managers have been forced by this Court to turn over their evidence through document production, it is clear that the evidence the House Managers have gathered is 100 times less compelling that what has been proclaimed.”

    Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has since appointed former Texas Secretary of State John Scott as a temporary replacement, while Paxton awaits his September 5 impeachment trial.

    During the Senate impeachment trial, the lieutenant governor will function as the judge and the senators will serve as jurors. A two-thirds vote of those present would be required to convict. Attorneys for Paxton said earlier this month he will not testify during the trial.

    Paxton, a conservative firebrand who has closely aligned himself with former President Donald Trump, has brought over two dozen cases against the Biden administration as Texas’s top prosecutor.

    CNN previously reported that he is also facing an FBI investigation for abuse of office and that Justice Department prosecutors in Washington, DC, took over a corruption investigation into Paxton. He is also under indictment for securities fraud in a separate, unrelated case. Paxton has denied all charges and allegations.

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  • Kentucky law aimed at increasing parental oversight in education takes effect | CNN Politics

    Kentucky law aimed at increasing parental oversight in education takes effect | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    A Kentucky law that aims to increase oversight in public schools by making it easier for parents to file complaints about – and, if desired, shield their children from – “harmful” materials has gone into effect after Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear declined to veto a Republican-pushed bill.

    Senate Bill 5 makes Kentucky the latest state to join a push by Republicans nationwide to champion so-called parental rights in the classroom.

    “Harmful” material, as defined in the bill, may “contain the exposure, in an obscene manner, of the unclothed or apparently unclothed human male or female genitals, pubic area, or buttocks or the female breast, or visual depictions of sexual acts or simulations of sexual acts, or explicit written descriptions of sexual acts.”

    The new law will establish a process for parents to lodge complaints. School principals will determine if the material in question is indeed inappropriate (the determinations can be appealed), and a parent may request that their child is blocked from seeing it.

    By not vetoing the bill, Beshear is allowing the law to go into effect. Michael Adams, Kentucky’s secretary of state, confirmed Monday that his office had received the bill.

    In a statement, Beshear’s office said the bill “is about creating a process that most school districts already have” and did not elaborate.

    The Kentucky chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, however, had called for Beshear to veto the bill.

    “Senate Bill 5 is part of a long history of attempted government censorship, and overrides systems already in place to review and analyze materials to determine if they are appropriate for students,” Kate Miller, the advocacy director for the ACLU of Kentucky, said. “This bill is blatant government overreach and adds additional layers of bureaucracy on already overburdened school employees, and during a massive teacher shortage.”

    Parental rights in education emerged as a significant political issue for the GOP during the Covid-19 pandemic, when school closures, along with mask and vaccine mandates, upended family routines and renewed scrutiny over school leadership. Republicans across the country, arguing that certain discussions around race, gender identity and sexuality are inappropriate for young children, have used the banner of “parental rights” to push for a curtailment of such conversations in schools, even though opinions on the matter vary widely among parents.

    Critics have broadly argued Republicans have used the issue to turn the classroom into a battleground and advance a political agenda. LGBTQ rights advocates, in particular, have argued it is a conscious effort to stigmatize a vulnerable slice of American society and could have a chilling effect on what they believe to be urgently needed discussions.

    In some states, such as Texas, Florida and Iowa, parental permission is now needed to discuss certain topics with students. Other states, such as Georgia, have put parents and school communities in charge of vetting books their children could encounter at school for signs of race-related or sexual themes, appealing to conservatives who have voiced concerns about “radical” literature.

    Last week, the GOP-led House of Representatives passed a bill requiring schools to provide parents with a list of books and reading materials available in the school library and post curriculum publicly, though the legislation is likely to fail in the Democratic-led Senate.

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  • After negotiating a peace deal, Jimmy Carter taught this Bible class | CNN Politics

    After negotiating a peace deal, Jimmy Carter taught this Bible class | CNN Politics

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



    CNN
     — 

    If you know anything about Jimmy Carter, this may be it: He never lost touch with his home in Plains, Georgia, and he never gravitated away from teaching his Baptist faith.

    Until just recently, the former US president and Nobel Peace Prize winner could be found teaching Sunday school in Georgia.

    What might be even more remarkable is that he maintained that grounding even when he was leading the free world, frequently popping up 16th Street to teach a couples’ Bible class in the balcony of the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, DC. Carter intertwined a first-person, real-time account of world events with his thoughts on the scripture.

    A week after celebrating the historic high point of his presidency – the 1978 Camp David Accords, which created a lasting peace between Israel and Egypt – Carter was telling his students, members of the First Baptist Church, about praying with then-prime minister of Israel Menachem Begin and then-president of Egypt Anwar Sadat.

    “I think some of the most unpleasant moments of my life occurred during the last two weeks,” he told the class. “And of course, also some of the most pleasant.”

    The photos of the three world leaders during their two-week negotiations at Camp David and signing of the agreement at the White House have followed Carter into the history books. Sadat was assassinated in 1981 and Begin died in 1992, but the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt is still in effect.

    Carter tells Bible class about Camp David Accords

    In today’s tightly controlled media environment, when the fences around the White House keep getting higher and the barricades farther away, it’s incredible to think that any parishioner could stand in the balcony of a church and interact with the US president.

    He attended the church regularly, and his daughter Amy was baptized there – things I learned after hearing from Christi Harlan, a former reporter who has been a member since the ’90s. She showed me the plaque on the second-row pew where Carter would sit with his family, in view of a stained-glass window of George Washington Carver, the agricultural scientist who, like Carter, was a peanut farmer.

    Harlan also gave me CD copies of taped recordings of the couples Bible class that Carter sometimes led when he was president and which have been sitting in the church’s archive ever since.

    This being a Bible class and the subject being peace in the Middle East, Carter talked about the importance of faith to the negotiations that brought a lasting truce between Israel and Egypt.

    “I was meeting with two leaders who are deeply devout and religious men who spent a great portion of their time at Camp David in prayer,” said Carter, adding that they all agreed they “worship the same God.”

    Sadat, Carter said, accepted that he and Begin were both descended from Abraham and were therefore brothers of a sort.

    “That was one of the things that I believe gave us kind of a clear, unshakable purpose, because we all believe that God wanted us to work toward peace,” Carter said. “It was one of the few things on which we agreed, at first.”

    Carter claps as Sadat hugs Begin on September 17, 1978, after signing the peace agreement in the East Room of the White House.

    While the fly-on-the-wall reports from Camp David are fascinating, these were primarily Bible classes. You get the sense that teaching was a sort of escape for Carter, who goes deep into the scripture. The week after the Camp David Accords, he focused on St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, when the apostle was imprisoned and facing death but still eager to advance the gospel.

    In other Bible class lessons, there are often moments where the weight of Carter’s words were influenced by his day job – such as when he brought along Georgi Vins, a Baptist pastor from the Soviet Union who had recently been exiled from Siberia.

    Despite the gesture, Carter insisted the class should not be about world affairs.

    “I would particularly want you this morning not to think about the time of Ahab, not to think about even the Soviet Union – but to think about the United States, the Washington, DC, community, and preferably, my life and your life and our actions in the eyes of God,” Carter told the class.

    Carter brings exiled Soviet pastor to Bible class

    His discussion about the murder of Naboth ultimately turned into a dissection of man’s law versus God’s law.

    Citing the Vietnam War, Carter told the students that the US government, which he led at the time, must be accountable:

    “American citizens have not only a right but a duty to constantly inquire into the righteousness of our nation’s actions. And that is not treason. And that is not in violation of God’s law.”

    Carter discusses man’s law vs. God’s law

    Most recent presidents have complained about the cloistered life in the White House and sought refuge in a private space.

    Donald Trump invited world leaders to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida. George W. Bush went down to his remote ranch in Crawford, Texas, to clear brush.

    Carter, on the other hand, joined the First Baptist Church.

    When he prayed in those years, he tried to distance himself from the presidency, Carter told Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air” in 1996, noting that he intentionally joined a church outside the White House and went there almost as a physical separation of church and state.

    “I worshipped as I would if I had not have been in public life at all,” Carter said.

    But praying as president is different, he added – more frequent and “maybe on average, more heartfelt than any other time in my life, because I felt that the decisions I made were affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people.”

    The Princeton University presidential historian Julian Zelizer told me that the distance presidents feel from the people they lead can be difficult.

    “The challenge is that they become further and further removed from the people who elected them – seeing the country through the prism of advisors, reporters, and colleagues,” he said in an email.

    But Carter’s insistence on staying grounded in a community was a key part of his appeal at a time when Americans’ faith in their government was shaken.

    “Carter – in the aftermath of Watergate – was determined to lower the barriers between himself and the electorate,” Zelizer said.

    In the “Fresh Air” interview, Carter talked more directly about his prayers as president. He wanted to keep the nation at peace and help spread peace to other nations, and end the Iran hostage crisis that lasted for more than a year – things that did eventually happen.

    “I never prayed for popularity. I never prayed to be reelected, things of that kind,” he said.

    “I think God always answers our prayers,” he told Gross. “Quite often God’s answer is no. We don’t get what we ask for.”

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  • Exclusive: National security officials tell special counsel Trump was repeatedly warned he did not have the authority to seize voting machines | CNN Politics

    Exclusive: National security officials tell special counsel Trump was repeatedly warned he did not have the authority to seize voting machines | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Former top national security officials have testified to a federal grand jury that they repeatedly told former President Donald Trump and his allies that the government didn’t have the authority to seize voting machines after the 2020 election, CNN has learned.

    Chad Wolf, the former acting Homeland Security secretary, and his former deputy Ken Cuccinelli were asked about discussions inside the administration around DHS seizing voting machines when they appeared before the grand jury earlier this year, according to three people familiar with the proceedings. Cuccinelli testified that he “made clear at all times” that DHS did not have the authority to take such a step, one of the sources said.

    Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, in a closed-door interview with federal prosecutors earlier this year, also recounted conversations about seizing voting machines after the 2020 election, including during a heated Oval Office meeting that Trump participated in, according to a source familiar with the matter.

    Details about the secret grand jury testimony and O’Brien’s interview, neither of which have been previously reported, illustrate how special counsel Jack Smith and his prosecutors are looking at the various ways Trump tried to overturn his electoral loss despite some of his top officials advising him against the ideas.

    Now some of those same officials, including Wolf, Cuccinelli and O’Brien, as well as others who have so far refused to testify, may have to return to the grand jury in Washington, DC, to provide additional testimony after a series of pivotal court rulings that were revealed in recent weeks rejected Trump’s claims of executive privilege.

    Cuccinelli was spotted going back into the grand jury on Tuesday, April 4.

    Without that privilege shield, former officials must answer questions about their interactions and conversations with the former president, including what he was told about the lack of evidence for election fraud and the legal remedies he could pursue.

    That line of questioning goes to the heart of Smith’s challenge in any criminal case he might bring – to prove that Trump and his allies pursued their efforts despite knowing their fraud claims were false or their gambits weren’t lawful. To bring any potential criminal charges, prosecutors would have to overcome Trump’s public claim that he believed then and now that fraud really did cost him the election.

    “There’s lots of ways you can show that. But certainly one of them is if they were told by people who knew what they were talking about, that that there was no basis to take the actions,” said Adav Noti, an election law attorney who previously served in the US Attorney’s Office in Washington, DC, and at the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel’s office.

    “I would not want to be a defense lawyer trying to argue, ‘Well, yes, my client was told that, but he never really believed it,’” Noti said.

    Inside the Trump White House after the 2020 election, the push to seize voting machines eventually led to executive orders being drafted in mid-December of that year, directing the military and DHS to carry out the task despite Wolf and Cuccinelli telling Trump and his allies their agency did not have the authority to do so.

    Those orders, which cited debunked claims about voting system irregularities in Michigan and Georgia, were presented to Trump by his former national security adviser Michael Flynn and then-lawyer Sidney Powell during a now-infamous Oval Office meeting on December 18.

    Smith’s team has asked witnesses about that meeting in front of the grand jury and during closed-door interviews, multiple sources told CNN. Among them was O’Brien, who told the January 6 House select committee that he was patched into the December 18 meeting by phone after it had already devolved into a screaming match between Flynn, Powell and White House lawyers, according to a transcript of O’Brien’s deposition that was released by the panel.

    O’Brien told the committee that at some point someone asked him if there was evidence of election fraud or foreign interference in the voting machines. “And I said, ‘No, we’ve looked into that and there’s no evidence of it,” O’Brien said he responded. “I was told we didn’t have any evidence of any voter machine fraud in the 2020 election.”

    When asked about that meeting by federal prosecutors working for Smith, O’Brien reiterated that he made clear there was no evidence of foreign interference affecting voting machines, according to the source familiar with the matter.

    O’Brien met with prosecutors earlier this year after receiving a subpoena from Smith’s team and is among the Trump officials who could be called back to discuss conversations with Trump under the judge’s recent decision on executive privilege.

    Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who personally told allies of the former president that there was no evidence of foreign election interference or widespread fraud that would justify taking extreme steps like seizing voting machines, must also testify, the judge decided.

    A spokesperson for Ratcliffe did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. Wolf declined to comment.

    Cuccinelli acknowledged to the January 6 committee last year that, after the election, he was asked several times by Trump’s then-attorney Rudy Giuliani, and on at least one occasion by Trump himself, if DHS had authority to seize voting machines. Wolf told the committee he was repeatedly asked the same question by then White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

    Giuliani, who was subpoenaed by the Justice Department before Smith took over the investigation, previously acknowledged to the January 6 committee that he participated in that December 18 Oval Office meeting and other conversations about having DHS and the military seize voting machines.

    Giuliani told congressional investigators that he and his team “tried many different ways to see if we could get the machines seized,” including options involving DHS, according to the transcript of his committee interview. Giuliani also acknowledged taking part in conversations – even before the Dec. 18 Oval Office meeting – where the idea of using the military to seize voting machines was raised.

    “I can remember the issue of the military coming up much earlier and constantly saying, ‘Will you forget about it, please? Just shut up. You want to go to jail? Just shut up. We’re not using the military,’” he added.

    Robert Costello, an attorney for Giuliani, told CNN that Giuliani has not received a subpoena from Smith. Costello said that in early November, Giuliani was subpoenaed by the DC US Attorney seeking documents and testimony. Costello says he told the Justice Department Giuliani couldn’t comply with the given deadlines because they were in the middle of disciplinary proceedings at the time. That was the last time Giuliani heard from DOJ, says Costello.

    “I haven’t heard a word since November 2022,” Costello told CNN on March 30.

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