CINCINNATI — Ohio lobbyist Matt Borges was sentenced Friday to five years in prison for his part in the largest corruption scandal in Ohio history. He avoided the much harsher sentence received a day earlier by former House Speaker Larry Householder, the scheme’s mastermind, by accepting responsibility and apologizing before the judge.
“Nothing makes it feel more stark than knowing I could have walked away from this at the very beginning,” the 51-year-old Borges, a former chair of the Ohio Republican Party, told U.S. District Judge Timothy Black.
Black nonetheless rebuked Borges for his role in preventing Ohioans the chance to repeal a tainted nuclear plant bailout bill.
“Larry Householder was a crook and you knew it. ‘ An unholy alliance ‘ is what you called it,” Black said.
“You didn’t care that you were aiding an Ohio House speaker to undermine the very foundation of our democracy,” he told Borges. “You just saw everyone else getting fat and rich, and you wanted a piece of it.”
Black admitted to being moved by Borges’ contrition, however, which may have contributed to him escaping the top of the 5- to 8-year range federal prosecutors sought. But the judge rejected any notion that Borges should only get the six months offered to cooperative witnesses or the 1 1/2 years sought by his attorneys, and ordered him into immediate custody.
As a handcuffed Borges left the courtroom, he looked back at his wife Kate, who had delivered an impassioned plea for leniency to the judge, and could be heard saying, “Bye, babe.” She blew him a kiss.
A jury convicted Householder and Borges in March, determining that Householder orchestrated and Borges participated in a $60 million bribery scheme secretly funded by Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. to secure Householder’s power, elect his allies and pass and defend a $1 billion nuclear plant bailout. Specifically, Borges was found to have offered a bribe in exchange for inside information on a referendum campaign aimed at repealing the bailout law.
Householder, 64, was sentenced to 20 years, the maximum allowed, on Thursday.
During the trial, Borges sought to distance himself from Householder — once one of Ohio’s most powerful Republican politicians — with his defense team highlighting his absence from meetings held by Householder’s allies and Borges quipping audibly in the courtroom that he didn’t even like the man.
After Householder confirmed on the stand during their trial that Borges was not among his confidantes, the younger Republican opted against testifying on his own behalf at that time.
Black said Friday that Borges’ expunged conviction years ago in a state government pay-to-play scandal didn’t play a significant role in his sentence this time.
Borges, who served as a campaign staffer and chief of staff to then-Republican State Treasurer Joe Deters, pleaded guilty in 2004 to one count of improper use of a public office. He was fined $1,000, but avoided jail time of up to six months.
Borges was charged with giving 10 brokers who had contributed to Deters’ campaign fund an advantage in getting contracts with the office of the treasurer — Ohio’s chief investment officer. A Deters fundraiser and a lobbyist who served as a go-between to the preferential treatment also were convicted.
Though Deters was never directly connected to the scheme, it stymied his career in state politics for almost two decades. That was, until GOP Gov. Mike DeWine named him in December to an open seat on the Ohio Supreme Court.
Because of his association with Borges, Deters has recused himself from a separate state case against FirstEnergy stemming from the scandal that’s been appealed to the high court.
U.S. Attorney Kenneth Parker said he was gratified that Borges showed remorse during Friday’s hearing, including saying how disappointed he was in himself and apologizing in open court to adversaries he lashed out at through a dedicated website.
“That’s the first step to rehabilitation, so I was glad to see that,” Parker said. “He, and only he, knows whether or not it was genuine. But that’s the first step to making things right, inside and outside.”
Householder and Borges were among five people arrested by federal authorities in July 2020, charged along with a dark money group, for their roles in the wide-ranging scheme. A federal investigation remains ongoing.
Two others — Juan Cespedes and Jeff Longstreth — have pleaded guilty and are cooperating as they await sentences of up to six months in prison. A third man, the late Statehouse superlobbyist Neil Clark, pleaded not guilty before dying by suicide in 2021. Generation Now, the 501(c) nonprofit through which much of the money flowed, also has pleaded guilty to racketeering.
FirstEnergy also has admitted to its role, admitting in an agreement with the government to using dark money groups to fund the effort and agreeing to pay a $230 million fine and meet other conditions in order to avoid prosecution.
CINCINNATI — Former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Thursday for his role in the largest corruption scandal in state history.
The 64-year-old Republican appeared before U.S. District Judge Timothy Black, who meted out the punishment, about an hour after he and his wife Taundra arrived at the federal courthouse.
Householder had pleaded for mercy ahead of the sentencing — not on behalf of himself, but his wife of 40 years, sons and friends. His wife, son Nathan and other friends and family were present.
Black instead delivered a blistering rebuke, accusing Householder of abusing voters’ trust.
“You were a bully with a lust for power who thought he was better than everyone else,” he said.
Householder and lobbyist Matt Borges, a former chair of the Ohio Republican Party, were both convicted in April of a single racketeering charge each, after a six-week trial. Borges is set to be sentenced Friday.
Householder also received one year of probation and before being led out of the courtroom in handcuffs as he was remanded into the custody of U.S. Marshals.
Jurors found that Householder orchestrated and Borges participated in a $60 million bribery scheme secretly funded by Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. to secure Householder’s power, elect his allies, pass legislation containing a $1 billion bailout for two aging nuclear power plants owned by a FirstEnergy affiliate and then to use a dirty tricks campaign to stifle a ballot effort to overturn the bill.
Federal prosecutors had recommended Householder receive 16 to 20 years, holding in a sentencing memo that he “acted as the quintessential mob boss, directing the criminal enterprise from the shadows and using his casket carriers to execute the scheme.” That strategy, they said, gave Householder ”plausible deniability.”
His own attorneys had recommended just 12 to 18 months, reporting to the judge that he is “a broken man” who has been “humiliated and disgraced” by the ordeal of his widely reported arrest, high-profile prosecution and seven-week trial by jury.
Householder was one of Ohio’s most powerful politicians, a historically twice-elected speaker, before his indictment. After Householder’s arrest in July 2020, the Republican-controlled House ousted him from his leadership post, but he refused to resign for nearly a year on grounds he was innocent until proven guilty. In a bipartisan vote, representatives ultimately ousted him from the chamber in 2021 — the first such expulsion in Ohio in 150 years.
All told, five people and a dark money group have been charged so far for their roles in the scheme. A federal investigation remains ongoing.
During the trial, the prosecution called two of the people arrested — Juan Cespedes and Jeff Longstreth, who both pleaded guilty and are cooperating — to testify about political contributions they said were not ordinary, but rather bribes intended to secure passage of the bailout legislation. Generation Now, the 501(c) nonprofit through which much of the money flowed, also has pleaded guilty to racketeering.
Cespedes and Longstreth face up to six months in prison each under their plea deals. Neither has been sentenced.
The last person arrested, the late Statehouse superlobbyist Neil Clark, was heard on tape in the courtroom. Clark had pleaded not guilty before dying by suicide in March 2021.
All the alleged members of the conspiracy benefited personally from the scheme, using sums that an FBI agent described colloquially as “bags of cash” from FirstEnergy. Householder spent around $500,000 of FirstEnergy money to settle a business lawsuit, pay attorneys, deal with expenses at his Florida home and pay off credit card debt. Another $97,000 was used to pay staff and expenses for his 2018 reelection campaign.
CINCINNATI — Former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Thursday for his role in the largest corruption scandal in state history.
The 64-year-old Republican appeared before U.S. District Judge Timothy Black, who meted out the punishment, about an hour after he and his wife arrived at the federal courthouse.
Householder and lobbyist Matt Borges, a former chair of the Ohio Republican Party, were both convicted in April of a single racketeering charge each, after a six-week trial. Borges is set to be sentenced Friday.
Householder also received on year of probation and was remanded into the custody of U.S. Marshals.
Jurors found that Householder orchestrated and Borges participated in a $60 million bribery scheme secretly funded by Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. to secure Householder’s power, elect his allies, pass legislation containing a $1 billion bailout for two aging nuclear power plants owned by a FirstEnergy affiliate and then to use a dirty tricks campaign to stifle a ballot effort to overturn the bill.
Federal prosecutors had recommended Householder receive 16 to 20 years, holding in a sentencing memo that he “acted as the quintessential mob boss, directing the criminal enterprise from the shadows and using his casket carriers to execute the scheme.” That strategy, they said, gave Householder ”plausible deniability.”
His own attorneys had recommended just 12 to 18 months, reporting to the judge that he is “a broken man” who has been “humiliated and disgraced” by the ordeal of his widely reported arrest, high-profile prosecution and seven-week trial by jury.
Householder was one of Ohio’s most powerful politicians, a historically twice-elected speaker, before his indictment. After Householder’s arrest in July 2020, the Republican-controlled House ousted him from his leadership post, but he refused to resign for nearly a year on grounds he was innocent until proven guilty. In a bipartisan vote, representatives ultimately ousted him from the chamber in 2021 — the first such expulsion in Ohio in 150 years.
All told, five people and a dark money group have been charged so far for their roles in the scheme. A federal investigation remains ongoing.
During the trial, the prosecution called two of the people arrested — Juan Cespedes and Jeff Longstreth, who both pleaded guilty and are cooperating — to testify about political contributions they said were not ordinary, but rather bribes intended to secure passage of the bailout legislation. Generation Now, the 501(c) nonprofit through which much of the money flowed, also has pleaded guilty to racketeering.
Cespedes and Longstreth face up to six months in prison each under their plea deals. Neither has been sentenced.
The last person arrested, the late Statehouse superlobbyist Neil Clark, was heard on tape in the courtroom. Clark had pleaded not guilty before dying by suicide in March 2021.
All the alleged members of the conspiracy benefited personally from the scheme, using sums that an FBI agent described colloquially as “bags of cash” from FirstEnergy. Householder spent around $500,000 of FirstEnergy money to settle a business lawsuit, pay attorneys, deal with expenses at his Florida home and pay off credit card debt. Another $97,000 was used to pay staff and expenses for his 2018 reelection campaign.
German officials say that an array of climate measures being introduced by the government will bring the country closer but not all the way toward meeting its national goals for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2030
FILE – Cars and trucks queue on a highway in Frankfurt, Germany, Wednesday, April 26, 2023. German officials said Wednesday, June 14, 2023, that an array of climate measures being introduced by the government will bring the country closer but not all the way toward meeting its national goals for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. (AP Photo/Michael Probst, File)
The Associated Press
BERLIN — German officials said Wednesday that an array of climate measures being introduced by the government will bring the country closer but not all the way toward meeting its national goals for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
Germany’s Climate Ministry said measures already in place or soon to become law will reduce emissions by about 900 million metric tons of carbon dioxide for the period from 2022 to 2030.
An “emissions gap” of about 200 million tons of CO2 will remain and needs to be closed through additional steps over the coming years, largely because of persistent high emissions in the transportation sector.
Germany aims to reduce its emissions of planet-warming gases by 65% from 1990 levels by 2030. The target for 2040 is an 88% reduction on the path to ”net zero” emissions by 2045.
A sharp increase in wind and solar power, energy efficiency improvements and subsidies for industry to reduce fossil fuel use are among the measures taken or planned by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government since it took office in late 2021.
“The political message is that, when I became a minister, achieving the climate targets looked impossible,” Economy and Climate Minister Robert Habeck told reporters in Berlin.
“For the first time, I would say, it is possible to keep to the climate targets,” added Habeck, a member of the environmentalist Greens who is also Germany’s vice chancellor. “The art of making things possible consists in not easing off now; I would say that we have put the ship back on course, and of course it is important now to pick up speed.”
After months of haggling that helped push down the governing coalition’s poll ratings, leaders of the three-party alliance also reached a compromise this week over plans to replace old fossil fuel heating systems with cleaner alternatives such as heat pumps. Habeck acknowledged that concrete details still have to be worked out in the coming weeks.
Germany’s solar industry warned Wednesday that it urgently needs more workers to meet demand for photovoltaic installations in the coming years.
Solar industry lobby group BSW said that companies need to hire about 100,000 skilled workers as annual installations are expected to rise to 26 gigawatts by 2026 from 7.4 GW last year.
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BRATISLAVA — French President Emmanuel Macron sought to mend fences with Eastern Europeans at a conference in Slovakia, telling an audience largely from the region that he wants a more collaborative relationship with ex-Soviet states.
“We didn’t listen enough to you, and your calls for your history and painful memories to be acknowledged,” he told an audience at the GLOBSEC security forum in the Slovak capital.
“Some said you missed opportunities to stay silent; I say we sometimes missed opportunities to listen to you. That time is over,” he said, referring to a swipe by former French President Jacques Chirac in 2003 that offended Eastern Europeans.
“I don’t think there is a western and an eastern Europe, an old Europe and a new one; there is only one Europe … with a will to build unity,” he said.
Policy notes that played well with Eastern Europeans included saluting the strength of NATO, acknowledging the experience of many countries formerly under Soviet rule, and supporting a pathway for Ukraine toward NATO membership.
The French president also said that although France had been criticized as being “arrogant,” “faraway” and “not interested” in the region, he has tried to engage more. His comments appeared to hit a chord among the delegates, who applauded him heartily during opening remarks.
The speech represents a shift in tone for the French president, who previously distanced himself from a more hard-line approach against Russia taken by ex-Soviet states. In the past, Macron had warned against aligning with more hawkish countries, thus risking extending the conflict in Ukraine.
And in the east, there is little love lost for the French president. Since the start of the war, Macron came under fire from Eastern European leaders for pursuing dialogue with Russia and clocking hours of calls with Vladimir Putin.
“It was logical to me that with a strong U.S.-German relation nowadays, Russia out of the picture, France should look for improving its relations with” Central and Eastern Europe, said a senior Central European diplomat who complimented the speech.
Previously, Macron’s statements that Russia should not be humiliated or that it should be given security guarantees have contributed to the perception that he has an ambiguous attitude toward Russia’s aggression.
But in Bratislava, the French president hammered home his commitment to supporting Ukraine “in the long-term.”
“We need to help Ukraine lead an efficient counter-offensive. What is at stake is lasting peace. We must be clear: A ceasefire is not enough, we will recreate a frozen conflict that will be another war for tomorrow,” he said.
Support for Ukraine
At GLOBSEC, Macron also called for “strong and tangible” security guarantees for Ukraine ahead of a key NATO summit in Vilnius in July. In recent weeks, Ukrainians have renewed their lobbying push for a concrete path toward membership, working hard to sway wary members of the alliance.
The French president said Ukraine should be given security guarantees — not only because it is “protecting Europe,” but also because it is “so well-equipped.”
“If we want a sustainable peace and want to be credible toward Ukraine, we must include it in an architecture of security,” he told delegates at the forum.
While there is a broad understanding Ukraine will not be able to join the alliance while it is still at war with Russia, NATO members are divided on how they should respond to Ukraine’s current push for membership.
Macron’s comments are likely to be read as a gesture toward many Eastern Europeans that think Ukraine’s allies should send positive signals on its NATO membership bid.
In Bratislava, while Macron said it was unlikely there would be consensus on full membership for Ukraine, he did give a sense of what option he might back for Ukraine.
“We have to build something between Israel-style security guarantees and fully-fledged membership,” he said.
SEVILLE, Spain — Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez won’t be on the ballot when Spaniards vote in local elections Sunday — but he might as well be.
Everyone in the country sees this weekend’s municipal votes as a dress rehearsal for the national election, which has to be held by the end of the year.
That’s bad news for Socialist candidates like Antonio Muñoz, the mayor of Seville who just wants to be reelected on his own merit — but may end up losing his post because Sánchez is so unpopular.
In an interview with POLITICO, Muñoz complained that the national framing of the election — and the conservative party’s critiques of Sánchez — had undermined the possibility of real debate over how to improve Spain’s fourth-largest city, the capital of the country’s Andalusia region.
“If you want to just generate noise and have a debate about national politics: run for parliament, not mayor of Seville,” Muñoz said. “Me, I’ve stayed faithful to my slogan in these elections — Seville and only Seville — and I think that’s what voters want to hear about.”
In any ordinary election season, Muñoz might be right.
The openly gay, 63-year-old economist is an unusually popular mayor in Seville, a city that once had a reputation for being inward-looking and socially conservative.
Elected to the city council in 2011, Muñoz has worked to redefine the city’s identity and reinforce the idea that there’s more to it than bullfights, religious processions and flamenco — while being careful not to alienate Seville’s traditionalists.
As the city council member in charge of the powerful urbanism, tourism and culture portfolios, he bet on a more alternative, vibrant vision of Seville — promoting electronic music and indie film festivals; and lobbying to steal major events like the Goyas, Spain’s version of the Oscars, away from Madrid.
It was under Muñoz’s watch that Game of Thrones came to town, when the dragon-packed extravaganza used the lush Alcázar palace as a stand-in for the kingdom of Dorne. The producers of Netflix’s The Crown also passed through, using the palatial Alfonso XIII Hotel as a double for Beverly Hills and filming Mohamed Al-Fayed’s Egyptian wedding in Seville’s sumptuous Casa de Pilatos estate.
At the same time that he’s shown off the city center — famed for its narrow, winding streets, whitewashed homes, interior gardens and Moorish architecture — he’s also promoted newer parts of Seville. These include the high-tech Cartuja Science and Technology Park, where the European Commission recently inaugurated the headquarters of its new European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency.
He’s also an enthusiastic booster of the eclectic Fibes Conference Center, located in the working-class Sevilla Este district, which this year will host the 2023 Latin Grammys, the first-ever to be held outside the United States.
“During the next term, we’ll be doing even more to consolidate this city as a Spanish and European reference point for culture, the green economy and the digital transition,” said Muñoz. He became mayor early last year when his predecessor stepped down to run for office at the regional level.
While crafting a more modern image of Seville, Muñoz has been careful not to neglect the city’s classic cultural scene.
He may not be a member of any religious brotherhood, but he has no problem joining religious processions during Holy Week. He may not be a bullfighting enthusiast, but he’s happy to socialize with famous toreros. And while he may not have a passion for flamenco, he’s an almostomnipresentforce at the city’s annual April Fair, where smartly dressed men spend a week dancing with women in long, ruffled, polka-dot dresses while downing pitchers of rebujito, the signature Andalusian cocktail.
“You can like those events more, or less … but they’re a part of our history, our way of life,” said Muñoz.
The skill with which Muñoz has walked the line has played well among sevillanos, especially those who work in the hospitality sector and have been delighted to see the number of tourists in the city boom. Some 6.5 million overnight stays were registered last year.
“I’ve always been proud of my city, but right now I feel that Seville is at a new level as a destination, as a brand,” said restaurant owner Emilio Gimeno. “I think a lot of that has to do with the mayor because he’s always promoting the city, he never stops.”
“I like that he’s a normal guy who lives in the city and doesn’t move around in an official vehicle or surrounded by bodyguards,” he added. “If you’re opening up a new bar, he’s the sort of person who will make time in his schedule to show up at the inauguration, the sort that wants things to work out and go well for you.”
The Sánchez problem
The trouble for Muñoz is that when Sevillanoshead to the polls, they’re be making their choice based not just on his performance — but on the reputation of his party.
“The polls suggest that three out of four Spaniards intend to base their vote on local matters, but a quarter admit their vote will depend on national issues,” said Pablo Simón, a political scientist at Madrid’s Carlos III university. “That’s problematic for some mayors because Sánchez is such a polarizing figure.”
The local election will take place just months before Sánchez’s fragile left-wing coalition government — the first in Spain’s history — is set to complete its four-year term in December.
Despite the devastating impact of the COVID crisis and the economic impact of the war in Ukraine, from the outside, Sánchez’s administration appears to have weathered the storm well.
Spain’s gross domestic product has been growing at a rate above the EU average, and unemployment has dropped to levels not seen since 2008.
The country’s residents pay some of the lowest power prices in Europe, thanks to the Iberian Exception energy price cap. The European Commission has applauded Spain for efficient handling of its share of the bloc’s pandemic recovery cash.
And yet, within Spain, perception of the government is negative, and all of the parties in the ruling coalition have suffered a steep drop in the polls. Since May of last year, Sánchez’s Socialists have trailed behind the country’s conservative Popular Party, which is currently 7 percentage points ahead.
Simón, the political scientist, said that some Spaniards distrust Sánchez for having entered into a coalition government with far-left parties with which he said he’d never govern. Not to mention that, like most political leaders, the prime minister’s prestige took a hit during the pandemic.
“The government’s policies — the higher minimum wage, the basic income, the country’s role in Europe — are broadly popular,” Simón said. “But at a personal level, he isn’t.”
Juan Espadas, Muñoz’s predecessor in Seville’s city hall and current leader of the Andalusian Socialists, admitted that the prime minister’s unpopularity had become a factor in the local elections.
“The right has realized that they can’t challenge him on his politics, so now what they’re trying to do is to discredit him on a personal level,” he said, adding that the Popular Party had focused on casting Sánchez as “an egoist” willing to do anything to hold on to power.
“Their only goal is to make it so that people won’t go vote because they don’t like the person behind the party,” he said.
The ghost of ETA
In addition to invoking the unpopular prime minister, the Spanish conservatives have been reminding voters of the coalition government’s cordial relations with pro-independence parties in the national parliament.
When the Basque pro-independence party EH Bildu included 44 former members of the terrorist group ETA in its official lists for the local elections earlier this month, the Popular Party seized on the issue and turned it into a major talking point in its campaign in cities across the country.
Muñoz has worked to redefine Seville’s identity and reinforce the idea that there’s more to it than bullfights, religious processions and flamenco | Cristina Quicler/AFP via Getty Images
In Seville, José Luis Sanz, the conservative candidate for mayor, rallied supporters by declaring that his neighbors “could not understand how Muñoz’s Socialists have surrendered to the heirs of ETA.”
Like other Socialist candidates, Muñoz has denounced this line of attack, stressing its irrelevance in a campaign that should be about the threat posed by housing insecurity or extreme heat — not a terrorist group that ceased to exist more than a decade ago.
“I think what the [Popular Party] is doing is enormously disrespectful toward voters,” he said. “Instead of talking about what’s needed in this city’s poorest neighborhoods, about what we can do to promote culture, about how we should manage tourism, they want to talk about a party that isn’t up for election in Seville.”
But what politicians want to talk about and what voters are hearing seem to rarely be the same thing.
In the middle-class Los Remedios district, 83-year-old María Camacho Rojas has followed the campaign and decided she won’t give her vote to the mayoral candidate of a party led by Sánchez, a politician she believes to be “a compulsive liar.”
“[Sánchez] does deals with ETA, he doesn’t care about Spain, and I — like most Spaniards — am worried about the state in which he’s going to leave our country,” she said.
She added she’d vote for Muñoz in a heartbeat if he belonged to another party. “I like the mayor, I like how much he does for the city, how much he cares about Seville,” she said. “I’m not going to vote against him but I won’t vote for him: I’ll cast a blank ballot on Sunday.”
In Seville, the latest polls predict a technical tie, with Muñoz’s Socialists winning 12 or 13 seats in the city council and the Popular Party taking 12. That would leave the two mainstream parties dependent on the support of more extreme elements, the far-right Vox party on one side and array of left-wing groups on the other — with those two ideological blocs also nearly tied.
Whatever the outcome, the fallout is not likely to remain contained within city limits: Muñoz’s Sánchez problem could easily become Sánchez’s Seville problem.
Losing the city — the largest municipality controlled by the Socialists — would be a severe blow for the prime minister just months ahead of the national elections.
“One city won’t decide a general election,” said Simón. “But it can make the outcome easier for some, and all the more difficult for others.”
DALLAS — Britain might have fallen out of love with Boris Johnson. But Ukraine’s allies in the U.S. reckon the charismatic ex-prime minister is still the perfect messenger to shore up support for the war in wavering Republican heartlands.
Pro-Ukraine think tankers on Monday brought Johnson to a private lunch in Dallas, Texas, to meet two dozen of the state’s leading conservative figures, including politicians, donors and captains of industry.
The message Johnson was there to deliver was simple: America must stay the course in Ukraine.
“I just urge you all to stick with it,” Johnson told those seated in the grand, wood-panelled dining room in downtown Dallas, where POLITICO was also in attendance. “It will pay off massively in the long run.”
The former U.K. prime minister flew to Texas as a growing number of conservative lawmakers, candidates and activists have started to question the size of the U.S. support package for Ukraine as it attempts to fight back against the invasion launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin in February 2022.
Political tensions over the war are expected to rise further as the 2024 U.S. election draws nearer.
The two most high-profile potential candidates for the Republican nomination — former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — have both voiced skepticism about America’s unwavering support for Ukraine. Trump has pledged to cut a “deal” to “end that war in one day,” while DeSantis dismissed it as a “territorial dispute” which does not involve America’s “vital national interests — though later partially backtracked.
But Johnson told Texan Republicans on Monday: “You are backing the right horse. Ukraine is going to win. They are going to defeat Putin.”
The lunch was not the first time Johnson has lobbied U.S. lawmakers on Ukraine’s behalf. He visited Washington in January, where he publicly urged the U.S. administration to give Ukraine fighter jets, and privately met Republican lawmakers on the same trip.
Following that visit, the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) — a bipartisan, Ukraine-supporting think tank based in Washington — decided to enlist Johnson’s support for a broader mission.
The group wanted him to take his energetic, pro-conservative case for the war out of metropolitan D.C. and deep into Republican territory.
“We wanted to make that case outside of Washington — where we all live in a bubble — and to really take it to the heartland, to places like Texas, to get more support for Ukraine, and make the case to people who are skeptical about that support,” said Alina Polyakova, CEPA’s chief executive.
“In many ways Dallas and Texas are the center of the Republican debate,” she added.
Texas will be a key battleground in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. Trump held his first presidential rally in the Lone Star State in March, while DeSantis and former Governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley have also been courting votes in Texas.
Johnson is “very much seen as the architect of the Western policy” on Ukraine, Polyakova said, adding that “because Trump had nice things to say about him when he was the president,” it also gives Johnson “a lot of credibility as well with the base of the Republican Party.”
As well as the private lunch with Republicans in Dallas on Monday, Johnson also met with former U.S. President George W. Bush, who lives in the city with his wife Laura. Johnson is due to meet Texas Governor Greg Abbott in Austin on Tuesday.
Unusually, the former U.K. prime minister, who raked in almost £5 million from speaking fees in the first six months after leaving office, was not paid for Monday’s lunchtime speaking engagement. However, he did arrange the Dallas trip as a stopover en route to the SCALE Global Summit in Las Vegas, a fintech conference where he will be paid an expected six-figure sum for a scheduled speech.
Man on a mission
Johnson has kept Ukraine at the top of his public agenda since being forced to resign as PM last July over a string of personal scandals, including his attendance at COVID-19 lockdown-busting parties at his Downing Street home and office.
In power, Johnson had forged a strong personal bond with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and played a leading role in early Western efforts to arm Ukraine. His allies even mooted the idea of him becoming a formal envoy to Ukraine following his abrupt Downing Street exit, though the idea never came to fruition.
That hasn’t stopped Johnson continuing his personal lobbying push, however. He visited the Ukrainian capital Kyiv in January 2023 — despite no longer being a frontline politician — and has continued to speak in support on multiple occasions.
At the Dallas lunch on Monday, Johnson insisted Western backing for Ukraine need not be indefinite, telling those present he had “every hope that the Ukrainians will be able to deliver a very substantial counterpunch this summer,” and that he believed there was “a prospect of a complete Russian military collapse.”
And addressing concerns in Republican quarters that the U.S. should be focusing its attention on China rather than on a land war in Eastern Europe, Johnson said victory for Putin would be “terrible in its ramifications for south-east Asia, for the South China Sea, for all the areas of potential conflict between the great powers in the decades to come.”
By contrast, he added, Western solidarity on Ukraine had already sent a clear message to China.
“From Beijing’s point of view, they’re looking at this and they’re thinking this has massively increased the strategic ambiguity and the risk surrounding a venture against Taiwan,” Johnson said.
One businessman present pressed Johnson on corruption in Ukraine, which he said he had heard was “really bad again.”
But the former prime minister insisted the $50 billion spending package agreed by President Biden would prove “value for money.” The U.S. is getting a “huge, huge boost for global security for a relatively small outlay,” he said.
And Johnson being Johnson, he couldn’t resist a swipe at his old rival Emmanuel Macron, whom he has reportedly referred to in private as “Putin’s lickspittle.”
“I think it was my French friend and colleague Emmanuel Macron who said ‘Putin must not be humiliated,’” Johnson told the lunch party, adopting a faux French accent to gently mock the president.
“I think it takes an awful lot to humiliate Vladimir Putin, frankly,” Johnson went on. “I don’t think it’s our job to worry about Vladimir Putin’s ego, or his political prospects, or developments in his career.”
Whether Johnson retains the populist credentials to win over the most ardent Trump supporters Stateside remains to be seen, however.
In an interview with Nigel Farage on GB News last month, Trump said that while Johnson was a “wonderful guy” and “a friend of mine,” he had been disappointed by his time in office.
Johnson had gone “a bit on the liberal side,” Trump noted sadly. “Probably in a negative way.”
JACKSON, Miss. — A Democrat running for Mississippi governor said Tuesday that he will push legislators to enact an ethics package that includes limits on campaign donations, frequent disclosure about lobbyists’ spending and a ban on former state officials quickly becoming lobbyists.
“We’re going to send a message in the tune of that old Willie Nelson song: ‘Shut Out the Lights, the Party’s Over,’” Brandon Presley said during a news conference on the Capitol steps.
Presley is trying to unseat Republican Gov. Tate Reeves. Presley is in his fourth term as an elected member of the three-person Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities.
Reeves is seeking a second term as governor in a state where Republicans hold all statewide offices and a supermajority in the Legislature. Reeves previously served in other statewide elected offices — two terms as lieutenant governor and two terms as state treasurer.
“Brandon Presley is a classic Democrat — accusing every Republican of corruption while pocketing big money from liberal donors and hiding the ball on his leftwing positions,” Reeves campaign spokesperson Elliott Husbands said in a statement Tuesday.
Presley on Tuesday said a welfare misspending case shows corruption is a problem in Mississippi government. He referred to welfare money being spent on fitness classes taught by Paul Lacoste, who played at Mississippi State University and for the Canadian Football League. Lacoste taught classes taken by Reeves, several lawmakers and other people.
“If you’re Tate Reeves’ personal trainer, the guy that teaches him to do jumping jacks, then you can get $1.3 million,” Presley said. “This type of corruption and this sort of good old boy network makes me sick at my stomach.”
Lacoste is among more than three dozen people and businesses being sued by the Mississippi Department of Human Services to try to recover welfare money that was misspent between 2016 and 2019 — when Reeves was lieutenant governor and presiding over the state Senate.
Court records filed last year show Lacoste’s business, Victory Sports Foundation, had a $1.3 million contract to teach fitness classes from 2018 to 2019, with money coming from a nonprofit organization that had Human Services contracts to spend money from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families antipoverty program.
Husbands did not respond to Presley’s characterization of Lacoste as Reeves’ personal trainer. Instead, Husbands said Presley won’t explain his stance on “leftwing gender theory in schools and eliminating the income tax.”
Reeves had more than $9 million in his campaign funds and Presley had $1.6 million, according to finance reports filed last week, which show money raised and spent through April.
Mississippi, Louisiana and Kentucky are the only states electing governors this year.
HARRISBURG, Pa. — A Democrat running for a vacant seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives received President Joe Biden’s endorsement Monday in a race likely to determine control of the legislative chamber, with implications for abortion rights, the 2024 presidential contest and Gov. Josh Shapiro’s agenda.
Biden cited the majority House stakes and referred to abortion rights in backing Heather Boyd in a special election against Republican Katie Ford in suburban Philadelphia’s Delaware County.
Biden’s statement said the outcome of Tuesday’s vote will “determine the future of so many fundamental freedoms that Pennsylvanians hold dear” and called Boyd “an experienced public servant who will protect a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions, stand up for common sense gun safety laws and expand access to voting rights.”
Boyd and Ford are seeking to replace Rep. Mike Zabel, a Democrat who resigned in March after a labor lobbyist accused him sexually harassing her. Ford is a military veteran, school volunteer and behavioral therapist; Boyd is a former congressional and state legislative aide.
Ford campaign chair Jamie Santora, a Republican who held the House seat until 2018, said Monday that the Biden endorsement indicates Democrats are worried the contest is close.
A campaign statement provided by Santora said Biden “just endorsed a person who covered up a sexual harassment scandal for four years. This is just another one of his failures that is destroying this country.”
After 12 years with majority Republican control of the House, Democrats flipped a net of 12 seats in November, then held the one-vote majority by sweeping three special elections in February. There is a second vacancy being filled in Tuesday’s voting, a Republican-majority district in central Pennsylvania that is not expected to change hands.
Not counting the two open seats, Democrats have a 101-100 House majority, so a Ford victory would likely give Republicans enough votes to restore one of their own to the speakership and control the House voting calendar and agenda. The state Senate has a Republican majority.
Pennsylvania is a swing state, but the great majority of House Republicans hold conservative positions on social issues, election law and government spending. Democrats losing the chamber would make it more difficult for Shapiro, a Democrat in his first year, to pursue his agenda just as intensive negotiations get underway ahead of the June 30 state budget deadline.
Boyd has focused much of her campaign on her support for abortion rights, a critical issue in the House, as Republicans are one House floor vote away from putting before voters a referendum that would say the Pennsylvania Constitution does not guarantee any rights relating to abortion or public funding of abortions. Proposed constitutional amendments do not require a governor’s signature and cannot be vetoed.
Ford has said she is personally against abortion but does not want to change state law and would vote against advancing the referendum. She has criticized Boyd for not doing more after learning of the sexual harassment allegations against Zabel. Boyd has said she honored the lobbyist’s request for confidentiality and has been endorsed by her.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee said Biden makes most of his endorsements in statewide and federal elections but does sometimes endorse legislative candidates. Biden’s most recent endorsement in a Pennsylvania special election for the Legislature was Democrat Marty Flynn in his successful state Senate race two years ago.
AUSTIN, Texas — Rare momentum in the Texas Capitol for a tougher gun law flickered out Wednesday after Republicans stalled a bill that would raise the purchase age for AR-style rifles, virtually assuring the GOP-controlled Legislature will in no major way restrict gun access after more mass shootings.
The legislation — always a longshot at best — now has little chance of coming back after unexpectedly coming within reach of a full vote in the state House with the help of two Republicans, which sent Texas’ powerful gun lobby scrambling into action.
The unusual forward progress in Texas of a proposed gun restriction jolted the Capitol on Monday, two days after a gunman near Dallas opened fire at an outdoor shopping mall with an AR-style rifle, killing eight people.
But late Tuesday night, House Republicans let a deadline lapse that stops the bill from going any further.
“Uvalde families didn’t fail. Texas politicians did,” tweeted Kimberly Mata Rubio, whose 10-year-old daughter Lexi was among the 19 children and two teachers killed by a gunman at Robb Elementary School nearly a year ago in Uvalde, Texas.
The deadline to move the bill toward a full House vote came and went as protesters chanted outside the chamber, including Brett Cross, who had been raising his 10-year-old nephew Uziyah Garcia in Uvalde before the fourth-grader was killed in the shooting. Video on social media showed four Texas Department of Public Safety troopers escorting Cross out of the Capitol during the protest.
Cross said troopers removed him from the Capitol for being too loud. DPS officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the incident Wednesday. State Rep. James Talarico, a Democrat, said he was concerned by the removal and planned to seek more information.
The failure of the bill was not unexpected: Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has long rejected calls for tighter gun laws after mass shootings in Texas. He did so again this week after another shooting Saturday in Allen, Texas.
Two Republicans had unexpectedly helped advance the legislation that would raise the purchase age of semiautomatic weapons from 18 to 21. For gun control advocates in Texas, it was nothing short of a milestone.
But that was followed by gun rights groups — which are rarely forced to play defense in the Texas Capitol — mobilizing pushback in an effort to swiftly stamp out even a glimpse of momentum for gun control supporters.
Texas Gun Rights, one of the most outspoken groups, was joined by Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three people during a Wisconsin protest in 2020 and was later acquitted of murder.
“This is a perfect example of a knee jerk ‘just do something’ mentality,” said Chris McNutt, president of Texas Gun Rights.
It underlined how almost any attempt to tighten gun laws in Texas is off the table in the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature, which in recent years has made gun access easier following other mass shootings and shows no appetite for reversing course. That includes Abbott, who after the shooting in Allen, called mental health the root of the problem.
One of the Republicans who voted to advance the bill was state Rep. Sam Harless, who represents a solidly GOP-leaning suburb near Houston. He said he received no pushback form his House colleagues over his decision.
“I just voted my heart and my constituents are likely not the gun groups,” Harless said.
Another Republican, state Rep. Justin Holland, also joined Democrats on the House Select Committee on Community Safety in voting 8-5 to advance the measure that would raise the purchase age of certain semiautomatic weapons from 18 to 21.
In a statement defending his vote, Holland said, “I do not believe in gun control.” He noted that he previously voted in support of Texas removing training and background checks to carry a handgun. He also said he had earned three consecutive “A” ratings from the National Rifle Association — but acknowledged he now has “no idea” if they will rate him so highly going forward.
He said testimony given to the committee convinced him that a law raising the purchase age might serve as a “significant roadblock” to a young person acquiring certain semiautomatic weapons and causing harm.
LONDON — He hopes to win the hearts and minds of devoted Donald Trump supporters ahead of next year’s U.S. election.
But Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis failed to impress British business chiefs at a high-profile London event Friday, in a tired performance described variously as “horrendous,” “low-wattage” and “like the end of an overseas trip.”
The Florida governor, expected to launch his bid next month to challenge Trump as the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential race, met with more than 50 representatives of major U.K. firms and business lobbying groups as a part of a four-country “trade mission” ending in London Friday.
His trip was officially billed as an attempt to build Florida’s economic relationships with the U.K., Israel, South Korea and Japan, but it has been widely seen in Washington as a chance for DeSantis to present himself as a statesman on the world stage.
For several of those present, however, the statesmanship was lacking.
One U.K. business figure said DeSantis “looked bored” and “stared at his feet” as he met with titans of British industry in an event co-hosted by Lloyd’s of London — the world’s largest insurance marketplace.
“He had been to five different countries in five days and he definitely looked spent, but his message wasn’t presidential,” they told POLITICO. “He was horrendous.”
A second business figure who was in the room said it was a “low-wattage” performance and that “nobody in the room was left thinking, ‘this man’s going places’.”
They said: “It felt really a bit like we were watching a state-level politician. I wouldn’t be surprised if [people in attendance] came out thinking ‘that’s not the guy’.”
“There wasn’t any stardust.”
A third person present at the event agreed “it felt like the end of an overseas trip — which it was,” but insisted DeSantis “came across well.” The best a fourth could muster was that DeSantis was “fine.”
DeSantis also met with U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly and Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch during a whistlestop tour of London, though Prime Minister Rishi Sunak avoided a bilateral with the right-wing governor.
Sunak was at a Scottish Conservative Party conference Friday, which a No. 10 official said had been in his diary for a “long time.”
DeSantis is trailing Trump in polling among Republican primary voters, but has attracted support among a number of establishment Republicans who see him as a less chaotic figure than the ex-president.
The governor won a landslide re-election last year in what is traditionally a swing state, and has attracted praise from many Republicans for his “anti-woke” agenda and his commitment to tax cuts.
A government official said Badenoch, a rising star in the Conservative Party, and DeSantis had a “fruitful” conversation and that the pair “got on well.”
However, the pair did not discuss the prospect of a state-level economic Memorandum of Understanding between the U.K. and Florida, despite Britain’s efforts to sign similar arrangements with other U.S. states.
A second official said Badenoch’s team “wanted to avoid talking about a Florida MoU” as others are being prioritized, and because of the difficult optics for a British government also dealing with Joe Biden’s White House on several trade-related issues.
A Foreign Office spokesperson said Cleverly and DeSantis discussed “the close and important relationship between the U.K. and Florida.”
“The meeting was an opportunity to strengthen ties with the … U.S. state, and support bilateral economic co-operation that is already worth more than £5 billion a year,” they said.
LONDON — As the U.K. prepares to overhaul its competition regime, a fierce lobbying battle has broken out between the world’s largest tech companies and their challengers.
Ministers are gearing up to publish new competition legislation in late-April, giving regulators more power to stop a handful of companies dominating digital markets.
But concern over the U.S. tech giants’ influence in Westminster has prompted ministers close to the bill to warn that the new legislation could be watered down.
Two ministers have expressed concerns that Big Tech firms are seeking to weaken the process for appealing decisions made by the country’s beefed-up competition regulator, according to multiple people who were either present at those discussions or whose organizations were represented there. They requested anonymity to discuss private meetings.
One MP said a minister had also approached them to raise concerns, while at an industry roundtable, two ministers spoke of worry about Big Tech firms trying to influence the appeal mechanism.
An industry representative said: “There has been a sh*t load of lobbying from Big Tech, but I don’t know if they’ll succeed.”
Appealing to who?
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill will give new powers to a branch of the Competition and Markets Authority called the Digital Markets Unit (DMU). Under the plan, the DMU will be able fine a company 10 percent of their annual turnover for breaching a code of conduct.
The code, which has not yet been published, would be designed to ensure that a company with ‘strategic market status’ cannot “unfairly use its market power and strategic position to distort or undermine competition between users of the … firm’s services,” the government has said.
Jonathan Jones, senior consultant in public law at Linklaters and formerly the head of the U.K. government’s legal department, wrote that the plan would have “very significant consequences” for Big Tech firms and could force them to “significantly alter” their business models.
One of Big Tech’s concerns is that the bill will only allow companies to appeal decisions made by the DMU on whether or not the right process was followed, known as the judicial review standard, rather than the content or merit of the decision. That puts it in line with other regulators and should mean the process is faster, but it also makes it harder to appeal decisions.
Big Tech firms want to be able to appeal on the “merit”, arguing it is unfair that they can’t challenge whether a DMU decision was correct or not. They also argue it won’t necessarily be slower than the judicial review standard.
One of the biggest fears from medium-sized firms is that the biggest tech companies will use strategies to lengthen the appeals process or even get the entire bill delayed | iStock
Tech Minister Paul Scully, who has responsibility for the bill, told POLITICO: “We want to make sure that the legislation is flexible, proportionate and fair to both big and challenger companies. Any remediation needs to be in place quickly as digital markets move quickly.”
One representative of a mid-sized tech firm said: “This is the fundamental point of contention and it will influence whether the bill works for SMEs and challengers against Big Tech.
“The fear is that big companies with big lawyers understand how to eke things out (during the appeals process) so that they’ll keep their market advantage for years. We’ve heard ministers express these concerns too.”
Consumer group Which? is also urging the government to stay with its proposed appeal system. “For the DMU to work effectively, the government must stick to its guns and ensure that the decisions it reaches are not tied up in an elongated appeals process,” said director of policy, Rocio Concha.
‘Investigator and executioner’
But Jones argued that the bill will make the DMU too powerful.
“The DMU will have power to decide who it is going to regulate, set the rules that apply to them, and then enforce those rules,” he wrote. “This makes the DMU effectively legislator, investigator and executioner.”
On the appeal method, Jones argued that it is an “oversimplification” to think that the government’s proposed standard of appeal would be quicker than one based on merits.
Ben Greenstone, managing director of tech policy consultancy Taso Advisory, said: “I can understand the argument from both sides. The largest tech companies are incentivized to push back against this, but my guess is the government will keep the appeals process as it is, because it keeps it in line with the wider competition regime.”
However, he added the bill would work better if some sort of compromise can be found with the biggest tech companies.
The international playbook
One of the biggest fears from medium-sized firms is that the biggest tech companies will use strategies already tried and tested abroad to lengthen the appeals process or even get the entire bill delayed.
Rick VanMeter, executive director of the Coalition for App Fairness, which is based in the U.S. but has U.K. members, said: “In the U.S. we’ve learned that these mobile app gatekeepers’ will stop at nothing to preserve the status quo and squash their competition.
“To be successful, policymakers around the world must see through these gatekeepers’ efforts for what they are: self-serving attempts to retain their market power.”
Google and Microsoft declined to comment. Apple did not respond.
TOPEKA, Kan. — Conservative Republicans who want to thwart socially and environmentally conscious investing are now being pushed to water down their proposals after backlash from powerful business groups and fears that state pension systems could see huge losses.
In both Kansas and Indiana, where the GOP has legislative supermajorities, bankers associations and state chambers of commerce criticized the strongest versions of anti-ESG legislation currently under consideration as anti-free market.
In Kansas, their opposition prompted a Senate committee’s chair to drop the toughest version of its bill — applying anti-ESG rules to firms handling private investments — before hearings began this week. The Kansas committee was slated to vote Thursday but could postpone action on a milder version of an anti-ESG bill after the head of the state pension system for teachers and government workers warned that it could see $3.6 billion in losses over 10 years if the bill were passed.
And last month, legislative researchers in Indiana reported that its pension system expected the first version of a House bill to cost the system $6.7 billion over 10 years, prompting lawmakers to rewrite it before the chamber passed it.
ESG stands for environmental, social and governance and those factors’ increased use in investing in recent years inspired GOP attempts to thwart it. Now, those efforts are riling groups long allied with Republicans in backing less government regulation.
“This is the underlying political nature of this,” said Bryan McGannon, acting CEO and managing director for US SIF: The Forum for Responsible and Sustainable Investment. “They really aren’t thinking about the consequences of the kind of the real world impacts of what this means in the financial system.”
About one-eighth of U.S. assets being professionally managed, or $8.4 trillion, are being managed in line with ESG principles, according a report in December from US SIF, which promotes sustainable investing.
At least seven states, including Oklahoma, Texas and West Virginia, have enacted anti-ESG laws in the past two years. GOP Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Gianforte of Montana also have moved to ensure their states’ funds aren’t invested using ESG principles.
Critics of ESG contend that using investments to move the U.S. away from fossil fuels, address gun violence or protect abortion rights sacrifices earnings for investors and undercuts the finances of public pensions.
“The agent who is representing or investing on behalf of the principal has a fiduciary duty to put the principal’s interest over the agent’s interest,” Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, a conservative Republican, told the state Senate committee this week. “That principle is such a such a core of American law.”
Anti-ESG efforts also draw support from companies and industries that feel under attack, such as oil and natural gas producers. During an Indiana House committee hearing last month, lawmakers heard a litany of complaints from businesses, including those in coal mining and firearms production, about difficulties they blame on corporate ESG policies.
“This is, again, a social agenda chasing something that they shouldn’t be chasing,” Kansas Senate committee Chair Mike Thompson, a Kansas City-area Republican who labels ESG investments as “potentially dangerous.”
Public pension funds are caught in the debate as big institutional investors: The Kansas system has $25 billion in assets and Indiana’s has $45 billion. NASRA, the association representing U.S. state pension fund administrators, opposes any move — including on either side of the ESG debate — away from making the security of pension fund assets “the paramount goal.”
In Kansas, Thompson scrambled Wednesday to set up behind-the-scenes talks to address the state pension system’s concerns.
Its executive director, Alan Conroy, testified that Kansas lawmakers’ current proposals are so broad that the state pension system couldn’t hire or retain an investment manager who did “anything in that ESG world.” The pension system would have to fire them all, hire new ones and likely settle for lower investment returns, he said.
Similar concerns played out in Indiana, but the pension system there backed off its figure for estimated losses after House members revised their bill.
Supporters say ESG isn’t about boycotting certain industries or companies but of doing a better job assessing future risks, such as costs from major accidents or pollution, or a diminishing local water supply. They argue that considering such factors is part of an investment manager’s obligation to get the best returns possible.
“The free market is trying to create a better risk-assessment framework, more comprehensive,” said Zack Pistora, a Sierra Club lobbyist in Kansas.
In Kansas, the bankers and credit union association and the state Chamber of Commerce went from opposing the tougher version of the anti-ESG legislation to being neutral on all or most of its milder cousin. In Indiana, the state chamber endorsed the more limited version.
Eric Stafford, a veteran Kansas Chamber of Commerce lobbyist, said free markets will make corrections if ESG investing provides lesser returns. And Alex Orel, a lobbyist for the Kansas Bankers Association, worried about a political “pendulum.”
He said: “You swing too far to the right, you swing back and it hits you right in the face.”
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Davies reported from Indianapolis.
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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A Republican lawmaker in Florida wants bloggers who write about elected officials to register with the state, raising concern among First Amendment groups who are calling the proposal unconstitutional.
The bill, filed by Sen. Jason Brodeur of Lake Mary, would require bloggers to file periodic reports with the state if they are paid for posts about the state’s governor, lieutenant governor, cabinet members or legislative officials.
Bloggers would have to disclose who paid them and how much, along with other information such as where the post is located online. They would be fined $25 per each day the report is late, up to a maximum of $2,500 for each report. The legislation would not apply to content on “the website of a newspaper or other similar publication.”
The proposal, filed last week, has already begun to draw criticism from First Amendment groups who argue it violates press freedoms.
“The only thing that I can see is that it’s an attempt to limit and control free speech,” said Bobby Block, executive director of the First Amendment Foundation. “It’s an attempt to bring critics to heel and it’s an attempt to make sure that people who want to talk about you think real hard before they do so.”
It is unclear how far the proposal will go in the GOP-controlled statehouse during the upcoming legislative session, which begins Tuesday. The Associated Press reached out to Brodeur as well as Republican leaders of the House and Senate and a spokesman for Gov. Ron DeSantis for comment.
In a Twitter post, Brodeur said the bill is aimed at bringing transparency to blogs that advocate or lobby for specific causes. The text of his bill states that it would apply to any blogger who is paid to write about elected officials in Florida.
“Do you want to know the truth about the so-called “blogger” bill?” Brodeur’s post reads. “It brings the current pay-to-play scheme to light and gives voters clarity as to who is influencing their elected officials, JUST LIKE how we treat lobbyists. It’s an electioneering issue, not a free speech issue.”
Brodeur is also sponsoring a separate bill that would make it easier to sue media for defamation, a proposal pushed by DeSantis, a Republican.
DeSantis has made criticizing the media a major facet of his national profile as he gears up for an expected 2024 presidential run, employing a tactic popular with Republicans who view news outlets as biased against conservatives.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida has slammed the proposal as “un-American to its core.”
“This is a clear violation of the First Amendment because it strongly discourages bloggers from speaking on politics – one of the most critical types of speech for maintaining a democracy,” the group said in a statement.
LONDON — Coronavirus lockdowns have been lifted and face masks are few and far between in Britain these days.
But COVID-19 has shot back into the headlines through the leak of more than 100,000 private messages sent or received by the health minister as the government scrambled to respond to the new, fast-spreading respiratory virus.
The words of former Health Secretary Matt Hancock in 2020 have revived painful debates in a country that has seen more than 182,000 coronavirus deaths. Could some deaths have been avoided if lockdowns came sooner, or did more people suffer because restrictions lasted too long?
The nature of the leak has also sparked a storm. Hancock shared his WhatsApp messages with journalist Isabel Oakeshott as they worked on a book, “Pandemic Diaries.” Oakeshott, in turn, handed the messages to the Daily Telegraph newspaper, which has splashed them in a series of front-page stories.
Hancock accused the journalist of a “massive betrayal and breach of trust,” but Oakeshott argued that she’d acted in the public interest.
“This is about the millions of people, every one of us in this country that were adversely affected by the catastrophic decisions to lock down this country repeatedly, often on the flimsiest of evidence for political reasons,” Oakeshott told the BBC.
Hancock said there was no public interest, because he has already given the messages to a public inquiry into Britain’s handling of COVID-19, which is due to start its hearings later this year.
Critics say Oakeshott has a well-known political agenda. She has called lockdowns a “disaster,” and her partner is politician Richard Tice, leader of the lockdown-skeptical Reform Party, formerly known as the Brexit Party.
The Telegraph stories quote selectively from the messages to convey the idea that Hancock resisted others — including then Prime Minister Boris Johnson — who were wary of stringent restrictions.
Steven Barnett, professor of journalism at the University of Westminster, said the Hancock leak was less about the public interest than “about driving an agenda that says the lockdown policies were wrong.”
“As often happens in the U.K. with print journalism, we are getting an agenda being driven by a particular newspaper with a very clear view of what is right and what is wrong,” he said.
Others said Hancock was naive to have trusted Oakeshott, who has a history of spilling secrets.
In 2019, she revealed leaked memos in which the U.K. ambassador in Washington, Kim Darroch, called the Trump administration dysfunctional and inept. The White House cut off contact with the British envoy, and Darroch had to resign.
In 2011, Oakeshott wrote a story disclosing that Vicky Pryce, an economist married to a lawmaker, had lied to police to let her husband escape a speeding fine. Oakeshott later handed her correspondence with Pryce to prosecutors. Both Pryce and her now ex-husband ended up going to prison.
The Telegraph stories have stirred painful memories for many in Britain, which had one of Europe’s highest coronavirus death tolls. One article claimed that Hancock ignored scientific advice to test everyone entering nursing homes for COVID-19, a lapse that led to thousands of deaths.
Hancock said the messages had been deceptively edited. He said testing at the time was limited — in Britain and elsewhere — by a lack of capacity.
James Bethell, a former junior health minister, defended Hancock, saying the messages reflected the confused early days of the pandemic, when officials were working under intense pressure with incomplete knowledge.
“There was a moment we were very unclear about whether domestic pets could transmit the disease,” he told Channel 4 News. “In fact, there was an idea at one moment that we might have to ask the public to exterminate all the cats in Britain.”
Lindsay Jackson, spokesperson for the pressure group COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, said the leaks showed the importance of families being allowed to question Hancock and other officials during the public inquiry, “so we can get full answers to our questions in the right setting instead of having to relive the horrors of our loss through exposés.”
The revelations are the latest setback for Hancock, who was forced to resign from the Conservative government in June 2021 after breaching coronavirus lockdown rules by having an affair with an aide — violating a ban on different households mixing.
He remains a lawmaker, but was suspended by the Conservative Party in November for flying to Australia for several weeks to appear on television reality show “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here.”
Hancock apologized Thursday for the impact of the leaks “on the very many people — political colleagues, civil servants and friends — who worked hard with me to get through the pandemic and save lives.”
“I will not be commenting further on any other stories or false allegations that Isabel will make,” he said in a statement. “I will respond to the substance in the appropriate place, at the inquiry, so that we can properly learn all the lessons based on a full and objective understanding of what happened in the pandemic, and why.”
CINCINNATI — The racketeering trial of former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder and lobbyist Matt Borges was cancelled due to illness again Friday, giving jurors a long holiday weekend to mull striking new details revealed this week by players directly involved in an alleged $60 million bribery scheme.
It marked the third time since the largest corruption trial in state history began Jan. 23 that U.S. District Judge Timothy Black in Cincinnati has postponed proceedings. Two previous pauses involved jurors testing positive for COVID-19; on Friday, Householder himself was sick, though apparently not with the coronavirus.
Testimony is scheduled to resume Tuesday, after the Presidents Day holiday. Before being slowed by illnesses, the trial was expected to last about six weeks.
The jury must decide whether Householder, 63, and Borges, 50, are guilty of conspiracy to participate in a racketeering enterprise involving bribery and money laundering. Both have pleaded not guilty and maintain innocence. Each faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
An indictment alleges Householder, Borges, three other people and a dark money group called Generation Now orchestrated an elaborate scheme, secretly funded by Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp., to secure Householder’s power, elect his allies, pass legislation containing a $1 billion bailout for two aging nuclear power plants, and then vex a ballot effort to overturn the bill with a dirty tricks campaign. The arrests happened in July 2020.
Juan Cespedes, a former lobbyist who has pleaded guilty in the case, provided the most gripping testimony of the week, if not the entire trial.
It amounted to the first time Cespedes had spoken publicly since the arrests. Jeff Longstreth, a longtime Householder associate who was also arrested and charged, has pleaded guilty and is expected to testify soon. The third man arrested along with Householder and Borges, long-powerful Statehouse lobbyist Neil Clark, pleaded not guilty before dying by suicide in March 2021.
“I’m here to tell the truth and be accountable for it,” Cespedes said as his testimony began.
He said he worked for FirstEnergy Solutions and coordinated tens of millions in donations steered to Generation Now, which he described as controlled by Householder and Longstreth.
Cespedes testified Monday to directing a client to give Householder, through Generation Now, a $500,000 campaign contribution in exchange for legislation bailing out two aging nuclear plants owned by his company, which the Ohio House would eventually pass under Householder’s watch.
He said that at an Oct. 10, 2018, meeting, another Columbus lobbyist, Robert Klaffky, slid a $400,000 check across to Householder while emphasizing the importance of the legislation.
“Our client cares very much about this issue,” Klaffky said.
Householder looked into the envelope containing the check, made out from FirstEnergy to Generation Now, and said, “Well yes, they do.” Klaffky told cleveland.com he does not recall saying those things.
The remaining $100,000 was given to Longstreth to give to Householder, Cespedes said.
Householder’s lawyers argued during opening statements that he was not part of any criminal conspiracy but was engaging in politics as usual.
Cespedes described the contribution as a clear pay-to-play scheme.
“We were trying to establish the fact that our support was specifically tied to the legislation,” Cespedes said.
Generation Now has pleaded guilty to its role in the scheme. In a deal to avoid prosecution, Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. has admitted to using dark money groups to fund the bribery scheme and agreed to pay $230 million and other conditions.
Cespedes testified Tuesday that he and Borges paid $15,000 off the books in 2019 to referendum operative Tyler Fehrman to try to get inside information on a campaign to repeal the nuclear bailout bill, known as House Bill 6.
The alleged $15,000 bribe is key to the government’s case against Borges, a former chair of the Ohio Republican Party. His attorneys describe the payment as a loan to help a friend.
Cespedes testified that it was for a spying effort on behalf of FirstEnergy Solutions, a then-subsidiary of FirstEnergy. He said he tried to keep the firm’s executive chair, John Kiani, in the dark because he believed Kiani would apply pressure to go through with the bribe. After Kiani learned of the plan, that came to pass, Cespedes said.
“(W)hat happened to the black ops,” Kiani asked in an Aug. 31, 2019, text, a reference Cespedes testified was to the plan to get inside information. On Sept. 2, 2019, Cespedes said he told Borges that Kiani “reiterated to do whatever it takes to get this information.”
Cespedes testified that Kiani had plans to operate the two Ohio nuclear plants for a short period, get a government bailout, then sell them in a deal that could have netted him $100 million. On cross-examination, Borges’ attorneys got Cespedes to concede that he, too, could have gotten rich off the planned sale.
Jurors also heard hours of tapes this week of the voice of the late Clark, which were gathered by two undercover FBI agents posing as developers who had hired him as their lobbyist.
Clark took the pair to a dinner at the Aubergine Private Dining Club in suburban Columbus on Sept. 23, 2019, to meet Householder — and advised them to bring a $50,000 check made out to Generation Now. Republican state Rep. Jay Edwards, of Athens County in southeastern Ohio, and a House staffer also attended.
In the recordings, Clark described himself as Householder’s “proxy” and told the agents that, for getting attention, “a noticeable number is $15,000, $20,000 or $25,000.” He said “it goes into a (c)(4),” referring to Generation Now by the IRS code section — 501(c)(4) — that sets the rules for a category of tax-exempt organizations that can raise and spend unlimited amounts without disclosing their donors.
“It’s the speaker’s (c)(4). That’s how it works,” he told them.
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This story was first published on February 17, 2023. It was updated on February 19, 2023 to correct how witness Juan Cespedes reiterated an executive’s desire “to do whatever it takes to get this information” on a referendum effort to defendant Matt Borges. Cespedes testified that he told Borges verbally; it was not contained in a text message.
WAREHAM, Dorset — Ukrainian fighter pilots will soon be trained in Britain — but Kyiv will have to wait a little longer for the modern combat jets it craves.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy left the U.K. Wednesday with a firm British commitment to train fighter jet pilots on NATO-standard aircraft, along with an offer of longer-range missiles.
U.K. Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has now been tasked with investigating which jets the U.K. might be able to supply to Ukraine, Downing Street announced — but Prime Minister Rishi Sunak fell short of making actual promises on their supply, which his spokesman said would only ever be a “long-term” option.
Speaking at a joint press conference at the Lulworth military camp in Wareham, southern England, Sunak said the priority must be to “arm Ukraine in the short-term” to ensure the country is not vulnerable to a fresh wave of Russian attacks this spring.
Standing alongside Zelenskyy in front of a British-made Challenger 2 tank, Sunak restated that “nothing is off the table” when it comes to provision of military assistance to Ukraine, and said fourth-generation fighter jets were part of his conversation with the Ukrainian president “today, and have been previously.”
These talks also covered the supply chains required to support such sophisticated aircraft, Sunak said.
But he cautioned a decision to deliver jets would only be taken in coalition with allies, and said training pilots must come first and could take “some time.”
“That’s why we have announced today that we will be training Ukrainian air force on NATO-standard platforms, because the first step in being able to provide advanced aircrafts is to have soldiers or aviators who are capable of using them,” Sunak said. “We need to make sure they are able to operate the aircraft they might eventually be using.”
The first Challenger 2 tanks pledged by Britain will arrive in Ukraine by next month, Sunak added.
President Zelenskyy ramped up the pressure on Rishi Sunak joking that he had left parliament two years earlier grateful for “delicious English tea”, but this time he would be “thanking all of you in advance for powerful English planes” | Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images
Describing his private conversations with Sunak as “fruitful,” Zelenskyy said he was “very grateful” that Britain had finally heard Kyiv’s call for longer-range missiles.
But he warned that without fighter jets, there is a risk of “stagnation” in his country’s battle against Russian occupation.
“Without the weapons that we are discussing now, and the weapons that we just discussed with Rishi earlier today, and how Britain is going to help us, you know, all of this is very important,” he said. “Without this, there would be stagnation, which will not bring anything good.”
Rolling out the red carpet
The U.K. had rolled out the red carpet for Zelenskyy’s surprise day-long visit, which alongside the visit to the military base included talks with Sunak at Downing Street, a meeting with King Charles at Buckingham Palace and a historic address to the U.K. parliament in Westminster.
Only a handful of leaders have made such an address in Westminster Hall over the past 30 years, including Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama.
“We have freedom. Give us wings to protect it,” Zelenskyy told British lawmakers, after symbolically handing House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle a helmet used by one of Ukraine’s fighter pilots. The message written upon it stated: “Combat aircraft for Ukraine, wings for freedom.”
Zelenskyy’s call was backed by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who urged Sunak to meet his request.
“We have more than 100 Typhoon jets. We have more than 100 Challenger 2 tanks,” he said. “The best single use for any of these items is to deploy them now for the protection of the Ukrainians — not least because that is how we guarantee our own long-term security.”
Western defense ministers will gather to discuss further military aid to Ukraine on February 14, at a meeting at the U.S. base of Ramstein in southwest Germany.
Sunak’s spokesman said that while Britain has made no decision on whether to send its own jets, “there is an ongoing discussion among other countries about their own fighter jets, some of which are more akin to what Ukrainian pilots are used to.”
Training day
Britain’s announcement marks the first public declaration by a European country on the training of Ukrainian pilots, and could spur other European nations into following suit. France is already considering a similar request from Kyiv.
Yuriyy Sak, an adviser to Ukrainian Minister of Defence Oleksii Reznikov, praised the U.K.’s decision and said allies “know very well that in order to defeat Russia in 2023, Ukraine needs all types of weaponry,” short of nuclear.
“A few weeks ago, the U.K. showed leadership in the issue of providing tanks to Ukraine, and then other allies have followed their example,” he said. “Now the U.K. is again showing leadership in the pilot training issue. Hopefully other countries will follow.”
The British scheme is likely to run in parallel to an American program to train Ukrainian pilots to fly U.S. fighters, for which the U.S. House of Representatives approved $100 million last summer. In October Ukraine announced a group of several dozen pilots had been selected for training on Western fighter jets.
The first Ukrainian pilots are expected to arrive in Britain in the spring, with Downing Street warning the instruction program could last up to five years. Military analysts, however, say the length of any such scheme could vary significantly depending on the pilots’ previous expertise and the type of fighter they learn to operate.
The U.K. announcement is therefore of “significant value” but “does not suggest the provision of fighter jets is imminent,” said Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow for airpower at the British think tank RUSI.
The British program is likely to involve simulators and focus on providing training on NATO tactics and basic cockpit procedures to Ukrainian pilots who already have expertise in flying Soviet-era jets, Bronk said.
The new training programs come in addition to the expansion in the numbers of Ukrainian early recruits being trained on basic tactics in the U.K., from 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers this year.
‘Unimaginable hardships’
Wednesday’s visit marked Zelenskyy’s first trip to the U.K. since Russia’s invasion almost a year ago and only his second confirmed journey outside Ukraine during the war, following a visit to the United States last December.
The Ukrainian president arrived on a Royal Air Force plane at an airport north of London Wednesday morning, the entire trip a closely guarded secret until he landed.
Recounting his first visit to London back in 2020, when he sat in British wartime leader Winston Churchill’s armchair, Zelenskyy said: “I certainly felt something — but it is only now that I know what the feeling was. It is a feeling of how bravery takes you through the most unimaginable hardships to finally reward you with victory.”
Zelenskyy travelled to Paris Wednesday evening for talks with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. In a short statement, Zelenskyy said France and Germany “can be game-changers,” adding: “The earlier we get heavy weapons, long-range missiles, aircraft, alongside tanks, the sooner the war will end.”
Macron said Ukraine “can count on France and Europe to [help] win the war,” while Scholz added that Zelenskyy expected attendance at a summit of EU leaders in Brussels Thursday “is a sign of solidarity.”
Dan Bloom and Clea Caulcutt provided additional reporting.
LONDON — As nations around the world scramble to secure crucial semiconductor supply chains over fears about relations with China, the U.K. is falling behind.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the world’s heavy reliance on Taiwan and China for the most advanced chips, which power everything from iPhones to advanced weapons. For the past two years, and amid mounting fears China could kick off a new global security crisis by invading Taiwan, Britain’s government has been readying a plan to diversify supply chains for key components and boost domestic production.
Yet according to people close to the strategy, the U.K.’s still-unseen plan — which missed its publication deadline last fall — has suffered from internal disconnect and government disarray, setting the country behind its global allies in a crucial race to become more self-reliant.
A lack of experience and joined-up policy-making in Whitehall, a period of intense political upheaval in Downing Street, and new U.S. controls on the export of advanced chips to China, have collectively stymied the U.K.’s efforts to develop its own coherent plan.
The way the strategy has been developed so far “is a mistake,” said a former senior Downing Street official.
Falling behind
During the pandemic, demand for semiconductors outstripped supply as consumers flocked to sort their home working setups. That led to major chip shortages — soon compounded by China’s tough “zero-COVID” policy.
Since a semiconductor fabrication plant is so technologically complex — a single laser in a chip lithography system of German firm Trumpf has 457,000 component parts — concentrating manufacturing in a few companies helped the industry innovate in the past.
But everything changed when COVID-19 struck.
“Governments suddenly woke up to the fact that — ‘hang on a second, these semiconductor things are quite important, and they all seem to be concentrated in a small number of places,’” said a senior British semiconductor industry executive.
Beijing’s launch of a hypersonic missile in 2021 also sent shivers through the Pentagon over China’s increasing ability to develop advanced AI-powered weapons. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine added to geopolitical uncertainty, upping the pressure on governments to onshore manufacturers and reduce reliance on potential conflict hotspots like Taiwan.
Against this backdrop, many of the U.K.’s allies are investing billions in domestic manufacturing.
The Biden administration’s CHIPS Act, passed last summer, offers $52 billion in subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. The EU has its own €43 billion plan to subsidize production — although its own stance is not without critics. Emerging producers like India, Vietnam, Singapore and Japan are also making headway in their own multi-billion-dollar efforts to foster domestic manufacturing.
US President Joe Biden | Samuel Corum/Getty Images
Now the U.K. government is under mounting pressure to show its own hand. In a letter to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak first reported by the Times and also obtained by POLITICO, Britain’s semiconductor sector said its “confidence in the government’s ability to address the vital importance of the industry is steadily declining with each month of inaction.”
That followed the leak of an early copy of the U.K.’s semiconductor strategy, reported on by Bloomberg, warning that Britain’s over-dependence on Taiwan for its semiconductor foundries makes it vulnerable to any invasion of the island nation by China.
Taiwan, which Beijing considers part of its territory, makes more than 90 percent of the world’s advanced chips, with its Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) vital to the manufacture of British-designed semiconductors.
U.S. and EU action has already tempted TSMC to begin building new plants and foundries in Arizona and Germany.
“We critically depend on companies like TSMC,” said the industry executive quoted above. “It would be catastrophic for Western economies if they couldn’t get access to the leading-edge semiconductors any more.”
Whitehall at war
Yet there are concerns both inside and outside the British government that key Whitehall departments whose input on the strategy could be crucial are being left out in the cold.
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is preparing the U.K.’s plan and, according to observers, has fiercely maintained ownership of the project. DCMS is one of the smallest departments in Whitehall, and is nicknamed the ‘Ministry of Fun’ due to its oversight of sports and leisure, as well as issues related to tech.
“In other countries, semiconductor policies are the product of multiple players,” said Paul Triolo, a senior vice president at U.S.-based strategy firm ASG. This includes “legislative support for funding major subsidies packages, commercial and trade departments, R&D agencies, and high-level strategic policy bodies tasked with things like improving supply chain resilience,” he said.
“You need all elements of the U.K.’s capabilities. You need the diplomatic services, the security services. You need everyone working together on this,” said the former Downing Street official quoted above. “There are huge national security aspects to this.”
The same person said that relying on “a few [lower] grade officials in DCMS — officials that don’t see the wider picture, or who don’t have either capability or knowledge,” is a mistake.
For its part, DCMS rejected the suggestion it is too closely guarding the plan, with a spokesperson saying the ministry is “working closely with industry experts and other government departments … so we can protect and grow our domestic sector and ensure greater supply chain resilience.”
The spokesperson said the strategy “will be published as soon as possible.”
But businesses keen for sight of the plan remain unconvinced the U.K. has the right team in place for the job.
Key Whitehall personnel who had been involved in project have now changed, the executive cited earlier said, and few of those writing the strategy “have much of a background in the industry, or much first-hand experience.”
Progress was also sidetracked last year by lengthy deliberations over whether the U.K. should block the sale of Newport Wafer Fab, Britain’s biggest semiconductor plant, to Chinese-owned Nexperia on national security grounds, according to two people directly involved in the strategy. The government eventually announced it would block the sale in November.
And while a draft of the plan existed last year, it never progressed to the all-important ministerial “write-around” process — which gives departments across Whitehall the chance to scrutinize and comment upon proposals.
Waiting for budget day
Two people familiar with current discussions about the strategy said ministers are now aiming to make their plan public in the run-up to, or around, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s March 15 budget statement, although they stressed that timing could still change.
Leaked details of the strategy indicate the government will set aside £1 billion to support chip makers. Further leaks indicate this will be used as seed money for startups, and for boosting existing firms and delivering new incentives for investors.
U.K. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt | Leon Neal/Getty Images
There is wrangling with the Treasury and other departments over the size of these subsidies. Experts also say it is unlikely to be ‘new’ money but diverted from other departments’ budgets.
“We’ll just have to wait for something more substantial,” said a spokesperson from one semiconductor firm commenting on the pre-strategy leaks.
But as the U.K. procrastinates, key British-linked firms are already being hit by the United States’ own fast-evolving semiconductor strategy. U.S. rules brought in last October — and beefed up in recent days by an agreement with the Netherlands — are preventing some firms from selling the most advanced chip designs and manufacturing equipment to China.
British-headquartered, Japanese-owned firm ARM — the crown jewel of Britain’s semiconductor industry, which sells some designs to smartphone manufacturers in China — is already seeing limits on what it can export. Other British firms like Graphcore, which develops chips for AI and machine learning, are feeling the pinch too.
“The U.K. needs to — at pace — understand what it wants its role to be in the industries that will define the future economy,” said Andy Burwell, director for international trade at business lobbying group the CBI.
Where do we go from here?
There are serious doubts both inside and outside government about whether Britain’s long-awaited plan can really get to the heart of what is a complex global challenge — and opinion is divided on whether aping the U.S. and EU’s subsidy packages is either possible or even desirable for the U.K.
A former senior government figure who worked on semiconductor policy said that while the U.K. definitely needs a “more coherent worked-out plan,” publishing a formal strategy may actually just reveal how “complicated, messy and beyond our control” the issue really is.
“It’s not that it is problematic that we don’t have a strategy,” they said. “It’s problematic that whatever strategy we have is not going to be revolutionary.” They described the idea of a “boosterish” multi-billion-pound investment in Britain’s own fabricator industry as “pie in the sky.”
The former Downing Street official said Britain should instead be seeking to work “in collaboration” with EU and U.S. partners, and must be “careful to avoid” a subsidy war with allies.
The opposition Labour Party, hot favorites to form the next government after an expected 2024 election, takes a similar view. “It’s not the case that the U.K. can do this on its own,” Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy said recently, urging ministers to team up with the EU to secure its supply of semiconductors.
One area where some experts believe the U.K. may be able to carve out a competitive advantage, however, is in the design of advanced semiconductors.
“The U.K. would probably be best placed to pursue support for start-up semiconductor design firms such as Graphcore,” said ASG’s Triolo, “and provide support for expansion of capacity at the existing small number of companies manufacturing at more mature nodes” such as Nexperia’s Newport Wafer Fab.
Ministers launched a research project in December aimed at tapping into the U.K. semiconductor sector’s existing strength in design. The government has so far poured £800 million into compound semiconductor research through universities, according to a recent report by the House of Commons business committee.
But the same group of MPs wants more action to support advanced chip design. Burwell at the CBI business group said the U.K. government must start “working alongside industry, rather than the government basically developing a strategy and then coming to industry afterwards.”
Right now the government is “out there a bit struggling to see what levers they have to pull,” said the senior semiconductor executive quoted earlier.
Under World Trade Organization rules, governments are allowed to subsidize their semiconductor manufacturing capabilities, the executive pointed out. “The U.S. is doing it. Europe’s doing it. Taiwan does it. We should do it too.”
This story has been updated. Cristina Gallardo contributed reporting.
They’re dazzlingly rich, and they expect to be in charge for a long, long time.
The monarchs leading Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia might seem from the outside like a trio of like-minded Persian Gulf autocrats. Yet their regional rivalry is intense, and Western capitals have become a key venue in a reputational battle royale.
“All of these governments … really want to have the largest mindspace among Western governments,” said Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
As the Gulf states seek to wean themselves off the oil that made them rich, they know they’ll need friends to help transform their economies (and modernize their societies).
“They think it’s important not to be tarred as mere hydrocarbon producers who are ruining the planet,” Alterman added.
The Qatari government categorically denies any unlawful behavior, saying it “works through institution-to-institution engagement and operates in full compliance with international laws and regulations.”
Against the background of regional rivalries, that engagement has become increasingly robust. While tensions with Riyadh have eased over the past few years, Qatar’s mutual antagonism with the United Arab Emirates has been particularly severe.
Qatar’s survival strategy
Regional rivalries burst beyond the Middle East in 2017 in a standoff that would reshape regional dynamics.
Until then, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had been essentially frenemies. As members of the Gulf Coordination Council, they’d been working toward building a common market and currency in the region — not so different from the European Union.
But different responses to the Arab Spring frayed relations to a breaking point.
The Qatar-based Al Jazeera news network gave a platform to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist party that rode a wave of unrest into power in Egypt and challenged governments throughout the Arab world. And Doha didn’t just offer a bullhorn — it gave the Muslim Brotherhood direct financial backing.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, considered the Muslim Brotherhood to be a terrorist group.
Along with Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE severed diplomatic ties with Doha in June 2017, barring Qatar’s access to airspace and sea routes; Saudi Arabia closed its border, blocking Qatar’s only land crossing.
Among the demands: close Al Jazeera, end military coordination with Turkey and step away from Iran. Qatar refused — even though it was crunch time for building infrastructure ahead of the 2022 World Cup and 40 percent of Qatar’s food supplies came through Saudi Arabia.
Fighting what it called an illegal “blockade” became an existential mission for Doha.
“The only thing Qatar could do was make sure everyone knew Qatar exists and is a nice place,” said MEP Hannah Neumann, chair of the Parliament’s delegation for relations with the Arab Peninsula (DARP).
“They really stepped up the diplomatic efforts all around the world to also show, ‘We are the good ones,’” said Neumann, of the German Greens.
Qatar needed Brussels because it had already lost an even bigger ally: Washington. Not only did then-President Donald Trump take the side of Qatar’s rivals in the fight; he also appeared to take credit for the idea of isolating Qatar — even though the U.S.’s largest military base in the region is just southwest of Doha.
Elsewhere, Qatar had already been working with the London-headquartered consultancy Portland Communications since at least 2014 — as its World Cup hosting coup was becoming a PR nightmare, with stories emerging over bribed FIFA officials and exploited migrant workers.
Exploding onto the EU scene
In Brussels, Doha leaned on the head of its EU Mission, Abdulrahman Mohammed Al-Khulaifi, who had moved to Belgium in 2017 from Germany, to step up European relations.
Within days of the fissure, Al-Khulaifi appeared in meetings at NATO, and within months opened a think tank called the Middle East Dialogue Center to hone Doha’s image as an open promoter of debate (in contrast,it contended, to its neighbors) and pressure the EU to intervene in the Mideast.
By the next year, he was speaking on panels about combating violent extremism — alongside Dutch and Belgian federal police. By late 2019, Al-Khulaifi hosted the first meeting of embassy’s Qatar-EU friendship group with a “working dinner.”
“The situation following the blockade has pushed Qatar to establish closer relations outside the context of the regional crisis with, for example, the European Union,” Pier Antonio Panzeri, then chair of the Parliament’s human rights subcommittee, told Euractiv in 2018.
The following year, Panzeri would attend the Qatari-hosted “International Conference on National, Regional and International Mechanisms to Combat Impunity and Ensure Accountability under International Law,” and heap praise on the country’s human rights record.
Panzeri is now in a Belgian prison, facing corruption charges; his NGO, Fight Impunity, is under intense scrutiny for being a possible front.
Neumann said that Qatar’s survival strategy has paid off. “Absolutely, it worked,” she said. “I think it’s fair enough, if they didn’t do it with illegal means.”
Directly or indirectly, Qatar clocked several big victories during this period, including multiple resolutions in Parliament on human rights in Saudi Arabia and a call to end arms exports to Riyadh in the wake of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Doha also inked a cooperation arrangement with the EU in March 2018, setting the stage for closer ties.
Frenemies once again
Since Saudi Arabia and Qatar signed a deal to end the crisis two years ago, Riyadh-Doha relations have generally thawed. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 37, traveled to Qatar in November for the World Cup and embraced Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, 42, while wearing a scarf in the host’s colors.
However, relations between Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — led by Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, 61 — remain chilly.
As the Gulf transforms, the United Arab Emirates “has come to see that role as being a status quo power,” said Alterman. On the part of its neighbor, “Qatar has come to see that role as aligning with forces of change in the region, and that’s created a certain amount of mutual resentment.”
Qatar’s smaller scale contributes to Doha’s sense of internal security, fueling its openness to engaging with groups that others see as an existential threat.
Qataris see themselves as “champions of the Davids against the Goliath,” said Andreas Krieg, an assistant professor at King’s College London who has worked in the past as a consultant for the Qatari armed forces. Civil society organizations founded by “a range of different opposition figures, Saudi opposition figures in the West, have been supported financially by Qatar as well,” Krieg added. (Khashoggi, one of the era’s most prominent Saudi opposition figures, had connections to the state-backed Qatar Foundation.) “Hence why Qatar was always seen as sort of a thorn in the side of its neighbors.”
And while the €1.5 million cash haul confiscated by Belgian federal police looks like an eye-popping sum, it certainly pales in comparison to the amount the Gulf states spend on legal lobbying in Brussels. And that sum, in turn, pales in comparison to what those countries spend in Washington.
“Brussels isn’t that important,” Krieg said. “If you look at the money that these Gulf countries spend in Washington, these are tens of millions of dollars every year on think tanks, academics … creating their own media outlets, investing strategically into Fox News, investing into massive PR operations.”
Nonetheless, the EU remains a key target. Abu Dhabi is strengthening its “long-standing partnership” with Brussels on economic and regional security matters “through deep, strategic cooperation with EU institutions and Member States,” said a UAE official, in a statement.
“Brussels was always a hub to create a narrative,” said Krieg.
And right now, each of the region’s power players is deeply motivated to change that narrative.
Alterman invoked a broad impression of the Gulf countries as “people who have more money than God who want to take the world back to the 7th Century.”
But that’s wrong, he said. “This is all about shaping the future with remarkably high stakes, profound discomfort about how the world will relate to them over the next 30 to 50 years — and frankly, a series of rulers who see themselves being in power for the next 30 to 50 years.”
