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  • Fact check: Biden makes 5 false claims about guns, plus some about other subjects | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Biden makes 5 false claims about guns, plus some about other subjects | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden made false claims about a variety of topics, notably including gun policy, during a series of official speeches and campaign remarks over the last two weeks.

    He made at least five false claims related to guns, a subject on which he has repeatedly been inaccurate during his presidency. He also made a false claim about the extent of his support from environmental groups. And he used incorrect figures about the population of Africa, his own travel history and how much renewable energy Texas uses.

    Here is a fact check of these claims, plus a fact check on a Biden exaggeration about guns. The White House declined to comment on Tuesday.

    Beau Biden and red flag laws

    In a Friday speech at the National Safer Communities Summit in Connecticut, Biden spoke of how a gun control law he signed in 2022 has provided federal funding for states to expand the use of gun control tools like “red flag” laws, which allow the courts to temporarily seize the guns of people who are deemed to be a danger to themselves or others. After mentioning red flag laws, Biden invoked his late son Beau Biden, who served as attorney general of Delaware, and said: “As my son was the first to enforce when he was attorney general.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claim is false. Delaware did not have a red flag law when Beau Biden was state attorney general from 2007 to 2015. The legislation that created Delaware’s red flag program was named the Beau Biden Gun Violence Prevention Act, but it was passed in 2018, three years after Beau Biden died of brain cancer. (In 2013, Beau Biden had pushed for a similar bill, but it was rejected by the state Senate.) The president has previously said, correctly, that a Delaware red flag law was named after his son.

    Delaware was far from the first state to enact a red flag law. Connecticut passed the first such state law in the country in 1999.

    Stabilizing braces

    In the same speech, the president spoke confusingly of his administration’s effort to make it more difficult for Americans to purchase stabilizing braces, devices that are attached to the rear of pistols, most commonly AR-15-style pistols, and make it easier to fire them one-handed.

    “Put a pistol on a brace, and it…turns into a gun,” Biden said. “Makes them where you can have a higher-caliber weapon – a higher-caliber bullet – coming out of that gun. It’s essentially turning it into a short-barreled rifle, which has been a weapon of choice by a number of mass shooters.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claims that a stabilizing brace turns a pistol into a gun and increases the caliber of a gun or bullet are false. A pistol is, obviously, already a gun, and “a pistol brace does not have any effect on the caliber of ammunition that a gun fires or anything about the basic functioning of the gun itself,” said Stephen Gutowski, a CNN contributor who is the founder of the gun policy and politics website The Reload.

    Biden’s assertion that the addition of a stabilizing brace can “essentially” turn a pistol into a short-barreled rifle is subjective; it’s the same argument his administration’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has made in support of its attempt to subject the braces to new controls. The administration’s regulatory effort is being challenged in the courts by gun rights advocates.

    Gun manufacturers and lawsuits

    Repeating a claim he made in his 2022 State of the Union address and on other occasions, Biden said at a campaign fundraiser in California on Monday: “The only industry in America you can’t sue is the – is the gun manufacturers.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claim is false, as CNN and other fact-checkers have previously noted. Gun manufacturers are not entirely exempt from being sued, nor are they the only industry with some liability protections. Notably, there are significant liability protections for vaccine manufacturers and, at present, for people and entities involved in making, distributing or administering Covid-19 countermeasures such as vaccines, tests and treatments.

    Under the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, gun manufacturers cannot be held liable for the use of their products in crimes. However, gun manufacturers can still be held liable for (and thus sued for) a range of things, including negligence, breach of contract regarding the purchase of a gun or certain damages from defects in the design of a gun.

    In 2019, the Supreme Court allowed a lawsuit against gun manufacturer Remington Arms Co. to continue. The plaintiffs, a survivor and the families of nine other victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, wanted to hold the company – which manufactured the semi-automatic rifle that was used in the 2012 killing – partly responsible by targeting the company’s marketing practices, another area where gun manufacturers can be held liable. In 2022, those families reached a $73 million settlement with the company and its four insurers.

    There are also more recent lawsuits against gun manufacturers. For example, the parents of some of the victims and survivors of the 2022 massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, have sued over the marketing practices of the company that made the gun used by the killer. Another suit, filed by the government of Buffalo, New York, in December over gun violence in the city, alleges that the actions of several gun manufacturers and distributors have endangered public health and safety. It is unclear how those lawsuits will fare in the courts.

    – Holmes Lybrand contributed to this item.

    The NRA and lawsuits

    At a campaign fundraiser in California on Tuesday, Biden said the National Rifle Association, the prominent gun rights advocacy organization, itself cannot be sued.

    “And the fact that the NRA has such overwhelming power – you know, the NRA is the only outfit in the nation that we cannot sue as an institution,” Biden said. “They got – they – before this – I became president, they passed legislation saying you can’t sue them. Imagine had that been the case with tobacco companies.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claim is false. While gun manufacturers have liability protections, no law was ever passed to forbid lawsuits against the NRA. The NRA has faced a variety of lawsuits in recent years.

    Machine guns

    At the same Tuesday fundraiser in California, Biden said that he taught the Second Amendment in law school, “And guess what? It doesn’t say that you can own any weapon you want. It says there are certain weapons that you just can’t own.” One example Biden cited was this: “You can’t own a machine gun.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claim is false. The Second Amendment does not explicitly say people cannot own certain weapons – and the courts have not interpreted it to forbid machine guns. In fact, with some exceptions, people in more than two-thirds of states are allowed to own and buy fully automatic machine guns as long as those guns were legally registered and possessed prior to May 19, 1986, the day President Ronald Reagan signed a major gun law. There were more than 700,000 legally registered machine guns in the US as of May 2021, according to official federal data.

    Federal law imposes significant national restrictions on machine gun purchases, and the fact that there is a limited pool of pre-May 19, 1986 machine guns means that buying these guns tends to be expensive – regularly into the tens of thousands of dollars. But for Americans in most of the country, Biden’s claim that you simply “can’t” own a machine gun, period, is not true.

    “It’s not easy to obtain a fully automatic machine gun today, I don’t want to give that impression – but it is certainly legal. And it’s always been legal,” Gutowski said in March, when Biden previously made this claim about machine guns.

    California, where Biden made this remark on Tuesday, has strict laws restricting machine guns, but there is a legal process even there to apply for a state permit to possess one.

    The ‘boyfriend loophole’

    In the Friday speech to the National Safer Communities Summit, Biden said “we fought like hell to close the so-called boyfriend loophole” that had allowed people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence to buy and possess guns if the victim was not someone they were married to, living with or had a child with. Biden then said that now “we finally can say that those convicted of domestic violence abuse against their girlfriend or boyfriend cannot buy a firearm, period.”

    Facts First: Biden’s categorical claim that such offenders now “cannot buy a firearm, period” is an exaggeration, though Biden did sign a law in 2022 that made significant progress in closing the “boyfriend loophole.” That 2022 law added “dating” partners to the list of misdemeanor domestic violence offenders who are generally prohibited from gun purchases – but in a concession demanded by Republicans, the law says these offenders can buy a gun five years after their first conviction or completion of their sentence, whichever comes later, if they do not reoffend in the interim.

    It’s also worth noting that the law’s new restriction on dating partners applies only to people who committed the domestic violence against a someone with whom they were in or “recently” had been in a “continuing” and “serious” romantic or intimate relationship. In other words, it omits people whose offense was against partners from their past or someone they dated casually.

    Marium Durrani, vice president of policy at the National Domestic Violence Hotline, said there are “definitely some gaps” in the law, “so it’s not a blanket end-all be-all,” but she said it is “really a step in the right direction.”

    Biden said at a campaign rally in Philadelphia on Saturday: “Let me just say one thing very seriously. You know, I think this is the first time – and I’ve been around, as I said, a while – in history where, last week, every single environmental organization endorsed me.”

    Facts First: It’s not true that every single environmental organization had endorsed Biden. Four major environmental organizations did endorse him the week prior, the first time they had issued a joint endorsement, but other well-known environmental organizations have not yet endorsed in the presidential election.

    The four groups that endorsed Biden together in mid-June were the Sierra Club, NextGen PAC, and the campaign arms of the League of Conservation Voters and the Natural Resources Defense Council. That is not a complete list of every single environmental group in the country. For example, Environmental Defense Fund, The Nature Conservancy, the National Audubon Society, Earthjustice and Greenpeace, in addition to some lesser-known groups, have not issued presidential endorsements to date.

    Biden’s claim of an endorsement from every environmental group comes amid frustration from some activists over his recent approvals of fossil fuel projects.

    In official speeches last Tuesday and last Wednesday and at a press conference the week prior, Biden claimed that Africa’s population would soon reach 1 billion. “You know, soon – soon, Africa will have 1 billion people,” he said last Wednesday.

    Facts First: This is false. Africa’s population exceeded 1 billion in 2009, according to United Nations figures; it is now more than 1.4 billion. Sub-Saharan Africa alone has a population of more than 1.1 billion.

    At a campaign fundraiser in Connecticut on Friday, Biden spoke about reading recent news articles about the use of renewable energy sources in Texas. He said, “I think it’s 70% of all their energy produced by solar and wind because it is significantly cheaper. Cheaper. Cheaper.”

    Facts First: Biden’s “70%” figure is not close to correct. The federal Energy Information Administration projected late last year that Texas would meet 37% of its electricity demand in 2023 with wind and solar power, up from 30% in 2022.

    Texas has indeed been a leader in renewable energy, particularly wind power, but the state is far from getting more than two-thirds of its energy from wind and solar alone. The organization that provides electricity to 90% of the state has a web page where you can see its current energy mix in real time; when we looked on Wednesday afternoon, during a heat wave, the mix included 15.8% solar, 10.2% wind and 6.6% nuclear, while 67.1% was natural gas or coal and lignite.

    In his Friday speech at the National Safer Communities Summit, Biden made a muddled claim about his past visits to Afghanistan and Iraq – saying that “you know, I spent a lot of time as president, and I spent 30-some times – visits – many more days in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claim that he has visited Afghanistan and Iraq “30-some times” is false – the latest in a long-running series of exaggerations about his visits to the two countries. His presidential campaign said in 2019 that he made 21 visits to these countries, but he has since continued to put the figure in the 30s. And he has not visited either country “as president.”

    At another campaign fundraiser in California on Monday, Biden reprised a familiar claim about his travels with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who is, like him, a former vice president.

    “It wasn’t appropriate for Barack to be able to spend a lot of time getting to know him, so it was an assignment I was given. And I traveled 17,000 miles with him, usually one on one,” Biden said.

    Facts First: Biden’s “17,000 miles” claim remains false. Biden has not traveled anywhere close to 17,000 miles with Xi, though they have indeed spent lots of time together. This is one of Biden’s most common false claims as president, a figure he has repeated over and over in speeches despite numerous fact checks.

    Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler noted in 2021 that Biden and Xi often did not even travel parallel routes to their gatherings, let alone physically travel together. The only apparent way to get Biden’s mileage past 17,000, Kessler found, is to add the length of Biden’s flight journeys between Washington and Beijing, during which Xi was not with him.

    A White House official told CNN in early 2021 that Biden was adding up his “total travel back and forth” for meetings with Xi. But that is very different than traveling “with him” as Biden keeps saying, especially in the context of his boasts about how well he knows Xi. Biden has had more than enough time to make his language more precise.

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  • DOJ has spent over $9 million investigating Trump since special counsel was appointed | CNN Politics

    DOJ has spent over $9 million investigating Trump since special counsel was appointed | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Justice Department has spent over $9.2 million investigating former President Donald Trump since the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith in November, according to the first public accounting of his expenses.

    Smith’s office, leading the high-profile investigations into Trump, has spent more than $5.4 million between November and March 31, the Justice Department said. Other DOJ entities have spent an additional $3.8 million to support Smith.

    Smith is investigating efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and prosecuting former Trump for allegedly retaining classified information after he left the White House.

    More than $2 million of that cost went to employee salaries, the report released Friday says. Another $1 million dollars paid for investigative support and more than $80,000 went to helping employees relocate while they worked for the special counsel. The reports run through March 31, 2023.

    The additional $3.8 million DOJ has spent includes payment for “hours worked by agents and investigative support analysts, as well as the cost of protective details for the Special Counsel when warranted.”

    While Smith’s topline number dramatically tops the amount that special counsels Robert Hur and John Durham spent in the same timeframe, about $600,000 and $1 million respectively, his spending on investigations into the Trump and his allies still pales in comparison to the nearly $32 million that Robert Mueller and other DOJ offices spent during his years-long prove into whether Russia swayed the 2016 election for Trump.

    Hur, who is leading the investigation into the handling of classified documents found at Joe Biden’s home and former private office, also spent a significant amount of his expenses on employee compensation. Hur was appointed just a few months after Smith and has not made any major public moves. DOJ spent an additional $572,000 in support of Hur, the report says.

    Durham, the special counsel appointed to investigate potential misconduct in the Trump-Russia probe, spent more than $7 million from the time he started his investigation as a special counsel, according to Friday’s filing. Additional DOJ expenditures related to it amount to $1.73 million.

    Durham’s work as a special counsel concluded in May after the release of a 300-page report, which strongly rebuked the FBI’s investigation into Trump, highlighting multiple errors in the origins of the bureau’s investigation into ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.

    The investigation, however, resulted in one guilty plea of an FBI lawyer who admitted to doctoring an email regarding a surveillance warrant. Durham’s other two prosecutions against a campaign lawyer for Hillary Clinton and a source for the Trump-Russia dossier both ended in acquittals.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Meta cut election teams months before Threads launch, raising concerns for 2024 | CNN Business

    Meta cut election teams months before Threads launch, raising concerns for 2024 | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Meta has made cuts to its teams that tackle disinformation and coordinated troll and harassment campaigns on its platforms, people with direct knowledge of the situation told CNN, raising concerns ahead of the pivotal 2024 elections in the US and around the world.

    Several members of the team that countered mis- and disinformation in the 2022 US midterms were laid off last fall and this spring, a person familiar with the matter said. The staffers are part of a global team that works on Meta’s efforts to counter disinformation campaigns seeking to undermine confidence in or sow confusion around elections.

    The news comes as Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is celebrating the unparalleled success of its new Threads platform, surpassing 100 million users just five days after launch and opening a potential new avenue for bad actors.

    A Meta spokesperson did not specify, when asked, how many staffers had been cut from its teams working on elections. In a statement to CNN on Monday night, the spokesperson said, “Protecting the US 2024 elections is one of our top priorities, and our integrity efforts continue to lead the industry.”

    The spokesperson did not answer CNN questions about what additional resources had been deployed to monitor and moderate its new platform. Instead, Meta said the social media giant had invested $16 billion in technology and teams since 2016 to protect its users.

    But the decision to lay off staffers ahead of 2024, when elections will not only take place in the United States but also in Taiwan, Ukraine, India and elsewhere, has raised concerns among those with direct knowledge of Meta’s election integrity work.

    The disparate nature of Meta’s work on elections makes it difficult for even people inside the company to say specifically how many people are part of the effort. One group of relevant employees hit harder by the layoffs were “content review” specialists who manually review election-related posts that may violate Meta’s terms of service, a person familiar with the cuts told CNN.

    Meta is trying to offset those cuts by more proactively detecting accounts that spread false election-related information, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

    For years, the social media giant has invested heavily in teams of personnel to root out sophisticated and coordinated networks of fake accounts. That “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” as Meta calls it, began in the lead up to the 2016 election when an infamous Russian government-linked troll operation ran amuck on Facebook.

    The team tasked with combating the influence campaigns – which includes former US government and intelligence officials – has been generally seen as the most robust in the social media industry. The company has published quarterly reports in recent years that expose governments and other entities found to have been operating covert campaigns pushing disinformation on Meta’s platforms.

    Those teams investigating disinformation campaigns now must further prioritize which campaigns and countries to focus on, another person familiar with the situation said, a trade-off that could result in some deceptive efforts going unnoticed.

    The person emphasized that Meta still has a dedicated team of professionals working on these issues, many of whom are widely respected in the cyber and information security communities.

    But while artificial intelligence and other automated systems can help detect some of these efforts, unearthing sophisticated disinformation networks is still a “very manual process” that involves intense scrutiny from expert staff, another person with direct knowledge of Meta’s counter disinformation efforts told CNN.

    The person said they feared Meta was regressing from progress it had made from learning from past mistakes. “Lessons that were learned at great costs,” they said, citing the company’s 2018 admission that its platforms were used to incite violence in Myanmar.

    In addition to its in-house team, Meta and other social media companies rely on tips from academics and other researchers who specialize in monitoring covert disinformation networks.

    Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, said he has sent the company valuable tips in recent months, but Meta’s response time has slowed significantly.

    Linvill, who has a long track record of successfully identifying covert online accounts, including helping to unearth a Russian election meddling effort in Africa in 2020, said that Meta recently removed a network of Russian language accounts that were posting both pro and anti-Ukraine content on Facebook and Instagram.

    “They were trying to stoke anger on both sides of the debates,” he said.

    Launched last Thursday, Threads has become an instant success with celebrities, politicians, and journalists flocking to the platform.

    The new Twitter-style app is tied to users’ existing Instagram accounts, rather than being linked directly to Facebook. Currently, Threads shares the same community standards as Instagram, but the platforms differ on issues relating to Meta’s methods to combat disinformation.

    Meta also applies labels to state-controlled accounts on Facebook and Instagram, such as Russia’s Sputnik news agency and China’s CCTV. However, these labels do not appear on state-controlled accounts on Threads.

    The launch of Threads even as Meta trims its disinformation-focused personnel comes at a turbulent and transformative time for those tasked with writing and implementing rules on social media platforms.

    Elon Musk, the billionaire who bought Twitter last year, has all but torn up that platform’s rule book and gutted the team that worked on implementing policies designed to combat disinformation efforts.

    Last month, YouTube, which has also made job cuts, announced it would allow videos that feature the false claim the 2020 US presidential election was stolen, a reversal of its previous policy.

    The rule reversals come as the Republican-controlled House of Representatives investigates interactions between technology companies and the federal government.

    Last week, a federal judge in Louisiana ordered some Biden administration agencies and top officials not to communicate with social media companies about certain content, handing a win to GOP states in a lawsuit accusing the government of going too far in its effort to combat Covid-19 disinformation.

    The restrictions and the scrutiny could give cover to social media companies that may want to pull back on some of their platforms’ rules around election integrity, said Katie Harbath, a former Facebook official who helped lead the company’s global election efforts until 2021.

    “I can [almost] hear [Meta Global Affairs President] Nick Clegg saying that ‘we’re going to be cautious of what we do, because we wouldn’t want to run afoul of the law,’” Harbath said.

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  • Asian Americans are anxious about hate crimes. TikTok ban rhetoric isn’t helping | CNN Business

    Asian Americans are anxious about hate crimes. TikTok ban rhetoric isn’t helping | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Ellen Min doesn’t go to the grocery store anymore. She avoids bars and going out to eat with her friends; festivals and community events are out, too. This year, she opted not to take her kids to the local St. Patrick’s Day parade.

    Min isn’t a shut-in. She’s just a Korean American from central Pennsylvania.

    Ever since the US government shot down a Chinese spy balloon last month, Min has withdrawn from her normal routine out of a concern she or her family may become targeted in one of the hundreds of anti-Asian hate crimes the FBI now says are occurring every year. The wave of anti-Asian hate that surged with the pandemic may only get worse, Min worries, as both political parties have amplified fears about China and the threat it poses to US economic and national security.

    “You can’t avoid paying attention to the rhetoric, because it has a direct impact on our lives,” Min said.

    That rhetoric surged again this week as a hostile House committee grilled TikTok CEO Shou Chew for more than five hours on Thursday about the app’s ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance. After lawmakers repeatedly accused Chew, who is Singaporean, of working for the Chinese government and tried to associate him with the Chinese Communist Party, Vanessa Pappas, a top TikTok executive, condemned the hearing as “rooted in xenophobia.”

    Chew had taken pains to distance TikTok from China, going so far as to anglicize his name for American audiences and to play up his academic credentials — he holds degrees from University College London and Harvard Business School. But it was not enough to prevent lawmakers from blasting TikTok as “a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party” and as “the spy in Americans’ pockets,” all while mangling pronunciations of Chew’s name and the names of other officials at its parent company, ByteDance. After Chew’s testimony, Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton said the CEO should be “deported immediately” and banned from the United States, saying his defense of TikTok was “beneath contempt.”

    There are good reasons to be mistrustful of ByteDance given that it is subject to China’s extremely broad surveillance laws. (TikTok has failed to assuage concerns the Chinese government could pressure ByteDance to improperly access the data, despite a plan by TikTok to “firewall” the information.) And the Chinese government’s authoritarian approach to numerous other issues clashes with important American values, said many Asian Americans interviewed for this article.

    But they also warned that policymakers’ choice to use inflammatory speech — in some cases, language tinged with 1950s-era, Red Scare-style McCarthyism — endangers countless innocent Americans by association. Moreover, politicians’ increasingly strident tone is creating conditions for new discriminatory policies at home and the potential for even more anti-Asian violence, civil rights leaders said.

    “We are afraid that, more and more, the actions and the language of the government is premised on the assumption that just because we are Chinese or have cultural ties to China that we could be disloyal, or be spies, or be under the influence of a foreign government,” said Zhengyu Huang, president of the Committee of 100, an organization co-founded by the late architect IM Pei, the musician Yo-Yo Ma and other prominent Chinese Americans. “We want to deliver the message: Not only are we not a national security liability — we are a national security asset.”

    But as the country wrestles with China’s influence as a competitive global power, caught in the middle are tens of millions of Americans like Min who, thanks to their appearance, may now face greater suspicion or hostility than they experienced even during the pandemic, according to Asian American lawmakers, civil society groups and ordinary citizens.

    The heated rhetoric surrounding China has undergone a shift from the pandemic’s early days, when xenophobia linked to Covid-19 was unambiguous.

    At the time, Asian Americans feared an uptick in violence inspired by derogatory phrases such as “Kung-flu” and “China virus.” That language had emerged amid then-President Donald Trump’s wider criticisms of China, which had led to a damaging trade war with the country. It was against that backdrop that Trump first threatened to ban TikTok, a move some critics said was an attempt to stoke xenophobia.

    In recent years, criticism of China has significantly expanded to encompass even more aspects of the US-China relationship. Concerns about China have gone mainstream as US national security officials and lawmakers have publicly grappled with state-backed ransomware attacks and other hacking attempts. The Biden administration has sought to confront China on how the internet should be governed, and like the Trump administration, it’s now taking aim at TikTok, again.

    As that shift has occurred, criticism of China has stylistically evolved from blatant name-calling to the more clinical vocabulary of national security, allowing an undercurrent of xenophobia to lurk beneath the respectable veneer of geopolitics, civil rights leaders said.

    People rallied during a

    In January, House lawmakers stood up a new select committee specifically focused on the “strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.” At its first hearing, the panel’s chairman, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, said: “This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century — and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.”

    A week later, US intelligence officials warned that the Chinese Communist Party represents the “most consequential threat” to US global leadership. An unclassified intelligence community report released the same day said China views competition with the United States as an “epochal geopolitical shift.” (Even so, the report maintained that the “most lethal threat to US persons and interests” continues to be racially motivated extremism and violence, particularly by White supremacy groups.)

    While some policymakers have added that their issue is with the Chinese government, not the Chinese people or Asians in general, leaders of Asian descent say the caveat has too often been a footnote in debates about China and not emphasized nearly enough. Leaving it unsaid or merely implied creates room for listeners to draw bigoted conclusions, critics said.

    “That can’t be a footnote; it can’t be an afterthought,” said Charles Jung, a California employment attorney and the national coordinator for Always With Us, a nationwide memorial event to remember the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings that killed six Asian women. “I’m speaking specifically, directly to both GOP and Democratic politicians: Be mindful of the words that you use. Because the words you use can have real world impacts on the bodies of Asian American people on the streets.”

    The current climate has led to at least one US lawmaker directly questioning the loyalty of a fellow member of Congress.

    California Democratic Rep. Judy Chu, who was born in Los Angeles and is the first Chinese American elected to Congress, last month confronted baseless claims of her disloyalty from Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden. Gooden’s remarks were swiftly condemned by his congressional colleagues. But to Chu, the incident was an example of the way politics surrounding China, technology and national security have fueled anti-Asian sentiment.

    “Rising tensions with China have clearly led to an increase in anti-Asian xenophobia that has real consequences for our communities,” Chu told CNN.

    Concerns about xenophobia are bipartisan. Rep. Young Kim, a California Republican, told CNN there is “no question” that anti-Asian hate crimes have risen since the pandemic.

    California Democratic Rep. Judy Chu, who was born in Los Angeles and is the first Chinese American elected to Congress, last month confronted baseless claims of her disloyalty from Texas Republican Rep. Lance Gooden.

    “This is unacceptable,” said Kim. “Asian American issues are American issues, and all Americans deserve to be treated with respect. We can treat all Americans with respect and still be wary of threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party.”

    But even in discussing the Chinese government’s real, demonstrated risks to US security, the way that some Americans describe those dangers is counterproductive, needlessly provocative and historically inaccurate, said Rep. Andy Kim, a New York Democrat and a member of the House select committee. Even the name “Chinese Communist Party” can itself prime listeners to adopt a Cold War mentality — a framework whose analytical value is dubious, Kim argued.

    “A lot of my colleagues, especially on the select committee, use rhetoric like, ‘This is a new Cold War,’” said Kim. “First of all, it’s not true: The Soviet Union was a very different competitor than China. And it’s framed in a very zero-sum way … It’s very much being talked about as if their entire way of life is incompatible with ours and cannot coexist with ours, and that heightens the tension.”

    In a November op-ed, Gallagher and Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio directly linked that rhetoric to TikTok, calling for the app to be banned due to the United States being “locked in a new Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party, one that senior military advisers warn could turn hot over Taiwan at any time.”

    Just because China may view its dynamic with the United States as an epic struggle does not mean Americans must be goaded into doing the same, Kim argued. Beyond the violence it could trigger domestically, a stark confrontational framing could cause the United States to blunder into poor policy choices.

    For example, he said, the right mindset could mean the difference between legally fraught “whack-a-mole” attempts to ban Chinese-affiliated social media companies versus passing a historic national privacy law that safeguards Americans’ data from all prying eyes, no matter what tech company may be collecting it.

    Security researchers who have examined TikTok’s app say that the company’s invasive collection of user data is more of an indictment of lax government policies on privacy, rather than a reflection of any TikTok-specific wrongdoing or national security risk.

    “TikTok is only a product of the entire surveillance capitalism economy,” said Pellaeon Lin, a Taiwan-based researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “Governments should try to better protect user information, instead of focusing on one particular app without good evidence.”

    Asked how he would advise policymakers to look at TikTok, Lin said: “What I would call for is more evidence-based policy.” Instead, some policymakers appear to have run in the opposite direction.

    Anti-China sentiment has already led to policies that risk violating Asian-Americans’ constitutional rights, several civil society groups said.

    John Yang, president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, pointed to the Justice Department’s now-shuttered “China Initiative,” a Trump-era program intended to hunt down Chinese spies but that produced a string of discrimination complaints and case dismissals involving innocent Americans swept up in the dragnet. The Biden administration shut down the program last year.

    More recently, Yang said, proposed laws in Texas and Virginia aimed at keeping US land out of the hands of those with foreign ties would create impossible-to-satisfy tests for Asian-Americans, showing how anti-China fervor threatens to infringe on the rights of many US citizens.

    “National security has often been used as a pretext specifically against Asian-Americans,” Yang said, referring to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the racial profiling of Muslim-Americans following Sept. 11. “We should remember that many Chinese-Americans came to this country to escape the authoritarian regime of China.”

    16 TikTok app STOCK

    Though he fears the situation for Asian-Americans will get worse before it gets better, Yang and other advocates called for US policymakers to stress from the outset that their quarrel lies with the Chinese government and not with people of Chinese descent.

    “We know from experience in the United States that once you demonize Chinese people, all Asian people living in this country face the brunt of that rhetoric,” said Jung. “And you see it not just in spy balloons and the reactions surrounding it and TikTok and Huawei, but also in modern-day racist alien land laws.”

    Growing up in Pennsylvania, Min was no stranger to racially motivated violence: Her home was regularly vandalized with eggs, tomatoes and epithet-laden graffiti (“Go home, gooks”); her father once discovered a crude homemade explosive stuffed in his car.

    But fears of racism stoked by modern US political rhetoric has forced Min to change how her family lives in ways they never had to during her childhood.

    Last year, amid another spate of assaults targeting elderly Asian-Americans, Min said her mother sold the family dry-cleaning business and moved to Korea, following Min’s father who had moved the year before.

    “It was a sad reality to say that as much as we want our family close to us and their grandchildren, they will be safer in Korea,” Min said.

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  • These 5 states will be the first to kick residents off Medicaid starting in April | CNN Politics

    These 5 states will be the first to kick residents off Medicaid starting in April | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Millions of Americans are at risk of losing their Medicaid coverage in coming months, but residents in Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, New Hampshire and South Dakota will be the first to bear the brunt of the terminations.

    States have been barred by Congress from winnowing their Medicaid rolls since the Covid-19 pandemic began. That prohibition ends on Saturday, and some states are moving much more swiftly than others to kick off those deemed ineligible for the public health insurance program for low-income Americans.

    That worries advocates, who say speed will result in eligible residents being incorrectly terminated. Also, it could hamper shifting those who no longer qualify to other types of coverage.

    “This is the fable of the tortoise and the hare,” said Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families. “Taking time is absolutely going to result in a better outcome for eligible children and families to remain covered. So speed is a big concern.”

    The five states will start cutting off coverage in April, followed by 14 more states in May and 20 additional states plus the District of Columbia in June. All states must complete their redeterminations over the next 14 months.

    Around 15 million people could be dropped from Medicaid, according to various estimates, though several million folks could find coverage elsewhere. Others may still be eligible but could be terminated for procedural reasons, such as not completing renewal forms. Those at risk include at least 6.7 million children, according to a Georgetown analysis.

    Medicaid enrollment has ballooned since March 2020, when lawmakers passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which prevented states from involuntarily removing anyone from coverage. In exchange, Congress boosted states’ federal Medicaid match rates by 6.2 percentage points.

    The provision was initially tied to the national public health emergency, but lawmakers changed that as part of the federal spending bill that passed in December. In addition to being able to start conducting terminations in April, states will receive an enhanced federal match through the rest of this year, though it will phase down over time.

    More than 92 million Americans were enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program in December, up 31% since February 2020, according to the most recent data available from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

    Reviewing the eligibility of all those enrollees will be a monumental task for state Medicaid agencies, many of which are also contending with slim staffing. To gear up, they are hiring new employees, temporary workers or contractors or bringing back retirees, according to a recent survey conducted by Georgetown and the Kaiser Family Foundation.

    Most states can automatically renew coverage for at least some of their enrollees using other data, such as state wage information. But agencies must get in touch with others in their Medicaid programs, which proved challenging even prior to the pandemic. Most states are using multiple methods to update enrollees’ contact information, including working with insurers that provide Medicaid coverage to residents.

    If notices sent by mail are returned, states must make good faith attempts to contact enrollees through at least two other methods before cutting them off. And states have to adhere to additional requirements to continue to qualify for the enhanced match. If they don’t, CMS also could suspend their terminations, require they take corrective action or impose monetary penalties.

    Of the roughly 15 million people who could lose Medicaid coverage, about 8.2 million will no longer qualify, according to a Department of Health and Human Services analysis released in August. Some 2.7 million of these folks would qualify for enhanced federal subsidies for Affordable Care Act policies that could bring their monthly premiums to as low as $0.

    Some 6.8 million people, however, will be disenrolled even though they remain eligible.

    Though the federal government has given states more than a year to conduct the eligibility reviews and terminations, some plan to move much more quickly.

    Idaho, which has been monitoring enrollees’ eligibility throughout the pandemic, plans to complete its reevaluations by September, which it touts as one of the fastest timelines in the country.

    Of the nearly 450,000 Idahoans in the program, about 150,000 of them either don’t qualify or haven’t been in touch with the state in the past three years. The state began sending notices in February to those who face termination. People have 60 days to respond before they are removed.

    Those that are not eligible have 60 days from their termination date to enroll in Idaho’s state-based Obamacare exchange, Your Health Idaho. The exchange receives information nightly from the state Medicaid agency about residents who no longer qualify for public coverage but may be eligible for federal subsidies for Affordable Care Act policies.

    The exchange is reaching out to those folks weekly while they still have Medicaid and then every 15 days during the two-month special enrollment period via various methods, including mail, email and text messages, said Pat Kelly, Your Health Idaho’s executive director.

    The exchange works with 900 agents, brokers and enrollment counselors who can help folks sign up for policies. And it plans to start an advertising campaign this month highlighting the hefty subsidies.

    “We have to really help Idahoans know and understand that low-cost options are available, and most importantly, that it’s comprehensive health insurance that they can get for $0 a month,” Kelly said.

    Still, advocates in Idaho are concerned that the state’s push to unwind quickly will result in eligible residents losing coverage.

    Many people are not aware that they once again need to prove that they qualify, and the state agency is understaffed and underfunded, said Hillarie Hagen, health policy associate at Idaho Voices for Children. Renewal letters may not make it to enrollees, and those who need help may not be able to get through to customer service.

    “We are very concerned about families, and particularly children, losing health coverage without their knowledge – that they will find out when they show up to the doctor,” Hagen said.

    Aware that many people don’t know they’ll have to renew their eligibility, Arizona’s Medicaid agency last summer sent text messages and letters and made robocalls to enrollees, asking them to update their contact information. It is also working with community partners, health care providers, pharmacies and insurers. And it’s ramping up another text campaign since the prior one was so successful, said Heidi Capriotti, public information officer for the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System.

    While the state can automatically redetermine the eligibility of about 75% of its Medicaid participants, it still has to connect with about 670,000 residents who could lose coverage because they are no longer eligible or they haven’t responded to the agency’s requests. The state plans to take 12 months to assess whether its enrollees still qualify.

    South Dakota will start terminating Medicaid enrollees in April, though some low-income adults may become eligible again in July, when the state’s Medicaid expansion program begins.

    Voters approved the broadening of Medicaid to low-income adults at the ballot box in November, over the objections of the Republican governor and legislature.

    Nearly 152,000 residents were enrolled in Medicaid in January, an increase of more than 30% from March 2020, according to the state’s Department of Social Services. But more than 22,000 people appear to be ineligible currently.

    The agency said in an FAQ that it will prioritize reviewing folks who are most likely to be ineligible because they no longer meet a coverage group or their income has increased, among other reasons.

    Those who are not eligible will be disenrolled with 10-days’ notice. If they appear eligible for expansion in July, they’ll receive a notice about it when they are terminated and sent a reminder in June. The agency is encouraging any enrollees who are determined to be ineligible to reapply after Medicaid expansion takes effect.

    But that three-month gap can wreak havoc on low-income residents’ health, said Jen Dreiske, deputy director of South Dakota Voices for Peace, which is working with the state’s immigrants and refugees to inform them of the unwinding. These folks may have to go without their heart medication or their cancer treatment. They may also be afraid to go to the doctor because of the cost.

    “Why can’t we just wait until July 1?” Dreiske said. “Our concern is that people are going to get sick or die because they’re not going to be able to access the health care that they so desperately need.”

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  • Blinken speaks to Russian foreign minister about WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan | CNN Politics

    Blinken speaks to Russian foreign minister about WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke Sunday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and called for the “immediate release” of detained Americans Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, according to the US State Department.

    “Secretary Blinken conveyed the United States’ grave concern over Russia’s unacceptable detention of a U.S. citizen journalist,” a readout from the department said.

    “Secretary Blinken further urged the Kremlin to immediately release wrongfully detained U.S. citizen Paul Whelan,” the readout continued, adding that the secretary and Lavrov “also discussed the importance of creating an environment that permits diplomatic missions to carry out their work.”

    Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter based in Russia, was detained last week on charges of espionage – the first time an American journalist has been detained on such accusations by Moscow since the Cold War. US officials in Moscow had not yet been granted consular access to Gershkovich as of Sunday.

    The Journal’s editor-in-chief, Emma Tucker, said Sunday that the call between Blinken and Lavrov was “hugely reassuring.”

    “We know that the US government is taking the case very seriously right up to the top,” she told CBS News.

    Whelan, meanwhile, is serving out a 16-year prison sentence for the same charges, which he strongly denies. His brother David Whelan said in an email to the press Thursday that his family was sorry to hear “that another American family will have to experience the same trauma that we have had to endure for the past 1,553 days.”

    Whelan has been designated as wrongfully detained by the US State Department, and Gershkovich is expected to receive the same designation but had not yet as of Sunday morning. Tucker said she hopes the US government will act swiftly to label Gershkovich as wrongfully detained, saying it will be anofficial recognition that the charges against the reporter are “entirely bogus.”

    The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Sunday’s phone call was initiated by the US and that Lavrov told Blinken that Gershkovich’s fate would be determined by a Russian court.

    Lavrov also blamed Washington and the Western press for politicizing the arrest.

    “It was emphasized that it is unacceptable for officials in Washington and Western media to hype up [the issue] with the clear intention of giving this case a political coloring,” the statement said.

    Gershkovich is currently being held in the notorious Lefortovo pre-detention center until May 29. He faces up to 20 years in prison on espionage charges.

    Sunday’s call was only the third time that Blinken has spoken with his Russian counterpart since the war in Ukraine began, and all of those conversations have discussed detained US citizens. The two spoke in person for the first time since the war broke out on the sidelines of the G20 foreign ministers meeting in India last month, and Blinken said he raised the issues of the war, Russia’s suspension of its participation in the New START nuclear agreement, and Whelan’s ongoing detention.

    The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee on Sunday expressed support for the Biden administration’s efforts to negotiate with Russia for Gershkovich’s release.

    “Certainly the Biden administration should continue its efforts to negotiate and to try to get the release of this journalist, but overall, people should be very cautious about staying in Russia,” Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

    Turner noted that the US government “gave people notice that they should get out of Russia” and said he would continued to encourage people to do so. The Biden administration has echoed those assessments. While the Kremlin has asserted that Russia is safe for accredited journalists, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told CNN on Friday, “Russia is not safe for Americans.”

    Turner appeared on “State of the Union” on Sunday from southern Poland, where he said he is “meeting with those who are active in intelligence and meeting with our servicemembers who are active in the support of Ukraine.”

    Pressed by Bash on remarks by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley that the war in Ukraine will likely not be won this year, the Ohio lawmaker appeared to agree.

    “One thing I can tell you is that Russia is not going to win either,” he said. “This is a war that Russia is not winning, and they’re not winning it because Ukraine realizes that they’re standing up for democracy, they’re fighting for their country. And as they continue to do so, the United States’ assistance and certainly the assistance of our NATO allies and partners are making a huge turnout for the battlefield.”

    This story has been updated with additional reaction.

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  • Why are so many Americans unhappy with the state of the US today? Here’s what they said in CNN’s latest poll | CNN Politics

    Why are so many Americans unhappy with the state of the US today? Here’s what they said in CNN’s latest poll | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    It’s one of the most commonly asked poll questions: How do Americans feel about the state of the nation? And recently, the answer has usually been a negative one.

    But figuring out why people are unhappy is complicated. CNN’s latest polling asked Americans whether things in the country were going well or badly – and then, to explain in their own words, why they felt that way.

    Among the 69% who said things were going either pretty or very badly, dim views of the nation’s economic conditions were a top driver. The smaller share who were more positive often cited their own, rosier takes on the economy.

    Other factors that influenced Americans’ outlooks, whether positive or negative, included their views of the current occupant of the White House, opinions on social issues, conclusions drawn from their daily lives or a combination of disparate concerns. Their explanations help shed light on what respondents really mean when they answer the broad, state-of-the-nation questions frequently included on surveys.

    Here’s a look at some common themes that emerged in our latest poll, as well as a sampling of responses from people across the country. Some answers have been lightly edited for length, grammar and clarity.

    Views of the nation and the economy often go hand in hand. Asked to explain their view of how things are going in the US today, both 35% of those who said things were going well and 52% who said things were going badly mentioned economic factors.

    Slightly over half of women, men, Whites, people of color, those younger than 45 and those 45 and older who said things were going badly all mentioned the economy when asked to explain why they felt that way.

    But there were differences both along and within partisan lines among this pessimistic group.

    A 58% majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents cited the economy as a reason for their discontent, with a smaller 42% of Democrats and Democratic leaners saying the same.

    Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents younger than 45 were 11 points likelier than their older counterparts to cite an economic reason. Among Republicans, there was no difference by age in the share citing the economy.

    Beyond general concerns about the economy, issues such as inflation and the cost of living hit home for many Americans who said the country was doing badly.

    • “Cost of living is way too high. Just seems like the economy is not doing very well, but it has been like this for years. Housing market is terrible, gas prices are terrible. Student loan debt is astronomical. Even though I agree students should pay their own loan, it shouldn’t be that expensive in the first place.” – Republican man, 29, from Pennsylvania
    • “A single mother cannot effectively support a household on one income. The price of everything is too high. Rent [is] outrageous while people trying to get a loan to buy a home is also unreachable to most.” – Republican woman, 30, from Iowa
    • “The economy is TERRIBLE. My cost of living is MUCH MUCH MUCH higher. Go to the grocery store and you will find out.” – Republican-leaning man, 71, from Illinois

    By contrast, those in the positive camp largely focused on the availability of jobs and a perception that the economy was improving. Among this group, Americans in households making $50,000 or more annually were 19 percentage points more likely than those in lower-earning households to name economic factors as a reason to say things were going well, 44% to 25%.

    • “The economy is doing well. I’m unhappy with women losing bodily autonomy, and the creeping fascism from the right, but I believe Biden is doing an excellent job with the economy, the environment, and international relations.” – Democratic woman, 65, from North Dakota
    • “There are still changes that I hope will be made, but for the most part we’re heading in the right direction. There is food on the shelves at the grocery stores. There are jobs at slightly better pay than before the pandemic.” – Democratic woman, 52, from Michigan
    • “Unemployment is at a historic low, economy isn’t bad. Inflation is a sign that people have more money.” – Democratic-leaning man, 51, from Massachusetts

    The public’s views of the economy are often deeply polarized, with Americans far more likely to rate conditions as good when their party holds the White House – either because their political beliefs drive them to different conclusions or because they treat survey questions as a way to tout their partisan allegiances.

    Views about the broader state of the US were also deeply polarized in CNN’s latest poll, with a near-unanimous 91% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents saying things in the US were going badly, a view shared by 48% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

    Among those who said things were going badly, 11% put the blame primarily on President Joe Biden or the Democrats, with smaller shares pointing to Congress or the government as a whole. Among Republicans and Republican leaners in that camp, the share was 17%

    • “My country is having a real rough time under Biden’s presidency. Things have gone downhill the past few years.” – Republican woman, 80, from Pennsylvania
    • “This country is going down the tubes. He has ruined it with everything he’s done. At least Trump was making America great again.” – Republican woman, who did not give her exact age, from New York
    • “Congress is simply not focused on working together to resolve the problems facing our country.” – Republican man, 65, from Colorado

    Among those who said things were going well, 5% credited Biden or the Democratic Party, and 6% offered comments opposing former President Donald Trump, with others citing improvements in government leadership or a general sense of stability.

    • “We have moved out of the dishonest and corrupt shadows of the Trump and ‘conservative’ fascist dominated term of misgovernance.” – Democratic man, 44, from Nebraska
    • “I think it could be so much worse, and the president is doing the best he can do with all the problems we have.” – Democratic-leaning woman, 67, from New Jersey
    • “Democrats are in office. Republicans will NEVER do anything to help the working class and poor.” – Democratic man, 60, from Indiana

    Others saw polarization itself as the issue. Of those who said things in the US were going badly, 7% said it was because they were concerned about political or societal divisions in the country. Democrats (13%) and those with college degrees (12%) were likelier than others to mention the issue as a main reason for their discontent.

    • “We’re more divided than we’ve ever been. The GOP is trying to destroy diversity, take away women’s and LGBTQ rights. It’s a disaster here.” – Democratic woman, 37, from Connecticut
    • “We have never been so divided as a nation on almost every topic and Biden is making it worse.” – Republican man, 60, from Kansas
    • “The division among the citizens continues to grow. Nobody cares about their neighbors and the community.” – independent man, 38, from Texas

    Among those unhappy with the state of the country, a significant share, 16%, cited crime or gun violence. But their precise focus varied widely, spanning everything from concerns about unrest and lawlessness to dismay about school shootings. Women were slightly more likely than men to express such concerns. A smaller share of Americans also mentioned a related constellation of issues, including policing, the criminal justice system, homelessness and drugs.

    Another 10% of those who said things were going badly mentioned immigration or the situation at the border, with that concern relatively high among Republicans (17% of whom cited the issue), those age 45 and older (15%) and White Americans (12%).

    • “The massive amount of senseless gun violence” – Democratic woman, 30, from California
    • “The biggest thing is the violence in major cities.” – Republican woman, 71, from Ohio
    • “Too many people killing kids and adults. Too much aggression and violence.” – independent woman, 40, from Oregon
    • “I say things are going pretty badly because they are not handling the gun violence and school shootings. Children do not feel safe going to schools because they are afraid of someone in their school or someone coming to their school shooting it up, because it’s so easy to buy a gun now, and because most parents have them and are not watching them or locking them up away from their children. … As an African American, I feel scared for my life every time I step out the house, because I never know when something is going to happen or I get into a situation with a cop and it goes badly.” – independent woman, 18, from Texas
    • “Country is headed for a depression with all these illegal immigrants costing us in money, resources, etc. Getting close to World War III. Lawlessness pervades us.” – Republican-leaning woman, 66, from Kansas

    In stark contrast to the widespread discontent with the state of the nation, most Americans tend to be relatively satisfied with the course of their own lives. That shaped the broader outlooks of some of those surveyed – among those who said that things in the country were going well, 8% pointed at least in part to positive aspects of their own lives.

    • “For me, I have a job, a family and have everything that I need.” – Democratic man, 70, from Texas
    • “I’m not living in a box or a tent.” – Republican man, 63, from Pennsylvania
    • “I’m in the military and my life hasn’t been impacted like others have.” – independent woman, 26, from Oklahoma
    • “I’m looking in the mirror. You listen to the news but also to your own world.” – Democratic man, 60, from Pennsylvania
    • “Everything comes down to our individual personal situation, and mine is better than it has been throughout most of my life. … Our environmental issues for future generations do not apply to me as it is highly unlikely there will be a future generation of my family. … Inflation is of little concern to me as I have always waited to buy everything on sale, and I know how to cook economically. My health is excellent. My finances are sound.” – Republican woman, 78, from Nebraska

    The CNN Poll was conducted by SSRS from March 1 through March 31 among a random national sample of 1,595 adults initially reached by mail. Surveys were either conducted online or by telephone with a live interviewer. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points; it is larger for subgroups.

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  • New York MTA resumes transit alerts on Twitter | CNN Business

    New York MTA resumes transit alerts on Twitter | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority said it would resume posting automated transit alerts to Twitter on Thursday after the social media company backtracked on a plan to charge public service accounts for access to the platform.

    In a statement Thursday, MTA Acting Chief Customer Officer Shanifah Rieara said Twitter had tried to charge the MTA more than $500,000 a year for access to its platform, but that the MTA refused.

    “We’re glad that Twitter has committed to offering free API access for public service providers,” the MTA tweeted, referring to the software interface that enables third parties to create automated posts on Twitter.

    In another tweet, it added: “We know that customers missed us, so starting today, we’ll resume posting service alerts on @NYCTSubway, @NYCTBus, @LIRR, and @MetroNorth.”

    In recent weeks, Twitter has sought to charge businesses for the ability to access its platform. Its paid plans cost as much as $2.5 million a year for top-tier access. The paywall’s introduction in March prompted widespread warnings by public services of possible disruptions to weather and transit alerts.

    Amid the outcry, Twitter changed course on Tuesday and said that verified government accounts would once again be able to post automated tweets for free.

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  • Ex-ByteDance employee claims China had ‘supreme access’ to all data | CNN Business

    Ex-ByteDance employee claims China had ‘supreme access’ to all data | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    China’s Communist Party had “supreme access” to all data held by TikTok’s parent company Bytedance, including on servers in the United States, a former employer who is bringing a wrongful termination lawsuit has alleged.

    The allegations in the lawsuit – which Bytedance denies and has vowed to contest – comes at a time of intense scrutiny within the US and other Western nations over what level of control, if any, Beijing is able to exert over TikTok and the social media app’s wildly popular content.

    Yintao “Roger” Yu filed a lawsuit of wrongful termination against Bytedance in Superior Court in San Francisco earlier this month. He says he worked at the company from August 2017 to November 2018, as a head of engineering for US operations.

    In a new complaint filed on Friday, Yu claimed that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had a special office in the company, sometimes referred to as the “Committee,” which monitored Bytedance and “guided how it advanced core Communist values.”

    “The Committee maintained supreme access to all the company data, even data stored in the United States,” the complaint obtained by CNN read.

    Yu’s lawsuit alleges that the company made user data accessible to China’s Communist Party via a backdoor channel, no matter where the data was located.

    Yu also claimed that he had observed Bytedance being “responsive to the CCP’s requests” to share, elevate or even remove content, describing Bytedance as “useful propaganda tool” for Beijing’s leaders.

    A Bytedance spokesperson has denied Yu’s allegations, saying he worked on an app called Flipagram while at the company, which was discontinued due to business reasons.

    “We plan to vigorously oppose what we believe are baseless claims and allegations in this complaint,” the spokesperson said to CNN.

    “Mr. Yu worked for ByteDance Inc. for less than a year and his employment ended in July 2018,” which Yu disputed in his complaint.

    Earlier reporting from Yu’s lawsuit detailed how shortly after he began his job, he realized that Bytedance had for years engaged in what he called a “worldwide scheme” to steal and profit from the content of others.

    The scheme involved using software purposely unleashed to “systematically” strip user content from competitors’ websites, chiefly Instagram and Snapchat, and populate its own video services without asking for permission.

    The former employee alleged he was “troubled by ByteDance’s efforts to skirt legal and ethical lines.”

    Yu is seeking compensatory damages such as lost earnings, injunctive relief and liquidated and punitive damages.

    In a statement to CNN, a ByteDance spokesperson said the company is “committed to respecting the intellectual property of other companies, and we acquire data in accordance with industry practices and our global policy.”

    The latest allegations come as the hugely popular TikTok app is at risk of being banned by US lawmakers for national security concerns.

    The Biden administration has threatened TikTok with a nationwide ban unless its Chinese owners sell their stakes in the company, spelling out an increasingly tense relationship between the two countries. Last month, Montana became the first US state to pass legislation banning TikTok on all personal devices.

    At issue is who owns the keys to TikTok’s algorithms and the vast troves of data collected from the 150 million people in the United States who use the app each month.

    US officials have widely expressed fears the Chinese government could potentially gain access to TikTok user data through its links to its parent company and that such information could be used to benefit Chinese intelligence or propaganda campaigns.

    However, security experts say there is still no public evidence the Chinese government has actually spied on people through TikTok, which doesn’t operate in China.

    In March, TikTok’s chief executive Shou Chew testified before Congress, saying that he had “seen no evidence that the Chinese government has access to that [US user] data; they have never asked us, we have not provided it.”

    “Our commitment is to move their data into the United States, to be stored on American soil by an American company, overseen by American personnel. So the risk would be similar to any government going to an American company, asking for data,” Chew said at the hearing.

    China has responded to the Biden administration’s demand, saying that it would “firmly” oppose a forced sale of TikTok.

    The Chinese government considers some advanced technology, including content recommendation algorithms, to be critical to its national interest. In December, Chinese officials proposed tightening the rules that govern the sale of that technology to foreign buyers.

    A sale or divestiture of TikTok would involve the export of technology, so it would need obtain a license and approval from the Chinese government, according to a commerce ministry spokeswoman in March.

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  • Sullivan declines to say if Biden brought up jailed Navy officer with Japanese PM but says US working ‘extremely hard’ on case | CNN Politics

    Sullivan declines to say if Biden brought up jailed Navy officer with Japanese PM but says US working ‘extremely hard’ on case | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, said Sunday that the White House is working “extremely hard” on the case of a US Navy officer jailed in Japan but declined to say whether President Joe Biden had brought it up during his trip to the country.

    “There are certain times when saying less in public and more in private is the best way to resolve these cases. This is one of those instances,” Sullivan said on “State of the Union” when asked if Biden had raised the case of Lt. Ridge Alkonis with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida during his trip to Hiroshima for the Group of Seven summit, which concluded Sunday.

    On Friday, a pair of Democratic lawmakers from California had asked Biden to once again bring up the issue with Kishida.

    In a letter addressed to Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, US Sen. Alex Padilla and US Rep. Mike Levin said that “while we understand the sensitive nature of this case” around Lt. Ridge Alkonis, “it is important to resolve this situation promptly to prevent further irritants in the U.S.-Japan relationship.”

    “Lieutenant Alkonis has served almost a year in Japanese prison after being involved in a tragic and unforeseeable car accident due to a medical emergency he suffered while driving. Despite your repeated interventions from your Administration, including National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Ambassador Rahm Emanuel. Lieutenant Alkonis’ case remains stalled in the Japanese system,” the pair wrote.

    Alkonis, who was stationed in Japan, was sentenced to three years in Japanese prison in October 2021 for negligent driving resulting in the death of two people and injuries to a third person in May 2021. CNN previously reported that Alkonis said he suffered from acute mountain sickness as he was driving with his family from Mount Fuji, which caused him to lose consciousness. That argument was rejected by the court, and his appeal was denied in July 2022.

    Biden raised the Alkonis case with Kishida during the prime minister’s visit to the White House in January, and the two countries agreed to establish a working group to solve the problem. But Alkonis has since expressed despair about his situation, according to a handwritten note to his wife.

    “I’m not doing that good,” he wrote in a letter dated April 30, which was shared with CNN. “The walls and bars seem to be making my cell even smaller as of late.”

    His family has requested that he be transferred back to the US under the Council of Europe’s Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons, which would allow him to serve out his sentence there.

    Alkonis’ wife, Brittany Alkonis, told CNN earlier this week that parts of the US government have been “incredibly proactive” on that request but claimed that the US Department of Defense as well as the Japanese government had not productively engaged. Ridge Alkonis has not been designated as wrongfully detained by the US State Department.

    “Prison has always been a hard place. You know, he talks about how just anything that would bring you happiness is not allowed. He says it’s just soul crushing,” Brittany Alkonis told CNN.

    “Lieutenant Alkonis’ service records make clear that he is an extraordinary officer, and we believe he deserves better,” the Democratic lawmakers wrote to Biden and Harris. “We ask that you insist on a prompt prisoner transfer under the Council of Europe Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons, so that he, his wife, and their three young children can be reunited in California.”

    Brittany Alkonis and her children have been able to visit Ridge Alkonis every few weeks in prison, with the current setup allowing for five half-hour visits per month, she said. Her children – all under the age of ten years old – are the ones who are “paying the price” for this challenging situation, she said.

    “They’re hurting. They try to make sense of this. We talk about it all the time,” Brittany Alkonis said. “But my son asked me the other day, he said, ‘Mommy, you said the president is getting daddy home, then why isn’t he home yet.’”

    This story and headline have been updated with additional details.

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

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

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    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • Trump on tape: Here’s what it means and what’s next | CNN Politics

    Trump on tape: Here’s what it means and what’s next | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump’s history of making inappropriate or questionable comments on tape got another chapter on Wednesday with fresh revelations from his post-White House life.

    The latest example emerged from CNN’s exclusive reporting that federal prosecutors have an audio recording of Trump acknowledging he held onto a classified Pentagon document after leaving office. The tape seems unlikely to dent his political position as the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2024. But it could have real consequences in the legal limbo where he lives.

    Most people recall the “Access Hollywood” tape of Trump using vulgar language to argue that “stars” can grab women. The emergence of that tape just before the 2016 election didn’t hurt him politically. But he later defended that statement as true, “unfortunately or fortunately,” in a video deposition, and jurors in New York recently found him liable for sexual abuse after the deposition was played back to them.

    And then there’s the recording of him asking election officials in Georgia to “find” votes to help him change the results of the 2020 presidential election. Those efforts to overturn President Joe Biden’s win in the Peach State are part of an ongoing investigation.

    This latest tape could also end up as part of a criminal case. The recording is in the possession of the Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith, who’s investigating the retention of national defense information. Smith’s investigation has shown signs of nearing its end, although it hasn’t resulted in any criminal charges.

    So why is this revelation so significant?

    “First of all, prosecutors love tapes,” CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor, told Jake Tapper on “The Lead” Wednesday.

    “If you have a subject on tape, that’s his own words, that’s his own voice. The defense can’t say, well, some witness is fudging the truth.”

    The recording of the July 2021 meeting, which CNN has not listened to but was described by multiple sources, seriously undercuts Trump’s longstanding argument that he mentally declassified material he took with him from the White House. It also adds his Bedminster club to the potential locations where Trump had classified documents after leaving office.

    The recording of the meeting captures the sound of paper rustling, sources said, though it is not clear if it was the actual document in question. That raises questions about exposure of the document since attendees at the meeting included people who did not have security clearances that would have allowed them to access classified information, sources said.

    Smith has focused on the meeting as part of the criminal investigation into Trump’s handling of national security secrets, and prosecutors have asked witnesses about the recording and the document before a federal grand jury, CNN’s Katelyn Polantz, Paula Reid and Kaitlan Collins reported.

    In response to the report, a Trump campaign spokesman said “leaks” are meant to “inflame tensions” around Trump.

    The recording also recalls the chaos at the end of his presidency. On the tape, sources tell CNN, Trump points to a classified Pentagon document to try to refute the idea that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley had been trying to stop him from starting a war with Iran.

    In July 2021, journalist Susan Glasser had reported that, near the end of Trump’s presidency, Milley had raised concerns about Trump trying to strike Iran and had told the Joint Chiefs to ensure Trump issued no illegal orders and that he be informed if there was any concern.

    That New Yorker story outraged Trump. On the tape, he mentions the document, which he said came from Milley, in response to that story – arguing that if others could see it, it would discredit Milley, sources said. (The document Trump references was not produced by Milley, CNN was told.)

    The document’s existence is hardly unusual. The Joint Chiefs of Staff has a directorate focused on developing and proposing strategies and plans for the chairman, and another that provides guidance about current plans and operations to commanders throughout the force.

    “You could pick any country and scenario and there is likely a contingency plan,” a US official told CNN’s Haley Britzky.

    It is even less unusual for Milley to have briefed Trump on those plans, the official added. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Milley’s job is to advise and brief the president on his military options as commander in chief.

    “That does not mean that Gen. Milley is a warmonger,” Beth Sanner, a former deputy director of National Intelligence who was involved with intelligence briefings during her career, said on CNN. “Quite the opposite. I spoke to him many times during my role as an intelligence official, and he absolutely did not want to go to war with Iran.”

    CNN’s report on the recording also includes the incredible development that investigators have questioned Milley, who is still the nation’s top general.

    The most important thing here could be Trump’s acknowledgment that the document is classified, contradicting his argument that he had the unilateral power to declassify things and take them from the White House.

    During a CNN town hall in New Hampshire earlier this month, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Trump if he had shown anyone classified documents to anyone.

    “Not really,” he told her, adding, “Let me just tell you, I have the absolute right to do whatever I want with them.”

    He had said that any classified documents he had were declassified, which is apparently contradicted by the audio recording.

    As CNN reported, Trump’s comments on the tape suggested he wanted to share the information but was aware of limitations on his ability post-presidency to declassify records, two of the sources said.

    The documents case is hardly the only legal matter hanging over Trump.

    The former president, and the country he wants to lead again, needs a color-coded calendar to keep track of all the legal developments involving him – and help separate potential trials and appeals from upcoming debate and primary dates.

    Besides the ongoing investigations into the aftermath of the 2020 election, here’s what else is looming over Trump.

    • His criminal trial in New York, which stems from the investigation into his alleged role in a hush money scheme, will coincide with March primary contests.
    • More immediately, there’s an October 2023 trial for the New York attorney general’s $250 million lawsuit against Trump, his eldest children and the Trump Organization. The Trump Organization was already convicted of criminal tax fraud in December.

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  • Convicted spy Robert Hanssen dies in prison | CNN Politics

    Convicted spy Robert Hanssen dies in prison | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Robert Philip Hanssen, who received payments of $1.4 million in cash and diamonds for the information he gave the Soviet Union and Russia, has died, the Federal Bureau of Prisons announced Monday. He was 79 years old.

    Hanssen had been in custody at Colorado’s USP Florence ADMAX since July 17, 2002.

    “On Monday, June 5, 2023, at approximately 6:55 am, inmate Robert Hanssen was found unresponsive at the United States Penitentiary (USP) Florence ADMAX in Florence, Colorado,” a release from the Federal Bureau of Prisons said. “Responding staff immediately initiated life-saving measures. Staff requested emergency medical services (EMS) and life-saving efforts continued.”

    “Mr. Hanssen was subsequently pronounced deceased by EMS personnel,” the release said.

    In 2001, Hanssen pleaded guilty to 15 counts of espionage and conspiracy in exchange for the government not seeking the death penalty. He was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

    Investigators accused him of compromising dozens of Soviet personnel who were working for the United States, some of whom were executed. He shared details of several US technical operations such as eavesdropping, surveillance and interception of communications. And he gave the Soviets the US plans of how it would react to a Soviet nuclear attack, both in protecting top government officials and retaliating against such an attack.

    The

    Hanssen case rocked the US intelligence community    , exposing major flaws in how the FBI and other agencies vet those with access to the nation’s secrets.

    After Hanssen’s treachery was exposed, investigators learned he had full access to the FBI and State Department’s computer systems and would spend hours trawling undetected for classified information. In his 25 years with the bureau, with access to highly sensitive sources and methods about US intelligence efforts targeting the Soviet Union and Russia, Hanssen had never been subjected to a polygraph examination.

    After the Hanssen case, the FBI moved to strengthen its so-called insider threat programs aimed at safeguarding the nation’s secrets by closely scrutinizing the finances and travel of personnel with access to classified information, and increasing the use of polygraphs to routinely assess employees for continued allegiance and suitability.

    Before Hanssen was exposed, then-FBI Director Robert Mueller said, “security was not a principle priority. There was no security division. The FBI didn’t have enough expertise. We moved to address that.”

    Hanssen began spying for the Soviet Union in 1979, three years after he had joined the FBI as a special agent.

    The counterintelligence officer worked as a spy for nearly 15 years, during some of the most consequential times for US and Russia relations and continuing past the end of the Cold War. He took a hiatus from spying for four years in the 1980s after being convinced by his wife, Bonnie.

    In a letter allegedly written by Hanssen to the Russians, he said that he was inspired as a teen by the memoirs of British double agent Kim Philby.

    “I decided on this course when I was 14 years old,” says the letter cited in the FBI’s affidavit. “I’d read Philby’s book. Now that is insane, eh!”

    The FBI began surveilling Hanssen in 2000 after he was identified from a fingerprint and from a tape recording supplied by a disgruntled Russian intelligence operative.

    After he was caught in 2001, Hanssen told his US interrogators, “I could have been a devastating spy, I think, but I didn’t want to be a devastating spy. I wanted to get a little money and get out of it.”

    Hanssen apologized for his actions during his sentencing in 2002. “I am shamed by it. Beyond its illegality, I have torn the trust of so many. Worse, I have opened the door for calumny against my totally innocent wife and our children. I hurt them deeply. I have hurt so many deeply,” he said.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Nvidia says US curbs on AI chip sales to China would cause ‘permanent loss of opportunities’ | CNN Business

    Nvidia says US curbs on AI chip sales to China would cause ‘permanent loss of opportunities’ | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Nvidia warned Wednesday that if the United States imposes new restrictions on the export of AI chips to China, it would result in a “permanent loss of opportunities” for US industry.

    The company’s chief financial officer, Colette Kress, said she didn’t anticipate any “immediate material impact” but tighter curbs would impact earnings in the future.

    US officials plan to tighten export curbs announced in October to restrict the sale of some artificial-intelligence chips to China, according to multiple media reports, including the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. Washington has ramped up efforts to cut China off from key technologies that can support its military.

    The US Department of Commerce has not replied to a CNN request for comment.

    The rules, as reported, could make it harder for companies like Nvidia

    (NVDA)     to sell advanced chips to China. Fueled by a boom in demand for its AI chips, the company briefly hit a market capitalization of $1 trillion in late May.

    “We are aware of reports that the US Department of Commerce is considering further controls that may restrict exports of our A800 and H800 products to China,” Kress told an investment conference.

    “Over the long-term, restrictions prohibiting the sale of our datacenter GPUs to China, if implemented, would result in a permanent loss of opportunities for US industry to compete and lead in one of the world’s largest markets and impact on our future business and financial results,” she said.

    GPUs refer to graphics processing units, which are chips or electronic circuits capable of rendering graphics for display on electronic devices.

    “Given the strength of demand for our products worldwide, we do not anticipate that such additional restrictions, if adopted, would have an immediate material impact on our financial results. We do not anticipate any immediate material impact on our financial results,” Kress added.

    Last October, the Biden administration unveiled a sweeping set of export controls that ban Chinese companies from buying advanced chips and chip-making equipment without a license.

    The new move is aimed in part at Nvidia’s A800 chip, which the US-based company created following the introduction of last year’s curbs in order to continue to sell to China, Bloomberg reported.

    China is a key market for Nvidia. Revenues from mainland China and Hong Kong accounted for 22% of the company’s revenue last year, according to its financial statements.

    On Wednesday, shares of Nvidia slumped as much as 3.2%, before recouping some of the losses. It ended down 1.8%. Chinese AI stocks suffered much heavier losses.

    Inspur Electronic Information Industry fell by 10%, the maximum allowed, on Wednesday in Shenzhen. It dropped again by 5.3% on Thursday. Chengdu Information Technology of Chinese Academy of Sciences slid 12% on Wednesday. Baidu

    (BIDU)    , which is developing a rival to ChatGPT, sank 4.4% on Thursday in Hong Kong.

    “The US could ruin China’s AI party,” Jefferies analyst said in a research note. Local chipsets do not have Nvidia’s GPU ecosystem, thus every update may require reworking, resulting in lower efficiency and higher costs.

    The Biden administration’s chip curbs would be “much more effective” in limiting China’s advances in military power driven by AI than rules restricting US investment in China’s tech sector, the analysts added.

    China has strongly criticized US restrictions on tech exports, saying earlier this year that it “firmly opposes” such measures.

    In May, Beijing banned Chinese operators of critical information infrastructure from buying products from Micron Technology

    (MU)    , in apparent retaliation against sanctions imposed by Washington and its allies on the country’s chip sector.

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  • Russian aircraft harass US drones over Syria for third time this week | CNN Politics

    Russian aircraft harass US drones over Syria for third time this week | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Russian aircraft once again harassed US MQ-9 Reaper drones over Syria Friday, the Air Force said, in a sign of increasing friction between the two countries in Middle East airspace.

    The incident marked the third time this week that US drones over Syria were intercepted by Russian aircraft.

    “Earlier today three MQ-9 drones were once again harassed by Russian fighter aircraft while flying over Syria,” commander of US Air Forces Central Lt. Gen. Alex Grynkewich said in a news release. “During the almost two hour encounter, Russian aircraft flew 18 unprofessional close passes that caused the MQ-9s to react to avoid unsafe situations.”

    “We continue to encourage Russia to return to the established norms of a professional Air Force so we can all return our focus to ensuring the enduring defeat of ISIS,” Grynkewich added.

    On Thursday, Russian fighter jets harassed a US MQ-9 Reaper drone that was conducting a mission against ISIS targets in northwest Syria. One of the Russian jets dropped flares in front of US drone in an apparent attempt to hit the drone, forcing it to take evasive maneuvers, the Air Force previously said.

    And earlier in the week, three Russian jets dropped parachute flares in front of three US drones, forcing the drones to take evasive maneuvers. One Russian jet also lit its afterburner in front of a US drone, limiting the drone operator’s ability to safely operate the aircraft.

    Russia is operating in Syria in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, while the US maintains its presence as part of the anti-ISIS coalition.

    While the two countries have used a deconfliction line in Syria over the last several years to avoid unintentional mistakes or encounters that can inadvertently lead to escalation, Russian military actions have increasingly violated the deconfliction protocols, including flying too close to US military bases in Syria.

    But the US wasn’t the only target of harassment from the Russian military this week. On Thursday, a Russian SU-35 fighter jet conducted a “non-professional interaction” with two French Rafale fighter jets that were flying a mission near the Iraq-Syria border, according to the official Twitter account of the French Armed Forces.

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  • EU blesses transatlantic data sharing deal | CNN Business

    EU blesses transatlantic data sharing deal | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The European Union on Monday gave final approval to an agreement with the US government that restores the ability for thousands of businesses to easily transfer the personal information of European citizens to servers located in the United States, and vice versa, in the face of surveillance concerns by privacy advocates.

    The decision resolves, for now, years of uncertainty about the future of transatlantic data flows that US officials say support more than $1 trillion in annual economic activity. Those data flows had been threatened when a previous EU-US agreement was struck down in 2020 by Europe’s top court over insufficient privacy protections for EU citizens.

    With the EU’s approval, the new agreement again allows businesses to transfer European data to the United States as if it were another EU member state, without requirements to implement additional privacy safeguards.

    Monday’s so-called “adequacy decision” by the European Commission paves the way for companies to sign up for the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, which entered into force the same day.

    EU officials said the new framework improves upon its predecessor by tying in an executive order signed by President Joe Biden last year limiting how US intelligence agencies may access European citizens’ personal information.

    The order also provided for the creation of a new court-like body that can force US companies to delete EU citizens’ data if an investigation determines that EU citizens’ privacy rights were violated. EU citizens will be able to file individual complaints to the Data Protection Review Court.

    In a statement, EU President Ursula von der Leyen called the US enhancements “unprecedented.”

    “Today we take an important step to provide trust to citizens that their data is safe, to deepen our economic ties between the EU and the US, and at the same time to reaffirm our shared values,” von der Leyen said. “It shows that by working together, we can address the most complex issues.”

    But civil liberties advocates on Monday sharply criticized the framework as too similar to “Privacy Shield,” the agreement struck down in 2020, signaling that the new framework is likely to be tested with its own court challenges.

    “Guess what: it is largely a copy of the old principles!” tweeted Max Schrems, the privacy activist who led the charge that resulted in Privacy Shield’s nullification.

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  • TSMC says skilled worker shortage delays start of Arizona chip production | CNN Business

    TSMC says skilled worker shortage delays start of Arizona chip production | CNN Business

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    Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co slumped more than 3% Friday after the world’s largest contract chipmaker flagged a 10% drop in 2023 sales and said production due to start next year at its first plant in Arizona would be delayed.

    On Thursday, TSMC

    (TSM)     reported a 23% fall in second-quarter net profit — its first year–on-year drop in quarterly profit since 2019 — as global economic woes take a toll on demand for chips used in everything from cars to cellphones.

    “While the company’s declining revenue and profit were disappointing, its long-term growth prospects remain encouraging,” said Brady Wang, associate director at Counterpoint Research. “Despite facing macroeconomic headwinds, TSMC’s long-term outlook remains robust, supported by mega trends like 5G and high-performance computing.”

    As TSMC steps up its global expansion, the company said production at its first plant in Arizona will be delayed until 2025 due to a shortage of specialist workers.

    “While we are working to improve the situation, including sending experienced technicians from Taiwan to train the local skilled workers for a short period of time, we expect the production schedule of N4 process technology to be pushed out to 2025,” TSMC chairman Mark Liu said Thursday.

    TSMC’s total investment in the US project amounts to $40 billion.

    The company said its position as the largest manufacturer of artificial intelligence chips and high demand for AI have not offset broader end-market weakness as the global economy recovers more slowly than it had expected.

    “The short-term frenzy about the AI demand definitely cannot extrapolate for the long term. Neither can we predict the near future — meaning next year — how the sudden demand will continue or flatten out,” Liu said.

    Still, the company’s earnings of 181.8 billion Taiwan dollars ($5.85 billion) for the quarter ending in June beat forecasts.

    “We see TSMC well-positioned for a strong growth outlook in 2024,” Goldman Sachs said in a research note. “We believe the US expansion delay is also well-expected by investors.”

    Other analysts, too, were upbeat on TSMC, thanks in part to strong demand for AI, which currently accounts for around 6% of the company’s revenue.

    “We expect a solid 2024-onward outlook on the back of its leading position in AI chip manufacturing,” Citi Research analysts said in a note.

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  • Inside the furious week-long scramble to hunt down a massive Pentagon leak | CNN Politics

    Inside the furious week-long scramble to hunt down a massive Pentagon leak | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Jack Teixeira, wearing a green t-shirt and bright red gym shorts with his hands above his head, walked slowly backward toward the armed federal agents outside his home in North Dighton, Massachusetts, who took him into custody on charges of leaking classified documents.

    The carefully choreographed arrest of the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman stood in stark contrast to the Biden administration’s scramble one week earlier to deal with the fallout from the revelation that highly classified documents had been sitting publicly on the internet for weeks.

    Those leaked documents, which appeared to catch the Biden administration flat-footed, disclosed a blunt US intelligence assessment of the war in Ukraine, as well as details revealing US intelligence collection on allies.

    The Biden administration raced to determine the identity of the leaker who had posted pictures of folded-up documents online, to understand the full scope of what had been leaked and to soothe allies who were varying degrees of angry that their secrets had spilled out for the world to see.

    While the suspected leaker has been arrested, the administration’s damage assessment is still ongoing. It remains unclear whether the full extent of the impact of the leaks is known, as details from additional classified documents continued to be published throughout the week – even on Friday morning, the day after his arrest.

    Inside the Pentagon, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley was “pissed” at the leak and “deeply concerned” about its national security implications, a US official told CNN. The Defense Department has been holding daily meetings on the leak since Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was first briefed last Thursday.

    The episode represents the most egregious disclosure of classified documents in years. The leaked documents have exposed what officials say are lingering vulnerabilities in the management of government secrets, even after agencies overhauled their computer systems following the 2013 Edward Snowden leak, which revealed the scope of the National Security Agency’s intelligence gathering apparatus.

    It is unlikely, however, that those safeguards would have prevented the most recent leak, sources said. “All classified systems have multiple levels of risk controls, but a determined insider will find the weak points over time,” said a former US official.

    The Pentagon has already taken steps to clamp down on who can access sensitive classified material, while Austin has ordered a review over access to classified documents. And Congress is vowing to investigate exactly what happened and why the US intelligence community failed to discover its secrets were sitting on a public internet forum for weeks.

    In a statement acknowledging the extent of the problem that the leaks exposed, President Joe Biden said Friday that he had directed both the military and intelligence community to “take steps to further secure and limit distribution of sensitive information.”

    “This is a breakdown,” Chris Krebs, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency, told CNN. “There’s no question that there will be a lot of introspection inside the intelligence community and across the government of where were those breakdowns? How do we ensure that we tighten that system of military discipline that that was referred to earlier to ensure that these things do not happen?”

    According to charging documents unsealed on Friday, Teixeira allegedly began posting classified information on the Discord server in December 2022.

    Teixeira is believed to be the head of obscure invite-only Discord chatroom called “Thug Shaker Central,” multiple US officials told CNN, where information from the classified documents was first posted.

    One of the users on the Discord server told FBI investigators that Teixeira began posting photographs of documents that appeared to be classified in January 2023, according to the affidavit unsealed Friday after Teixeira was arraigned.

    Investigators wrote in the affidavit that at least one of the documents that described the status of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, including troop movements, was classified at the TS-SCI level, meaning it contains top-secret, sensitive compartmentalized information.

    “The Government Document is based on sensitive U.S. intelligence, gathered through classified sources and methods, and contains national defense information,” the affidavit states.

    Teixeira, an airman first class stationed at Otis Air National Guard Base, was assigned to the 102nd Intelligence Wing, which is a “24/7 operational mission” that takes in intelligence from various sources and packages it into a product for some of the most senior military leaders around the globe, a defense official said.

    His job was not to be the one packaging the intelligence for those senior commanders, but rather to work on the network on which that highly classified intelligence lived. For that purpose, the official said Teixeira would be required to have a TS/SCI clearance, in the instance that he was exposed to that level of intelligence.

    “It’s not like your regular IT guy where you call a help desk and they come fix your computer,” the official said. “They’re working on a very highly classified system, so they require that clearance.”

    CNN has reviewed 53 documents that were posted on social media sites, which include US intelligence assessments of Ukrainian and Russian forces, as well as details about other countries providing weapons to Ukraine and other intelligence matters. The Washington Post has reported on an additional tranche of documents from the server.

    The photos showed crumpled documents laid on top of magazines and surrounded by other random objects, such as zip-close bags and Gorilla Glue, suggesting they had been hastily folded up and shoved into a pocket before being removed from a secure location.

    A Discord user told investigators that Teixeira had become concerned “he may be discovered making the transcriptions of text in the workplace, so he began taking the documents to his residence and photographing them,” according to the affidavit.

    Four Discord users active in a different Discord chatroom where the documents later appeared told CNN they began circulating on Thug Shaker. Another user who was in the Thug Shaker chatroom told CNN they saw the original posts of classified documents but declined to speak further about them.

    While the documents were being shared on Discord, there’s no indication that the US intelligence community was aware they were on the internet. Discord servers are typically small, private online communities that require an invitation to join.

    On April 6, The New York Times first reported on the leaked documents and the Pentagon having launched an investigation into who may have been behind the leak.

    The investigation into finding the leaker quickly moved into the hands of the Justice Department, while the Pentagon investigation focused on a damage assessment of the leaks themselves.

    But the number of leaked documents continued to grow in the hours and days that followed the initial disclosure, revealing new intelligence assessments on everything from South Korea’s hesitance to provide the US weapons that might be sent to Ukraine to intelligence suggesting Egypt planned to supply rockets to Russia.

    US diplomats were forced to deal with the fallout. Seoul said it would hold “necessary discussions with the US” following the leak.

    The documents that were leaked appear to be part of a daily intelligence briefing deck prepared for the Pentagon’s senior leaders, including Milley, the top US military general. On any given day, the slides in that deck can be properly accessed by hundreds, if not thousands, of people across the government, officials said.

    Last Friday’s announcement of a Justice Department investigation underscored just how high a priority the leak was considered.

    By Monday, FBI agents from Washington to California to Boston were combing through evidence, conducting interviews and tracking volumes of computer data that within days pointed to Teixeira. They worked with Army CID investigators experienced in classified document probes.

    Anthony Ferrante, a former FBI agent, said that the “first few hours are critical” in a case like the Discord leaks as investigators rush to preserve digital evidence before it becomes harder to find online or vanishes altogether.

    FBI agents likely worked backward from the initial Discord posts to build a profile of the leaker, combing through his other online accounts to “put a human behind a keyboard,” Ferrante, who is now global head of cybersecurity at FTI Consulting, told CNN.

    Even though Teixeira emerged quickly as the most obvious suspect, counterintelligence agents trained in uncovering foreign spies looked through Teixeira’s background to try to find any sign that he could be working with a foreign intelligence service.

    The FBI agents’ work was made more urgent because the trove of documents had set off a media frenzy and reporters found ready interviews among members of Teixeira’s Internet social circle.

    On Monday, the FBI interviewed a user of the Discord chatroom where the classified information had been posted, according to the affidavit. That person told investigators that a user who went by “Jack” and said he was in the Air National Guard was the server’s administrator.

    A day earlier, the investigative news outlet Bellingcat posted an interview with a member of that same chatroom.

    On Wednesday, a day before Teixeira’s arrest, the FBI obtained records from Discord that included the subscriber information of the server’s administrator, which had Teixeira’s name and address, according to the affidavit.

    By day 5 of the FBI’s search, agents believed they had enough to charge Teixeira, and they began surveilling him.

    In a different scenario, without the intense public attention, agents might have watched him for weeks to see if he was meeting anyone suspicious or if he had accomplices.

    Instead, they moved to make an arrest Thursday, as news helicopters flew above.

    Teixeira was charged under the Espionage Act with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal of classified information and defense materials. He will next appear on Wednesday in federal court in Massachusetts.

    For the Biden administration, the episode has already prompted the Pentagon to begin to limit who across the government receives its highly classified daily intelligence briefs, amid lingering questions over why a 21-year-old junior Air National Guardsman had access to such classified information – and why it wasn’t discovered more quickly.

    Austin and Milley spent time on the phone speaking with US allies and partners around the world regarding the sensitive intelligence and top-secret documents suddenly thrust into the public sphere. Those conversations were expected to continue through the end of the week, another US official said.

    Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman was tapped to lead the diplomatic response to the leaked US intelligence documents, according to a US official familiar with the matter.

    Biden was continually briefed on the state of the investigation while abroad, as well as the efforts of his top officials to engage with allies over the leaked information, officials said. Behind the scenes, that effort was a reality that loomed over a deeply personal and important foreign trip for Biden, one official acknowledged. 

    Still, the leaks didn’t arise when Biden met Wednesday with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a Five Eyes intelligence sharing ally.

    Biden publicly downplayed the significance of the leak when he made his first comments on the matter. “I’m concerned that it happened, but there is nothing contemporaneous that I’m aware of that is of great consequence,” Biden told reporters Thursday.

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  • Ron DeSantis, facing challenges at home, will test presidential ambitions overseas | CNN Politics

    Ron DeSantis, facing challenges at home, will test presidential ambitions overseas | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    After a trying week for his national political ambitions, Gov. Ron DeSantis is headed abroad this week for a series of visits to allied nations – an opportunity for the Florida Republican to step onto the international stage for the first time as a likely presidential contender.

    The official purpose behind DeSantis’ globetrotting is for an “international trade mission,” according to his office. DeSantis, as well as first lady Casey DeSantis and two representatives from his administration, will travel to Japan, South Korea, Israel and the United Kingdom to meet with officials and chat up potential business partnerships.

    “This trade mission will give us the opportunity to strengthen economic relationships and continue to demonstrate Florida’s position as an economic leader,” the governor said in a news release Thursday.

    DeSantis met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Monday in Tokyo where the two exchanged views on “regional affairs.” Kishida said he hopes DeSantis’ “visit to Japan will lead to the further strengthening of Japan-US and Japan-Florida relationship,” according to a Japanese foreign ministry statement published on Monday.

    While in Israel, DeSantis will also keynote an event hosted by The Jerusalem Post and the Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem. The appearance there comes at a time of increased tension between the US and its Middle East ally over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul proposal.

    The trip will spotlight DeSantis’ foreign policy credentials as he inches toward a White House bid. DeSantis rose to the national consciousness as a pandemic contrarian and by leading his state through a series of cultural fights, but his views on world affairs had been less scrutinized until recently, when the governor offered a series of contradicting opinions on the war in Ukraine.

    DeSantis’ remark that support for Ukraine was not of “vital” national interest set off alarm bells among hawkish Republicans in Congress before the governor backtracked in an interview with Piers Morgan and called Russian President Vladimir Putin a war criminal. He further obscured his position a few days later by dismissing the war as a fight over the “borderlands.”

    Over his nearly six years as a congressman in Washington, DeSantis, a former Navy lawyer stationed in both Guantanamo Bay and Iraq, served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he was often critical of President Barack Obama’s overseas agenda. As governor, he has urged hard-line policies against communist governments in Cuba and China, most recently banning TikTok on state government devices and pushing legislation that would make it illegal for Chinese nationals to buy property in Florida.

    And even as he is scheduled to meet with allies to encourage business with his state, DeSantis on Friday poked fun at a United Nations committee resolution that criticized an anti-riot law he championed as governor.

    “I wear that criticism as a badge of honor,” he said at an event hosted by The Heritage Foundation outside Washington.

    DeSantis’ trip abroad marks the first time he has left US soil on official business since the early days of his first term as governor in 2019, when he visited Israel along with the state’s elected cabinet members. As an elected official, DeSantis has not visited a foreign country other than Israel.

    DeSantis’ predecessor, now-US Sen. Rick Scott, embarked on more than a dozen trade missions during his tenure as governor. DeSantis, though, has focused largely on issues at home while also dealing with a coronavirus outbreak that significantly restricted travel for much of his first term.

    As he now prepares for his first visits to Europe and East Asia as governor, DeSantis is leaving behind the most difficult stretch so far of the unofficial rollout of his expected presidential campaign, as well as challenges in his home state that have caused critics to raise questions about his extensive recent travel.

    Some key donors have publicly expressed reservations about DeSantis’ chances in a primary against Donald Trump, who continues to hammer his onetime ally on social media. The former president last week upstaged DeSantis’ return to Capitol Hill to seek support from within the chamber he once served in by rolling out a string of congressional endorsements – including a handful from Florida lawmakers. Eleven Florida Republicans have endorsed Trump over DeSantis so far – including seven last week.

    DeSantis has also faced scrutiny for his response this month to torrential storms – described as a 1-in-1,000-year rainfall event – that left Fort Lauderdale and surrounding communities underwater. Amid the severe flooding, DeSantis took his book tour to Ohio and spoke at a fundraiser for New Hampshire Republicans – returning to Florida in between trips for a late-night, closed-door signing of a six-week abortion ban – and said little publicly about the storms.

    “Fort Lauderdale is under water and DeSantis is campaigning in Ohio right now instead of taking care of the people suffering in his state,” Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son, tweeted earlier this month.

    The storms also caused gasoline shortages throughout South Florida, leading the state’s US senators, both Republicans, to criticize the response, though without directly calling out DeSantis. Sen. Marco Rubio called the situation “crazy,” adding, “They gotta get this thing fixed.”

    “Florida families shouldn’t have uncertainty about their next tank of gas. Every resource available should be deployed to fix this,” Scott tweeted.

    Asked about the comments from Florida’s senators, DeSantis spokesman Bryan Griffin told CNN that “the state emergency response apparatus has been at work since the flooding occurred and continues in full swing responding to the needs of the localities as they are communicated to us. The governor issued a state of emergency the day after the flooding occurred.”

    On Saturday, DeSantis requested a major disaster declaration from the Biden administration.

    Meanwhile, in his state’s capital of Tallahassee, the Florida Legislature is nearing the end of a 60-day session where GOP lawmakers have been tasked with helping DeSantis rack up policy victories before he launches a campaign for president. He has already signed several of those bills, including the abortion ban, a measure to allow Floridians to carry concealed guns in public and an overhaul of the state’s tort laws.

    With DeSantis mostly on the road, though, several of his priorities appear to have stalled in the GOP-controlled legislature. A bill that would make it easier to sue media outlets for libel hasn’t moved in weeks. State lawmakers have also balked at a provision in DeSantis’ immigration package that would eliminate in-state tuition for undocumented residents.

    US Rep. Greg Steube, who previously served in the Florida Senate and endorsed Trump last week, accused state lawmakers on Friday of “carrying the water for an unannounced presidential campaign.”

    “Your constituents voted you into those positions to represent them, not to kowtow to the presidential ambitions of a Governor!” the GOP lawmaker tweeted. “Be strong and courageous, the people of Florida will thank you.”

    Appearing unfazed by the chatter, DeSantis on Friday rattled off his conservative victories as governor before a friendly audience at the Heritage Foundation event.

    DeSantis also looked briefly ahead to the 2024 race, laying out what was at stake in the next presidential election and suggesting the country needed a “determined and disciplined chief executive to root out politicization and corruption throughout the old executive branch” – a likely jab at the distracted and often chaotic presidency of Trump.

    “We need to reject the pessimism that is in the air about our country’s future,” DeSantis said. “Because at the end of the day, decline is a choice, success is attainable and freedom is worth fighting for.”

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Blinken says US is ‘engaged with Syria’ in efforts to free missing journalist Austin Tice | CNN Politics

    Blinken says US is ‘engaged with Syria’ in efforts to free missing journalist Austin Tice | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The United States is “engaged with Syria, engaged with third countries” to try to bring detained journalist Austin Tice home, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday.

    “We are extensively engaged with regard to Austin, engaged with Syria, engaged with third countries, seeking to find a way to get him home. And we’re not going to relent until we do,” Blinken said in remarks at a Washington Post event on World Press Freedom Day.

    Tice was taken hostage in Syria in 2012. President Joe Biden declared last year that the US government knows “with certainty that he has been held by the Syrian regime” and called on Damascus to cooperate on efforts to release him.

    The government of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad has not publicly acknowledged they are detaining Tice. The US does not have diplomatic relations with the Syrian regime and has voiced opposition to rapprochement with Assad.

    Blinken did not provide details about the engagements to bring Tice home. White House and State Department officials would not confirm a report from the Wall Street Journal that US officials had held talks with Syrian officials in Oman.

    “We cannot confirm any specific meetings past or present. As you know in general meetings and negotiations to secure the release of wrongfully detained Americans, that is incredibly sensitive,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a White House briefing. “We want to be really, really careful and mindful and don’t want to confirm any specific conversation from the past or in the present.”

    CNN reported last August that the Biden administration had direct engagements with the Syrian government in an effort to secure Tice’s release. In 2020 under the Trump administration, Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens secretly traveled to Damascus and met with Assad regime officials.

    Austin Tice’s mother Debra Tice told CNN Monday that she thinks that the administration is committed to bringing her son home but “they stumble over what needs to be done.” She said she had no doubt that her son would walk free.

    Biden paid tribute to Austin Tice and other wrongfully detained Americans, including Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan in Russia, in remarks at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday.

    A number of family members of wrongfully detained Americans – many of whom have joined forces in an organization called the “Bring Our Families Home” campaign – as well as those who had been freed from detention gathered in Washington, DC, this week to seek a meeting with the president and call on the US government to do more to secure the release of their loved ones.

    “Although our loved ones are wrongfully detained and held hostage abroad, including China, including Russia, including Iran, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela, our voices are stronger together,” said Harrison Li, the son of Kai Li, who is detained in China.

    “Although each case has its own idiosyncrasies, we all need the same things: for President Biden to meet with us, and to use all tools to bring them home,” he said.

    “We have asked for a meeting with the president for so long now that I frankly don’t know how else to ask or what else to say,” Hannah Sharghi, whose father Emad Shargi is detained in Iran, said at a news conference Wednesday.

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