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Tag: political figures – intl

  • UK PM Liz Truss admits mistakes on controversial tax cuts plan, but doubles down on it anyway | CNN

    UK PM Liz Truss admits mistakes on controversial tax cuts plan, but doubles down on it anyway | CNN

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    British Prime Minister Liz Truss admitted mistakes had been made with her government’s controversial “mini-budget” announced last week – which sent the pound to historic lows and sparked market chaos – but stood by her policies.

    Speaking to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday morning Truss said: “I do accept we should have laid the ground better and I’ve learned from that, and I’ll make sure I’ll do a better job of laying the ground in the future.”

    She said that she wanted “to tell people I understand their worries about what happened this week and I stand by the package we announced and I stand by the fact we announced it quickly.”

    Last week, Truss’ government announced that they would cut taxes by £45 billion ($48 billion) in a bid to get the UK economy moving again, with a package that includes scrapping the highest rate of income tax for top earners from 45% to 40% and a big increase in government borrowing to slash energy prices for millions of households and businesses this winter.

    Many leading economists described the unorthodox measures as a reckless gamble, noting that the measures came a day after the Bank of England warned that the country was already likely in a recession.

    Truss said the reforms were not agreed by her cabinet, but were a decision made by Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng. “It was a decision the chancellor made,” she told the BBC.

    She doubled down on that decision however, saying that her government made the “right decision to borrow more this winter to face the extraordinary consequences we face,” referring to the energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine. She claimed that the alternative would be for people to pay up to £6,000 in energy bills, and that inflation would be 5% higher.

    “We’re not living in a perfect world, we are living in a very difficult world, where governments around the world are taking tough decisions,” Truss said.

    Regarding the rising cost of living in the UK, namely the rise of mortgage rates, Truss said that is mostly driven by interest rates and is “a matter for the independent Bank of England.”

    The Bank of England said Wednesday it would buy UK government debt “on whatever scale is necessary” in an emergency intervention to halt a bond market crash that it warned could threaten financial stability.

    Meanwhile, Credit Suisse said that UK house prices could “easily” fall between 10% and 15% over the next 18 months if the Bank of England aggressively hikes interest rates to keep inflation in check.

    The fallout could make it harder for people to get approved for mortgages, and encourage prospective buyers to delay their purchases. A drop in demand would lead to falling prices.

    Truss defended her government’s policies to the BBC as the Conservative party’s annual conference kicked off in in Birmingham.

    The party is bitterly divided, with its poll ratings sinking lower than they were even under the disgraced leadership of Boris Johnson.

    On Sunday, that chill was evident, as Nadine Dorries, the former culture secretary who backed Truss to be prime minister, accused Truss of throwing Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng “under a bus” in her BBC interview, when she said the tax cut decision were made by him and not the Cabinet.

    “One of @BorisJohnson faults was that he could sometimes be too loyal and he got that. However, there is a balance and throwing your Chancellor under a bus on the first day of conference really isn’t it. [Hope] things improve and settle down from now,” Dorries said on Twitter.

    Conservative members of parliament fear the combination of tax cuts along with huge public spending to help people cope with energy bills, rising inflation, rising interest rates and a falling pound are going to make winning the next general election impossible.

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  • Russian forces retreat from strategic Donetsk city a day after Moscow’s annexation of the region | CNN

    Russian forces retreat from strategic Donetsk city a day after Moscow’s annexation of the region | CNN

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    Kyiv, Ukraine
    CNN
     — 

    Russian forces retreated from Lyman, a strategic city for its operations in the east, the Russian defense ministry said Saturday, just a day after Moscow’s annexation of the region that’s been declared illegal by the West.

    “In connection with the creation of a threat of encirclement, allied troops were withdrawn from the settlement of Krasny Liman to more advantageous lines,” the ministry said on Telegram, using the Russian name for the town of Lyman.

    Russian state media Russia-24 reported that the reason for Russia’s withdrawal was because “the enemy used both Western-made artillery and intelligence from North Atlantic alliance countries.”

    The retreat marks Ukraine’s most significant gain since its successful counteroffensive in the northeastern Kharkiv region last month.

    Russia’s announcement comes just hours after Ukrainian forces said they had encircled Russian troops in the city, which is located in the Kramatorsk district of Donetsk.

    Ukrainian forces said earlier Saturday that they had entered Stavky, a village neighboring Lyman, according to Serhii Cherevatyi, the military spokesperson for the eastern grouping of Ukrainian forces.

    “The Russian group in the area of Lyman is surrounded. The settlements of Yampil, Novoselivka, Shandryholove, Drobysheve, and Stavky are liberated. Stabilization measures are ongoing there,” Cherevatyi said in a televised press conference on Saturday morning.

    “[The liberation] of Lyman is important, because it is another step towards the liberation of the Ukrainian Donbas. This is an opportunity to go further to Kreminna and Severodonetsk. Therefore, in turn, it is psychologically very important,” he said.

    Cherevatyi said the Ukrainian troops actions are setting the tone to “break the course of these hostilities.”

    He added that there had been “many killed and wounded,” but could not provide any further details.

    The head of Luhansk regional military administration Serhiy Hayday also revealed Saturday further details of the Lyman offensive, suggesting Russian forces had offered to retreat, but to no avail from the Ukrainian side.

    “Occupiers asked [their command] for possibility to retreat, and they have been refused. Accordingly, they have two options. No, they actually have three options. Try to break through, surrender, or everyone there will die,” Hayday said.

    “There are several thousand of them. Yes, about 5,000. There is no exact number yet. Five thousand is still a colossal grouping. There has never been such a large group in the encirclement before. All routes for the supply of ammunition or the retreat of the group are all completely blocked,” he added.

    Yurii Mysiagin, Ukrainian member of Parliament and deputy head of the parliament’s committee on national security, referenced the move into Stavky on Saturday by publishing a video on Telegram showing a Ukrainian tank moving up the road with a clear sign indicating the region of Stavky. CNN could not independently verify the original source or the date.

    A video posted on social media, and shared by President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, shows two Ukrainian soldiers standing on a military vehicle attaching the flag with tape to a large sign with the word “Lyman.”

    “We are unfurling our country’s flag and planting it on our land. On Lyman. Everything will be Ukraine,” one of the soldiers says to the camera.

    Meanwhile, pressure appears to be growing on Russian President Vladimir Putin to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield.

    Ramzan Kadyrov, leader of the Chechen republic, in an angry statement slamming Russian generals in the wake of the withdrawal from Lyman, said it was time for the Kremlin to make use of every weapon at his disposal.

    “In my personal opinion we need to take more drastic measures, including declaring martial law in the border territories and using low-yield nuclear weapons,” Kadyrov said on his Telegram channel. “There is no need to make every decision with the Western American community in mind.”

    Earlier this week, Dmitry Medvedev, who served as Russia’s President between 2008 and 2012, discussed nuclear weapons use on his Telegram channel, saying it was permitted if the existence of the Russian state was threatened by an attack even by conventional forces.

    “If the threat to Russia exceeds our established threat limit, we will have to respond … this is certainly not a bluff,” he wrote.

    Concerns have risen sharply that Moscow could resort to nuclear weapons use after Putin’s proclamation on Friday that Russia would seize nearly a fifth of Ukraine, declaring that the millions of people living there would be Russian citizens “forever.”

    The announcement was dismissed as illegal by the United States and many other countries, but the fear is the Kremlin might argue that attacks on those territories now constitute attacks on Russia.

    In his speech in the Kremlin, the Russian leader made only passing reference to nuclear weapons, noting the United States was the only country to have used them on the battlefield.

    “By the way, they created a precedent,” he added.

    Also on Saturday, the director-general of Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was detained by a Russian patrol, according to the president of state nuclear company Energoatom.

    Director-General Ihor Murashov was in his vehicle on his way from the plant when he was “stopped … taken out of the car, and with his eyes blindfolded he was driven in an unknown direction. For the time being there is no information on his fate,” Energoatom’s Petro Kotin said in a statement.

    “Murashov is a licensed person and bears main and exclusive responsibility for the nuclear and radiation safety of the Zaporizhzhya NPP,” Kotin said, adding, that his detention “jeopardizes the safety of operation of Ukraine and Europe’s largest nuclear power plant.”

    Kotin called for Murashov’s release, and urged the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to “take all possible immediate actions to urgently free” him.

    Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs “strongly” condemned Murashov’s “illegal detention,” calling it a “another manifestation of state terrorism from the side of Russia and a gross violation of international law.”

    “We call on the international community, in particular the UN, the IAEA and the G7, to also take decisive measures to this end,” the ministry said in a statement.

    Overnight, Russia hit Zaporizhzhia with four S300 missiles, according to the head of the regional administration Oleksandr Starukh.

    And in Kharkiv, the Regional Prosecutor’s Office said Saturday that the bodies of 22 civilians, including 10 children, were found following Russian shelling on a convoy of cars near the eastern town of Kupiansk.

    The cars were shot by the Russian army on September 25 “when civilians were trying to evacuate,” it said in a Telegram post, adding that an investigation was ongoing.

    Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) and police had “discovered a convoy of seven cars that had been shot dead near the village of Kurylivka, Kupiansk district,” on Friday, Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office said.

    The SBU confirmed on Telegram they would be investigating a “war crime” where at least 20 people died in “a brutal attack.”

    CNN could not independently verify the allegations. There has been no official Russian response to the claims made.

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  • Putin has his back to the wall with the clock ticking ever louder | CNN

    Putin has his back to the wall with the clock ticking ever louder | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Time is running out for Russian President Vladimir Putin, and he knows it.

    Meanwhile his bombast continues: announcing the annexation of Ukrainian territories on Friday, Putin declared Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson will become part of Russia “forever.” He is rushing to claim a victory and cement slender gains and sue for peace, running a dangerous political tab, regardless of the fanfare in Moscow.

    He called on Ukraine to “cease fire” immediately and “sit down at the negotiating table,” but added: “We will not negotiate the choice of the people. It has been made. Russia will not betray it.”

    He is doing his best to hide it, but he is losing his war in Ukraine. The writing is on the wall.

    Andrey Kortunov, who runs the Kremlin-backed Russian International Affairs Council in Moscow, sees it, too. “President Putin wants to end this whole thing as fast as possible,” he told CNN.

    Putin’s recent heavy-handed conscription drive for 300,000 troops won’t reverse his battlefield losses any time soon, and is backfiring at home, running him up a dangerous political tab.

    According to official data from the EU, Georgia and Kazakhstan, around 220,000 Russians have fled across their borders since the “partial mobilization” was announced. The EU said its numbers – nearly 66,000 – represented a more than 30% increase from the previous week.

    Ex-oligarch says Putin made a dangerous move and is risking his life

    Independent Russian media quoting Russia’s revamped KGB, the FSB, put the total exodus even higher. They say more military age men have fled the country since conscription – 261,000 – than have so far fought in the war – an estimated 160,000 to 190,000.

    CNN is unable to verify the Russian figures, but the 40 kilometers (around 25 miles) traffic tailbacks at the border with Georgia, and the long lines at crossings into Kazakhstan and Finland, speak to the backlash and the strengthening perception that Putin is losing his fabled touch at reading Russia’s mood.

    The clock ticks loudly for Putin because his back is against the wall.

    Kortunov says he doesn’t know what goes on in the Kremlin but that he understands the public mood over the huge costs and loss of life in the war. “Many people would start asking questions, why did we get into this mess? Why, you know, we lost so many people.”

    Putin’s logical option, Kortunov says, is to declare victory and get out on his own terms. But for this he needs a significant achievement on the ground. “Russia cannot simply get to where it was, on the 24 February of this year, say, okay, you know, that’s fine. Our mission is accomplished. So we go home… …There should be something that can be presented to the public as a victory.”

    And this is the logic Putin appears to be following, rubber-stamping the sham referendums in Ukraine’s Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and declaring them part of Russia.

    He used the same playbook annexing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and now, like then, threatens potential nuclear strikes should Ukraine, backed by its Western allies, try to take the annexed territories back.

    Western leaders are in a battle of brinksmanship with Putin. Last Sunday US national security adviser Jake Sullivan told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Washington would respond decisively if Russia deployed nuclear weapons against Ukraine and has made clear to Moscow the “catastrophic consequences” it would face.

    Leaders have also vowed not to recognize the regions as part of Russian territory.

    US President Joe Biden said Moscow’s actions have “no legitimacy,” adding that Washington will continue to “always honor Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders.” The European Union said it “will never” recognize the Kremlin’s “illegal annexation,” and described the move as a “further violation of Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

    Hear what worries Sen. Rubio more than a Russian nuclear attack

    There is little new in what Putin does, which, if nothing else, is making his moves more predictable, and therefore more readily analyzed.

    Kurt Volker, who was US ambassador to NATO and US special representative to Ukraine under former President Donald Trump, believes Putin maybe gearing up for peace. “I think what he must be striving for, is to brandish the nuclear weapons, make all kinds of threats to Europe, and then say, okay, so let’s negotiate a settlement. And let me keep what I have already taken.”

    Fiona Hill, who has advised three US Presidents on national security about Russia, also thinks Putin may be attempting an end game. “He feels a sense of acute urgency that he was losing momentum, and he’s now trying to exit the war in the same way that he entered it. With him being the person in charge and him framing the whole terms of any kind of negotiation. “

    If these analyses are correct, they go a long way toward explaining the mystery of what happened under the Baltic Sea on Monday.

    Both Danish and Swedish seismologists recorded explosive shockwaves from close to the seabed: the first, at around 2 a.m. local time, hitting 2.3 magnitude, then again, at around 7 p.m., registering 2.1.

    Within hours, roiling patches of sea were discovered, the Danes and the Germans sent warships to secure the area, and Norway increased security around its oil and gas facilities.

    So far, at least four leaks in Russia’s Nord Stream pipelines 1 and 2 have been discovered, each at the surface resembling a boiling cauldron, the largest one kilometer across, and together spewing industrial quantities of toxic greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

    Sabotage suspected in Nord Stream pipeline leaks

    Russian naval vessels were seen by European security officials in the area in the days prior, Western intelligence sources have said. NATO’s North Atlantic Council has described the damage as a “deliberate, reckless and irresponsible act of sabotage.”

    Russia denies responsibility and says it has launched its own investigation. But former CIA chief John Brennan said Russia has the expertise to inflict this type of damage “all the signs point to some type of sabotage that these pipelines are only in about 200 feet or so of water and Russia does have an undersea capability to that will easily lay explosive devices by those pipelines.”

    Brennan’s analysis is that Russia is the most likely culprit for the sabotage, and that Putin is likely trying to send a message: “It’s a signal to Europe that Russia can reach beyond Ukraine’s borders. So who knows what he might be planning next.”

    Nord Stream 2 was never operational, and Nord Stream 1 had been throttled back by Putin as Europe raced to replenish gas reserves ahead of winter, while dialling back demands for Russian supplies and searching for replacement providers.

    The Nord Stream pipeline sabotage could, according to Hill, be a last roll of the dice by Putin, so that “there’s no kind of turning back on the gas issues. And it’s not going to be possible for Europe to continue to build up its gas reserves for the winter. So what Putin is doing is throwing absolutely everything at this right now.”

    Another factor accelerating Putin’s thinking may be the approach of winter. Napoleon and Hitler both failed to take Moscow as supply lines running through Ukraine were too long and arduous in winter. Volker says that what historically saved Russia is now pressing down on Putin: “This time, it’s Russia that has to supply lines, trying to sustain its forces in Ukraine. That’s going to be very hard this winter. So all of a sudden, for all these factors, Putin’s timeline has moved up.”

    The bottom line, said Hill, is that “this is the result of Ukraine gaining momentum on the ground on the battlefield and of Putin himself losing it, so he’s trying to adapt to the circumstances and basically take charge and get every advantage.”

    No one knows what’s really going on in Putin’s mind. Kortunov doubts Putin will be willing to compromise beyond his own terms for peace, “not on the terms that are offered by President Zelensky, not on the terms which are offered by the West… .[though] he should be ready to exercise a degree of flexibility. But we don’t know what these degrees [are] likely to be.”

    According to Hill, Putin wants his negotiations to be with Biden and allies, not Ukraine: “He’s basically saying now you will have to negotiate with me and sue for peace. And that means recognizing what we have done on the ground in Ukraine.”

    Having failed in the face of Western military unity backing Ukraine, Putin appears set to test Western resolve diplomatically, by trying to divide Western allies over terms for peace.

    Volker expects Putin to pitch France and Germany first “to say, we need to end this war, we’re going to protect our territories at all costs, using any means necessary, and you need to put pressure on the Ukrainians to settle.”

    If this is Putin’s plan, it could turn into his biggest strategic miscalculation yet. There is little Western appetite to see him stay in power – US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said as much in the summer – and even less to let down Ukraine after all its suffering.

    Putin knows he is in a corner, but doesn’t seem to realize how small a space he has, and that of course is what’s most worrying – would he really make good on his nuclear threats?

    The war in Ukraine may have entered a new phase, and Putin may have his back against the wall, but an end to the conflict could still be a very long way off.

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  • Bolsonaro or Lula? As Brazil prepares to vote, here’s what to know | CNN

    Bolsonaro or Lula? As Brazil prepares to vote, here’s what to know | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Brazil’s hotly contested presidential election is less than 24 hours away, and for many Brazilians, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

    Two household names – former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and current leader Jair Bolsonaro – are battling to become the country’s next president. Depending on who ultimately wins, Latin America’s largest economy will likely either continue on Bolsonaro’s conservative, pro-business path, or else take a left turn under Lula.

    In recent weeks, both candidates have ramped up efforts to woo voters. But this is an arduous task in a country where 85% of voters say they have already made up their minds, according to a Datafolha poll released Thursday.

    For Lula, more votes could mean victory in the first round of voting, with no need for a runoff. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro needs to catch up, after slipping 14 points behind his rival in the same survey.

    Brazilians will vote for their next president on Sunday, October 2, in the first round of the elections. On the same date, governors, senators, federal and state deputies for the country’s 26 states plus the federal district will also be chosen.

    Voting is scheduled to start at 8 a.m. local time in Brasilia (7 a.m. ET) and concludes at 5 p.m. local (4 p.m. ET).

    In the Brazilian electoral system, a winning candidate must gain more than 50% of the vote. If no candidate crosses that threshold, a second round of voting will be organized, in which the options will be narrowed down to the two frontrunners from the first round.

    In Brazil, opinion polls always estimate candidates’ potential performance in the first round (competing against with all other candidates) and in the second round (with just two top candidates).

    Over 156 million Brazilians are eligible to vote.

    Bolsonaro and Lula are by far the candidates to watch. Though other candidates are also in the race, they’re polling with one-digit percentages and are unlikely to pose much competition.

    Lula, 76, was Brazil’s President for two terms – from 2003 to 2006 and 2007 to 2011. A household name, he first came into the political scene in the 1970s as a leader of worker strikes which defied the military regime.

    In 1980, he was one of the founders of the Workers’ Party (PT), which went on to become Brazil’s main left-wing political force. Lula’s presidential terms were marked by programs aimed at reducing poverty and inequality in the country but also rocked by revelations of a corruption scheme involving the payment of congressional representatives to support government proposals. Due to lack of evidence of his involvement, Lula himself was never included in the investigation of this scheme.

    Lula’s campaign for the presidency now promises a new tax regime that will allow for higher public spending. He has vowed to end hunger in the country, which has returned during the Bolsonaro government. Lula also promises to work to reduce carbon emissions and deforestation in the Amazon.

    Bolsonaro is a former army captain who was a federal deputy for 27 years before running for President in 2018. A marginal figure in politics during much of this time, he emerged in the mid-2010s as a leading figure of a more radically right-wing movement, which perceived the PT as its main enemy.

    As a President, Bolsonaro has pursued a conservative agenda, supported by important evangelical leaders. His government also became known for its support for ruthless exploitation of land in the Amazon, leading to record deforestation figures. Environmentalists have warned that the future of the rainforest could be at stake in this election.

    In his program, Bolsonaro promises to increase mining, privatize public companies and generate more sustainable energy to bring down energy prices. He has vowed to continue paying a R$600 (roughly US$110) monthly benefit known as Auxilio Brasil.

    Da Silva speaks during an event organized by workers' unions on International Workers' Day in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Sunday, May 1, 2022.

    Vote counting begins right after ballots (mostly electronic) close on Sunday.

    Brazil’s electoral authorities say they expect final results from the first round to be officially announced that evening, on October 2. They will be published on the electoral court’s website.

    In the last few elections, results were officially declared two to three hours after voting finished. If the leading candidate does not manage to muster more than half of all valid votes, a second round will take place on October 30.

    Observers will be watching closely to see if all candidates accept the vote result publicly. Bolsonaro, who has been accused of firing up supporters with violent rhetoric, has sought to sow doubts about the result and said that the results should be considered suspicious if he doesn’t gain “at least 60%.”

    Both he and his conservative Liberal Party claimed that Brazil’s electronic ballot system is susceptible to fraud – an entirely unfounded allegation that has drawn comparisons to the false election claims of former US President Donald Trump.

    There have been no proven instances of voter fraud in the electronic ballot in Brazil.

    The Supreme Electoral Court has also rejected claims of flaws in the system, as “false and untruthful, with no base in reality.”

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  • Liz Truss faces her party faithful after a disastrous week. Many Conservatives fear defeat looms at UK’s next election | CNN

    Liz Truss faces her party faithful after a disastrous week. Many Conservatives fear defeat looms at UK’s next election | CNN

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    Liz Truss’ first full week as British Prime Minister has not been an easy one. It began with the pound crashing to its lowest level in decades following her government’s mini-budget last Friday. It ended with her meeting the UK’s independent financial forecaster and having to explain herself after a week of economic chaos.

    This weekend, she will travel to Birmingham to attend her Conservative party’s annual conference, a meeting that could become a defining moment in her premiership.

    Her party is bitterly divided. Since becoming leader, poll ratings have sunk lower than they were even under the disgraced leadership of Boris Johnson. Conservative members of Parliament fear the combination of tax cuts along with huge public spending to help people cope with energy bills, rising inflation, rising interest rates and a falling pound are going to make winning the next general election impossible.

    Even her supporters privately say that while they support her tax cuts, the communication has been appalling and fear that she might never recover from her disastrous start. Many are comparing it to Black Wednesday in 1992, when sterling crashed sufficiently that the UK had to pull out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Then-Prime Minister John Major never recovered from the crisis and despite an economic recovery, lost the next election in 1997.

    For now, no one expects the government to reverse its policy. “They are stuck with this. The thing with radical policy that shakes market confidence is that U-turning creates even more instability and won’t restore market confidence,” says one Conservative MP.

    Beyond how a U-turn might look to those outside, the more important reason Truss is likely to stick to her guns is that she sincerely believes that her economic plan is the right thing for Britain. Her supporters argue that the UK has had anemic growth for years. They believe that a more competitive tax system and new regulatory system is the best way to encourage investment, create jobs and grow the economy.

    In itself, this is not a controversial idea. What some fear is that the combination of tax cuts and borrowing to fund public spending is a disastrous combination of policies that have been poorly communicated at the worst possible time.

    “We look like reckless gamblers who only care about the people who can afford to lose the gamble,” one former Conservative minister told CNN earlier this week. “My fear is that it’s the final role of the dice to win the next election that has already backfired.”

    The idea that this is a gamble, Truss’ kitchen sink moment, to do something drastic and win the next election, is shared by other Conservatives.

    However, they are concerned that these policies have been cooked up by politicians who spend too much time in Westminster talking to people who agree with them, but are alienated from what average voters are concerned about.

    “Ordinary people are seeing their mortgages go up at a rate that outstrips any government support for energy bills or money saved through tax cuts,” says another former minister. “The crazy thing is that Boris [Johnson] won an 80-seat majority with an electoral coalition that still exists today. Ripping up his government’s policies and reinventing the wheel just wasn’t necessary.”

    The mood going into Conservative Party conference is undeniably bleak. Not everyone thinks that the next election is already lost, but most think the current situation is a mess that needs sorting out very quickly.

    “They need to explain their fiscal rules, cut spending on white elephant projects and not look like they are doing everything so hastily,” says a Conservative MP who supported Truss’ leadership campaign.

    Another Truss ally says: “The problem with Liz and Kwasi [Kwarteng, the finance minister] is they are both very intelligent and think about six moves ahead of everyone else. They need to explain their actions more clearly and give people the time to understand what they are trying to do.”

    And her critics also believe there are ways of turning this around without losing face. “They could keep the policies but roll them out slowly. Kick some stuff into the long grass so there isn’t so much immediate impact.”

    There is also the real possibility that her plans work. Sterling could recover, the economy could grow against the odds and she might have some real wins to take into next election, which is still probably over two years away.

    The question Conservatives are asking is, does Truss have the political talent, both herself and in the team around her, to win over the public?

    Her team is full of young people who are undeniably skilled, but in some cases lack the experience you’d typically associate with people who work for the leader of a country, many Conservatives believe. There is also a sense that the third change in leaders in six years has burned through the talent.

    There is still time for Truss to turn things around. But she is losing support from her own side, and there is already speculation that Conservative MPs are thinking about ways to get rid of her, which is incredible just weeks into her premiership.

    The official opposition Labour Party held their conference earlier this week, and the mood was one of cautious optimism. Almost everyone there, from corporate PRs to party activists, felt this was a party on the verge of power.

    In the coming week, Truss needs to address her own party faithful and give them something to be optimistic about. If she doesn’t, the sense of inevitability that power is slipping away from the Conservatives could become a self-fulfilling prophecy that drives the party into the wilderness after over a decade at the top of British politics.

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  • US and Europe condemn ‘sabotage’ as suspicion mounts that Russia was behind pipeline leaks | CNN Politics

    US and Europe condemn ‘sabotage’ as suspicion mounts that Russia was behind pipeline leaks | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The US and Europe are closing ranks, signaling to Moscow their unity over the war in Ukraine won’t be shattered by what they say is the “sabotage” of dual undersea gas pipelines that could represent a possible new front in energy warfare.

    The transatlantic allies have yet to directly blame Russia for what they say are leaks in the pipelines from Russia to Germany that followed underwater explosions. European security officials on Monday and Tuesday observed Russian Navy support ships in the vicinity of the leaks, CNN reported Wednesday, citing two Western intelligence officials and one other source familiar with the matter. But it remains unclear, according to these sources, whether the ships were connected to the explosions, and three US officials said that the US has no thorough explanation yet for what happened, CNN’s Katie Bo Lillis, Natasha Bertrand and Kylie Atwood reported. On Thursday, Germany’s ambassador to the United Kingdom said a fourth leak was discovered and that there was a “very strong indication” these were acts of sabotage.

    The leaks have raised suspicions that Russian President Vladimir Putin is moving up to the next notch on his escalatory scale to hike pain on his foes for their support of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. If confirmed, Russian attacks on external pipelines would deepen fears that Putin is ready to widen operations outside Ukraine at a time when he is also seeking to scare Western publics with his nuclear rhetoric.

    And while Russia has denied involvement in the pipeline leaks, the leaks could emphasize Moscow’s leverage over natural gas markets and raise new fears of shortages and fast rising prices in Europe over the winter as it seeks to fracture Western resolve and support for Ukraine.

    The leaks did not immediately cause a crisis since neither pipeline was actually in use. One pipeline, Nord Stream 2, never went online because of sanctions over the war in Ukraine and Nord Stream 1 had been shut down for weeks. Given the conditions at sea, it may take time to assess the damage as gas bubbles to the surface and it could be complicated to ascribe blame.

    But if nothing else, the pipeline leaks are a metaphorical severing of an era of post-Cold War US and European energy relations, which left the continent overly reliant on Russian gas exports and prone to geopolitical blackmail. A long estrangement now appears certain at least as long as Putin is in power, which will bring reminders of the Warsaw Pact’s decades-long standoff with the West.

    But perhaps to Putin’s disappointment, there was no immediate sign of weakening European resolve. In a fresh sign of solidarity that has surprised some observers, the US and Europe quickly issued similar statements over the pipeline breaches, vowing to investigate and to lessen reliance on Russian energy.

    The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said the leaks appeared to be a “deliberate act,” comments that were echoed by the Danish and Swedish prime ministers. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen referred to “sabotage action” in a tweet. US national security adviser Jake Sullivan called the leaks “apparent sabotage” in a tweet on Tuesday night, and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said there was no sign the leaks would weaken Europe’s energy resistance and that sabotage would be “clearly in no one’s interest.”

    Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the idea that the Russia might have deliberately sabotaged the pipelines as “predictably stupid,” and Moscow promised its own investigation.

    European officials earlier said the leaks were discovered on Monday and that initial investigations showed that powerful underwater explosions occurred before the pipelines burst. CNN reported on Wednesday that the US warned several allies over the summer, including Germany, that the pipelines could be attacked.

    The warnings were based on US intelligence assessments, but were vague and did not say who might carry out such action.

    The drama over the pipelines came as the war of words between the West and Moscow took another hostile lurch, with Western leaders slamming what they regard as sham referendums in captured Ukrainian territory that Moscow reported resulted in majorities voting to join Russia. It also follows strong warnings from Washington over the weekend that any use by Putin of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be “catastrophic” for Russia.

    Peskov upped the rhetoric from the Russian side, warning that the US was getting “closer to becoming a party” to the conflict in Ukraine. The US has sent billions of dollars in support to Kyiv’s forces with weapons that have caused carnage among Russia’s poorly performing military. But the White House hit back by saying it would not be deterred from supporting Ukraine, announcing a new $1.1 billion package of weapons – including 18 new High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems and hundreds of armored vehicles, radars and counter-drone systems.

    In another sign of deepening crisis, the United States warned Americans that Russia might try to conscript dual US-Russian citizens for service in Putin’s partial mobilization, which has caused tens of thousands of young men to try to flee the country to avoid being used as cannon fodder in his disastrous war.

    Political reverberations are growing from Putin’s warnings last week that he was not bluffing over the possible use of nuclear weapons to defend Russian territory – a threat that caused anxiety given the referendums that could soon lead to the annexation of Ukrainian territory, which could then could come under attack from Kyiv’s forces and potentially trigger the Kremlin.

    Some analysts see the warnings as an example of Putin trying to scramble support for Ukraine among the West and to warn the US and its NATO allies off of more strident support for the country. Using a tactical battlefield nuclear weapon would cross a dangerous threshold and mark the first use of an atomic device in warfare since the US dropped two on Japan at the end of World War II. A tactical nuclear weapon has a far smaller footprint than the strategic warheads that Russia and the United States have previously lined up against each other and that could cause a nuclear Armageddon if World War III erupted. But a tactical weapon could still cause major destruction on a scale not seen since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wiping out large parts of the Ukrainian armed forces and causing nuclear contamination.

    The US has no seen indication so far that Russia is moving nuclear weapons around, CNN’s Bertrand and Lillis reported Wednesday. But one theory among some observers is that Putin might use a nuclear blast as a last resort in order to stave off a defeat that could result in his toppling from power in Moscow. Such a battlefield loss has appeared more likely after stunning Ukrainian offensives in recent weeks.

    There are many reasons why the use of such weapons might give Putin pause, including the possibility that it could further cement Russia’s isolation from nations like China and India, which have been prepared to defy US attempts to box Putin in economically. The idea that what Putin initially sold to the Russian people as a limited “special operation” in Ukraine could culminate in a nuclear detonation would also raise new questions about his capacity to stave off backlashes inside and outside the Kremlin.

    Still, officials are sufficiently worried that Putin has invested so much personal capital in the war that he could not survive a humiliating defeat and might turn to weapons of mass destruction in an attempt to save himself.

    And there has been speculation over whether his strategic sense is decaying. French President Emmanuel Macron, for instance, told CNN’s Jake Tapper last week that long periods of isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic might have changed the Russian leader. CIA Director Bill Burns said in an interview with CBS News on Tuesday that Washington was not taking the issue lightly. “We have to take very seriously his kind of threats given everything that is at stake,” Burns said.

    Sullivan indicated over the weekend that Washington had sent stern messages through private channels to Moscow warning against the use of nuclear weapons. The administration has not said how it would respond. But it appears to be trying to develop some level of deterrence, and there is speculation that Russia crossing such a threshold would raise pressure for a direct NATO military response and risk the kind of clash and wider escalation of the war that President Joe Biden has painstakingly tried to avoid.

    Western officials have spent the 22 years that Putin has been in power seeking to understand his motives and decision making. But no one can read his mind, or know fully how a leader who has built his ruthless rule on an image of strength would react to the possibility of looking weak and having to admit defeat.

    That is why Putin is likely to use all of his remaining leverage – from nuclear rhetoric to the possibility of attacks on critical energy infrastructure – and it underscores that the worse the war inside Ukraine goes for him, the more the possibility of escalation grows.

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  • The UK is gripped by an economic crisis of its own making | CNN Business

    The UK is gripped by an economic crisis of its own making | CNN Business

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    London
    CNN Business
     — 

    A week ago, the Bank of England took a stab in the dark. It raised interest rates by a relatively modest half a percentage point to tackle inflation. It couldn’t know the scale of the storm that was about to break.

    Less than 24 hours later, the government of new UK Prime Minister Liz Truss unveiled its plan for the biggest tax cuts in 50 years, going all out for economic growth but blowing a huge hole in the nation’s finances and its credibility with investors.

    The pound crashed to a record low against the US dollar on Monday after UK finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng doubled-down on his bet by hinting at more tax cuts to come without explaining how to pay for them. Bond prices collapsed, sending borrowing costs soaring, sparking mayhem in the mortgage market and pushing pension funds to the brink of insolvency.

    Financial markets were already in a febrile state because of the rising risk of a global recession and the gyrations caused by three outsized rate increases from a US central bank on the warpath against inflation. Into that “pressure cooker” stumbled the new UK government.

    “You need to have strong, credible policies, and any policy missteps are punished,” said Chris Turner, global head of markets at ING.

    After verbal assurances by the UK Treasury and Bank of England failed to calm the panic — and the International Monetary Fund delivered a rare rebuke — the UK central bank pulled out its bazooka, saying Wednesday it would print £65 billion ($70 billion) to buy government bonds between now and October 14 — essentially protecting the economy from the fallout of the Truss’ growth plan.

    “While this is welcome, the fact that it needed to be done in the first place shows that the UK markets are in a perilous position,” said Paul Dales, chief UK economist at Capital Economics, commenting on the bank’s intervention.

    The emergency first aid stopped the bleeding. Bond prices recovered sharply and the pound steadied Wednesday against the dollar. But the wound hasn’t healed.

    The pound tumbled 1%, falling back below $1.08 early Thursday. UK government bonds were under pressure again, with the yield on 10-year debt climbing to 4.16%. UK stocks fell 2%.

    “It wouldn’t be a huge surprise if another problem in the financial markets popped up before long,” Dales added.

    The next few weeks will be critical. Mohamed El-Erian, who once helped run the world’s biggest bond fund and now advises Allianz

    (ALIZF)    , said that the central bank had bought some time but would need to act again quickly to restore stability.

    “The Band-Aid may stop the bleeding, but the infection and the bleeding will get worse if they do not do more,” he told CNN’s Julia Chatterley.

    The Bank of England should announce an emergency rate hike of a full percentage point before its next scheduled meeting on November 3. The UK government should also postpone its tax cuts, El-Erian said.

    “It is doable, the window is there, but if they wait too long, that window is going to close,” he added.

    The UK government has previewed rolling announcements in the coming weeks about how it plans to change immigration policy and make it easier to build big infrastructure and energy projects to boost growth, culminating in a budget on November 23 at which it has promised to publish a detailed plan for reducing debt over the medium term.

    But it shows no sign of backing away from the fundamental policy choice of borrowing heavily to fund tax cuts that will mainly benefit the rich at a time of high inflation. And the UK Treasury says it won’t bring forward the November announcement.

    Truss, speaking publicly for the first time since the crisis erupted, blamed global market turmoil and the energy price shock from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for this week’s chaos.

    “This is the right plan that we’ve set out,” she told local radio on Thursday.

    One big problem identified by investors, former central bankers and many leading economists is that her government only set out half a plan at best. It went ahead without an independent assessment from the country’s budget watchdog of the assumptions underlying the £45 billion ($48 billion) annual tax cuts, and their longer term impact on the economy. It fired the top Treasury civil servant earlier this month.

    Charlie Bean, former deputy governor at the Bank of England, told CNN Business that the government was guilty of “really stupid” decisions. His former boss at the bank, Mark Carney, accused the government of “undercutting” UK economic institutions, saying that had contributed to the “big knock” suffered by the country’s financial system this week.

    “This is an economic crisis. It is a crisis… that can be addressed by policymakers if they choose to address it,” he told the BBC.

    British newspapers have started to speculate that Truss will have to fire Kwarteng, her close friend and political soulmate, if she wants to regain the political initiative and prevent her government’s dire poll ratings from plunging even further.

    “Every single problem we have now is self-inflicted. We look like reckless gamblers who only care about the people who can afford to lose the gamble,” one former Conservative minister told CNN.

    But for now she’s trying to tough it out, and cling onto the Reaganite experiment.

    “Raising, postponing, or abandoning tax cuts will be avoided by Truss at all costs as such a reversal would be humiliating and could leave her looking like a lame duck prime minister,” wrote Mujtaba Rahman and Jens Larson at political risk consultancy Eurasia Group.

    The only alternative left to balance the books would be to slash government spending, and that would prove equally politically difficult as the country enters a recession with its public services under enormous strain and a restive workforce that has shown it’s ready to strike in large numbers over pay.

    “Truss and Kwarteng are now facing a severe economic crisis as the world’s financial markets wait for them to make policy changes that they and the Conservative party will find unpalatable,” the Eurasia analysts wrote.

    The foreign investors who keep the British economy solvent are left scratching their heads for another eight weeks, leaving plenty of time for doubts to surface again about the UK government’s commitment to responsible fiscal policymaking.

    “The message of financial markets is that there is a limit to unfunded spending and unfunded tax cuts in this environment and the price of those is much higher borrowing costs,” Carney said.

    That leaves the Bank of England in a tight spot. A week ago it was pressing the brakes on the economy to take the heat out of price increases, even as the government tried to juice growth. The task got even harder this week when it was forced to dust off its crisis playbook and bail out the government.

    It may not be long before it has to intervene again, this time with an emergency rate hike.

    “[Wednesday’s] intervention is designed to stabilize UK government bond prices, keep the bond market liquid and prevent financial instability but that won’t necessarily stop sterling falling further, with its attendant inflationary consequences,” Bean, the former central banker, told CNN Business.

    “I think there is still a good chance they will need to act ahead of the November meeting,” he added.

    — Julia Horowitz, Luke McGee, Anna Cooban, Rob North, Livvy Doherty and Morgan Povey contributed to this article.

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  • Putin’s draft could upend the deal that kept him in power | CNN

    Putin’s draft could upend the deal that kept him in power | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Russian President Vladimir Putin has managed the unexpected in just under a week: upending the social contract that has kept him in power for over two decades.

    Putin’s deal with the Russian electorate has long been that they would stay out of politics and he would guarantee a modicum of stability – which seemed to be the bargain on offer when Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.

    At the time, Putin was careful to emphasize that the military assault – euphemistically referred to as a “special military operation” – would only be fought by military professionals. That was a fiction, and one that allowed many Russians to be lulled into a sense of normalcy, going about their lives in Moscow or St. Petersburg indifferent to the horrific carnage in Ukraine.

    The “partial mobilization” declared last week by the Kremlin leader has abruptly ended that and fear is now convulsing Russia’s body politic. The long lineups of cars queuing at Russia’s borders with Finland, Georgia and Mongolia show that thousands of Russian men eligible for military service are voting with their feet. Protests are erupting in ethnic minority regions. And military enlistment offices are being set on fire – and a recruitment officer has been shot.

    Rumors are now swirling that the Russian government may be preparing to close its borders, prevent military-age men from leaving the country altogether, or announce some form of martial law.

    The Kremlin’s denials have not been reassuring.

    “I don’t know anything about it,” Kremlin press spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters when asked about possible border closures. “There are no decisions regarding this yet.”

    Putin built his power in Russia by positioning himself as the opposite of former leader Boris Yeltsin, who presided over Russia’s chaotic post-Soviet transition in the 1990s. But today, scenes of angry crowds confronting officials and brawling with local police over the conscription of husbands and sons look very much like a flashback to that decade.

    The same goes for the scenes emerging on Russian Telegram channels and other social media. Some appear to show Russian draftees receiving news that they will be sent to the front with scant training. One widely shared video shows a woman in military uniform telling new inductees that they need to provide their own essential kit, from sleeping bags to tourniquets.

    “Ask girlfriends, wives, mothers for sanitary pads, the cheapest sanitary pads plus the cheapest tampons,” she says in the unverified video. “Do you know what the tampons are for? Gunshot wound, you plug it in, it starts to swell and it supports the walls. Men, I know this from Chechnya.”

    The first war in Chechnya from 1994 to 1996 ended with a humiliating defeat for the Russian Federation. It laid bare both corruption in the ranks and the collapse of Russia’s military might.

    Putin rode to power on the second Chechen war that began in 1999. In that war, the Kremlin was much more careful about controlling the media, helping Putin create an aura of competence and toughness.

    But the images of dead and captured Russian soldiers and destroyed hardware in Ukraine today offer strong visual parallels with the disastrous first Chechen War, when photographers captured images of frightened and poorly-equipped conscripts in Chechen captivity.

    Watch: They decided to get married the day he was sent to war

    Putin presided over a professionalization of the Russian military that was supposed to reduce the use of conscripts in favor of contract service. There’s a reason for this: Treatment of draftees in the Russian military is traditionally brutal, and activist groups such as the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers mobilized during the Chechen wars to help provide legal advice to conscripts. Russian mothers famously organized to retrieve their sons who had been taken prisoner by the Chechens and often challenged the authorities over their treatment of soldiers.

    Recent protests against Putin’s partial mobilization are a reminder that the draft remains a third rail in Russian political life. In heated protests against the mobilization Sunday in Makhachkala, the regional capital of the north Caucasus region of Dagestan, women were captured in social media videos confronting police, saying, “Why are you taking our children? Who attacked who? It’s Russia that attacked Ukraine!”

    That explains why Putin’s most ardent propagandists are also channeling some of the public rage over what appears to be a dragnet by local officials, with officials issuing call-up papers to medically disqualified men and banging on doors to meet apparent quotas.

    Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of state TV channel RT (formerly Russia Today) posted a series of complaints about heavy-handedness by officials on social media, including one case involving an employee going on vacation with return ticket in hand who was turned back at the border.

    Still, such criticism of officials overzealously or incompetently carrying out orders is not directed at Putin. It’s reminiscent of an old trope from Russian history of the “good tsar” and “bad boyars.” The tsar – in this case, Putin – is seen popularly as a wise, munificent (albeit distant) ruler, while his conniving local subordinates and lower-level functionaries are to blame for undermining his good intentions. They, not the ruler, are the targets of popular anger.

    There’s also an implied threat here. It’s not just the bad local officials who can be punished for failing to meet their quotas properly. The call-up is also a tool meant to instil fear and passivity. In another social-media post, Simonyan with satisfaction noted that draft summons had been issued to men who took part in an anti-mobilization protest on the Arbat, a central thoroughfare in Moscow.

    “All the men who were attended the rally against mobilization on the Arbat were issued over 200 draft notices. Another shipment prepared,” she wrote. “Better them than the Teacher of the Year from Pskov, in my view.”

    Competently carried out or not, the partial mobilization may be on of Putin’s riskiest moves to date. And while his grip on power remains strong, he is pulling on a foundation block of Russia’s Jenga puzzle.



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  • Donald Trump Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    Donald Trump Fast Facts | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the life of Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States.

    Birth date: June 14, 1946

    Birth place: New York, New York

    Birth name: Donald John Trump

    Father: Fred Trump, real estate developer

    Mother: Mary (Macleod) Trump

    Marriages: Melania (Knauss) Trump (January 22, 2005-present); Marla (Maples) Trump (December 1993-June 1999, divorced); Ivana (Zelnicek) Trump (1977-1990, divorced)

    Children: with Melania Trump: Barron, March 20, 2006; with Marla Maples: Tiffany, October 13, 1993; with Ivana Trump: Eric, 1984; Ivanka, October 30, 1981; Donald Jr., December 31, 1977

    Education: Attended Fordham University; University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Finance, B.S. in Economics, 1968

    As Trump evolved from real estate developer to reality television star, he turned his name into a brand. Licensed Trump products have included board games, steaks, cologne, vodka, furniture and menswear.

    He has portrayed himself in cameo appearances in movies and on television, including “Zoolander,” “Sex and the City” and “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.”

    Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was first used by Ronald Reagan while he was running against President Jimmy Carter.

    For details on investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election, visit 2016 Presidential Election Investigation Fast Facts.

    1970s – After college, works with his father on apartment complexes in Queens and Brooklyn.

    1973 – Trump and his father are named in a Justice Department lawsuit alleging Trump property managers violated the Fair Housing Act by turning away potential African American tenants. The Trumps deny the company discriminates and file a $100 million countersuit, which is later dismissed. The case is settled in 1975, and the Trumps agree to provide weekly lists of vacancies to Black community organizations.

    1976 – Trump and his father partner with the Hyatt Corporation, purchasing the Commodore Hotel, an aging midtown Manhattan property. The building is revamped and opens four years later as the Grand Hyatt Hotel. The project kickstarts Trump’s career as a Manhattan developer.

    1983-1990 – He builds/purchases multiple properties in New York City, including Trump Tower and the Plaza Hotel, and also opens casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, including the Trump Taj Mahal and the Trump Plaza. Trump buys the New Jersey Generals football team, part of the United States Football League, which folds after three seasons.

    1985 – Purchases Mar-a-Lago, an oceanfront estate in Palm Beach, Florida. It is renovated and opens as a private club in 1995.

    1987 – Trump’s first book, “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” is published, and becomes a bestseller. The Donald J. Trump Foundation is established in order to donate a portion of profits from book sales to charities.

    1990 – Nearly $1 billion in personal debt, Trump reaches an agreement with bankers allowing him to avoid declaring personal bankruptcy.

    1991 – The Trump Taj Mahal files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

    1992 – The Trump Plaza and the Trump Castle casinos file for bankruptcy.

    1996 – Buys out and becomes executive producer of the Miss Universe, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants.

    October 7, 1999 – Tells CNN’s Larry King that he is going to form a presidential exploratory committee and wants to challenge Pat Buchanan for the Reform Party nomination.

    February 14, 2000 – Says that he is abandoning his bid for the presidency, blaming discord within the Reform Party.

    January 2004 – “The Apprentice,” a reality show featuring aspiring entrepreneurs competing for Trump’s approval, premieres on NBC.

    November 21, 2004 – Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts Inc. files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

    2005 – Establishes Trump University, which offers seminars in real estate investment.

    February 13, 2009 – Announces his resignation from his position as chairman of Trump Entertainment Resorts. Days later, the company files for bankruptcy protection.

    March 17, 2011 – During an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Trump questions whether President Barack Obama was born in the United States.

    June 16, 2015 – Announces that he is running for president during a speech at Trump Tower. He pledges to implement policies that will boost the economy and says he will get tough on immigration. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re sending people who have lots of problems,” Trump says. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”

    June 28, 2015 – Says he’s giving up the TV show “The Apprentice” to run for president.

    June 29, 2015 – NBCUniversal says it is cutting its business ties to Trump and won’t air the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants because of “derogatory statements by Donald Trump regarding immigrants.”

    July 8, 2015 – In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Trump says he “can’t guarantee” all of his employees have legal status in the United States. This is in response to questions about a Washington Post report about undocumented immigrants working at the Old Post Office construction site in Washington, DC, which Trump is converting into a hotel.

    July 22, 2015 – Trump’s financial disclosure report is made public by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

    August 6, 2015 – During the first 2016 Republican debate, Trump is questioned about a third party candidacy, his attitude towards women and his history of donating money to Democratic politicians. He tells moderator Megyn Kelly of Fox News he feels he is being mistreated. The following day, Trump tells CNN’s Don Lemon that Kelly was singling him out for attack, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

    September 11, 2015 – Trump announces he has purchased NBC’s half of the Miss Universe Organization, which organizes the annual Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants.

    December 7, 2015 – Trump’s campaign puts out a press release calling for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

    May 26, 2016 – Secures enough delegates to clinch the Republican Party nomination.

    July 16, 2016 – Introduces Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate.

    July 19, 2016 – Becomes the Republican Party nominee for president.

    September 13, 2016 – During an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says his office is investigating Trump’s charitable foundation “to make sure it’s complying with the laws governing charities in New York.”

    October 1, 2016 – The New York Times reports Trump declared a $916 million loss in 1995 which could have allowed him to legally skip paying federal income taxes for years. The report is based on a financial document mailed to the newspaper by an anonymous source.

    October 7, 2016 – Unaired footage from 2005 surfaces of Trump talking about trying to have sex with a married woman and being able to grope women. In footage obtained by The Washington Post, Trump is heard off-camera discussing women in vulgar terms during the taping of a segment for “Access Hollywood.” In a taped response, Trump declares, “I said it, I was wrong and I apologize.”

    October 9, 2016 – During the second presidential debate, CNN’s Cooper asks Trump about his descriptions of groping and kissing women without their consent in the “Access Hollywood” footage. Trump denies that he has ever engaged in such behavior and declares the comments were “locker room talk.” After the debate, 11 women step forward to claim that they were sexually harassed or sexually assaulted by the real estate developer. Trump says the stories aren’t true.

    November 8, 2016 – Elected president of the United States. Trump will be the first president who has never held elected office, a top government post or a military rank.

    November 18, 2016 – Trump agrees to pay $25 million to settle three lawsuits against Trump University. About 6,000 former students are covered by the settlement.

    December 24, 2016 – Trump says he will dissolve the Donald J. Trump Foundation “to avoid even the appearance of any conflict with my role as President.” A spokeswoman for the New York Attorney General’s Office says that the foundation cannot legally close until investigators conclude their probe of the charity.

    January 10, 2017 – CNN reports that intelligence officials briefed Trump on a dossier that contains allegations about his campaign’s ties to Russia and unverified claims about his personal life. The author of the dossier is a former British spy who was hired by a research firm that had been funded by both political parties to conduct opposition research on Trump.

    January 20, 2017 – Takes the oath of office from Chief Justice John Roberts during an inauguration ceremony at the Capitol.

    January 23, 2017 – Trump signs an executive action withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration and awaiting congressional approval.

    January 27, 2017 – Trump signs an executive order halting all refugee arrivals for 120 days and banning travel to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days. Additionally, refugees from Syria are barred indefinitely from entering the United States. The order is challenged in court.

    February 13, 2017 – Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigns amid accusations he lied about his communications with Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. Flynn later pleads guilty to lying to the FBI.

    May 3, 2017 – FBI Director James Comey confirms that there is an ongoing investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia during a hearing on Capitol Hill. Less than a week later, Trump fires Comey, citing a DOJ memo critical of the way he handled the investigation into Clinton’s emails.

    May 2017 – Shortly after Trump fires Comey, the FBI opens an investigation into whether Trump “had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests,” citing former law enforcement officials and others the paper said were familiar with the probe.

    May 17, 2017 – Former FBI Director Robert Mueller is appointed as special counsel to lead the probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, including potential collusion between Trump campaign associates and Russian officials. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein makes the appointment because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from investigations into Trump’s campaign.

    May 19, 2017 – Departs on his first foreign trip as president. The nine-day, five-country trip includes stops in Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, a NATO summit in Brussels and a G7 summit in Sicily.

    June 1, 2017 – Trump proclaims that the United States is withdrawing from the Paris climate accord but adds that he is open to renegotiating aspects of the environmental agreement, which was signed by 175 countries in 2016.

    July 7, 2017 – Meets Russian President Vladimir Putin in person for the first time, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany.

    August 8, 2017 – In response to nuclear threats from North Korea, Trump warns that Pyongyang will “face fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Soon after Trump’s comments, North Korea issues a statement saying it is “examining the operational plan” to strike areas around the US territory of Guam.

    August 15, 2017 – After a violent clash between neo-Nazi activists and counterprotesters leaves one dead in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump holds an impromptu press conference in the lobby of Trump Tower and declares that there were “fine people” on both sides.

    August 25, 2017 – Trump’s first pardon is granted to former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt for disregarding a court order in a racial-profiling case. Trump did not consult with lawyers at the Justice Department before announcing his decision.

    September 5, 2017 – The Trump administration announces that it is ending the DACA program, introduced by Obama to protect nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. Trump calls on Congress to introduce legislation that will prevent DACA recipients from being deported. Multiple lawsuits are filed opposing the policy in federal courts and judges delay the end of the program, asking the government to submit filings justifying the cancellation of DACA.

    September 19, 2017 – In a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, Trump refers to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as “Rocket Man” and warns that the United States will “totally destroy North Korea” if forced to defend itself or its allies.

    September 24, 2017 – The Trump administration unveils a third version of the travel ban, placing restrictions on travel by certain foreigners from Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. (Chad is later removed after meeting security requirements.) One day before the revised ban is set to take effect, it is blocked nationwide by a federal judge in Hawaii. A judge in Maryland issues a similar ruling.

    December 4, 2017 – The Supreme Court rules that the revised travel ban can take effect pending appeals.

    December 6, 2017 – Trump recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and announces plans to relocate the US Embassy there.

    January 11, 2018 – During a White House meeting on immigration reform, Trump reportedly refers to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.”

    January 12, 2018 – The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump allegedly had an affair with a porn star named Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels. The newspaper states that Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, arranged a $130,000 payment for a nondisclosure agreement weeks before Election Day in 2016. Trump denies the affair occurred. In March, Clifford sues Trump seeking to be released from the NDA. In response, Trump and his legal team agree outside of court not to sue or otherwise enforce the NDA. The suit is dismissed. A California Superior Court judge orders Trump to pay $44,100 to Clifford, to reimburse her attorneys’ fees in the legal battle surrounding her nondisclosure agreement.

    March 13, 2018 – Trump announces in a tweet that he has fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and will nominate CIA Director Mike Pompeo as Tillerson’s replacement.

    March 20, 2018 – A New York Supreme Court judge rules that a defamation lawsuit against Trump can move forward, ruling against a July 2017 motion to dismiss filed by Trump’s lawyers. The lawsuit, filed by Summer Zervos, a former “Apprentice” contestant, is related to sexual assault allegations. In November 2021, attorneys for Zervos announce she is dropping the lawsuit.

    March 23, 2018 – The White House announces that it is adopting a policy, first proposed by Trump via tweet in July 2017, banning most transgender individuals from serving in the military.

    April 9, 2018 – The FBI raids Cohen’s office, home and a hotel room where he’d been staying while his house was renovated. The raid is related to a federal investigation of possible fraud and campaign finance violations.

    April 13, 2018 – Trump authorizes joint military strikes in Syria with the UK and France after reports the government used chemical weapons on civilians in Douma.

    May 7, 2018 – The Trump administration announces a “zero tolerance” policy for illegal border crossings. Sessions says that individuals who violate immigration law will be criminally prosecuted and warns that parents could be separated from children.

    May 8, 2018 – Trump announces that the United States is withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal.

    May 31, 2018 – The Trump administration announces it is imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from allies Canada, Mexico and the European Union.

    June 8-9, 2018 – Before leaving for the G7 summit in Quebec City, Trump tells reporters that Russia should be reinstated in the group. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 led to Russia’s suspension. After leaving the summit, Trump tweets that he will not endorse the traditional G7 communique issued at the end of the meeting. The President singles out Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for making “false statements” at a news conference.

    June 12, 2018 – Trump meets Kim in person for the first time during a summit in Singapore. They sign a four-point statement that broadly outlines the countries’ commitment to a peace process. The statement contains a pledge by North Korea to “work towards” complete denuclearization but the agreement does not detail how the international community will verify that Kim is ending his nuclear program.

    June 14, 2018 – The New York attorney general sues the Trump Foundation, alleging that the nonprofit run by Trump and his three eldest children violated state and federal charity law.

    June 26, 2018 – The Supreme Court upholds the Trump administration’s travel ban in a 5-4 ruling along party lines.

    July 16, 2018 – During a joint news conference with Putin in Helsinki, Trump declines to endorse the US government’s assessment that Russia interfered in the election, saying he doesn’t “see any reason why” Russia would be responsible. The next day, Trump clarifies his remark, “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.” He says he accepts the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia meddled in the election but adds, “It could be other people also.”

    August 21, 2018 – Cohen pleads guilty to eight federal charges, including two campaign finance violations. In court, he says that he orchestrated payments to silence women “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office.” On the same day, Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort is convicted on eight counts of federal financial crimes. On December 12, Cohen is sentenced to three years in prison.

    October 2, 2018 – The New York Times details numerous tax avoidance schemes allegedly carried out by Trump and his siblings. In a tweet, Trump dismisses the article as a “very old, boring and often told hit piece.”

    November 20, 2018 – Releases a statement backing Saudi Arabia in the wake of the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Virginia resident, killed in October at a Saudi consulate in Turkey. Khashoggi was a frequent critic of the Saudi regime. The Saudis initially denied any knowledge of his death, but then later said a group of rogue operators were responsible for his killing. US officials have speculated that such a mission, including the 15 men sent from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to murder him, could not have been carried out without the authorization of Saudi leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In the statement, Trump writes, “Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”

    December 18, 2018 – The Donald J. Trump Foundation agrees to dissolve according to a document filed in Manhattan Supreme Court. The agreement allows the New York attorney general’s office to review the recipients of the charity’s assets.

    December 22, 2018 – The longest partial government shutdown in US history begins after Trump demands lawmakers allocate $5.7 billion in funding for a border wall before agreeing to sign a federal funding package.

    January 16, 2019 – After nearly two years of Trump administration officials denying that anyone involved in his campaign colluded with the Russians to help his candidacy, Trump lawyer and former New York City mayor, Rudy Giuliani, says “I never said there was no collusion between the campaign, or people in the campaign. I said the President of the United States.”

    January 25, 2019 – The government shutdown ends when Trump signs a short-term spending measure, providing three weeks of stopgap funding while lawmakers work on a border security compromise. The bill does not include any wall funding.

    February 15, 2019 – Trump declares a national emergency to allocate funds to build a wall on the border with Mexico. During the announcement, the President says he expects the declaration to be challenged in court. The same day, Trump signs a border security measure negotiated by Congress, with $1.375 billion set aside for barriers, averting another government shutdown.

    February 18, 2019 – Attorneys general from 16 states file a lawsuit in federal court challenging Trump’s emergency declaration.

    March 22, 2019 – Mueller ends his investigation and delivers his report to Attorney General William Barr. A senior Justice Department official tells CNN that there will be no further indictments.

    March 24, 2019 – Barr releases a letter summarizing the principal conclusions from Mueller’s investigation. According to Barr’s four-page letter, the evidence was not sufficient to establish that members Trump’s campaign tacitly engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government to interfere with the election.

    April 18, 2019 – A redacted version of the Mueller report is released. The first part of the 448-page document details the evidence gathered by Mueller’s team on potential conspiracy crimes and explains their decisions not to charge individuals associated with the campaign. The second part of the report outlines ten episodes involving possible obstruction of justice by the President. According to the report, Mueller’s decision not to charge Trump was rooted in Justice Department guidelines prohibiting the indictment of a sitting president. Mueller writes that he would have cleared Trump if the evidence warranted exoneration.

    May 1, 2019 – The New York Times publishes a report that details how Giuliani, in his role as Trump’s personal attorney, is investigating allegations related to former Vice President Joe Biden, a potential Trump opponent in the 2020 presidential race. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma Holdings. In 2016, the elder Biden pressured Ukraine to oust a prosecutor who had investigated Burisma for corruption. Giuliani suggests that Biden’s move was motivated by a desire to protect his son from criminal charges. Giuliani’s claims are undermined after Bloomberg reports that the Burisma investigation was “dormant” when Biden pressed the prosecutor to resign.

    June 12, 2019 – Trump says he may be willing to accept information about political rivals from a foreign government during an interview on ABC News, declaring that he’s willing to listen and wouldn’t necessarily call the FBI.

    June 16, 2019 – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveils a sign at the proposed site of a Golan Heights settlement to be named Trump Heights.

    June 18, 2019 – Trump holds a rally in Orlando to publicize the formal launch of his reelection campaign.

    June 28, 2019 – During a breakfast meeting at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman reportedly discuss tensions with Iran, trade and human rights.

    June 30, 2019 – Trump becomes the first sitting US president to enter North Korea. He takes 20 steps beyond the border and shakes hands with Kim.

    July 14, 2019 – Via Twitter, Trump tells Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Illhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley to “go back” to their home countries. Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Pressley are natural-born US citizens; Omar was born in Somalia, immigrated to the United States and became a citizen.

    July 16, 2019 – The House votes, 240-187, to condemn the racist language Trump used in his tweets about Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Omar and Pressley.

    July 24, 2019 – Mueller testifies before the House Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence Committee.

    July 25, 2019 – Trump speaks on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump asks Zelensky for a “favor,” encouraging him to speak with Giuliani about investigating Biden. In the days before the call, Trump blocked nearly $400 million in military and security aid to Ukraine.

    August 12, 2019 – A whistleblower files a complaint pertaining to Trump’s conduct on the Zelensky call.

    September 11, 2019 – The Trump administration lifts its hold on military aid for Ukraine.

    September 24, 2019 – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announces the beginning of an impeachment inquiry related to the whistleblower complaint.

    September 25, 2019 – The White House releases notes from the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky. The readout contains multiple references to Giuliani and Barr. In response, the Justice Department issues a statement that says Barr didn’t know about Trump’s conversation until weeks after the call. Further, the attorney general didn’t talk to the President about having Ukraine investigate the Bidens, according to the Justice Department. On the same day as the notes are released, Trump and Zelensky meet in person for the first time on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. During a joint press conference after the meeting, both men deny that Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate Biden in exchange for aid.

    September 26, 2019 – The House releases a declassified version of the whistleblower complaint. According to the complaint, officials at the White House tried to “lock down” records of Trump’s phone conversation with Zelensky. The complaint also alleges that Barr played a role in the campaign to convince Zelensky that Biden should be investigated. Trump describes the complaint as “fake news” and “a witch hunt” on Twitter.

    September 27, 2019 – Pompeo is subpoenaed by House committees over his failure to provide documents related to Ukraine. Kurt Volker, US special envoy to Ukraine, resigns. He was named in the whistleblower complaint as one of the State Department officials who helped Giuliani connect with sources in Ukraine.

    October 3, 2019 – Speaking to reporters outside the White House, Trump says both Ukraine and China should investigate alleged corruption involving Biden and his son. CNN reports that the President had brought up Biden and his family during a June phone call with Xi Jinping. In that call, Trump discussed the political prospects of Biden as well as Elizabeth Warren. He also told Xi that he would remain quiet on the matter of Hong Kong protests. Notes documenting the conversation were placed on a highly secured server where the transcript from the Ukraine call was also stored.

    October 6, 2019 – After Trump speaks on the phone with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the White House announces that US troops will move out of northern Syria to make way for a planned Turkish military operation. The move marks a major shift in American foreign policy and effectively gives Turkey the green light to attack US-backed Kurdish forces, a partner in the fight against ISIS.

    October 9, 2019 – Turkey launches a military offensive in northern Syria.

    October 31, 2019 – Trump says via Twitter that he is changing his legal residency from New York to Florida, explaining that he feels he is treated badly by political leaders from the city and state.

    November 7, 2019 – A judge orders Trump to pay $2 million to settle a lawsuit against his charity filed by the New York state attorney general. According to the suit, Trump breached his fiduciary duty by allowing his presidential campaign to direct the distribution of donations. In a statement, Trump accuses the attorney general of mischaracterizing the settlement for political purposes.

    November 13, 2019 – Public impeachment hearings begin and Trump meets Erdogan at the White House.

    November 20, 2019 – During a public hearing, US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland says he worked with Giuliani on matters related to Ukraine at the “express direction of the President of the United States” and he says “everyone was in the loop.” Sondland recounts several conversations between himself and Trump about Ukraine opening two investigations: one into Burisma and another into conspiracies about Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 US election.

    December 10, 2019 – House Democrats unveil two articles of impeachment, one for abuse of power and one for obstruction of Congress.

    December 11, 2019 – Trump signs an executive order to include discrimination against Jewish people as a violation of law in certain cases, with an eye toward fighting antisemitism on college campuses.

    December 13, 2019 – The House Judiciary Committee approves the two articles of impeachment in a party line vote.

    December 18, 2019 – The House of Representatives votes to impeach Trump, charging a president with high crimes and misdemeanors for just the third time in American history.

    January 3, 2020 – Speaking at Mar-a-Lago, Trump announces that a US airstrike in Iraq has killed Qasem Soleimani, the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force.

    January 8, 2020 – Iran fires a number of missiles at two Iraqi bases housing US troops in retaliation for the American strike that killed Soleimani. No US or Iraqi lives are reported lost, but the Pentagon later releases a statement confirming that 109 US service members had been diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injuries in the wake of the attack.

    January 24, 2020 – Makes history as the first President to attend the annual March for Life rally in Washington, DC, since it began nearly a half-century ago. Trump reiterates his support for tighter abortion restrictions.

    January 29, 2020 – Trump signs the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement into law, which replaces the North American Free Trade Agreement.

    January 31, 2020 – The Trump administration announces an expansion of the travel ban to include six new countries. Immigration restrictions will be imposed on: Nigeria, Eritrea, Tanzania, Sudan, Kyrgyzstan and Myanmar (known as Burma), with exceptions for immigrants who have helped the United States.

    February 5, 2020 – The Senate votes to acquit Trump on two articles of impeachment. Sen. Mitt Romney is the sole Republican to vote to convict on the charge of abuse of power, joining with all Senate Democrats in a 52-48 not guilty vote. On the obstruction of Congress charge, the vote falls along straight party lines, 53-47 for acquittal.

    May 29, 2020 – Trump announces that the United States will terminate its relationship with the World Health Organization.

    July 10, 2020 – Trump commutes the prison sentence of his longtime friend Roger Stone, who was convicted of crimes that included lying to Congress in part, prosecutors said, to protect the President. The announcement came just days before Stone was set to report to a federal prison in Georgia.

    October 2, 2020 – Trump announces that he has tested positive for coronavirus. Later in the day, Trump is transferred to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and returns to the White House on October 5.

    November 7, 2020 – Days after the presidential election on November 3, CNN projects Trump loses his bid for reelection to Biden.

    November 25, 2020 – Trump announces in a tweet that he has granted Michael Flynn a “full pardon,” wiping away the guilty plea of the intelligence official for lying to the FBI.

    December 23, 2020 – Announces 26 new pardons, including for Stone, Manafort and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father, Charles.

    January 6, 2021 – Following Trump’s rally and speech at the White House Ellipse, pro-Trump rioters storm the US Capitol as members of Congress meet to certify the Electoral College results of the 2020 presidential election. A total of five people die, including a Capitol Police officer the next day.

    January 7-8, 2021 – Instagram and Facebook place a ban on Trump’s account from posting through the remainder of his presidency and perhaps “indefinitely.” Twitter permanently bans Trump from the platform, explaining that “after close review of recent Tweets…and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

    January 13, 2021 – The House votes to impeach Trump for “incitement of insurrection.” He is the only president to be impeached twice.

    January 20, 2021 – Trump issues a total of 143 pardons and commutations that include his onetime political strategist, Steve Bannon, a former top fundraiser and two well-known rappers but not himself or his family. He then receives a military-style send-off from Joint Base Andrews on Inauguration morning, before heading home to Florida.

    February 13, 2021 – The US Senate acquits Trump in his second impeachment trial, voting that Trump is not guilty of inciting the deadly January 6 riots at the US Capitol. The vote is 43 not guilty to 57 guilty, short of the 67 guilty votes needed to convict.

    May 5, 2021 – Facebook’s Oversight Board upholds Trump’s suspension from using its platform. The decision also applies to Facebook-owned Instagram.

    June 4, 2021 – Facebook announces Trump will be suspended from its platform until at least January 7th, 2023 – two years from when he was initially suspended.

    July 1, 2021 – New York prosecutors charge the Trump Organization and Trump Payroll Corporation with 10 felony counts and Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg with 15 felony counts in connection with an alleged tax scheme stretching back to 2005. Trump himself is not charged. On December 6, 2022, both companies are found guilty on all charges.

    February 14, 2022 – Accounting firm Mazars announces it will no longer act as Trump’s accountant, citing a conflict of interest. In a letter to the Trump Organization chief legal officer, the firm informs the Trump Organization to no longer rely on financial statements ending June 2011 through June 2020.

    May 3, 2022 – The Trump Organization and the Presidential Inaugural Committee agree to pay a total of $750,000 to settle with the Washington, DC, attorney general’s office over allegations they misspent money raised for former President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

    June 9-July 21, 2022 – The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol holds eight hearings, where it hears from witnesses including top ex-Trump officials, election workers, those who took part in the attack and many others. Through live testimony, video depositions, and never-before-seen material, the committee attempts to paint the picture of the former president’s plan to stay in power and the role he played on January 6.

    August 8, 2022 – The FBI executes a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, as part of an investigation into the handling of presidential documents, including classified documents, that may have been brought there.

    August 12, 2022 – A federal judge unseals the search warrant and property receipt from the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. The unsealed documents indicate the FBI recovered 11 sets of classified documents from its search, including some materials marked as “top secret/SCI” – one of the highest levels of classification, and identify three federal crimes that the Justice Department is looking at as part of its investigation: violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice and criminal handling of government records.

    September 21, 2022 – The New York state attorney general files a lawsuit against Trump, three of his adult children and the Trump Organization, alleging they were involved in an expansive fraud lasting over a decade that the former President used to enrich himself. According to the lawsuit, the Trump Organization deceived lenders, insurers and tax authorities by inflating the value of his properties using misleading appraisals.

    October 3, 2022 – Trump files a lawsuit against CNN for defamation, seeking $475 million in punitive damages.

    November 15, 2022 – Announces that he will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

    November 19, 2022 – Trump’s Twitter account, which was banned following the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, is reinstated after users respond to an online poll posted by Twitter CEO and new owner Elon Musk.

    December 19, 2022 – The Jan. 6 insurrection committee votes to refer Trump to the Department of Justice on at least four criminal charges. Four days later the panel releases its final report recommending Trump be barred from holding office again.

    February 9, 2023 – Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts are restored following a two-year ban in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, a Meta spokesperson confirms to CNN. On March 17, 2023, YouTube restores Trump’s channel.

    March 30, 2023 – A grand jury in New York votes to indict Trump, the first time in American history that a current or former president has faced criminal charges.

    April 4, 2023 – Surrenders and is placed under arrest before pleading not guilty to 34 felony criminal charges of falsifying business records in Manhattan criminal court. Prosecutors allege that Trump sought to undermine the integrity of the 2016 election through a hush money scheme with payments made to women who claimed they had extramarital affairs with Trump. He has denied the affairs. Hours after his arraignment, Trump rails against the Manhattan district attorney and the indictment during a speech at his Florida resort at Mar-a-Lago.

    May 9, 2023 – A Manhattan federal jury finds Trump sexually abused former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll in a luxury department store dressing room in the spring of 1996 and awards her $5 million for battery and defamation.

    May 15, 2023 – A report by special counsel John Durham is released. In it he concludes that the FBI should never have launched a full investigation into connections between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. The report does not recommend any new charges against individuals or “wholesale changes” about how the FBI handles politically charged investigations, despite strongly criticizing the agency’s behavior.

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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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  • White House preparations for state dinner with India’s Modi include plant-based chef and violinist Joshua Bell | CNN Politics

    White House preparations for state dinner with India’s Modi include plant-based chef and violinist Joshua Bell | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Preparations are underway at the White House as President Joe Biden and first lady Dr. Jill Biden will welcome India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Washington for an official state visit on Thursday, rolling out pomp and circumstance at a state dinner in the evening as the two countries reaffirm close ties.

    There has been close attention to diplomatic detail in advance of Thursday’s state dinner, including catering to the guest’s dietary restrictions.

    Nina Curtis, a plant-based chef from Sacramento, California, will be the dinner’s guest chef, working with White House Executive Chef Cris Comerford, and White House Executive Pastry Chef Susie Morrison to develop the menu, the office of the first lady said.

    Modi, a White House official said, is a vegetarian and “the First Lady selected Chef Curtis for her experience with plant-based cuisine.”

    And Grammy Award-winning American violinist and conductor Joshua Bell will provide the evening’s entertainment, the office of the first lady said.

    The state dinner is one element of an elaborate visit for the prime minister, which comes amid some criticism over Modi’s human rights record.

    State dinners, former White House curator Betty Monkman said, are “a courtesy, an expression of good will, and a way of extending hospitality,” as well as “an event that also showcases global power and influence.” The office of the first lady works closely with her social team, executive residence staff from the calligraphers to the florists to the pastry chefs and the State Department in preparation for these dinners.

    National security adviser Jake Sullivan traveled to India this week ahead of the dinner, meeting with Modi and other officials.

    “He reviewed preparations for the upcoming official state visit of the prime minister, and discussed a range of strategic, regional, and bilateral issues including steps to advance the strategic technology and defense partnership between the United States and India,” a readout of Sullivan’s trip stated.

    This will mark the third state dinner of the Biden administration after the Bidens hosted French President Emmanuel Macron in December and South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol in April.

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  • Biden says Putin has ‘absolutely’ been weakened after revolt in Russia | CNN Politics

    Biden says Putin has ‘absolutely’ been weakened after revolt in Russia | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden told CNN on Wednesday his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin has “absolutely” been weakened by the short-lived mutiny over the weekend.

    It was his most definitive comment to date on how the rebellion by Wagner Group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin affected the Russian leader’s stature.

    Biden and his team have been cautious in commenting on the events, wary of providing Putin pretext for claiming a western plot to oust him. But on Wednesday, Biden expanded on his views of Putin’s diminished stature.

    Asked whether the Russian president had been weakened, Biden said: “Absolutely.”

    Later, expanding on the extent of Putin’s weakness, Biden said it was difficult to ascertain.

    “It’s hard to tell but he’s clearly losing the war,” Biden told reporters on the White House South Lawn, mistakenly referring to the war in Iraq instead of Ukraine.

    “He’s losing the war at home. He’s become a bit of a pariah around the world. And it’s not just NATO, it’s not just the European Union, it’s Japan,” he added.

    Asked again if Putin is weaker today than he was last week, Biden said: “I know he is.”

    Earlier this week, Biden sought to distance the United States from the weekend rebellion in Russia, insisting in his first public remarks since the episode that the West had nothing to do with the mutiny.

    Still, American intelligence agencies were able to determine ahead of time that Prigozhin was preparing to challenge the Russian military, a sign of how closely the US had been monitoring tensions between Moscow and the Wagner boss.

    Speaking from the White House, Biden suggested it was too early to say how the situation would unfold going forward.

    “It’s still too early to reach a definitive conclusion about where this is going,” he said in the East Room. “The ultimate outcome of all this remains to be seen, but no matter what comes next I will keep making sure that our allies and our partners are closely aligned in how we are reading and responding to the situation.”

    Biden has spoken to the leaders of France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada and Italy since the events over the weekend. He also spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

    Earlier Wednesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Prigozhin’s rebellion could be beneficial to Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

    “To the extent that Moscow is distracted by its own internal divisions, that may help,” Blinken said in an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

    “To the extent that the Wagner forces themselves are no longer on the front lines, that could help, because they have been effective. They just literally throw people into a meat grinder of Putin’s own making, but that’s had some effect,” Blinken continued.

    This story has been updated with additional reporting.

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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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  • Chipmakers look to Japan as worries about China grow | CNN Business

    Chipmakers look to Japan as worries about China grow | CNN Business

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    Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said he welcomed and expected more investment from global chipmakers, after meeting top executives on Thursday before a Group of Seven summit.

    China is set to be high on the agenda of the annual G7 leaders meeting that begins on Friday, with the United States increasingly urging its allies to counter the Asian giant’s chip and advanced technology development.

    Growing Taiwan and US tensions with China have brought serious challenges to the semiconductor industry. Taiwan is a major producer of chips used in everything from cars and smartphones to fighter jets.

    Ensuring diversified, resilient supply chains is a key component of the economic security theme being emphasized by Japan at the talks, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters on Air Force One.

    Kishida told the executives, including those from Micron Technology Inc

    (MU)    , Intel Corp

    (INTC)     and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co

    (TSM)     (TSMC), that stabilizing supply chains would be a topic of discussion at the G7 talks in the western city of Hiroshima.

    “I am very pleased with your positive attitude towards investment in Japan, and would like the government as a whole to work on further expanding direct investment in Japan and support the semiconductor industry,” Kishida said.

    An industry ministry official later said Kishida wanted to foster cooperation to strengthen semiconductor supply chains, while Industry Minister Yasutoshi Nishimura said Japan would use 1.3 trillion yen ($9.63 billion) of the supplementary budget from the last fiscal year to support its chip business.

    In particular, Kumamoto prefecture in southwestern Japan is quickly becoming a hotbed for tech investment from companies including TSMC and Fujifilm Holdings Corp

    (FUJIF)    .

    Micron said in a statement that it would bring extreme ultraviolet (EUV) technology to Japan, becoming the first semiconductor company to do so, and expected to invest up to 500 billion yen ($3.6 billion) with support from the Japanese government.

    Bloomberg News reported the financial incentives would total about 200 billion yen.

    An industry ministry official said no decision had been made on whether Japan would give a subsidy to Micron, but that one would be made as soon as possible.

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  • Elon Musk says Tesla is coming to India ‘as soon as humanly possible’ | CNN Business

    Elon Musk says Tesla is coming to India ‘as soon as humanly possible’ | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday the company is looking to invest in India “as soon as humanly possible,” following a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New York.

    “[Modi] really cares about India because he’s pushing us to make significant investments in India, which is something we intend to do. We are just trying to figure out the right timing,” Musk told reporters.

    “I am confident that Tesla will be in India and will do so as soon as humanly possible,” he said, without specifying a timeline. Musk said he tentatively plans to visit India next year.

    Musk’s push into the Indian market has been in the works for a long time. Back in 2017, the CEO said that Tesla

    (TSLA)     was planning to sell cars in India as soon as that summer.

    But that plan has been delayed because of Tesla’s efforts to negotiate lower import duties with local government. Musk tweeted in 2021 that Tesla wanted to enter India, “but import duties are the highest in the world by far of any large country.”

    Tesla had sought to slash the duties, but the Indian government reportedly wants the company to make cars locally before considering any tax breaks, according to Reuters.

    On Tuesday, Musk said he had a “fantastic meeting” with the Modi and feels “incredibly excited about the future of India.”

    “[Modi] really wants to do the right thing for India. He wants to be open, he wants to be supportive to the companies. And obviously, at the same time, make sure that it accrues to India’s advantage,” Musk said.

    Tesla currently has one gigafactory in Asia, which is located in Shanghai. The Shanghai factory is Tesla’s biggest car manufacturing plant outside the United States and accounted for more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries in 2022.

    Last month, Musk said at an event that the company would likely pick a location for a new Tesla factory by the end of the year and that India was an interesting option, Reuters reported at the time.

    Both China and India have been trying to attract global EV investment and boost the EV industry.

    On Wednesday, China announced it would extend tax breaks for consumers buying new energy vehicles — which include battery electric cars, plug-in hybrids, and fuel-cell vehicles — through 2027, in its latest effort to boost sales and production in the world’s biggest EV market. The current policy allows purchase tax exemption on NEVs until the end of 2023.

    The tax break is estimated to reach 520 billion yuan ($72.3 billion) from 2024 to 2027, said Xu Hongcai, vice minister of finance, at a press conference in Beijing on Wednesday.

    The move follows a State Council meeting earlier this month, during which senior officials said they would study policies to promote NEV development and optimize tax exemption.

    From May 30 to June 1, Musk made his first visit to China since the pandemic and met a string of government officials to discuss EV development and Tesla’s operations in the country.

    He also visited the Shanghai gigafactory, thanking the workers and saying that they make the “highest quality” Tesla cars around the world, with the “most efficient production.”

    Before leaving, Musk also met Chen Jining, the Communist Party chief of Shanghai, who encouraged him to boost investment and operations and “bring more new products, new technologies and new services” to the city, according to a statement by the government.

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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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  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says justices are ‘destroying the legitimacy’ of the Supreme Court | CNN Politics

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says justices are ‘destroying the legitimacy’ of the Supreme Court | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said Sunday that some Supreme Court justices are “destroying the legitimacy of the court,” amid a lack of oversight, calling it “profoundly dangerous” for democracy.

    “We have a broad level of tools to deal with misconduct, overreach and abuse of power, and the Supreme Court has not been receiving the adequate oversight necessary in order to preserve their own legitimacy,” Ocasio-Cortez told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

    The progressive lawmaker cited recent allegations against Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas over ethics improprieties. Her comments come as the court wrapped up its term with a slew of consequential rulings, including ending affirmative action for college admissions, clocking student loan debt relief and limiting LGBTQ protections.

    Alito did not disclose a luxury 2008 trip he took in which a hedge fund billionaire flew him on a private jet, even though the businessman would later repeatedly ask the Supreme Court to intervene on his behalf, ProPublica reported. In a highly unusual move, Alito preemptively disputed the nature of the report before it published last month.

    Thomas, meanwhile, has fielded sharp criticism after a separate ProPublica report detailed his relationship with GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, including luxury travel and other lavish gifts that Thomas received from Crow, as well as Crow’s purchase from Thomas and his family the home where the justice’s mother still lives.

    The real estate transaction and the bulk of the hospitality went unreported on Thomas’ annual financial disclosures, as did Crow’s reported payments for the tuition of a grandnephew of the justice.

    Thomas has defended the omission of the Crow-financed travel from his reports, saying he was advised at the time that he was not required to report the hospitality.

    “If Chief Justice Roberts will not come before the Congress for an investigation voluntarily, I believe we should be considering subpoenas, we should be considering investigations, we should pass much more binding and stringent ethics guidelines,” Ocasio-Cortez said Sunday.

    Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, previously said his committee would mark up legislation on Supreme Court ethics after lawmakers return from their July 4 recess. Durbin had also asked Chief Justice John Roberts to appear before the Judiciary panel – a request that Roberts declined in April.

    Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday also called on the Biden administration to keep pursuing student loan cancellation after the Supreme Court blocked the president’s student loan forgiveness plan Friday, rejecting a program aimed at delivering up to $20,000 of relief to millions of borrowers.

    “People should not be incurring interest during this 12-month on-ramp period,” she said, referring to the administration’s proposal to help borrowers avoid penalties if they miss a payment during the first 12 months after student loan repayments resume in October.

    “So, I highly urge the administration to consider suspending those interest payments. Of course, we still believe in pursuing student loan cancellation and acting faster than that 12-month period wherever possible.”

    “We truly believe that the president – Congress has given the president this authority. The Supreme Court is far overreaching their authority. And I believe, frankly, that we really need to be having conversations about judicial review as a check on the courts as well,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

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  • Why Israel’s instability matters to the US | CNN Politics

    Why Israel’s instability matters to the US | CNN Politics

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



    CNN
     — 

    The pictures from Israel are incredible: seas of protesters rising up across the country.

    A general strike interrupted daily life and threatens to cripple the economy.

    The country’s defense minister has been sacked by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

    The flashpoint for all of this is Netanyahu’s controversial plan to change the country’s judicial system, weaken its Supreme Court and give Israel’s parliament – the Knesset, which is currently controlled by his government – more say over appointing justices.

    Netanyahu’s government acknowledged the pushback and hit a monthlong pause on that judicial overhaul plan late Monday, perhaps trying to cool things down without abandoning the plan.

    Read updates from throughout Monday.

    Frustration with the court extends beyond Netanyahu, but his effort just so happens to coincide with his trial for corruption. Netanyahu denies any wrongdoing and any link between the judicial changes and his trial – but not everyone takes his denials at face value.

    “He’s embraced this judicial reform movement – it’s actually a revolution movement – to try to give him the ability to stack … the Supreme Court in a way that people, Israelis generally, suspect is designed to protect him from the consequences of the prosecution, the trial that he’s now going through,” former US Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk noted on CNN on Monday.

    “So, it looks like it’s more of a personal agenda than a national agenda that he’s pursuing.”

    Netanyahu has defended the plan, which he argued in a recent interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper maintains the judiciary’s independence without allowing it to be “unbridled.”

    Indyk noted that other members of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition have their own reasons for wanting to overhaul the country’s Supreme Court.

    Far-right allies of Netanyahu don’t want the court to protect Palestinian land rights in the West Bank, Indyk said, and religious parties don’t want the court to force their orthodox religious students to serve in the army like other Israelis.

    CNN’s Hadas Gold, who has been reporting all day from the protests, has an in-depth look at the judicial overhaul effort, who supports it and why it has created so much controversy. Read her story.

    The protests have been building for months, but it is a general strike that shut down daily life and the firing by Netanyahu of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that appear to have changed the situation.

    “It’s clear that he’s lost control of the country,” Indyk said. “There’s never been a general strike like this, which is shutting down the ports, the airport, the hospitals, schools.”

    Netanyahu has few options to pull back from the judicial overhaul plan, Amir Tibon, a senior editor at the Haaretz newspaper, said on CNN International on Monday.

    “On the one hand, he’s got a coalition that is based purely on Israel’s right wing, ultra-religious, far-right nationalistic political elements,” Tibon said, noting that those elements have long wanted to curb the power of the Supreme Court, which they see as a liberalizing force in Israel that has pushed for LGBTQ and women’s rights in the country.

    “On the other hand, the people protesting in the streets in Israel against this judicial overhaul, this is really the backbone of the Israeli economy,” Tibon said. “It’s the high-tech industry, it’s academia, a lot of people are from the high ranks of the military.”

    Gallant, before his firing, warned the country’s military could dissolve if there is a perception it is sliding away from democracy.

    Tibon envisioned another flare-up in a month if the judicial overhaul plan returns, and worried that the Knesset could be on a collision course with the courts.

    “Israel’s enemies are watching this and rubbing their hands in glee,” Indyk said. “And that affects American national security interests as well because we depend on Israel to stabilize the region.”

    President Joe Biden, who Indyk noted has a long history with Netanyahu, “needs to adopt the ‘friends don’t let friends drive drunk’ approach, put his arm around Bibi (a commonly used nickname for Netanyahu) and say, listen old pal, you need to back off and you need to do it quickly – not just for the sake of Israel, which we care about deeply. But also for the sake of American national security interests.”

    Netanyahu may bristle at Americans trying to influence the judicial overhaul plan, but he has similarly gotten involved in domestic US politics. He actively campaigned in the US against the Iran nuclear deal during the Obama administration and got very close to former President Donald Trump, who ended it. The relationship between Trump and Netanyahu has since soured.

    Efforts by the Biden administration to reinstate the deal have so far failed.

    The US subsidizes Israel’s security to the tune of billions of dollars. In addition to a 10-year agreement to give Israel $3.3 billion in financing annually, the US also spends $500 million per year on the country’s missile defense system. In fact, Israel is “the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II,” according to a recent Congressional Research Service report.

    Biden, like most US politicians, likes to say that US support for Israel is absolute, but there is growing frustration with Israel among his Democratic Party.

    In fact, Democrats’ sympathies are now more likely to lay with Palestinians over Israel for the first time since Gallup started tracking the issue in 2001. That shift is driven mostly by young Americans – millennials born between 1980 and 2000.

    There is more vocal opposition to Israel’s policy moves among Democratic lawmakers.

    “What Bibi is doing is alarming, appalling, and perilous for the relationship between our two countries,” Sen. Brian Schatz, the Hawaii Democrat, said on Twitter. “We stand for democracy.”

    The Biden administration is set to convene its second virtual summit to promote democracy this week, an incredible coincidence as it watches a key democracy struggle. Israel has been invited to participate, and Netanyahu is scheduled to partake in the summit on Wednesday, though he is not listed on the public schedule of the event. US officials familiar with the planning told CNN’s White House team that there are no plans to change Netanyahu’s participation in the event as of now.

    Ultimately, the stakes are much larger than the judicial overhaul push that has set the recent events off.

    “It’s about what is the nature of Israel,” the former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Monday. “Will Israel remain a Jewish democratic state or (become) a nondemocratic … dictatorship or more religious country.”

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  • Biden will ‘at some point’ meet with China’s Xi Jinping, top White House official says | CNN Politics

    Biden will ‘at some point’ meet with China’s Xi Jinping, top White House official says | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden will “at some point” meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, as the two countries work to reset normal relations amid what has been an extremely tumultuous and tense year in the relationship.

    “We will, I hope, soon see American officials engaging at senior levels with their Chinese counterparts over the coming months to continue that work. And then, at some point, we will see President Biden and President Xi come back together again,” Sullivan told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in an interview on “GPS” that aired Sunday.

    “There is nothing inconsistent with, on the one hand, competing vigorously in important domains on economics and technology, and also ensuring that that competition does not veer into conflict or confrontation. That is the firm conviction of President Biden,” Sullivan added.

    Sullivan’s remarks come as relations between the world’s two biggest economies remain strained.

    China’s defense minister on Sunday accused the United States and its allies of trying to destabilize the Indo-Pacific region – just hours after the US had accused a Chinese warship of cutting in front of an American vessel that was taking part in a joint exercise with the Canadian navy in the Taiwan Strait, forcing the American vessel to slow down to avoid a collision. The incident marked the second time in two weeks that Chinese military personnel have engaged in aggressive maneuvers in the vicinity of US military personnel near China’s border. A Chinese fighter jet conducted an “unnecessarily aggressive maneuver” during an intercept of a US spy plane in international airspace over the South China Sea last week, the US military said Tuesday.

    Tensions between Washington and Beijing soared in February after a suspected Chinese spy balloon flew over the continental US and was subsequently shot down by the American military.

    The incident prompted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to postpone a planned trip to Beijing. While the trip has not yet been rescheduled, the State Department announced Saturday that the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs is traveling to China this week “to discuss key issues in the bilateral relationship.”

    China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang said in May that a “series of erroneous words and deeds” by the United States had placed relations between the two superpowers on “cold ice,” but stabilizing ties was a “top priority.”

    Amid the US efforts to reengage with China, Sullivan met with top Chinese official Wang Yi in Vienna last month in one of the highest-level engagements between US and Chinese officials since the spy balloon incident.

    There is a desire, Sullivan said, to “put a floor under the relationship” in order to more responsibly manage the competition between them.

    “There are a number of different elements to that. But one of the key ones is that as we have intense competition, we also have intense diplomacy,” he said.

    Biden, as recently as mid-May, projected optimism that he would eventually meet with his Chinese counterpart “whether it’s soon or not.” The two leaders last met in November at the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, for a three-hour conversation that Biden afterward described as “open and candid.”

    Meanwhile, Sullivan also told Zakaria that the US believes the highly anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive will result in Kyiv taking back “strategically significant territory.”

    “Exactly how much, in what places, that will be up to developments on the ground as the Ukrainians get this counteroffensive underway,” Sullivan said. “But we believe that the Ukrainians will meet with success in this counteroffensive.”

    Asked if this meant he expected some form of negotiations by the end of this year, Sullivan wouldn’t provide any sort of timetable but said that developments on the battlefield will have a “major impact” on any future negotiation.

    “But what I will say is this: President Zelensky himself has said that this war will end ultimately through diplomacy,” Sullivan said.

    The Ukrainian military has been spotted moving military hardware toward the front lines of its conflict with Russia and carrying out attacks against Russian targets that could facilitate an offensive, including recent strikes in the Russian-occupied southern port city of Berdiansk.

    A senior US official confirmed to CNN in May that Ukraine had begun conducting “shaping” operations in advance of a counteroffensive against Russian forces. Shaping involves striking targets such as weapons depots, command centers and armor and artillery systems to prepare the battlefield for advancing forces.

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

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

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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