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Tag: President Joe Biden

  • Biden forms task force to avoid mishandling of classified documents during presidential transitions

    Biden forms task force to avoid mishandling of classified documents during presidential transitions

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    President Joe Biden on Monday launched a task force aimed at addressing the “systemic” problem of mishandling classified information during presidential transitions, days after a Justice Department special counsel’s sharply critical report said he had done just that.The Presidential Records Transition Task Force will study past transitions to determine best practices for safeguarding classified information from an outgoing administration, the White House said. It will also assess the need for changes to existing policies and procedures to prevent the removal of sensitive information that by law should be kept with the National Archives and Records Administration. The report from special counsel Robert Hur listed dozens of sensitive documents found at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, and at his former Washington office. The papers were marked as classified or later assessed to contain classified information. The majority of the documents, Hur’s report stated, appeared to have been mistakenly removed from government offices, though he also detailed some items that Biden appeared to knowingly retain. He concluded that criminal charges were not warranted in the matter.”I take responsibility for not having seen exactly what my staff was doing,” Biden said last week after Hur’s report was released. He added that “things that appeared in my garage, things that came out of my home, things that were moved were moved not by me but my staff.”Biden aides first discovered some of the documents as they cleared out the offices of the Penn-Biden Center in Washington in 2022, and more were discovered during subsequent searches by Biden’s lawyers and the FBI. Biden promptly reported the discoveries to federal authorities, which prompted the special counsel probe. That’s unlike former President Donald Trump, who is accused of resisting efforts to return classified government records that he moved to his Florida residence before leaving office in 2021 and of obstructing the investigation into them in a separate special counsel investigation.In even the best of circumstances, presidential transitions can be chaotic as records of the outgoing administration are transferred to the National Archives and thousands of political appointees leave their jobs to make way for the incoming administration. Officials of multiple administrations have said there is a systemic problem with mishandling of classified information by senior government officials, particularly around transitions, magnified by rampant over-classification across the government. Former Vice President Mike Pence turned over some classified documents discovered at his home last year. And former officials from all levels of government discover they are in possession of classified material and turn them over to the authorities at least several times a year.”Previous presidential transitions, across administrations stretching back decades, have fallen short in ensuring that classified presidential records are properly archived at NARA,” the White House said. “In light of the many instances that have come to light in recent years revealing the extent of this systemic issue, President Biden is taking action to strengthen how administrations safeguard classified documents during presidential transitions and to help address this longstanding problem going forward.”Hur’s report said many of the documents recovered at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, in parts of Biden’s Delaware home and in his Senate papers at the University of Delaware were retained by “mistake.”Biden could not have been prosecuted as a sitting president, but Hur’s report states that he would not recommend charges against Biden regardless. But investigators did find evidence of willful retention and disclosure of a subset of records found in Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware house, including in a garage, office and basement den. The files pertain to a troop surge in Afghanistan during the Obama administration that Biden had vigorously opposed. He kept records that documented his position, including a classified letter to Obama during the 2009 Thanksgiving holiday.Biden also retained his personal notebooks after leaving the vice presidency, some of which investigators found contained classified information, though other officials have kept similar documents as their personal property. The task force will be headed by Katy Kale, deputy administrator of the General Services Administration, who was assistant to the president for management and administration during the Obama administration, the post that oversees the human resources and document retention functions at the White House.The panel will include representatives from the White House, General Services Administration, NARA, the National Security Council and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.The task force is to produce its recommendations ahead of the next presidential transition. It is set to operate independently from the White House Transition Coordinating Council, which is chaired by the White House chief of staff and required by law to be stood up six months before any presidential election.

    WASHINGTON —

    President Joe Biden on Monday launched a task force aimed at addressing the “systemic” problem of mishandling classified information during presidential transitions, days after a Justice Department special counsel’s sharply critical report said he had done just that.

    The Presidential Records Transition Task Force will study past transitions to determine best practices for safeguarding classified information from an outgoing administration, the White House said. It will also assess the need for changes to existing policies and procedures to prevent the removal of sensitive information that by law should be kept with the National Archives and Records Administration.

    The report from special counsel Robert Hur listed dozens of sensitive documents found at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, and at his former Washington office. The papers were marked as classified or later assessed to contain classified information.

    The majority of the documents, Hur’s report stated, appeared to have been mistakenly removed from government offices, though he also detailed some items that Biden appeared to knowingly retain. He concluded that criminal charges were not warranted in the matter.

    “I take responsibility for not having seen exactly what my staff was doing,” Biden said last week after Hur’s report was released. He added that “things that appeared in my garage, things that came out of my home, things that were moved were moved not by me but my staff.”

    Biden aides first discovered some of the documents as they cleared out the offices of the Penn-Biden Center in Washington in 2022, and more were discovered during subsequent searches by Biden’s lawyers and the FBI.

    Biden promptly reported the discoveries to federal authorities, which prompted the special counsel probe. That’s unlike former President Donald Trump, who is accused of resisting efforts to return classified government records that he moved to his Florida residence before leaving office in 2021 and of obstructing the investigation into them in a separate special counsel investigation.

    In even the best of circumstances, presidential transitions can be chaotic as records of the outgoing administration are transferred to the National Archives and thousands of political appointees leave their jobs to make way for the incoming administration. Officials of multiple administrations have said there is a systemic problem with mishandling of classified information by senior government officials, particularly around transitions, magnified by rampant over-classification across the government.

    Former Vice President Mike Pence turned over some classified documents discovered at his home last year. And former officials from all levels of government discover they are in possession of classified material and turn them over to the authorities at least several times a year.

    “Previous presidential transitions, across administrations stretching back decades, have fallen short in ensuring that classified presidential records are properly archived at NARA,” the White House said. “In light of the many instances that have come to light in recent years revealing the extent of this systemic issue, President Biden is taking action to strengthen how administrations safeguard classified documents during presidential transitions and to help address this longstanding problem going forward.”

    Hur’s report said many of the documents recovered at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, in parts of Biden’s Delaware home and in his Senate papers at the University of Delaware were retained by “mistake.”

    Biden could not have been prosecuted as a sitting president, but Hur’s report states that he would not recommend charges against Biden regardless. But investigators did find evidence of willful retention and disclosure of a subset of records found in Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware house, including in a garage, office and basement den. The files pertain to a troop surge in Afghanistan during the Obama administration that Biden had vigorously opposed. He kept records that documented his position, including a classified letter to Obama during the 2009 Thanksgiving holiday.

    Biden also retained his personal notebooks after leaving the vice presidency, some of which investigators found contained classified information, though other officials have kept similar documents as their personal property.

    The task force will be headed by Katy Kale, deputy administrator of the General Services Administration, who was assistant to the president for management and administration during the Obama administration, the post that oversees the human resources and document retention functions at the White House.

    The panel will include representatives from the White House, General Services Administration, NARA, the National Security Council and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

    The task force is to produce its recommendations ahead of the next presidential transition. It is set to operate independently from the White House Transition Coordinating Council, which is chaired by the White House chief of staff and required by law to be stood up six months before any presidential election.

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  • The Special Election That Could Give Democrats Hope for November

    The Special Election That Could Give Democrats Hope for November

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    In late 2021, Tom Suozzi made an announcement that exasperated Democratic Party leaders: The third-term representative would give up a reelection bid for his highly competitive New York House district to mount a long-shot primary challenge against Governor Kathy Hochul.

    Suozzi got trounced, but the ripple effects of his ill-fated run extended far beyond his Long Island district. Democrats ended up losing their narrow majority in the House, in part because the seat Suozzi vacated went to a little-known Republican named George Santos. He’s not so little-known anymore. Nor is he in Congress, having been expelled in December after his colleagues discovered that his stated biography was a fiction and that his campaign was an alleged criminal enterprise.

    Steve Israel: How a perfectly normal New York suburb elected a con man

    In a special election next week, Suozzi will try to reclaim the seat he abandoned—and bring the Democrats one step closer to recapturing the House. He’s made amends with party leaders (including Hochul), but he’s not apologizing. “I don’t regret any of my decisions,” Suozzi told me recently. “When things don’t work out, that’s the way it is.”

    A pro-business moderate, Suozzi helped start the cross-party Problem Solvers Caucus in the House after Donald Trump won the presidency. He told me that his penchant for bipartisanship makes him “a very poor candidate” in a Democratic primary—he’s now lost two such gubernatorial campaigns by more than 50 points—but a much better one in a general election.

    Officials in both parties give Suozzi a slight edge; he has more money and is much better known than his GOP opponent, Mazi Pilip, a county legislator who spent her teenage years in Israel and served in the Israeli Defense Forces. But Suozzi is trying to run as an underdog, shunning a Democratic brand that he believes has been soiled on Long Island by voter frustration with the migrant crisis, the high cost of living, and turmoil overseas. He’s kept his distance from President Joe Biden, who, according to both Democratic and Republican strategists, is no more popular in the district than Trump. “If I run my campaign to say, ‘I’m Tom Suozzi. I’m the Democrat, and my opponent’s the Republican,’ I lose this race,” Suozzi said at a rally before members of the carpenters’ union on Saturday.

    The third congressional district borders the blue bastion of New York City and includes a sliver of Queens, but Republicans have clobbered Democrats across Long Island in recent years. Tuesday’s special election represents the Democrats’ first attempt to claw back some of that territory and test out messages that they hope can resonate in suburban swing districts across the country this fall.

    Like other Democrats, Suozzi is emphasizing his support for abortion rights, an issue that has helped the party limit GOP gains since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But he’s also pitching himself as a bipartisan dealmaker—his campaign slogan is “Let’s fix this!” Suozzi is betting that voters are angered as much by congressional inaction on issues such as immigration and border security as they are by Biden or his policies. If he’s right, the GOP’s rejection this week of a bipartisan border deal that its leaders had initially demanded will play into his hands.

    Whether Suozzi’s campaign proves effective next week will offer clues about the swing districts that could determine control of Congress. A win could point the way for Democratic candidates to redirect attacks on Biden’s record and ease fears that the border impasse could be an insurmountable liability this fall. But his defeat in a district that ought to be winnable for Democrats would suggest that the party is in real trouble as the general election begins.

    Next week’s election will also serve as a test of whether Democrats can turn out voters for a candidate who, like Biden, doesn’t inspire much enthusiasm.

    Read: Is Biden toast?

    Suozzi, 61, is a familiar figure on Long Island; he became a mayor at 31 and then won two terms as a county executive overseeing a population of 1.3 million people in Nassau County. But he’s also suffered his share of defeats. Eliot Spitzer beat him by more than 60 points in the 2006 primary for governor. Suozzi then lost two campaigns for county executive before winning a House seat in 2016. “He felt that he was destined to be president of the United States,” former Representative Peter King, a Republican who served alongside Suozzi in the House and has known him for decades, told me. “Tom started off as the young superstar, and then suddenly you become old.”

    On Saturday, local labor organizers amassed several hundred members of the carpenters’ union in a banquet hall for the rally. Most of them had been bused from outside the district, and many of them weren’t exactly excited to be there. “We’re here under protest,” one union member grumbled as I searched for actual Suozzi supporters in the crowd. The murmuring laborers showed so little interest in the speakers who were touting Suozzi that the candidate at one point awkwardly grabbed the microphone and implored them to pay attention.

    Some of the attendees who did live in Nassau County weren’t thrilled about the Democrat, repeating attacks from GOP ads that have been airing nonstop in recent weeks. “Suozzi’s terrible on the border,” said Jackson Klyne, 44, who told me he didn’t plan to vote for either Suozzi or Pilip next week. A Biden voter in 2020, Klyne said that “it would probably be Trump” for him in November.

    Suozzi must also win over Democrats who are unhappy that he abandoned his congressional seat to challenge Hochul, leading to the election of Santos. “It was a dangerous choice,” Stephanie Visconti, a 47-year-old attorney from New Hyde Park, told me. “I thought it was self-serving.”

    Visconti volunteers with Engage Long Island, an affiliate of the progressive organizing group Indivisible that endorsed a primary challenger to Suozzi for Congress in 2020. But she fully backs him now; on Saturday, she and other members of the group were knocking on doors for his campaign. “He is the right candidate for right now,” she said, citing the need for Democrats to win back control of the House. “Looking at the global big picture, this for us is the first step toward making bigger and broader changes.”

    Biden carried the district in 2020, but Republicans have been ascendant on Long Island ever since. They swept the House races in the midterms and won big local races again last year. Santos defeated the Democratic nominee in the third district by seven points in 2022, and Suozzi isn’t sure he would have won had he been on the ballot. When I asked him what he’d say to people who argue that he bears some responsibility for Santos’s election, Suozzi replied, “‘Thank you for your endorsement, because you’re saying I’m the only person who could have won.’”

    Republican leaders are relying on Biden’s unpopularity and their party’s prodigious turnout machine to keep the seat. They picked Pilip as their candidate—the special election had no primary—in part because in the aftermath of October 7, they hoped that her connection to Israel would resonate in a district where about 20 percent of the electorate is Jewish. (Suozzi is also a longtime supporter of Israel. Within a week of Pilip’s selection, he traveled there to meet with the families of hostages held by Hamas.)

    With only a few exceptions, Pilip has kept a low profile for a political newcomer. She’s agreed to just one debate with Suozzi, three days before the election, and she hasn’t held many publicly promoted campaign events. (Her campaign did not make her available for an interview.) Nassau County Republicans scheduled their biggest rally of the election for a Saturday, when Pilip, who observes the Sabbath, would not be able to attend. She filmed a short video to be played in her absence. “The strategy is intentional,” Steve Israel, a Democrat who represented the third district in the House for 16 years, told me. “She is untested, and Republicans fear that she will say something that could effectively lose the election. They’d rather take their lumps for hiding her.”

    That approach could be risky given the district’s experience with Santos. “We’ve already had someone we didn’t know. We don’t want that again,” Judi Bosworth, a Democratic former town supervisor, said as she campaigned with Suozzi.

    Abortion has been a central issue in the race; Democratic ads have warned that a vote for Pilip could lead to a national ban. But in the closing weeks, the migrant crisis has come to the fore. GOP commercials blame Suozzi and Biden for the “invasion” at the southern border, and Suozzi has criticized Pilip for opposing the bipartisan border-security deal unveiled this week in the Senate. Although national issues are dominating the race, neither candidate wants to be associated with their party’s leaders in Washington. Pilip, until recently a registered Democrat, has declined to say whether she voted for Trump in 2020 and has yet to endorse his comeback bid. When House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries spoke at a rally for Suozzi on Saturday, the Democrat’s campaign did not invite the press. The day before, the Pilip campaign kept quiet about an appearance by Speaker Mike Johnson.

    The outcome next week could have an immediate impact in the narrowly divided House, where Republicans have only a three-vote majority. Earlier this week, Republicans fell just one vote short of impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas; a Suozzi victory would likely keep it on hold, at least for the time being. But Suozzi wants to make a deeper impression in a second stint in Congress. He has campaigned not as a dispassionate centrist but as an impatient negotiator anxious to get back to the bargaining table.

    He had wanted a bigger job altogether, but he assured me that he would not be bored by a return to the House. I asked him what message his victory would send. He rattled off a list of bipartisan deals he wants to strike—on the border, Ukraine, housing, climate change, and more. “If I win,” he said, “I can go to my colleagues in Washington and say, ‘Wake up. This is what the people want.’”

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    Russell Berman

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  • Michigan officials to vote ‘uncommitted’ in Democratic primary due to Biden’s handling of Gaza

    Michigan officials to vote ‘uncommitted’ in Democratic primary due to Biden’s handling of Gaza

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    click to enlarge

    Dearborn Mayor Abdullah H. Hammoud.

    More than 30 southeast Michigan officials including Dearborn Mayor Abdullah H. Hammoud have pledged to vote “uncommitted” in the Democratic presidential primary election on Feb. 27.

    The officials signed a letter on Feb. 6 following the campaign announcement by Listen to Michigan urging Michiganders to “Vote Uncommitted” in order to send a message to President Joe Biden on his handling of the war in Gaza.

    “We must hold our president accountable and ensure that we, the American taxpayers, are no longer forced to be accomplices in a genocide that is backed and funded by the United States government,” Listen to Michigan said in a statement.

    The action is a result of Biden and his administration failing to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire more than four months after Israel launched its military campaign in response to the Gaza following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. The conflict has resulted in the loss of more than 30,000 lives and the displacement of over 2 million people in Gaza.

    “Our government has failed to act in the best interests of the lives of innocent men, women, and children, and worse yet, have suggested that there is an exception to the rule when it comes to Palestinian lives,” Mayor Hammoud stated. “This matter has a direct impact on our Dearborn community, and more importantly, on each of us as human beings. We intend to make our voices heard in the presidential primary.”

    Last weekend, the Wall Street Journal published a racist, Islamaphobic, and misinformed opinion piece calling Dearborn “America’s jihad capital.” Local officials say that the best way to support the people of Dearborn is to support a ceasefire.

    This week, President Biden’s senior officials plan to meet with Arab and Muslim American communities in Michigan to discuss policy surrounding the conflict, reported The Detroit News. This was supposed to happen weeks ago, but many leaders, including Mayor Hammoud, refused to attend out of protest.

    Many Muslim activists in metro Detroit have been pledging to “Abandon Biden” for months, but Listen to Michigan hopes the campaign pushes the president to shift policy. The coalition believes that Biden is not listening to what his voters want, and must earn the vote of Democrats through a dramatic change. And, according to recent surveys, most Detroit-area voters support a permanent ceasefire.

    In the Michigan Democratic primary, there are five options: Joe Biden, Dean Phillips, Marianne Williamson, “Uncommitted,” and a blank line for write-ins. The Listen to Michigan campaign is urging voters to select “Uncommitted” in the election.

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    Layla McMurtrie

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  • Donald Trump and UAW President Shawn Fain exchange barbs: ‘Get rid of this dope’

    Donald Trump and UAW President Shawn Fain exchange barbs: ‘Get rid of this dope’

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    Donald Trump and UAW President Shawn Fain exchange barbs: 'Get rid of this dope'

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  • The RNC chairwoman calls for unity as the party faces a cash crunch and attacks by some Trump allies

    The RNC chairwoman calls for unity as the party faces a cash crunch and attacks by some Trump allies

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    LAS VEGAS, Nevada (AP) — Facing a cash crunch and harsh criticism from a faction of far-right conservatives, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel on Friday called for the party to unite behind the goal of defeating President Joe Biden.

    McDaniel spoke at the RNC’s winter meeting in Las Vegas behind closed doors on Friday, addressing a gathering of state chairmen and other top party members in what’s expected to be a critical swing state in the November election.

    “We Republicans will stick together, as united as the union our party long ago fought to preserve,” McDaniel said, according to people who were in the room and disclosed her remarks on condition of anonymity to discuss a private gathering. “We’ll have our battles ahead of us, but they’re good battles, and they’re worth fighting for.”

    McDaniel’s appeal for unity comes as former President Donald Trump and his allies push the party to get behind him and effectively end the primary even though he still faces a final major rival, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. While McDaniel has fought off opponents before, winning a competitive race for a fourth term as chairwoman last year, she’s now facing Trump supporters on the far right who are creating parallel efforts that could conflict with the national party.

    Campaign finance disclosures released this week show the RNC had just $8 million in the bank and $1 million in debt. While the Trump campaign heads into 2024 with $42 million cash on hand, Biden’s political operation reported raising $97.1 million in the final months of 2024 across the various committees it uses to fundraise and ended the year with $117.4 million on hand.

    Biden is already working with the Democratic National Committee, which partners automatically with the incumbent president. An effort by Trump allies to have the RNC this week declare Trump the “presumptive nominee” was withdrawn after it drew criticism because Haley is still running.

    Trump has previously backed McDaniel, though his campaign and the RNC have disagreed at times. Trump declined to participate in party-sponsored primary debates before this year’s Iowa caucuses.

    But there’s long been tension between the party establishment and some people who consider themselves Trump’s strongest supporters.

    McDaniel faced a week of withering attacks launched by far-right figures spearheaded by the group Turning Point, a glitzy and well-funded organization founded by 30-year-old media figure Charlie Kirk, who was part of an unsuccessful effort to oust McDaniel last year.

    Days before the party’s winter meeting convened, Turning Point hosted a counterprograming event and training session at a casino across Las Vegas Boulevard dubbed “Restoring National Confidence,” a play on the RNC’s initials. The invite-only event drew nearly 400 attendees aligned with the group, including some RNC members, as well as state and local Republican Party chairs.

    Kirk, who hosts a popular radio show, is part of a faction of conservatives who’ve openly stoked a feud with the RNC, which they have blasted for spending lavishly and being out of touch with the party’s grassroots base. That, they argue, led to losses in 2018 and 2020 as well as underwhelming results in 2022.

    Some Turning Point supporters have become RNC members, while the group is actively recruiting others, an effort that, if successful, would give the group more sway over the direction of the party and perhaps a stronger say in the party’s chair.

    “We know a pack of losers when we see it: top to bottom, the entire RNC staff in its current form,” Kirk said Thursday on his radio show.

    “They don’t even know what winning is,” he added.

    Inside the RNC meeting, some members, including those who have been critical of McDaniel, said the Turning Point effort was ill-advised.

    “Attacking the brand and the chair doesn’t advance our fundamental goal of winning elections,” said Mississippi national committeeman Henry Barbour, who has at times criticized McDaniel.

    And McDaniel’s allies note that the Democratic National Committee was in debt to the tune of $5 million in the early days of the 2020 race, when the party was trying to return a Democrat to the White House.

    Turning Point is looking to expand its influence and reach beyond the youth movement, with mixed results. The group has struggled in its adopted home state of Arizona, where many of its preferred candidates failed to win in statewide races that many saw as winnable.

    Its leaders have also come under scrutiny over their own spending practices, including charter jet travel, offering lucrative salaries and paying to host Kirk’s wedding reception in 2021. Turning Point is currently trying to raise $108 million for a three-state get-out-the-vote campaign in Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia that would operate parallel to efforts that are already underway.

    RNC spokeswoman Emma Vaughn dismissed the challenges as coming from people complaining online.

    “Outside noise might be what keyboard warriors and the Democrats are focused on,” she said. “Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and the entire Republican National Committee are laser-focused on beating Biden this fall.”

    ___

    Slodysko reported from Washington.

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  • The Power of Women: Biden-Harris Push For Equal Pay on Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act Anniversary

    The Power of Women: Biden-Harris Push For Equal Pay on Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act Anniversary

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    Heading into an election in which the votes of women are critical, the Biden-Harris administration is marking the 15th anniversary of the very first bill of the Obama-Biden administration, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, with further actions to help close wage gaps and improve pay transparency.

    “Women workers are still paid on average 84 cents for every dollar paid to men, and the disparities are even greater for many women of color. Today, my Administration is taking new actions to advance pay equity for the federal workforce and employees of federal contractors. These new actions adopt commonsense policies that will help pay millions of workers fairly, close gender and racial wage gaps, and yield tangible benefits for the federal government and federal contractors. These policies are good for workers, our economy, and for families,” President Biden said in a statement provided to PoliticusUSA.

    Every year when the Lilly Ledbetter Act comes up, critics of the Fair Pay Act argue that there’s no discrepancy and if there is a discrepancy, it’s because women aren’t as qualified. But Pew found that indeed in 2022, American women “typically earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by men,” and the “pay gap persists even though women today are more likely than men to have graduated from college.”

    It’s even worse for women of color. “In 2022, Black women earned 70% as much as White men and Hispanic women earned only 65% as much. The ratio for White women stood at 83%, about the same as the earnings gap overall, while Asian women were closer to parity with White men, making 93% as much.”

    The actions announced Monday will impact pay equity and disclosure/transparency around pay with federal workers and contractors. White House Director of the New Policy Council Jennifer Kline explained during a call with reporters, in which we participated, that this will serve as a model that is good for employees and employers, in addition to strengthening the economy.

    In what she described as a “major step forward,” the Director of the Office of Management and Budget Shalanda Young said OPM is announcing a new regulation that will “prohibit the use of salary history in setting pay for role in the federal government” as well as the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council publishing a proposed rule to prohibit federal contractors from “seeking and considering information about job applicants past compensation when making employment decisions.”

    Young explained, “Relying on a candidate’s salary history can exacerbate pre-existing inequality and our pay structures and disproportionately impact women and workers of color,” adding that this had actually happened to her earlier in her career, which is a good example of why having people with different backgrounds and experiences at the table matters.

    The federal government in 2022 had a much lower pay gap (5.6%-under 1% at senior level) than the national gender pay gap (16%), but still has room for improvement, and it is the only area over which the President can exert control.

    “Under this new regulation. Federal agencies will not considering applicants non federal salary history when setting pay for new employees. Relying on a candidate candidate salary history can exacerbate great existing inequality, and disproportionately impacts women and workers of color,” Director of the Office of Personnel Management Kiran Ahuja said on the call.

    This is called leading by example.

    The President also called on Congress to “pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, to increase pay transparency and strengthen our tools to fight sex-based pay discrimination,” although we can be sure the Republican-led House will not take any interest in protecting pay for women.

    It is in perhaps seemingly small and certainly missed actions like these that an administration tells the people what they stand for. It’s about where they flex and where they put their resources. For women, the pay gap is not only demoralizing and unjust, but it can add up to millions of dollars over a lifetime.

    There’s something poignant about Biden getting to add to the first Act of the Obama-Biden administration at this stage in his career. The President is no stranger to awareness of women’s issues, though, having submitted in 1990 a proposal to address violence against women which eventually became the Violence Against Women Act. That act centered around provisions on rape, included the first federal criminal law against battering and addressed stalking, as well as funding for victim services and evidentiary matters. The work took four years to pass, due in part to resistance from then Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a Republican.

    Having a President who sees these injustices as something worth fighting to change is a far cry from the last one, whose actions against women ultimately led to the Me Too movement and who has just been told by a jury that he must pay his rape victim $83.3 million for defaming her.



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    Sarah Jones

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  • First in the Nation—And Last?

    First in the Nation—And Last?

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    Donald Trump shares an essential trait with the voters of New Hampshire: a craving for flattery and affirmation.

    Residents here are accustomed to parades of candidates trekking up every four years to tell them how sacred their first-in-the-nation primary is, how discerning their famously “independent” and “contrarian” voters are. Politicians strain endlessly to convey how vital New Hampshire is to the process.

    But things feel precarious and a bit upside down here these days—more final whimper than first salvo.

    I landed in Manchester on Friday afternoon and found the place almost numb with abandonment. Elm Street, the “main drag” of New Hampshire’s biggest city, which is usually good for a few candidate sightings and media scrums, was quiet. Once the marquee stopover on the presidential tour, this original colony felt neglected in the final weekend before today’s primary, and well past its glory.

    “Where is everyone?” I asked the woman next to me at the counter of the downtown Red Arrow Diner on Friday. The century-old greasy spoon on Lowell Street has served as a landmark for visiting political hacks and as a reliable backdrop for candidate photo ops.

    “Ryan Binkley was just here,” my stool-neighbor informed me. I Googled Ryan Binkley. He is a pastor from Texas who says he is running for president because God called him to. Who is Ryan Binkley? the yard signs say (good enough to finish fifth in Iowa, apparently).

    You can see why the once-pandered-to populace of the Granite State might feel unloved. Last year, the Democrats—led by the current president of the United States—dumped New Hampshire in favor of South Carolina as the party’s official first primary. The scorned New England mainstay scheduled its primary anyway, even though the Democratic National Committee said it would not recognize the results or award any delegates derived from this unholy action. President Joe Biden has not campaigned in the state, and his name is not on the ballot.

    Read: Trump is about to steamroll Nikki Haley

    Now Republicans keep dropping out, leaving the GOP race down to Trump, who routed the field in Iowa last week, and the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley (plus Binkley and a few others). Campaign events were still occurring in New Hampshire in this final week, but far fewer than usual; Trump, and to a lesser extent Haley, drew most of the attention and the biggest crowds.

    The former president seemed both rambling and serene. “When I fly over a blue state, two days later, I get a subpoena,” Trump said at the start of a rally in Concord on Friday night. Technically, New Hampshire is itself a blue state, or at least it has been in the past several presidential elections; Trump lost it in both 2016 and 2020. But things were feeling quite safe here for Trump in the primary. Recent polls showed him with double-digit leads over Haley and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who was still in the race heading into the weekend but barely bothered with New Hampshire.

    “DeSantis, God bless him. He’s a remainder at this point,” New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, a Republican, told me at a Haley event in a Milford restaurant on Friday afternoon. “What happened to this guy?” Trump asked of DeSantis a few hours later in Concord. “One of the great self-destructions I think I’ve ever witnessed.”

    At the very least, DeSantis understood that the prevailing dynamic of the Republican Party over the past eight years has stayed intact. “You can be the most worthless Republican in America,” he said in one of his final campaign stops in Iowa, discharging a few nuggets of clarity as he approached the end. “If you kiss the ring, he’ll say you are wonderful.” The governor quit the race on Sunday and, yes, kissed the ring on the way out, endorsing Trump.

    Read: Ron DeSantis’s cold, hard reality

    This followed a week’s procession of white flags. Former Trump “opponents” kept endorsing the former president—Vivek Ramaswamy last Monday; the governor of North Dakota, whoever that was, the day before; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina on Friday, joining Trump in Concord. By Sunday, New Hampshire felt like the last stand of a battle that had never started.

    Throughout the weekend, Trump tried to assure his supporters that he knows how important the state is, even though he would almost certainly rather spend his time elsewhere; he described New Hampshire as “a drug-infested den” in a 2017 phone call with the then-president of Mexico. He has been holding nightly rallies across the state since Friday, telling everyone how special they are, and the admiration is of course mutual.

    “I’m thrilled to be back in the home of first-in-the-nation,” Trump said at his Concord rally. Any candidate who comes to New Hampshire cannot utter those four words—first in the nation—enough. And Trump did, four times in the space of a few sentences.

    “You know who kept you first in the nation?” Trump asked the crowd.

    “Trump!” he said, uttering his own name along with some in the audience.

    “But I just want to tell you, you’re first in the nation,” he said. “You’re always going be first in the nation!”

    Read: What is Nikki Haley even talking about?

    For her part, Haley has been intent on convincing everyone that New Hampshire is still a race at all. A two-person race, to be precise. “Between Nikki and Trump,” Sununu repeated, like a fleece-wearing parrot, as he accompanied Haley across the state, four or five stops a day. He and Haley kept contrasting this particular two-person race with the one most Americans are dreading, between Trump and Biden.

    “People don’t want two 80-year-olds running for president,” Haley said in a brief press conference Friday at a diner in Amherst (Trump is 77; Biden is 81). She devoted much of the session to scolding the media for not properly correcting the false things Trump says about her. “Y’all need to call him out,” she urged. She also theorized that although 70 percent of Americans don’t want to be subjected to a Trump-Biden rematch, “70 percent of the media does want a rematch.”

    This is dubious, for what it’s worth. If anything, “the media” wanted a competitive primary campaign—some genuine uncertainty and drama, and a reason beyond obligation to keep tuning in.

    Like Trump, Dean Phillips is happy to fill the vacuum of love for New Hampshire. “We’ve got to practice democracy,” the Democratic representative from Minnesota said at a Nashua senior center on Saturday afternoon. Phillips, a wealthy former gelato baron, is waging a long-shot campaign against Biden—actually, a write-in version of Biden, who, because he’s not on the ballot, can be voted for only that way by New Hampshirites willing to overlook the president’s ghosting of their state.

    “Why write in Biden?” Phillips asked at the event, if Biden is “writing off New Hampshire?” Polite chuckles, maybe a moan or two. Phillips also suggested that Biden was “taking the Granite State for granted.” (Dean Phillips: The Dad Joke candidate!)

    Read: 90 minutes in a van with Dean Phillips

    Back in Concord, Trump had gone even further in conveying his admiration for his host and its traditions—reaching all the way back to the Civil War. Uh-oh. Haley did this last month, and it didn’t go well. But Trump—student of history that he is—had an important lesson to share. “They said the people from New Hampshire were very tough fighters,” Trump said. “Did you know that?” (No one seemed to.) He said he had read that somewhere. “History,” he continued. “Very tough fighters.”

    “You won a lot of battles. That was a nasty war.”

    He later proceeded with a strange flurry of comments about Haley, ridiculing her failure to protect the U.S. Capitol on January 6—wait, did he mean Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the House? Maybe, but Trump kept saying Haley’s name, over and over.

    “They,” he said, don’t want to talk about how Haley was in charge of security on January 6.

    He also said that Haley—this time he apparently did mean Nikki Haley, the one he’s running against—was not “capable,” “tough,” “smart,” or “respected” enough to be president and handle Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, or Kim Jong Un. “Very fine people,” Trump called them.

    In a different time, this would be the kind of weird front-runner face-plant that could turn a New Hampshire primary on its head. Haley did her best to keep Trump’s bizarre comments aloft over the weekend. But mostly they were met with the usual resignation of a party with little will to fight, drifting toward the inevitable.

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    Mark Leibovich

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  • In new filing, Trump lawyers foreshadow potential lines of defense in classified documents case

    In new filing, Trump lawyers foreshadow potential lines of defense in classified documents case

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawyers for former President Donald Trump foreshadowed elements of their defense in the criminal case charging him with illegally retaining classified documents, saying in a motion filed Tuesday that they will dispute prosecutors’ allegations that the estate where the records were stored was not secure.

    The defense team also said in a wide-ranging court filing that they are seeking communication between the Justice Department prosecution team and associates of President Joe Biden in hopes of advancing their claims that the classified documents case is “politically motivated” and designed to harm Trump’s 2024 campaign.

    The brief, which asks a judge to compel special counsel Jack Smith’s team to turn over a trove of information, offers the most expansive view yet of potential lines of defense in one of the four criminal cases Trump faces as he seeks to capture the Republican nomination and reclaim the White House.

    It offers a blend of legal analysis and political bombast that has come to be expected in Trump team motions. For instance, it references Trump’s record victory this week in the Iowa caucuses and decries the charges as “partisan election interference” — familiar statements from the ex-president’s lawyers that seem intended to appeal as much to voters on the campaign trail as to the judge presiding over the case.

    “The Special Counsel’s Office has disregarded basic discovery obligations and DOJ policies in an effort to support the Biden Administration’s egregious efforts to weaponize the criminal justice system in pursuit of an objective that President Biden cannot achieve on the campaign trail: slowing down President Trump’s leading campaign in the 2024 presidential election,” Trump’s lawyers wrote.

    Despite Trump’s repeated claims, there is no evidence of any coordination between the Justice Department and the White House, which has said it had no advance knowledge of the FBI’s August 2022 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate that recovered dozens of classified documents he had taken with him when he left the White House. Attorney General Merrick Garland months later appointed Smith as special counsel as a way to try to insulate the Justice Department from claims of political bias.

    A spokesman for Smith declined to comment Tuesday night. Prosecutors will have a chance to respond to the filing, and are likely to tell U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that much of the material defense lawyers are seeking is not relevant to the case.

    A June 2023 indictment charging Trump with dozens of felony counts alleges that investigators found boxes of sensitive documents recklessly stored at Mar-a-Lago in spaces including a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, his bedroom and a storage room. Prosecutors have said the documents he stowed, refused to return and in some cases showed to visitors risked jeopardizing not only relations with foreign nations but also the safety of troops and confidential sources.

    But defense lawyers said in their motion that they intend to dispute allegations that “Mar-a-Lago was not secure and that there was a risk that materials stored at those premises could be compromised.”

    They argued that prosecutors should be forced to disclose all information related to what they have previously described as “temporary secure locations” at Mar-a-Lago and other Trump properties. They contended that such evidence would refute prosecutors’ allegations because the Secret Service took steps to secure the residences and made arrangements for him to review and discuss classified information.

    Trump’s lawyers also referenced what they said was an Energy Department action in June, after the charges were filed, to “retroactively terminate” a security clearance for the former president.

    They demanded more information about that, saying evidence of a post-presidential possession of a security clearance was relevant for potential arguments of “good-faith and non-criminal states of mind relating to possession of classified materials.”

    The case is currently scheduled for trial on May 20, but that date may be pushed back.

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  • What Trump’s Victory in Iowa Reveals

    What Trump’s Victory in Iowa Reveals

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    Donald Trump’s victory in the Iowa caucus was as dominant as expected, underscoring the exceedingly narrow path available to any of the Republican forces hoping to prevent his third consecutive nomination. And yet, for all Trump’s strength within the party, the results also hinted at some of the risks the GOP will face if it nominates him again.

    Based on Trump’s overwhelming lead in the poll conducted of voters on their way into the voting, the cable networks called the contest for Trump before the actual caucus was even completed. It was a fittingly anticlimactic conclusion to a caucus contest whose result all year has never seemed in doubt. In part, that may have been because none of Trump’s rivals offered Iowa voters a fully articulated case against him until Florida Governor Ron DeSantis unleashed more pointed arguments against the front-runner in the final days.

    Trump steamrolled over the opposition of the state’s Republican and evangelical Christian leadership to amass by far the largest margin of victory ever in a contested Iowa GOP caucus. He drew strong support across virtually every demographic group—though, in a preview of a continuing general election challenge if he wins the nomination, his vote notably lagged among caucus-goers with at least a four-year college degree.

    Read: The end is coming for Trump’s GOP rivals

    The results as of late Monday evening showed DeSantis solidifying a small lead over former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley for a distant second place behind Trump. Even though DeSantis held off Haley, his weak finish after investing so much time and money in the state—and attracting endorsements from local political leaders including Governor Kim Reynolds—likely extinguishes his chances of winning the nomination. That’s true whether he remains in the race, as he pledged on Monday, or drops out in the next few weeks.

    Though Haley could not overtake DeSantis here, she has a second chance to establish momentum next week in New Hampshire, where she is running close to Trump in some surveys. But the magnitude of Trump’s Iowa victory shows how far Haley remains from creating a genuine threat to the front-runner. Her support largely remained confined to an archipelago of better-educated, more moderate voters in the state’s largest population centers.

    After the Iowa results, “she’ll be the alternative to Donald Trump,” said Douglas Gross, a longtime GOP Iowa activist who supported Haley. Her credible showing “is not because of organization or message, because she didn’t have either. It’s because she’s perceived as the alternative to Trump and the other candidates tried to be Trump.”

    Haley, though, clearly signaled her intent to escalate her challenge to Trump as the race moves on to New Hampshire. In an energetic post-caucus speech, she debuted a new line of argument against Trump, linking him to President Joe Biden as an aging symbol of a caustic and divisive past that American voters must transcend. “Our campaign is the last best hope of stopping the Trump-Biden nightmare,” she insisted, in a line of argument likely to dominate her message in the week until New Hampshire votes on January 23.

    For Haley, the first challenge may be reversing the gathering sense in the party that Trump is on the verge of wrapping up the contest even as it just begins. The behavior of GOP elected officials in the final days before the caucus may have revealed as much about the state of the race as the result of the first voting itself. Trump in recent days has received a parade of endorsements, including from Utah Senator Mike Lee, who criticized him sharply in 2016, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whom Trump mercilessly belittled and mocked when he ran in the 2016 presidential race.

    Read: Trump is coming for Obamacare again

    As telling: Reynolds, the most prominent supporter of DeSantis, and New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, Haley’s most prominent backer, each declared in separate television interviews just hours before the vote that they would support Trump if he’s the nominee. Haley did the same in an interview on Fox: “I would take Donald Trump over Joe Biden any day of the week,” she told the Fox News Channel host Neil Cavuto on Monday, hours before she unveiled her much tougher message toward the former president Monday night.

    Trump himself revealed his confidence in a restrained victory speech Monday night that included rare praise of DeSantis, Haley, and Vivek Ramaswamy, who finished fourth and then dropped out of the race. Trump’s uncharacteristically sedate and conciliatory remarks suggested that he sees the opportunity to force out the others, and consolidate the party, before very long.

    Trump’s commanding lead in the vote testified to the depth of his victory. Results from the “entrance poll” of caucus-goers on their way to cast their votes underscored the breadth of his win.

    Across every demographic divide in the party, Trump improved over his performance in 2016, when he narrowly lost the state to Texas Senator Ted Cruz. This time, Trump won both men and women comfortably, according to the entrance poll conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations. He won nearly half of voters in both urban and suburban areas, as well as a majority in rural areas, the poll found.

    DeSantis won endorsements from much of the state’s evangelical-Christian leadership, but Trump crushed him among those voters by almost two to one, according to the entrance poll. In 2016, Iowa evangelicals had preferred Cruz to Trump by double digits. Trump on Monday also carried nearly half of voters who were not evangelicals, beating Haley among them by about 20 percentage points. In 2016, Trump managed only a three-percentage-point edge over Rubio among Iowa caucus-goers who were not evangelicals. (In both the 2012 and 2016 Republican presidential primaries, the candidate who won Iowa voters who are not evangelicals ultimately won the nomination.)

    Before Trump, the most important dividing line in GOP presidential primaries had been between voters who were and were not evangelical Christians. But on Monday night, as in 2016, Trump reoriented that axis: Education was a far better predictor of support for him than whether a voter identified as an evangelical.

    Trump carried two-thirds of the caucus-goers who do not have a four-year college degree, the entrance poll found on Monday night. That was more than twice as much as Trump won among those voters in 2016, when Cruz narrowly beat him among them.

    Other findings in the entrance poll also testified to Trump’s success at reshaping the party in his image. The share of caucus-goers who identified as “very conservative” was much higher than in 2016. About two-thirds of those attending the caucuses said they do not believe that President Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. Rural areas that Trump split with Cruz in 2016 broke decisively for him this time.

    Yet amid all these signs of strength, the entrance poll offered some clear warning signs for Trump in a potential general election—as did some of the county-level results.

    Despite some predictions to the contrary, Trump still faced substantial resistance from college-educated voters, just as he did in 2016. In the entrance poll Monday night, he drew only a little more than one-third of them. That was enough to push Trump safely past Haley, who split the remainder of those voters primarily with DeSantis (each of them won just under three in 10 of them). But compared with the 2016 Iowa result, Trump improved much less among college-educated voters than he did among those without degrees.

    Trump’s relative weakness among college-educated voters in the 2016 GOP primary presaged the alienation from him in white-collar suburbs that grew during his presidency. Though Biden’s approval among those voters has declined since 2021, Trump’s modest showing even among the college-educated voters willing to turn out for a GOP caucus likely shows that resistance to him also remains substantial. When the results are tallied, Trump might win all 99 counties in Iowa, an incredible achievement if he manages it. But Trump drew well under his statewide percentage in Polk County, the state’s most populous; in fast-growing Dallas County; and in Story and Johnson, the counties centered on Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. (Johnson is the one county where Trump trails as of now.) Those are all the sorts of places that have moved away from the GOP in the Trump years.

    Also noteworthy was voters’ response to an entrance-poll question about whether they would still consider Trump fit for the presidency if he was convicted of a crime. Nearly two-thirds said yes, which speaks to his strength within the Republican Party. But about three in 10 said no, which speaks to possible problems in a general election. That result was consistent with the findings in a wide array of polls that somewhere between one-fifth and one-third of GOP partisans believe that Trump’s actions after the 2020 election were a threat to democracy or illegal. How many of those Republican-leaning voters would ultimately support him will be crucial to his viability if he wins the nomination. On that front, it may be worth filing away that more than four in 10 college graduates who participated in the caucus said they would not view Trump as fit for the presidency if he’s convicted of a crime, the entrance poll found.

    Those are problems Trump will need to confront on another day, if he wins the nomination. For now, he has delivered an imposing show of strength within a party that he has reshaped in his belligerent, conspiratorial image. The winter gloom in Iowa may not be any bleaker than the spirits tonight of the dwindling band of those in the GOP hoping to loosen Trump’s iron grip on the party.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Capitol riot, 3 years later: Hundreds of convictions, yet 1 major mystery is unsolved

    Capitol riot, 3 years later: Hundreds of convictions, yet 1 major mystery is unsolved

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — Members of far-right extremist groups. Former police officers. An Olympic gold medalist swimmer. And active duty U.S. Marines.

    They are among the hundreds of people who have been convicted in the massive prosecution of the Jan 6, 2021, riot in the three years since the stunned nation watched the U.S. Capitol attack unfold on live TV.

    Washington’s federal courthouse remains flooded with trials, guilty plea hearings and sentencings stemming from what has become the largest criminal investigation in American history. And the hunt for suspects is far from over.

    “We can not replace votes and deliberation with violence and intimidation,” Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, told reporters on Thursday.

    Authorities are still working to identify more than 80 people wanted for acts of violence at the Capitol. And they continue to regularly make new arrests, even as some Jan. 6 defendants are being released from prison after completing their sentences.

    The cases are playing out at the same courthouse where Donald Trump is scheduled to stand trial in March in the case accusing the former president of conspiring to overturn his 2020 election loss in the run up to the Capitol attack.

    Here’s a look at where the cases against the Jan. 6 defendants stand:

    BY THE NUMBERS

    More than 1,230 people have been charged with federal crimes in the riot, ranging from misdemeanor offenses like trespassing to felonies like assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy. Roughly 730 people have pleaded guilty to charges, while another roughly 170 have been convicted of at least one charge at a trial decided by a judge or a jury, according to an Associated Press database.

    Only two defendants have been acquitted of all charges, and those were trials decided by a judge rather than a jury.

    About 750 people have been sentenced, with almost two-thirds receiving some time behind bars. Prison sentences have ranged from a few days of intermittent confinement to 22 years in prison. The longest sentence so far was handed down to Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys national chairman who was convicted of seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors described as a plot to stop the transfer of power from Trump to President Joe Biden.

    Many rioters are already out of prison after completing their sentences, including some defendants who engaged in violence. Scott Fairlamb — a New Jersey man who punched a police officer during the riot and was the first Jan. 6 defendant to be sentenced for assaulting law enforcement — was released from Bureau of Prisons’ custody in June.

    ALL EYES ON THE SUPREME COURT

    Defense attorneys and prosecutors are closely watching a case that will soon be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court that could impact hundreds of Jan. 6 defendants. The justices agreed last month to hear one rioter’s challenge to prosecutors’ use of the charge of obstruction of an official proceeding, which refers to the disruption of Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election victory over Trump.

    More than 300 Jan. 6 defendants have been charged with the obstruction offense, and so has Trump in the federal case brought by special counsel Jack Smith. Lawyers representing rioters have argued the charge was inappropriately brought against Jan. 6 defendants.

    The justices won’t hear arguments in March or April, with a decision expected by early summer. But their review of the obstruction charge is already having some impact on the Jan. 6 prosecutions. At least two defendants have convinced judges to delay their sentencings until after the Supreme Court rules on the matter.

    RIOTERS ON THE LAM

    Dozens of people believed to have assaulted law enforcement during the riot have yet to be identified by authorities, according to Graves. And the statute of limitations for the crimes is five years, which means they would have to be charged by Jan. 6, 2026, he said.

    Several defendants have also fled after being charged, including a Proud Boys member from Florida who disappeared while he was on house arrest after he was convicted of using pepper spray gel on police officers. Christopher Worrell was sentenced on Thursday to 10 years in prison after spending weeks on the lam.

    The FBI is still searching for some defendants who have been on the run for months, including a brother-sister pair from Florida. Olivia Pollock disappeared shortly before her trial was supposed to begin in March. Her brother, Jonathan Pollock, is also missing. The FBI has offered a reward of up to $30,000 for information leading to the arrest of Jonathan Pollock, who is accused of thrusting a riot shield into an officer’s face and throat, pulling an officer down steps and punching others.

    Another defendant, Evan Neumann, fled the U.S. two months after his December 2021 indictment and is believed to be living in Belarus.

    WHAT ABOUT THE PIPE BOMBER?

    One of the biggest remaining mysteries surrounding the riot is the identity of the person who placed two pipe bombs outside the offices of the Republican and Democratic national committees the day before the Capitol attack. Last year, authorities increased the reward to up to $500,000 for information leading to the person’s arrest. It remains unclear whether there was a connection between the pipe bombs and the riot.

    Investigators have spent thousands of hours over the last three years doing interviews and combing through evidence and tips from the public, said David Sundberg, assistant director in charge of the FBI Washington Field Office.

    “We urge anyone who may have previously hesitated to come forward or who may not have realized they had important information to contact us and share anything relevant,” he said in an emailed statement on Thursday.

    The explosive devices were placed outside the two buildings between 7:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. on Jan. 5, 2021, but officers didn’t find them until the next day. Authorities were called to the Republican National Committee’s office around 12:45 p.m. on Jan. 6. Shortly after, a call came in for a similar explosive device found at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. The bombs were rendered safe, and no one was hurt.

    Video released by the FBI shows a person in a gray hooded sweatshirt, a face mask and gloves appearing to place one of the explosives under a bench outside the DNC and separately shows the person walking in an alley near the RNC before the bomb was placed there. The person wore black and light gray Nike Air Max Speed Turf sneakers with a yellow logo.

    ____

    Richer reported from Boston. Associated Press reporter Lindsay Whitehurst contributed from Washington.

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  • Why Biden Should Shift the Debate to This Topic

    Why Biden Should Shift the Debate to This Topic

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    President Joe Biden and Democrats cannot win the debate over the economy without fundamentally reframing the terms of the choice they are offering voters, an extensive new research study by one of the party’s prominent electoral-strategy groups has concluded.

    The study, scheduled to be released today, seeks to mitigate one of the party’s most glaring vulnerabilities heading into the 2024 election: the consistent finding in surveys that when it comes to managing the national economy or addressing inflation, significantly more voters express confidence in Republicans than in Democrats.

    To close that gap, the study argues, Biden and Democrats must shift the debate from which party is best equipped to grow the overall economy to which side can help families achieve what the report calls a “better life.” The study argues that Democrats can win that argument with a three-pronged message centered on: delivering tangible kitchen-table economic benefits (such as increased federal subsidies for buying health insurance), confronting powerful special interests (such as major corporations), and pledging to protect key personal liberties and freedoms, led by the right to legal abortion.

    The study was conducted by Way to Win, a group that provides funding for candidates and organizations focused on mobilizing voters of color, in conjunction with Anat Shenker-Osorio, a message consultant for progressive candidates and causes. Last year, Way to Win was among the top advocates pushing the party to stress a message of protecting personal freedoms and democracy—an approach that helped Democrats overperform expectations despite widespread discontent about the economy.

    Reversing the advantage Donald Trump and the GOP have on the economy will require Democrats to highlight “the tangible improvements their policies have made in people’s lives, in lieu of speaking of abstract economic gains, as well as touting their future agenda of expanding on these gains, taking on corporate greed and the MAGA Republicans who aim to rule only for the wealthy few,” concludes a memo summarizing the research that was provided exclusively to The Atlantic.

    Read: The two Republican theories for beating Trump

    Based on months of polls, focus groups, and other public-opinion research, the study comes amid simmering Democratic anxieties over national and swing-state surveys showing Trump leading Biden. Especially frustrating for the White House and other Democrats has been the persistence and pervasiveness of negative public attitudes about the economy, despite robust economic growth, low unemployment, and a huge reduction in the inflation rate over the past year. Democrats were particularly unnerved by a recent survey from Democracy Corps, a group founded by the longtime party strategists James Carville and Stanley B. Greenberg, that found that voters in the key swing states gave Trump a retrospective job-approval rating for his performance as president nearly 10 percentage points higher than what they give Biden for his current performance.

    Biden has spent months trying to highlight positive trends in the economy by describing them under the rubric of “Bidenomics.” But the Way to Win study, like the Democracy Corps research, argues that it is counterproductive for the administration to try to convince voters that inflation is abating or that the economy is improving while so many are struggling to make ends meet. Telling voters that “inflation is going down [produced a] backlash” in the research, Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, Way to Win’s senior vice president, told me: “Their experience is that it’s up. If you make an overarching statement that things are getting better, it rubs people the wrong way.”

    Probably the key insight in the report is the contention that it’s a mistake for Democrats to focus the 2024 debate on any of the broad national trends in the economy, including those that have been positive under Biden, such as job growth.

    For many years, the report argues, voters have been inclined to believe that Republicans are better than Democrats at managing the overall economy—an advantage that may be especially pronounced for Trump, a former business mogul, if he’s the GOP nominee. But, the study found, swing voters, as well as the irregular voters the party needs to turn out in 2024, give Democrats an edge on which party can best deliver for “you and your family’s economic well-being.”

    “If the argument is who [handles] the economy best, even though it’s not true in any sense, that’s their brand advantage,” Shenker-Osorio told me. “If the question is who is going to create the best future for your family, that is a Democratic-brand advantage. That is a story we can tell. It’s a credible story, and it’s a story that people care more about.”

    Read: A war on blue America

    To shift the debate into this more favorable terrain, the report argues, Biden and other Democrats must simultaneously reorient their economic arguments in opposite directions. The group argues that Democrats must narrow their focus by talking less about macroeconomic trends and more about specific policies they have enacted to help families make ends meet. That includes policies that Biden has passed to lower prescription-drug and utility costs, and policies he could promote in a second term, such as restoring the expanded child tax credit that Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia stripped from the Inflation Reduction Act last year.

    “Among both swing voters and surge voters, folks are moved more by talking about tangible gains than by talking about growing the economy,” Shenker-Osario said.

    Simultaneously, the report argues that Democrats must link their economic agenda to a broader promise to defend voters against an array of forces threatening their ability to succeed. In its research, the group found that the strongest case for Democrats blended pledges to deliver concrete economic benefits with promises to defend fundamental rights and stand up to big, wealthy corporations.

    Across all of these fronts, Fernandez Ancona argues, the key for Democrats is not just to warn about what a second Trump term could mean but to give voters a positive vision that emphasizes their success at stopping him and the prospect that reelecting Biden could deliver measurable benefits. “We really believe we can’t just rely on telling people the bad things,” Fernandez Ancona said.

    Key results in the 2022 election offer Democrats some reason for optimism that the approach urged by Way to Win can succeed. In the five swing states most likely to decide the 2024 presidential race, Democrats won seven of the nine Senate and gubernatorial races in 2022, primarily around variations on the themes that Way to Win wants the party to stress next year.

    The range of problems confronting Biden, such as doubts about his age and capacity, can’t all be resolved by recalibrating his message. Fernandez Ancona doesn’t pretend otherwise. But she argues that a more precisely targeted message will provide Biden the best chance of maximizing his support whatever the background environment looks like next year. “We can’t control what conditions are,” she told me. “Messaging can’t solve all problems. But it does do something to paint the path forward and make sure that voters go into the booth knowing what the stakes are.”

    With Trump looming as the likely GOP nominee, Democratic strategists at this point may have greater consensus about the stakes in 2024 than the path forward for the party. The sheer proliferation of studies proposing a new approach for Biden may be the most telling measure of how much more difficult this election looks than Democrats once anticipated.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Protests At UN Climate Talks See ‘Shocking Level Of Censorship’

    Protests At UN Climate Talks See ‘Shocking Level Of Censorship’

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    DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Activists designated Saturday a day of protest at the COP28 summit in Dubai. But the rules of the game in the tightly controlled United Arab Emirates at the site supervised by the United Nations meant sharp restrictions on what demonstrators could say, where they could walk and what their signs could portray.

    At times, the controls bordered on the absurd.

    A small group of demonstrators protesting the detention of activists — one from Egypt and two from the UAE — was not allowed to hold up signs bearing their names. A late afternoon demonstration of around 500 people, the largest seen at the climate conference, couldn’t go beyond the U.N.-governed Blue Zone in this autocratic nation. And their calls for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip couldn’t name the parties involved.

    “It is a shocking level of censorship in a space that had been guaranteed to have basic freedoms protected like freedom of expression, assembly and association,” Joey Shea, a researcher at Human Rights Watch focused on the Emirates, told The Associated Press after their restricted demonstration.

    Pro-Palestinian protesters who were calling for a cease-fire and climate justice were told they could not say “from the river to the sea,” a slogan prohibited by the U.N. over the days of COP28.

    In the aftermath of a brutal Hamas attack on Israel in October and the subsequent Israeli bombing and ground offensive in the Gaza Strip, that phrase has been used at pro-Palestinian rallies to call for single state on the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Some Jews hear a clear demand for Israel’s destruction in the call.

    Protesters got around rules banning national flags by instead wearing keffiyeh scarves and holding signs depicting watermelons to show their support for the Palestinians.

    Protestor Dylan Hamilton of Scotland said it remained important for demonstrators to cry out their grievances, even if they sounded like a cacophony of concerns ranging from climate change, the war or Indigenous rights.

    “It’s essential to remind negotiators what they are negotiating about,” Hamilton said. “It’s trying to remind people to care about people you’ll never meet.”

    Despite the restrictions, activists protesting for a cease-fire in Gaza called the action historic due to its size.

    “I don’t want to look back one day where a Palestinian can’t remember what their history and their culture used to look like, because that’s exactly what happened to us in Mexico,” climate activist Isavela Lopez said. “I’m here to say to end with the colonial powers and with the white supremacy.”

    Many climate activists point to the same causes for today’s climate crisis.

    Typically, COP summits see mass demonstrations of tens of thousands of people outside of the Blue Zone. But given the UAE’s rules, the only place where activists can protest is inside that U.N.-controlled space, which has its own tight restrictions on speech.

    Just before the demonstration about the detained activists, organized by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, protesters had to fold over signs bearing the names of the detainees — even after they already had crossed out messages about them. The order came roughly 10 minutes before the protest was due to start from the U.N., which said it could not guarantee the security of the demonstration, Shea said.

    While speaking during the protest, Shea also had to avoid naming the Emirates and Egypt as part of the U.N.’s rules.

    “The absurdity of what happened at this action today speaks volumes,” she said.

    The Emirati government, in response to questions from the AP about the detainees protest, said it “does not comment on individual cases following judicial sentences.”

    “In the spirit of inclusivity, peaceful assemblies in designated areas have been and continue to be welcomed,” the statement said. “We remain dedicated to fostering dialogue and understanding as we work together at COP28 to deliver impactful solutions for accelerating climate action.”

    Demonstrators carried signs bearing the image of Emirati activist Ahmed Mansoor and Egyptian pro-democracy activist Alaa Abdel-Fattah.

    Mansoor, the recipient of the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders in 2015, repeatedly drew the ire of authorities in the United Arab Emirates by calling for a free press and democratic freedoms in the autocratic federation of seven sheikhdoms. He was targeted with Israeli spyware on his iPhone in 2016 likely deployed by the Emirati government ahead of his 2017 arrest and sentencing to 10 years in prison over his activism.

    Abdel-Fattah, who rose to prominence during the 2011 pro-democracy Arab Spring uprisings, became a central focus of demonstrators during last year’s COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, as he had stopped eating and drinking water to protest his detention. He has spent most of the past decade in prison because of his criticism of Egypt’s rulers.

    Since 2013, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi’s government has cracked down on dissidents and critics, jailing thousands, virtually banning protests and monitoring social media. El-Sissi has not released Abdel-Fattah despite him receiving British citizenship while imprisoned and interventions on his behalf from world leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden.

    Demonstrators also held up the image of Mohamed al-Siddiq, another Emirati detained as part of the crackdown.

    The detainees protest had been scheduled to take place days earlier, but negotiations with U.N. officials dragged on — likely due to the sensitivity of even mentioning the detainees’ names in the country.

    Meanwhile, protesters briefly staged a sit-in at OPEC’s stand over a leaked letter reportedly calling on cartel member states to reject any attempt to include a phase-down of fossil fuels in any text at the summit.

    “It’s like having, you know, a convention on fighting the tobacco industry and having the tobacco industry present in a negotiation. That is not okay,” campaigner Nicholas Haeringer said. “It’s like having a fox in the henhouse. And to be honest with you guys, I think at some point we will run out of analogies before these guys run out of oil.”

    Associated Press journalists Peter Dejong, Lujain Jo and Malak Harb contributed to this report.

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  • Hunter Biden charged with tax crimes in Los Angeles

    Hunter Biden charged with tax crimes in Los Angeles

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    Hunter Biden, the president’s son, was indicted Thursday in Los Angeles on several federal tax charges, marking the start of a second criminal case that will proceed during his father’s reelection campaign.

    Biden, who resides in Malibu, was accused of failing to pay his taxes on time from 2016 to 2019, filing false and fraudulent tax returns in 2018, and tax evasion, according to the 56-page indictment.

    The charges in the nine-count indictment span a period when Biden was addicted to alcohol and crack cocaine, which he documented in graphic detail in a memoir that dwells on the death of his brother, Beau, along with the grief and depression that consumed him and his family.

    Biden has since become sober, paid his taxes, along with penalties and interest, and his lawyers are expected to point to his well-publicized addiction to explain his chaotic financial affairs.

    But prosecutors contend that he “willfully” failed to file and pay his taxes on time, and that rather than pay the IRS, he plunked down cash for a bacchanalia across L.A. featuring “drugs, escorts and girlfriends, luxury hotels and rental properties, exotic cars, clothing, and other items of a personal nature.”

    Further, prosecutors allege that when preparing tax returns in 2020, in the early months of his sobriety, Biden misclassified a litany of personal expenses from 2018 as business expenses to reduce his tax burden. Those expenses include tuition for his daughter and a Venmo payment to an exotic dancer, according to the indictment.

    If convicted of all charges — six misdemeanors and three felonies — Biden would face a maximum penalty of 17 years in prison, although federal guidelines would call for a far lower sentence.

    The case was unsealed on the eve of President Biden’s arrival in Southern California for his first in-person fundraising trip here since Hollywood strikes put a pause on campaign events.

    The charges come months after Hunter Biden was set to enter a plea deal for tax and firearms violations. The deal would have avoided time behind bars and included immunity from additional federal charges, but it collapsed under questioning by a federal judge in Delaware. Shortly after, Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland appointed David Weiss, the U.S. attorney in Delaware, as special counsel.

    Weiss has since brought a fresh indictment in Delaware against Biden for the firearms violations, accusing him of lying about his drug use in 2018 when purchasing a gun that he briefly owned. Biden has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which are rarely filed as a standalone case.

    The special counsel also brought the tax charges against Biden in California, asserting in a statement that the president’s son “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills.”

    Biden’s defense attorney, Abbe Lowell, emphasized that his client had long ago paid his tax debts and accused Weiss of bowing to Republican pressure by filing “unprecedented and unconstitutional gun charges.”

    “Based on the facts and the law, if Hunter’s last name was anything other than Biden, the charges in Delaware, and now California, would not have been brought,” Lowell said, an apparent nod to millions of people who annually fail to pay their taxes on time.

    “Now, after five years of investigating with no new evidence — and two years after Hunter paid his taxes in full — the U.S. attorney has piled on nine new charges when he had agreed just months ago to resolve this matter with a pair of misdemeanors.”

    Lowell noted that he had written to the special counsel’s office this week, seeking a “customary meeting” to discuss the tax inquiry. “The response was media leaks today that these charges were being filed,” Lowell said.

    The indictment offers the most detailed window into the Department of Justice’s long-running inquiry into Biden.

    In his memoir and in several interviews, Biden has been open about the depths of his addiction and unsavory lifestyle in L.A., when he lived out of the Chateau Marmont, Hollywood Roosevelt and other luxury hotels in a haze of sex and crack-induced euphoria. “I never slept. There was no clock. Day bled into night and night into day,” Biden wrote in “Beautiful Things,” in which he recounts his journey to sobriety.

    Still, the grand jury indictment outlines how such sordid travails were fiscally carried out — with $7 million in income from 2016 to 2020 from various business dealings — and uses Biden’s own words to claim discrepancies in his tax returns.

    The most serious charges stem from 2018, the height of Biden’s addiction. Prosecutors allege the filing of that year’s tax returns for both Biden and his business, Owasco PC, was fraudulent and evasive.

    Those returns were prepared in early 2020 by an accounting team in L.A. Prosecutors describe a three-hour meeting that Biden had with the accountants that year where he reviewed records to confirm their accuracy and used a yellow highlighter to indicate outlays that should not be deducted as business expenses.

    According to the indictment, Biden failed to identify several personal expenses, including the Venmo payment to an exotic dancer; $2,312.50 to a test prep service for one of his daughters; and a $30,000 law school tuition payment for his daughter.

    The indictment makes no mention of Biden’s father, nor does it specify the amount that Biden allegedly under-reported his taxes or how that would ultimately impact his tax bill.

    Although prosecutors claim that Biden in 2020 “never told” his accountants about his extensive drug and alcohol use, “which might have prompted greater scrutiny of his claims of hundreds of thousands of dollars in business expenses,” he had already begun discussing his alcohol and drug addiction in public.

    Times staff writer Stacy Perman contributed to this report.

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  • Trump Isn’t Bluffing

    Trump Isn’t Bluffing

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    Mandel Ngan / Getty

    We’ve become inured to his rhetoric, but his message has grown darker.

    Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

    “We pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Donald Trump said this past November, in a campaign speech that was ostensibly honoring Veterans Day. “The real threat is not from the radical right; the real threat is from the radical left … The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within. Our threat is from within.”

    David A. Graham: Trump says he’ll be a dictator on “day one”

    What immediately leaps out here is the word vermin, with its echoes of Hitler and Mussolini. But Trump’s inflammatory language can overshadow and distract from the substance of what he’s saying—in this case, appearing to promise a purge or repression of those who disagree with him politically.

    Explore the January/February 2024 Issue

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    This sort of language isn’t entirely new. Trump spoke in Manichaean terms throughout his first campaign and term, encouraging chants to lock up Hillary Clinton in 2016, and in 2018 referring to undocumented immigrants as “animals” who would “infest our country.” Over time, the shock of Trump’s rhetoric has worn off, making it easy to miss the fact that his message has grown even darker.

    Trump himself has changed, too—the old Trump seemed to be running for office partly for fun and partly in service of his signature views, such as opposition to immigration and support for protectionism. Today’s Trump is different. His fury over his 2020 election defeat, the legal cases against him, and a desire for revenge against political opponents have come to eclipse everything else.

    From the January/February 2024 issue: David Frum on the revenge presidency

    In the past few months, the former president has described himself as a “very proud election denier.” He has repeatedly threatened and intimidated judges, witnesses, prosecutors, and even the family of prosecutors involved in the cases against him, going so far as to say that his legal opponents will be consigned to mental asylums if he’s reelected. He has suggested that the man he picked for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff deserves to be executed on grounds of treason. He’s called for investigating NBC and possibly yanking the network off the air, also on grounds of treason—one of his most direct attacks on the First Amendment. And he’s vowed to arrest and indict President Joe Biden and other political opponents for no apparent reason other than that they oppose him.

    The fact that Trump’s ideas have become more authoritarian is not yet fully appreciated. One reason is people have heard Trump say outlandish things for so long that they can’t identify what’s new, or they’ve become numb. Another is venue: Once Trump left the White House and stopped tweeting, his vitriol became less noticeable to anyone who didn’t attend his rallies, seek out videos of them, or join Trump’s own Truth Social network.

    Even when a comment is so extreme that it does break into the mainstream, what happens next is predictable. The first time Trump says something, people react with shock and compare him to Hitler. The second time, people say Trump is at it again. By the third time, it becomes background noise—an appalling but familiar part of the Trump shtick.

    David A. Graham: Trump isn’t merely unhinged

    This is just the sort of “normalization” that Trump’s critics warned against from the start, but it’s also a natural human response to repeated exposure. The result is that Trump has been able to acclimate the nation to authoritarianism by introducing it early and often. When a second-term President Trump directs the Justice Department to lock up Democratic politicians or generals or reporters or activists on flimsy or no grounds at all, people will wring their hands, but they’ll also shrug and wonder why he didn’t do it sooner. After all, he’s been promising to do it forever, right?

    This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Trump Isn’t Bluffing.”

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    David A. Graham

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  • How Trump Gets Away With It

    How Trump Gets Away With It

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    If Donald Trump regains the presidency, he will once again become the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States. There may be no American leader less suited to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” as the Constitution directs the president. But that authority comes with the office, including command of the Justice Department and the FBI.

    We know what Trump would like to do with that power, because he’s said so out loud. He is driven by self-interest and revenge, in that order. He wants to squelch the criminal charges now pending against him, and he wants to redeploy federal prosecutors against his enemies, beginning with President Joe Biden. The important question is how much of that agenda he could actually carry out in a second term.

    Explore the January/February 2024 Issue

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    Trump tried and failed to cross many lines during his time in the White House. He proposed, for example, that the IRS conduct punitive audits of his political antagonists and that Border Patrol officers shoot migrants in the legs. Subordinates talked the former president out of many such schemes or passively resisted them by running out the clock. The whole second volume of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which documented 10 occasions on which Trump tried to obstruct justice, can be read as a compilation of thwarted directives.

    From the November 2023 issue: How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump

    The institutional resistance Trump faced has reinforced his determination to place loyalists in key jobs should he win reelection. One example is Jeffrey Clark, who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. Trump sought to appoint Clark as acting attorney general in early January 2021, but backed off after a mass-resignation threat at the DOJ. People who know him well suggest that he would not let that threat deter him a second time. Trump will also want to fire Christopher Wray, the FBI director, and replace him with someone more pliable. Only tradition, not binding law, prevents the president and his political appointees from issuing orders to the FBI about its investigations.

    The top jobs at the DOJ require Senate confirmation, and even a Republican Senate might not confirm an indicted conspirator to overturn an election like Clark for attorney general. Under the Vacancies Reform Act, which regulates temporary appointments, Trump can appoint any currently serving Senate-confirmed official from anywhere in the executive branch as acting attorney general. Of course, all of the officials serving at the beginning of his new term would be holdovers from the Biden administration.

    Trump’s allies are searching for loyalists among the Republicans currently serving on several dozen independent boards and commissions, such as the Federal Trade Commission, that have “party balancing” requirements for their appointees. Alternatively, Trump could choose any senior career official in the Justice Department who has served for at least 90 days in a position ranked GS-15 or higher on the federal pay scale—a cohort that includes, for example, senior trial attorneys, division counsels, and section chiefs. As Anne Joseph O’Connell, a Stanford law professor and an expert on the Vacancies Reform Act, reminded me, “This is how we got Matthew Whitaker,” the former attorney general’s chief of staff, as acting attorney general. (Whitaker was widely criticized as unqualified.)

    Would some career officials, somewhere among the department’s 115,000 employees, do Trump’s bidding in exchange for an acting appointment? Trump’s team is looking.

    Once Trump has installed loyalists in crucial posts, his first priority—an urgent one for a man facing 91 felony charges in four jurisdictions—would be to save himself from conviction and imprisonment.

    Of the four indictments against him, two are federal: the Florida case, with charges of unlawful retention of classified documents and obstruction of justice, and the Washington case, which charges Trump with unlawful efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Those will be the easiest for him to dispose of.

    To begin with, there is little to stop Trump from firing Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing both of the federal investigations. Justice Department regulations confer a measure of protection on a special counsel against arbitrary dismissal, but he may be removed for “misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or for other good cause.” That last clause is a catchall that Trump could readily invoke.

    David A. Graham: The cases against Trump: A guide

    The regulations state that a special counsel may be fired “only by the personal action of the Attorney General,” but that would not stop Trump either. In the unlikely event that his handpicked attorney general were reluctant, he could fire the attorney general and keep on firing successors until he found one to do his bidding, as Richard Nixon did to get rid of Archibald Cox. Alternatively, Trump could claim—and probably prevail, if it came to a lawsuit—that the president is not bound by Justice Department regulations and can fire the special counsel himself.

    Smith’s departure would still leave Trump’s federal criminal charges intact, but no law would prevent Trump from ordering that they be dropped. He could do so even with a trial in progress, right up to the moment before a jury returned a verdict. No legal expert I talked with expressed any doubt that he could get away with this.

    Dismissing the charges would require the trial judges’ consent. But even if the judges were to object, Trump would almost certainly win on appeal: The Supreme Court is not likely to let a district judge decide whether or not the Justice Department has to prosecute a case.

    Trump will be able to avoid going to prison even if he has already been convicted of federal charges before he is sworn in. Here again, a trial judge is unlikely to order Trump imprisoned, even after sentencing, before he exhausts his appeals. And there is no plausible scenario in which that happens before Inauguration Day.

    At any time while Trump’s appeals are pending, his Justice Department may notify the appellate court that the prosecution no longer wishes to support his conviction. This is known as a confession of error on the government’s part; the effect, if the court grants the request, is to vacate a conviction. Under Attorney General Bill Barr, the Trump administration did something to similar effect in a false-statements case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, moving to dismiss the charges after Flynn had pleaded guilty but before his sentencing. (Trump later pardoned Flynn.) According to the relevant rule of criminal procedure, dismissal during prosecution—including on appeal from a conviction—requires “leave of the court,” but it’s highly unlikely that an appellate court would refuse to grant such a motion to dismiss.

    Trump might also invoke the pardon power on his own behalf. He has already asserted, as far back as 2018, that “I have the absolute right to PARDON myself.” No president has ever tried this, and whether he can is a contested question among legal scholars. Experts who agree with Trump say the Constitution frames the pardon power as total but for one exception, implicitly blessing all other uses. (The exception is that the president may not pardon an impeachment.) Those who disagree include the Justice Department itself, through its Office of Legal Counsel, which concluded in 1974 that a self-pardon would be invalid under “the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.”

    But the debate over self-pardons wouldn’t matter much to Trump in practice. If he pardoned himself of all criminal charges, there would be no one with standing to challenge the pardon in court—other than, perhaps, the Justice Department, which would be under Trump’s control.

    Unlike the federal charges, Trump’s state criminal cases—for alleged racketeering and election interference in Georgia and hush-money payments to a porn star in New York—would not fall under his authority as president. Even so, the presidency would very likely protect him for at least the duration of his second term.

    The Office of Legal Counsel, which makes authoritative interpretations of the law for the executive branch, has twice opined, in 1973 and again in 2000, that “the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions.” That conclusion is binding for federal prosecutors, but state prosecutors are not obliged to follow it.

    No one knows what would happen if Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, or Alvin Bragg, the DA in New York, decided to press ahead with their cases against Trump should he regain the presidency. Like so many outlandish questions pertaining to Trump, this one has no judicial precedent, because no sitting president has ever been charged with felony crimes. But legal scholars told me that Trump would have strong arguments, at least, to defer state criminal proceedings against him until he left the White House in 2029. By then, new prosecutors, with new priorities, may have replaced Willis and Bragg.

    Trump has named a long list of people as deserving of criminal charges, or execution. Among them are Joe Biden, Mark Milley, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, James Clapper, and Arthur Engoron, the judge in his New York civil fraud case.

    If he returns to office, Trump may not even have to order their prosecutions himself. He will be surrounded by allies who know what he wants. One likely DOJ appointee is Mike Davis, a Republican who has substantial government credentials: He was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and chief counsel for nominations to Senator Charles Grassley when Grassley chaired the Judiciary Committee.

    If Davis were acting attorney general, he said on a right-wing YouTube show, he would “rain hell on Washington.” First, “we’re gonna fire a lot of people in the executive branch, in the deep state.” He would also “indict Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and James Biden and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden.” And “every January 6 defendant is gonna get a pardon.” Trump could not immediately appoint an outsider like Davis attorney general. But he could make him a Justice Department section chief, and then appoint him as acting attorney general after 90 days.

    Trump could also appoint—or direct his attorney general to appoint—any lawyer, at any time, as special counsel to the Justice Department, with the authority to bring charges and prosecute a case. Trump might not be able to convict his political enemies of spurious charges, but he could immiserate them with years of investigations and require them to run up millions of dollars in legal fees.

    Likewise, if he managed to place sufficiently zealous allies in the Office of Legal Counsel, Trump could obtain legal authority for any number of otherwise lawless transgressions. Vice President Dick Cheney did that in the George W. Bush administration, inducing the OLC to issue opinions that authorized torture and warrantless domestic surveillance. Those opinions were later repudiated, but they guided policy for years. Trump’s history suggests that he might seek comparable legal blessing for the use of lethal force at the southern border, deployment of federal troops against political demonstrators, federal seizure of state voting machines, or deferral of the next election in order to stay in power. He would be limited only by the willingness of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the career civil service to say no.

    It occurred to me, as I interviewed government veterans and legal scholars, that they might be blinkered by their own expertise when they try to anticipate what Trump would do. All of the abuses they foresee are based on the ostensibly lawful powers of the president, even if they amount to gross ruptures of legal norms and boundaries. What transgressions could he commit, that is, within the law?

    But Trump himself isn’t thinking that way. On Truth Social, in December 2022, he posted that righting a wrong of sufficient “magnitude” (in this case, his fictitious claim of election fraud) “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

    The “take Care” clause of the Constitution calls for the president to see that laws are carried out faithfully. But what if a court rules against Trump and he simply refuses to comply? It’s not obvious who would—or could—enforce the ruling.

    This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Trump Will Get Away With It.”

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    Barton Gellman

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  • Pro-Palestinian protesters force Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to stop

    Pro-Palestinian protesters force Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to stop

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    Pro-Palestinian protesters force Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to stop

    Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was temporarily paused when a group of about 30 pro-Palestinian protesters ran into the street and apparently glued themselves to the pavement of the parade route in New York City.

    The protesters were demonstrating along Sixth Avenue when a handful of them jumped the barricades and ran into the street along 49th Street.

    PHOTO: People demonstrate during the 97th Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, in Manhattan, New York City, Nov. 23, 2023. (Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters)PHOTO: People demonstrate during the 97th Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, in Manhattan, New York City, Nov. 23, 2023. (Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters)

    PHOTO: People demonstrate during the 97th Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, in Manhattan, New York City, Nov. 23, 2023. (Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters)

    The protesters have been taken into custody, officials said.

    MORE: Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade: Through the Years

    President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden called into the parade to give their thanks and urged Americans to “come together.”

    “We have to remind ourselves how blessed we are to live in the greatest nation on the face of the earth,” the president said. “Today is about coming together, giving thanks for this country we call home. And thanks to all the firefighters, police officers, first responders and our troops, some of whom are stationed abroad.”

    The first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade took place in 1927. It’s been a holiday tradition ever since.

    ABC News’ Nadine El-Bawab contributed to this report.

    Pro-Palestinian protesters force Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to stop originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

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  • The ‘Anti-Defeat’ Candidate

    The ‘Anti-Defeat’ Candidate

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    Like many politicians, Representative Dean Phillips likes to look people in the eye. And because he’s a politician, Phillips can glean things, just as President George W. Bush did when he peered into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and saw his soul.

    “I’ve looked Benjamin Netanyahu in the eye,” Phillips told a group of students at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, last week.

    And?

    “I did not like what I saw,” Phillips said of the Israeli prime minister. “I do not like his government. He’s got to go.”

    Philips has also looked into Donald Trump’s eyes. That, too, was ominous. It was a few years ago, and the former president had invited a bunch of new House members to the White House for an introductory visit.

    “I looked him in the eye for the better part of an hour,” Phillips told me.

    And?

    “I saw right through him,” Phillips said. “I know exactly how to handle weaklings like Donald Trump.”

    How?

    “You’ll see,” he said. “Why would I give away my special sauce?”

    Phillips was telling me this while tucked into the back of a minivan, having just set off on a 90-minute ride from Hanover to Manchester. He wore a down vest over a blue dress shirt and looked me straight in the you-know-what as he described the “gravity of this entire circumstance” he was now embarked upon.

    Read: Dean Phillips has a warning for Democrats

    He had just concluded one of his early days as an official primary challenger to President Joe Biden, the incumbent he must first dispatch before he can douse Trump with his proprietary Dean Sauce. Phillips is pursuing this mission despite long odds and an unsurprising chorus of how dare yous and not helpfuls from various Democratic gatekeepers. He has already said plenty about why he is doing this—about how Democrats are desperate for a Plan B to Biden, who Phillips says has no business seeking reelection at his age (81 on Monday), with his poll numbers and the catastrophic threat of his likely GOP opponent (yes, him). Phillips agonized over his decision and unburdened himself in multiple forums, including, quite expansively last month, to my colleague Tim Alberta.

    I was in New Hampshire because I wanted to see Phillips transition from theoretical to actual challenger. It is one thing to scream warnings about alarming data, and another to segue into the granular doings of a campaign. “This is an all-hands-on-deck initiative,” he told me, his words landing somewhere between hyper-earnest and naive, with occasional tips into grandiose. Phillips, 54, is a figure of uncommonly big plans and weighty burdens, especially given his relatively modest station (he has represented Minnesota’s Third Congressional District since 2019). He seems sincere about what he’s doing, especially compared with the two-faced default of so many elected Democrats who tout Biden’s reelection in public while privately pining for some other candidate, like Gretchen Whitmer, the Rock, or whomever they want instead. In this sense, Phillips’s gambit is noble, even necessary. It can also be lonely and awkward to watch up close.

    Since entering the race a month ago, Phillips has held a series of mostly low-key events in New Hampshire and has made a stop in South Carolina. I first encountered him during a heartfelt give-and-take with half a dozen members of the Dartmouth Political Union. “This is a beautiful American moment,” Phillips declared after a dialogue about abortion policy with a polite young Nikki Haley supporter. Later, at a town hall across campus, Phillips described that bridge-building exchange as “one of the most profound hours of engagement” he’s had in a long while and something “I will remember for years to come.”

    Phillips told me that his initial campaign forays have only—surprise—reaffirmed the premise of his errand: “Other than some Democratic elected officials, and only a few of them, I’ve not yet encountered a single person who doesn’t feel the same way,” he said, about the need for a Biden alternative. His go-to weapon against the president is public opinion, for which Phillips keeps getting fresh ammunition. “I want to give you some simple data,” he said during a meet and greet with about 50 students, faculty, and community members before the town hall. He mentioned a recent survey of voters in battleground states that had Biden trailing Trump by four points, 48–44. “But then you look at how Trump does against a ‘generic Democrat,’” Phillips said, “and the generic Democrat wins 48–40.” Heads bobbed in the classroom; Phillips shook his in exasperation.

    Phillips himself is polling at just 10 percent among likely New Hampshire Democratic-primary voters, according to a CNN survey released last week that had Biden at 65 percent. During our car ride, I suggested to Phillips that maybe he should change his name to “Generic Democrat.”

    “I never in my life aspired to be generic,” he replied, chuckling.

    Read: The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden

    Primary challenges to incumbent presidents have historically been associated with signature causes and fiery rhetoric. They tend to be ideologically driven—such as Ted Kennedy’s challenge to President Jimmy Carter from the left in 1980 and Pat Buchanan’s to President George H. W. Bush from the right in 1992. No one will mistake Phillips for a brawling populist. He is affable, well mannered, and extremely rich, with a net worth of about $50 million, some portion of it derived from the gelato-and-sorbet company—Talenti—that he co-owned before it was sold.

    Still, Phillips frequently brings up the late Senator Eugene McCarthy, a fellow Minnesota Democrat, whose uprising against President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 helped push Johnson to not seek reelection. The comparison is fraught in that Democrats wound up nominating another Minnesotan, Hubert Humphrey, who went on to lose to Richard Nixon. Carter and Bush also lost their general elections. This tends to be the main critique of Phillips: that his project could weaken Biden against Trump.

    One student at Dartmouth questioned Phillips about the 1980 example, arguing that Kennedy was the reason that Carter was ultimately blown out by Ronald Reagan. Phillips came back with a lengthy and somewhat defensive response. “Ted Kennedy didn’t cause Carter’s problems any more than I’ve caused Joe Biden’s problems,” he said. The student nodded and thanked the candidate, who in turn thanked the student—and another beautiful American moment was forged.

    “I am the anti-defeat candidate,” Phillips said, describing his enterprise to me later. “I am the truth-telling candidate.” “Truth-telling” is of course subjective, in campaigns as in life. Phillips then told me about a visit he’d made to a Hanover restaurant that day. After a series of “wonderful conversations” with random diners, he’d encountered a young woman who “I sensed was not showing any compassion for butchered Israelis”—a reference to the Hamas attacks on October 7. So Phillips, who is Jewish, paused the conversation and asked a question of his own. “I said, ‘Are you telling me that you support Hamas?’” Phillips said. “And she goes, ‘Yes.’” At which point, he’d heard enough.

    “I said, ‘Look, I really enjoyed our conversation, but I can’t continue this.’”

    “Wait, did you really enjoy that conversation?” I interrupted, questioning his truth-telling.

    “I’ll tell you what, that’s a good point,” Phillips acknowledged. “I did not enjoy it.”

    In that spirit of engaging with people of different backgrounds and persuasions, Phillips frequently invokes his friendship with Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, who was censured by the House this month for her comments about Israel. Phillips refers to Tlaib as “my Palestinian sister” and to himself as “her Jewish brother.”

    Juliette Kayyem: Rashida Tlaib’s inflammatory language

    I pressed Phillips on the state of his relations with Tlaib. “It’s as difficult as ever and more important than ever,” he said. He then raised the stakes even higher. “I believe that as Rashida Tlaib and Dean Phillips go, so will the Middle East,” he said. (A lot of pressure there!)

    As our nighttime ride persisted southeast down Interstate 89, the conversation took some quick turns.

    “Is Kamala Harris prepared to step in if something happened to Biden?” I asked Phillips.

    “I think that Americans have made the decision that she’s not,” he said.

    I replied that I was interested in the decision of one specific American, Dean Phillips.

    “That is not my opinion,” Phillips clarified. He said that every interaction he’s had with the vice president has been “thoughtful” and that “I’ve enjoyed them.”

    “That said …” Phillips paused, and I braced for the vibe shift.

    “I hear from others who know her a lot better than I do that many think she’s not well positioned,” he said of Harris. “She is not well prepared, doesn’t have the right disposition and the right competencies to execute that office.” Phillips also noted that Harris’s approval numbers are even worse than Biden’s: “It’s pretty clear that she’s not somebody people have faith in.”

    But again, Phillips is not one of those people: “From my personal experiences, I’ve not seen those deficiencies.”

    From the November 2023 issue: The Kamala Harris problem

    If Phillips had looked me in the eye at that moment—and granted, it was dark in the back of the van—he would have seen a slightly confused expression. Why was he hiding behind these Trumplike “many people are saying” attributions? Similarly, he often speaks in glowing terms about Biden’s performance in office—“his administration has been quite extraordinary”—while leaning heavily on “the opinion of others” or “the data” to make his case that the president himself needs to go. Phillips can seem torn at times as he attempts to hedge his way through somewhat contradictory impulses: to give Biden his proper due while also trying to end his career.

    I asked Phillips what would happen if his campaign really takes off—he wins a bunch of primaries—and then Biden tries to placate the insurgents by dumping Harris in favor of their hero, Dean Phillips. Would he agree to serve as Biden’s new understudy?

    I anticipated the “I’m not answering hypothetical questions” blow-off that they teach in Candidate School. But Phillips apparently skipped class that day. “That’s a really interesting question,” he said, before letting me down gently.

    “President Biden will never replace Vice President Harris on the ticket, ever,” he said.

    For the record—bonus nugget—Phillips predicts that Trump will select Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be his running mate. “And they will be very difficult to beat,” he fears. These are the kinds of empty punditing calories that get passed around during long drives on chilly campaign nights.

    As we approached Manchester, Phillips flashed back to reality, or something. “I am the best positioned to defeat Donald Trump,” he said. “All I’m focused on right now is to run a spirited, thoughtful, and energetic campaign.”

    “What about ‘vigorous’ and ‘robust’?” I asked.

    “Yes, yes,” Phillips said, nodding. It was getting late, and we were both getting a bit punchy.

    “And bold,” he added.

    Our van pulled into the Manchester DoubleTree just before 10 p.m. Phillips had to wake up in a few hours to catch a 6:15 a.m. flight back to Washington. He looked me in the eye. I’m not sure what he saw, or what I saw, but I wished him luck.

    “I’ve enjoyed this,” Phillips said.

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    Mark Leibovich

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  • Demonstrators Demanding A Ceasefire In Gaza Shut Down Bridges In Boston, San Francisco

    Demonstrators Demanding A Ceasefire In Gaza Shut Down Bridges In Boston, San Francisco

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    SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Demonstrators seeking a cease-fire in Gaza blocked bridges on both sides of the U.S. on Thursday, including a major span into San Francisco during a global trade summit involving President Joe Biden and other world leaders.

    At least 50 protesters were arrested on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and 15 vehicles were towed after demonstrators blocked all lanes on the upper deck, with some drivers tossing their keys into the bay, said California Highway Patrol division chief Ezery Beauchamp.

    Traffic was snarled for hours after more than 200 demonstrators demanded that Biden, in San Francisco for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ conference, call for an immediate cease-fire in the war between Israel and Hamas.

    In Boston, about 100 protesters stopped traffic on the bridge connecting the city to Cambridge for more than two hours during the morning rush. They chanted “cease-fire now!” and held a banner with the words “Jews say: ceasefire now” and they called on one of Massachusetts’ two senators, Democrat Elizabeth Warren, to do more to halt the hostilities.

    On the West Coast, Aisha Nizar, of the Palestinian Youth Movement, said in a statement that President Biden was “hosting cocktail parties in San Francisco” while thousands of people were being killed in Gaza. Protesters unfurled huge banners and some of them lay on the ground with white sheets draped over their bodies as part of a “die-in.”

    Beauchamp, of the highway patrol, called the Bay Area protest highly coordinated and said he expected that more participants would be arrested. He said the patrol supports free speech rights but not a traffic shutdown that could prevent emergency vehicles from crossing.

    “This is the wrong way to do it,” he said. “This is 100% wrong, it’s unacceptable and it’s illegal.”

    Demonstrations over the war are becoming more disruptive across the U.S. Protesters calling for a cease-fire clashed with police Wednesday outside Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., where Democratic representatives and candidates were inside for a reception.

    The protests came as Israeli forces dropped leaflets warning Palestinians to flee parts of southern Gaza, residents said Thursday, signaling a possible expansion of the Israeli offensive following Hamas-led attacks in Israel on Oct. 7.

    Associated Press writer David Sharp in Portland, Maine, contributed to this report.

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  • Why a Blue-Leaning Swing State Is Getting Redder

    Why a Blue-Leaning Swing State Is Getting Redder

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    Last week, when The New York Times and Siena College released a poll that showed President Joe Biden in trouble in battleground states, Democrats began to sound apocalyptic. The panic, turbocharged by social media, was disproportionate to what the surveys actually showed. Although the results in my home state, Nevada, were the worst for the president out of the six swing states that were polled, the findings are almost certainly not reflective of the reality here, at least as I’ve observed it and reported on it.

    Nevertheless, they bring to the surface trends that should worry Democrats—and not just in Nevada.

    The Times/Siena data show Donald Trump ahead of Biden in Nevada 52 percent to 41 percent, a much larger margin than the former president’s lead in the other battleground states. Could this be true? I’m skeptical, and I’m not alone. After the poll came out, I spoke with a handful of experts in both parties here, and none thinks Trump is truly ahead by double digits in the state, where he lost by about 2.5 points in the previous two presidential cycles. But Nevada is going to be competitive, perhaps more so than ever.

    Some of the Times/Siena poll’s internal numbers gave me pause. Among registered voters in Clark County, where Las Vegas is located and where 70 percent of the electorate resides, the poll found Trump ahead of Biden 50–45. But Democrats make up 34 percent of active voters in the county, compared with Republicans’ 25 percent, and Biden won Clark by nine percentage points in 2020.

    Other recent polls, not quite as highly rated as Times/Siena’s, have found the presidential race here to be much closer than the Times did. Last month, a CNN poll of registered Nevada voters found Biden and Trump virtually tied. Recent surveys from Emerson College, which has been unreliable in the state in the past, and Morning Consult/Bloomberg both had Trump up three points among likely voters. The Times/Siena polling outfit has a good reputation, but shortly before the 2020 election, it found Biden ahead of Trump in Nevada by six percentage points, more than double Biden’s eventual margin of victory.

    Read: Is Biden toast?

    Nevada is difficult to poll for a variety of reasons. Here as much as anywhere else, pollsters tend to underestimate the number of people they need to survey by cellphone to get a representative sample, and they generally don’t do enough bilingual polling in Nevada, where nearly a third of the population is Hispanic. Nevada also has a transient population, lots of residents working 24/7 shifts, and an electorate that’s less educated than most other states’. (“I love the poorly educated,” Trump said after winning Nevada’s Republican caucuses in 2016.) The polling challenge has become only more acute, because nonpartisan voters now outnumber Democrats and Republicans in Nevada, making it harder for pollsters to accurately capture the Democratic or Republican vote. (Since 2020, a state law has allowed voters to register at the DMV, and if they fail to do so, their party affiliation is defaulted to independent.)

    Nevada matters in presidential elections, but we are also, let’s face it, a tad weird.

    Still, Democrats have reasons to worry. Nevada was clobbered by COVID disproportionately to the rest of the country, because our economy is so narrowly focused on the casino industry. The aftereffects—unemployment, inflation—are still very much being felt here. Nevada’s jobless rate is the highest in the country, at 5.4 percent. That’s down dramatically from an astonishing 28.2 percent in April 2020, when the governor closed casinos for a few months. Although the situation has clearly improved, many casino workers still haven’t been rehired.

    Democrat Steve Sisolak was the only incumbent governor in his party to lose in 2022, and his defeat was due at least partly to the fallout from COVID. Fairly or not, President Biden wears a lot of that too, as all presidents do when voters are unhappy with the economy. The Morning Consult/Bloomberg poll illuminated the bleak pessimism of Nevada voters, 76 percent of whom think the U.S. economy is going in the wrong direction.

    Here, as elsewhere, voters are also concerned about Biden’s age, and that informs their broader views of him. Sixty-two percent of Nevadans disapprove of Biden’s performance, according to the Times, and only 40 percent have a favorable impression of him. Trump’s numbers, although awful—44 percent see him favorably—are better than Biden’s here, as well as in some blue or bluish states.

    In Nevada, and in general, Biden is losing support among key groups—young and nonwhite voters. The Times/Siena poll found Biden and Trump tied among Hispanics in the state, despite the fact that Latinos have been a bedrock of the Democratic base here for a decade and a half. In the 2022 midterms, polls taken early in the race showed Catherine Cortez Masto, the first Latina elected to the U.S. Senate, losing Hispanic support, though her campaign managed to reverse that trend enough to win by a very slim margin.

    Democratic presidential nominees have won Nevada in every election since 2008. Democrats also hold the state’s two U.S. Senate seats and three of the four House seats, and the party dominates both houses of the legislature. But the state has been slowly shifting to the right—not just in polling but in Election Day results. In 2020, Nevada was the only battleground state that saw worse Democratic performance compared with 2016, unless you include the more solidly red Florida. Nevada’s new Republican governor, Joe Lombardo, is building a formidable political machine. Republicans have made inroads with working-class white voters here, leaving Democrats with an ever-diminishing margin of error.

    Ronald Brownstein: Republicans can’t figure it out

    Abortion, an issue that was crucial to Cortez Masto’s narrow victory, could help Biden in Nevada. The Times/Siena poll showed that only a quarter of Nevadans think abortion should be always or mostly illegal. A 1990 referendum made abortion up to 24 weeks legal here, and the law can be changed only by another popular vote. Democrats in Nevada, though, want to take those protections a step further next year and are trying to qualify a ballot measure that would amend the state constitution to guarantee the right to abortion. As the off-year elections last week showed, that issue, more than the choice between Biden and Trump, could be what saves the president a year from now. Nevada also has a nationally watched Senate race in 2024, in which the incumbent Democrat, Jacky Rosen, has already signaled that she will mimic her colleague Cortez Masto and put abortion front and center in her campaign.

    So many events could intervene between now and next November, foreign and/or domestic, and we have yet to see how effective the Trump and Biden campaigns will be, assuming that each man is his party’s nominee. Democratic Senator Harry Reid was deeply unpopular here in 2009, then got reelected by almost six percentage points; Barack Obama was thought to be in trouble in 2011, then won Nevada and reelection.

    Democrats clearly hope that if Trump becomes the Republican nominee, many voters will see the election as a binary choice and will back Biden. But if the election instead becomes a referendum on Biden’s tenure, including the economy he has presided over, Trump could plausibly win Nevada—and the Electoral College.

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    Jon Ralston

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  • Is Biden Toast?

    Is Biden Toast?

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    It’s a year before the presidential election, and Democrats are panicking. Their incumbent is unpopular, and voters are refusing to give him credit for overseeing an economic rebound. Polls show him losing to a Republican challenger.

    What’s true now was also true 12 years ago. Today, Democrats are alarmed by recent surveys finding that President Joe Biden trails Donald Trump in five key swing states. But they were just as scared in the fall of 2011, when President Barack Obama’s approval rating languished in the low 40s and a pair of national polls showed him losing to Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who would become the GOP nominee. Barely one-third of independent voters said Obama deserved a second term. A New York Times Magazine cover story asked the question on many Democrats’ minds: “Is Obama Toast?”

    A year later, Obama beat Romney handily, by a margin of 126 in the Electoral College and 5 million in the popular vote. Those results are comforting to Democrats who want to believe that Biden is no worse off than Obama was at this point in his presidency. “This is exactly where we were with Obama,” Jim Messina, the former president’s 2012 campaign manager, told me by phone this week. For good measure, he looked up data from earlier elections and found that George W. Bush and Bill Clinton each trailed in the polls a year out from their reelection victories. Perhaps, Messina hoped, that would “calm my bed-wetting fucking Democratic friends down.”

    Yet the comparison between Biden today and Obama in 2011 goes only so far. The most obvious difference is that Biden, who turns 81 this month, is nearly three decades older than Obama was at the time of his second presidential campaign. (He’s also much older than Clinton and Bush were during their reelection bids.) Voters across party lines cite Biden’s age as a top concern, and a majority of Democrats have told pollsters for the past two years that he shouldn’t run again. Obama was in the prime of his political career, an electrifying orator who could reenergize the Democratic base with a few well-timed speeches. Not even Biden’s biggest defenders would claim that he has the same ability. Put simply, he looks and sounds his age.

    Watch: America’s aging presidential front-runners

    In a recent national CNN poll that showed Trump with a four-percentage-point lead over Biden, just a quarter of respondents said the president had “the stamina and sharpness to serve”; more than half said the 77-year-old Trump did. Privately, Democratic lawmakers and aides have fretted that the White House has kept the president too caged in for fear of a verbal or physical stumble. At the same time, they worry that a diminished Biden is unable to deliver a winning economic message to voters.

    “The greatest concern is that his biggest liability is the one thing he can’t change,” David Axelrod, Obama’s longtime chief strategist, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) on the day that The New York Times and Siena College released polls showing Trump ahead of Biden by as much as 10 points in battleground states. “The age arrow only points in one direction.” Axelrod’s acknowledgment of a reality that many senior Democrats are hesitant to admit publicly, and his gentle suggestion that Biden at least consider the wisdom of running again, renewed concerns that the president and his party are ignoring a consistent message from their voters: Nominate someone else.

    Tuesday’s election results, in which Democratic candidates and causes notched wins in Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio, helped allay those concerns—at least for some in the party. “It’s way too early to either pop the champagne or hang the funeral crepe,” Steve Israel, the former New York representative who chaired the Democrats’ House campaign arm during Obama’s presidency, told me on Wednesday. “Biden has the advantage of time, money, a bully pulpit, and, based on last night’s results, the fact that voters in battleground areas seem to agree with Democrats on key issues like abortion.”

    The Biden campaign embraced the victories as the continuation of a trend in which Democrats have performed better in recent elections than the president’s polling would suggest. “Time and again, Joe Biden beats expectations,” the campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler told reporters Thursday morning. “The bottom line is that polls a year out don’t matter. Results do.”

    The Democrats’ strength in off-year elections, however, may not contradict Biden’s lackluster standing in a hypothetical matchup against Trump. The political realignment since Obama’s presidency—in which college-educated suburban voters have drifted left while working-class voters have joined Trump’s GOP—has given Democrats the upper hand in lower-turnout elections. The traditionally left-leaning constituencies that have soured on Biden, including younger and nonwhite voters, tend to show up only for presidential votes.

    As Messina pointed out, the overall economy is better now than it was in late 2011 under Obama, when the unemployment rate was still over 8 percent—more than double the current rate of 3.9 percent. But voters don’t seem to feel that way. Their biggest economic preoccupation is not jobs but high prices, and although the rate of inflation has come down, costs have not. Polling by the Democratic firm Blueprint found a huge disconnect between what voters believe Biden is focused on—jobs—and what they care most about: inflation. “It’s very alarming,” Evan Roth Smith, who oversaw the poll, told reporters in a presentation of the findings this week. “It tells a lot of the story about why Bidenomics is not resonating, and is not redounding to the benefit of the president.”

    Nothing stirs more frustration among Democrats, including some Biden allies, than the sense that the president is misreading the electorate and trying to sell voters on an economy that isn’t working for them. “It takes far longer to rebuild the middle class than it took to destroy the middle class,” Representative Ro Khanna of California, a former Bernie Sanders supporter who now serves on an advisory board for Biden’s reelection, told me. “No politician, president or incumbent, should be celebrating the American economy in the years to come until there is dramatic improvement in the lives of middle-class and working-class Americans.” Khanna said that Biden should be “much more aggressive” in drawing an economic contrast with Trump and attacking him in the same way that Obama attacked Romney—as a supplicant for wealthy and corporate interests who will destroy the nation’s social safety net. “Donald Trump is a much more formidable candidate than Mitt Romney,” Khanna said. “So it’s a harder challenge.”

    Just how strong a threat Trump poses to Biden is a matter of dispute among Democrats. Although all of the Democrats I spoke with predicted that next year’s election would be close, some of them took solace in Trump’s weakness as a GOP nominee—and not only because he might be running as a convicted felon. “Donald Trump, for all of his visibility, is prone to making big mistakes,” Israel said. “A Biden-versus-Trump matchup will reveal Trump’s mistakes and help correct the current polling.”

    David Frum: Here’s what Biden can do to change his grim polling

    The New York Times–Siena polls found that an unnamed “generic” Democrat would fare much better against Trump than Biden would. But they also found that a generic Republican would trounce Biden by an even larger margin. “Mitt Romney was a much harder candidate than Donald Trump,” Messina told me. (When I pointed out that Khanna had made the opposite assertion, he replied, “He’s in Congress. I’m not. I won a presidential election. He didn’t.”)

    None of the Democrats I interviewed was pining for another nominee, or for Biden to drop out. Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota hasn’t secured a single noteworthy endorsement since announcing his long-shot primary challenge. Vice President Kamala Harris is no more popular among voters, and all of the Democrats I spoke with expressed doubts that the candidacy of a relatively untested governor—say, Gavin Newsom of California, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, or Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania—would make a Democratic victory more likely. Messina said that if Biden dropped out, a flood of ambitious Democrats would immediately enter the race, and a free-for-all primary could produce an even weaker nominee. “Are we sure that’s what we want?” Messina asked.

    Others downplayed Biden’s poor polling, particularly the finding that Democrats don’t want him to run again. Their reasoning, however, hinted at a sense of resignation about the coming campaign. Israel compared the choice voters face to a person deciding whether or not to renew a lease on their car: “I’m not sure I want to extend the lease, until I looked at other models and realized I’m going to stick with what I have,” he explained. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said that voters he talks to don’t bring up Biden’s age as an issue; only the media does. “I don’t know. He’s old, but he’s also really tall,” Murphy told me. “I don’t care about tall presidents if it doesn’t impact their ability to do the job. I don’t really care about presidents who are older if it doesn’t impact their ability to do the job either.” He was unequivocal: “I think we need Joe Biden as our nominee.”

    For most Democrats, the debate over whether Biden should run again is now mostly academic. The president has made his decision, and top Democrats aren’t pressuring him to change his mind. Democrats are left to hope that the comparisons to Obama bear out and the advantages of incumbency kick in. Biden’s age—he’d be 86 at the end of a second term—is a fact of life. “You have to lean into it,” Israel told me. “You can’t ignore it.” How, I asked him, should Biden lean into the age issue? “I don’t know,” Israel replied. “That’s what a campaign is for.”

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    Russell Berman

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